Law school is a tough road to travel…rewarding, but lots and lots of hard work. You should try doing everything you can to make your life as a law student easier, even if it’s just small things. Every little bit counts!

Before you begin your first semester, there are a few things you can do to minimize your stress and make the best of your time.

Live quietly
Don’t wait until the last minute to arrive at school. If you show up a few weeks in advance, you can nail down your living arrangements before classes kick into gear. Try to find roommates who are also going to law school and avoid living with anyone who parties or talks a lot. If your roommates aren’t law students, it’s not the end of the world, but they may not appreciate your need for long hours of peaceful solitude to get your studying done.

Hopefully, you made arrangements ahead of time for an apartment or room on campus and already have some friends or fellow students enlisted to help share the cost. If you didn’t and you have the resources to do so, try to find a place you can call yours alone so the only schedule you have to worry about is yours. Additionally, the closer you can live to campus, the better off you’ll be.

The family factor
If you’re an adult student returning to school and have a home, spouse, or kids — or all three…well, living alone or with other law students is probably not an option unless you have a very understanding and accommodating family! You’ll need to establish some guidelines with your family around what you need and enlist the support of your spouse in allowing you to be out of the house studying on campus, the public library, or at Starbucks if needed.

Quiet will be important and the background sounds of the television and dinner cooking can be an incredible distraction to your train of thought. If your family doesn’t help out in letting you get your work done, law school is going to be much more difficult.

Save time
While you’re in law school, you will find any loss of precious minutes to be an annoying intrusion on your tightly packed schedule. Simple things such as commuting and finding a parking space can be enough to drive you over the edge for a day. Before your classes start, you should get familiar with campus and the ins and outs of the various parking lots and building locations. Some lots will always be full and others may be more apt to have at least a few spots open on any given day.

You can also save time by mapping out the library and where you’ll need to spend most of your time. Ask the staff there where the most commonly used resources for law students are located and get an orientation if they have anything of that sort to offer. There’s no sense wasting time trying to find things on your own when the library staff may be able to greatly simplify things for you.

Make and maintain a friendly relationship with the library staff or you could be shooting yourself in the foot. There are a lot of students who treat the library staff members as their personal servants and don’t even bother to find out their names. If you stand out in a positive way, they may be more willing to give you a little extra help. It’s also not unusual for head librarians at law schools to be lawyers themselves (as well as professional librarians), and they usually like to help students with interesting research problems — but are probably more interested in helping the likeable ones!

Micromanage your schedule
Figure out in advance where and when to do your necessary errands. For instance, don’t do your grocery shopping during popular times such as Saturday mornings — you’ll just get aggravated. You can get in some pretty efficient shopping late at night or early in the morning.

It will simplify your life if you make a detailed weekly schedule for everything and stick to it! This schedule should include everything: exercise, movies, study time (set aside at least four hours a day), class-note entry, TV, etc. Schedule as much homework time as possible during your daytime class breaks so you can free up some of your evening time. Don’t make your day all about work, though —save at least an hour for lunch, and try to have lunch with your classmates. You can all have a good laugh over your active social lives as law students.

Choose your friends wisely
Decide early on which classmates you really like and might want to spend time with. Don’t commit time to anyone else, but don’t be unfriendly, either. There’s just not much point to agreeing to spend leisure time with people you really don’t want to hang with. As a law student, your time is precious. Don’t be afraid to say no!

Save your pennies
You should set aside several thousand dollars to get you through the first few months of school. It’s not unheard of for financial aid disbursements to be slow in coming. If you don’t have cash, try to arrange something with relatives. If you need to, apply for credit cards or a line of credit but try to avoid doing so if you can. Taking on debt is never the best option for anyone.