Speak Up During the Year of Your LL.M.

By: Sindy Ding-Voorhees

This week we have a guest blogger, Sindy Ding-Voorhees.  Sindy graduated from Fordham's LL.M. program in Intellectual Property and Information Technology in 2013 and has since been working as an Intellectual Property attorney in New York and Washington D.C.  She wrote this blog post to share her experiences and advice with our incoming LL.M. students.  We are grateful for her contribution!

An LL.M. program for most non-U.S. candidates is something with multiple purposes. First and foremost, it is an intensive one-year long program of study covering various American substantive legal subjects. It also provides an almost exclusively English-speaking environment, which is a first for many people. Most importantly, an open, mingle-cultured (both legally and socially) society is right there, waiting to embrace you, whether or not you are prepared for it. 

I am a foreign-trained lawyer who recently graduated from the LL.M. program at Fordham Law, which is located in midtown Manhattan near Columbus Circle—not a very quiet place! In this article, I will share my experience and give you some tips on what you, as an international student, need to do to make your year the most rewarding.