I’m going to graduate from a German law school in a few weeks, and it’s really preying on me.
To begin with, let me describe what the curriculum looks like: German legal education is divided into two parts. After university studies (usually four to five years), students write an examination called the First State Examination. That’s the one I’m sitting for in three weeks; it consists of six written exams of five hours each, written within one week, plus examinations a few months later. The exams can be about practically everything learned during these four or five years, and it’s awfully theoretical. (There’s also a 40-page thesis which will affect the final grade; I’ve already written it, without having gotten a grade on it so far, but don’t ask me about that - the grading standards for this new feature in the examination curriculum hasn’t fully developed so far, and seems quite arbitrary to me.)
After an additonal two years of mandatory internships with lawyers, courts, governments agencies etc., student will sit for the Second State Examination, conducted in a similar way. Passing this will admit you to the bar.
The really nasty thing is that right now there’s plenty of lawyers on the employment market. That’s why the grades earned in the examinations are extremely important. Employers with attractive vacancies will base their hiring decisions mostly on grades; government agencies and courts filling vacant judge posts are legally obliged to base their recruitment on grades alone, at least when it comes to initial recruitment into a career (promotions later on are different). In this respect, the Second Examination will be more important, but grades from the first one will also be taken into account.
Generally, I think I’m well prepared for the exams in early March; I’ve been preparing for them for a year and a half now, like most of my classmates, and I don’t think I lacked discipline doing it. Besides, my grades in preparatory practice exams which I’ve been taking were mostly satisfactory. Still, the prospect of actually sitting in these exams makes me quite nervous.
The only thing to cheer myself up in this phase right before the single most important exam in my life so far is the prospect of what to do afterwards. I applied for a Master’s degree in Oxford, and I was already awarded one of Germany’s two Rhodes Scholarships to fund that project. That’s less glamorous than it might sound to Americans; the Rhodes Scholarships are far less prestigious in Germany than they are in the U.S. - most people, even on universities, have never heard of them. Yet, it’s still cool to have the prospect of getting out of what I’ve been doing here for the past four years. On the other hand, it increases grade pressure, because I think Oxford University will only admit me upon condition of a certain grade average.
So that’s the story of my situation right now. It will most likely last for just another three weeks, plus the weel of the exam itself; after that, it’s about two to three months of waiting for the results of the exams. But it feels reaaaaaally long when you’re in the middle of the trouble.