In a new series of columns, alums of USC Annenberg share stories of their time at the school, discuss their career, and offer advice to students.

This advice applies most poignantly to students taking the California Bar Exam, but should be useful to all in line for the experience of reducing their academic lives to a few short hours of performance art.

Let’s set the stage:

I’ve volunteered to be a bar mentor for this round of bar takers, and I want to encourage your success. Preparing for the bar is intense, and requires as much time and effort as you can manage.

My husband (UCLA law) and I (USC law) have a joke from our bar prep days that we never had such a clean apartment as we did that summer, or ever spent so much time at the gym. You have to take breaks, right? We also saved an entire Twilight Zone marathon and watched exactly one 30-minute episode per day. Please update these references as necessary if you have a self-cleaning robot, sport a wearable fitness device, and/or are currently streaming an original content show on a second screen (while watching YouTube on your mobile phone).

How are you preparing? Reading over outlines gets tedious after a while, and you don’t know what you know until you have to put it into play.

Here’s how to make active learning work for you:

1. Formal test prep classes are useful, but the practice exams are the best of all. It’s not real until you download what you’ve been uploading.
2. Share with your (soon-to-be former) friends what you know. It’s best to have a fellow bar-taker as your study buddy, but explaining what you know to almost anyone forces you to break the definitions down to their essences and audibly demonstrates any gaps in your knowledge.
3. Make your own [bleep] outlines. I know they are commercially available, but creating your own visual map of how you learned and will remember the material is ever so valuable.

So breathe (right now, and you know, later, too). Take your time with the test prep and give it as much effort as you need to say “No Regrets” and to feel that you are walking into the exam as prepared as humanly possible.

Some day in the future, you may look back on your test prep days with great fondness.

Just kidding, that's not going to happen.

Best of luck!