McColman Achieves Top-10 Status at Maine Law
Jordan McColman, who graduated from UMF with a degree in history, achieved top-10 status within his class at the University of Maine School of Law. His high marks won him a coveted faculty invitation to serve as an editor of Maine Law’s Ocean and Coastal Law Journal, which publishes scholarly articles on marine resource regulation, coastal zone management, marine environmental protection and other ocean and coastal law topics.
Stellar marks at Maine Law also helped him secure an internship with Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe the summer after his first year in law school.
For McColman, the UMF curriculum was the perfect primer for law school.
“UMF professors pushed me to become a better writer. Liberal arts courses are ideal preparation because they emphasize reading, researching and writing critical analyses on what you’ve read,” he said. “When I got to law school, I was ahead of the game. I’m using the same techniques I learned at UMF to research and critically analyze cases.”
At UMF, McColman published his senior capstone research paper, “Go North Young Man: A Historiographical Look at Vietnam War Draft Resisters and Military Deserters in Canada,” on The UMF Historian, which was recognized as the best online student history journal in the nation by Phi Alpha Theta, the national collegiate history honor society.
“I loved the classroom setting at UMF and the intellectual challenge of the whole endeavor,” he said. “When graduation loomed large, I asked myself, ‘How high can I set this bar?’”
Thus, McColman made passing the Bar Exam the next bar to clear. Although studies at UMF gave him ample experience with research, writing and critical thinking, he said adjusting to the rigors of law school was by no means easy.
“In law school your grade is based on the final exam. There are no other graded assignments for feedback along the way. It’s like teaching people how to swim by rowing them out to the middle of a lake and tossing them out of the boat,” joked McColman, who defends the high expectations of law school with compelling logic: “You walk into a courtroom either ready or not. You cannot say to a judge, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I needed to know that for the case. Can I have another week to prepare?’”
