Niffy is a third year Law student and a Widening Participation ambassador at City.
Some facts about me
Hello, my name is Niffy, I’m a final year Law student at City.
I am from: I was born in Nigeria, but I moved to Ireland when I was very young and grew up in a small town there.
A fact about me: I am a big BTS fan and I have been to all but one of their London concerts in the past few years. Attending their concerts and other BTS related events has made my time in London even more memorable because I was able to see a group I loved and meet new people while exploring the city.
I live: I lived in student accommodation in Newington Green in during my second year. I share a flat with six other girls and we all have our own bathrooms. We had some issues with stolen spoons and freezer space but by the end of the year we had mostly resolved the issues and we even became friends.
My accommodation is only twenty minutes from university which made coming to and from lectures very easy and meant I didn’t have to worry about long commutes. My favourite thing about my accommodation was probably the several corner shops that were open 24 hours a day so I could buy ice-cream no matter what time of day it was.
My favourite thing about City
My favourite thing about City is the amount of opportunities you have as a student to gain experience outside of your degree.
I wanted to come to London to gain various experiences and become immersed in the environment and City really helped by offering numerous programs for students like the student ambassador and widening participation programmes, the micro-placements programme, professional mentoring programme, study abroad opportunities and I even got the chance to start my own podcast with other students.
Along with the careers service I feel like I always have lots of opportunity to develop myself while at City which is an amazing opportunity to me.
What do you need to study law
While studying law I found that the ability to really understand and analyse work is one of the most important skills.
While working on my assignments this term which involved writing 2000 words on changes to be made to the current law I had to make sure I first understood the laws we had today, why we had those laws and think about how we could make those laws better for our society.
As law is a subject that can impact almost every area of life it is important that as a law student you can recognise when the law fails to serve the people.
An interesting project I have taken part in
For first year I was required to take part in a moot court as part of my exams.
“A moot is a mock trial where we are a given a made-up case and told to argue our points to a judge. During a moot we are judged on the strength of our argument, knowledge of the law and how we present our arguments.”
I found the moot difficult at first because we had to use certain words like “my lord” and “learned friend” when talking to the judge or referring to our opponent.
Even though the moot was challenging it was still a lot of fun and I am glad I took part. Looking back at it now I remember how terrified I was because the judge had asked lots of questions and I thought I messed up but I came out with a first which I was over the moon about.
Read more about the skills you need at university. And you can read Niffy’s first year survival guides to university here:
Read our other Law students’ experiences of university:
Read more about the micro-placement experience.
