STEM Club Members Lean on Each Other in Law School

At first, law school can be a stretch for STEM students.

They’re wired and trained to think visually, not to read volumes of text.

So says Karen Joo L’23, co-president of the Penn Law STEM Club, formed to help law students with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics make the transition to a new study and learning regime.

“We don’t study well off just texts,” Joo said. “We tend to learn better from pictures.”

And apparently from each other. The STEM Club has more than doubled in membership since its founding in 2019. It has gone from nearly 30 members to 61 at present, 23 of whom are new this year. According to the Law School Admissions Office, STEM students make up approximately 20 percent of the student body.

The idea for the group stems from an experience that classmates Emily Losi L’21 and Maria Tartakovsky L’21 had when they were studying together for final exams their first year. Both realized they had different study habits than many of their peers.

Tartakovsky, who majored in biology with a concentration in computer science at the University of Florida, said she was accustomed to searching for the right answer in college only to find that law school exams were not about the best answer but rather a test of your ability to sort through issues and explain your thought process.

“I changed my study habits to better incorporate the practice of that particular skill set,” said Tartakovsky, an Associate in IP and Tech litigation at Quinn Emanuel in San Francisco.

STEM students bring a unique dimension to the classroom. They offer new perspectives and insights into key areas of law that are becoming ever more technical with each passing year.”
Christopher Yoo
John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science

Losi, a mathematics major at CUNY Hunter College, said her math studies were cumulative but law school was less linear. Her attempts to emulate her classmates with a comprehensive outline failed because she couldn’t remember everything from the beginning of the year, some of which never came up again.

“I decided to turn back to the methods I had used in undergrad,” said Losi, an Associate in the Technology & IP Transactions group at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. “I would use a classroom whiteboard and make flowcharts to map out the concepts we had learned.

“I found that the whiteboard method helped me see how things that I had learned at the beginning of the semester — and had mostly forgotten about — actually connected to concepts we learned throughout the course. Because I could make those visual connections, I found this study method much more effective.”

Joo acknowledged that there’s typically a period of adjustment, but also said that STEM students have a built-in advantage over some members of the class: their ability to think analytically, which is a major plus in law school.

“I feel that we are able to analyze things more systematically,” said Joo, who studied chemical engineering at McGill University.

Losi and Tartakovsky said the growth of the STEM Club testifies to the increasing prevalence of science and technology students on law school campuses. Indeed, law schools have stepped up recruitment of STEM students, recognizing their ability to understand new issues surrounding technology and its increasing use in the legal profession.

Over the last few years, the Law School has hosted a variety of virtual events to recruit admitted students with STEM backgrounds, including mock IP classes and conferences sponsored by the Penn Intellectual Property Group as well as efforts to match STEM applicants with Penn Law students of similar background.

Tartakovsky explained the value of STEM students in the classroom, calling conversations “significantly more robust” even outside of IP classes when someone with scientific expertise “sheds light on an issue we otherwise wouldn’t have considered.”

Christopher Yoo, John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science, agrees.

“STEM students bring a unique dimension to the classroom,” Yoo said. “They offer new perspectives and insights into key areas of law that are becoming ever more technical with each passing year.”