Special Reports

Law Students Offered Relaxing Activities to Help Cope with Final Exam Stress

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In an effort to help law students make it through the finals, a law school offered several de-stressing activities aimed at lowering student stress, new reports say.

About 100 students at the University of St. Thomas School of Law participated in the "Flight of the Paper Airplanes," reports the National Law Journal. The activity, which was just one of the several de-stressing activities offered, had students writing the causes of their stress on a piece of paper, folding them into small paper airplanes, and thrown from the fourth floor of the school's glass atrium.

As an added bonus, if the paper planes hit specific targets on the first floor, students who threw the planes will receive prizes.

First-year St. Thomas student Kirsten Bolaños, who has two young children, said the launching of the paper planes was indeed helpful.

"As law students, we don't have a lot of time to spend together outside of the classroom to talk to each other," Bolaños said. "It was nice to have something so goofy and elementary - to make paper airplanes and throw them together. It was 20 minutes to forget all about law school."

Getting a law degree is much harder than an undergraduate degree. One final exam in law school can account for most, if not all, first-year grades. And if a student doesn't perform well during his first year, the effects can be felt very strongly.

"A student's first-year grades make a big difference for certain types of job offers, such as clerkships and Big Law," Susan Brooks, assistant dean for experiential learning at Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, said.

Law schools, in order to help students fight the stress brought by the final exams, conduct various de-stressing programs. These include yoga, meditation sessions, massages, therapy animals, round-the-clock coffee bars, midnight pancake binges, and even Zumba classes.

Law students usually feel much stress going to the finals. In fact, the stress is so high, one nasty incident is blamed for it. According to Above the Law, a student at an unnamed law school even defecated on the toilet floor, missing the toilet itself.

"It was wrapped in a paper towel. It was not in a toilet," wrote the person who discovered the "poop perpetrator's" unpleasant deed.

Well, it would always be better for law schools to give students prizes for de-stressing, compared to spending more school funds on maintaining a fresh and clean toilet.

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