Think Like a Lawyer Graduation
Date Published: 11.06.2022
The graduation day at Wadham gave participants the opportunity to see what it’s like studying law at Oxford.
“It was wonderful to bring the Think Like a Lawyer participants to Wadham and celebrate their achievements."
Think Like a Lawyer is a free, two year programme open to Year 12 pupils from non-selective state schools in Wadham’s link regions. It is a collaborative programme ran by Wadham College, under the Access to Excellence umbrella, and Linklaters, the global law firm.
The Wadham trip follows on from a visit to Linklaters London Office the previous week where the focus was on what it’s like working for a top law firm.
The graduation day at Wadham gave the participants the opportunity to see what it’s like studying law at Oxford. Pupils got to visit Wadham in person and speak to first year law undergraduates (Alexandra Saward, Isabel Wellings, Jennifer Petch, Karishma Khosla and Thomas McBride).
For their final assignments, pupils had been asked to provide legal guidance to a fictitious company in hot water. Now at Wadham, they had tutorials on this assignment with the College's tutors in law (Sandy Steel, Lewis Graham and Peter Wills).
Fellow in Law, Lewis Graham, giving tutorial to Think Like a Lawyer pupils
The pupils commented that it had been fun to speak to an expert, receive personalised feedback on their essays and get a taste of what law tutorials can be like. The law tutors were similarly impressed with the participants.
“It was wonderful to finally bring the Think Like a Lawyer participants to Wadham and celebrate their achievements on the programme", said Hugh Munro, Acting Tutor for Access. "It has been a privilege to see their academic confidence and critical thinking grow across the sessions.”
Although the graduation marks the end of the critical thinking part of the programme, the participants will still benefit from personal statement mentoring delivered by Causeway Education and A-level tutoring from TutorHouse.
Think Like a Lawyer aims to support access to law at university and careers in the legal sector adopting a “life cycle” approach to address specific barriers at key stages from pre-application to post-graduation.
Fellow in Law, Sandy Steel said, “We are emphasising the scalability of this programme. Programme resources can be re-purposed to allow them to be used beyond the participants, contributing a series of valuable online resources that help to develop the analytical skills needed to study Law at Oxford and elsewhere."