Student ambassador at BPP University Law School Sarina Yamahata reflects on the SQE study strategy that helped her secure a successful result
When Sarina Yamahata completed her LLB in 2022, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to qualify as a lawyer. However, after spending two years in Geneva studying international law and then working as a legal intern for the United Nations, she decided to return to the UK to take her SQE and get qualified.
She began the LLM SQE 1 & 2 at BPP University Law School in September 2024, passed her SQE 1 first time in January and is currently waiting for the results of her SQE 2. In the meantime, she has been delving into medical negligence, employment and family law as part of BPP’s Essentials for Practice Master’s term, for which students choose to focus their further learning on one of three practice steams: General Practice (which Sarina opted for), Commercial or Corporate.
“What really motivated me to study law in the first place was human rights,” Yamahata tells me. “I was born and raised in Japan, but my parents are both from Myanmar. I heard and read a lot about the human rights abuses in the country growing up, which made me really passionate about going into the field of human rights.”
Yamahata studied law at King’s College London, during which she considered a career in commercial law. “While I was doing my degree, I did try out the commercial law path,” she says. “It’s what everyone around me was doing and there were all these events on campus focusing on recruiting students, so I tried it – but I quickly realised it wasn’t for me.”
Returning to her interest in human rights law, Yamahata studied an LLM in international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute and stayed in Geneva to work as a legal intern at the United Nations and several NGOs. It was this experience that motivated her to return to the UK to qualify as a lawyer. “When I was working at the UN, I realised that my colleagues who had roles that I aspired to have in the future – roles like legal officers or legal analysts – were all qualified lawyers and they all had years of experience in their domestic jurisdiction behind them,” she explains. “This was a path that I hadn’t fully explored yet so I decided to go back to the UK and get qualified.”
So, why the LLM SQE 1 & 2 at BPP? “I found the LLM part of BPP’s SQE prep course to be really interesting,” Yamahata replies. “Topics like family law, employment law and medical negligence are areas I never really got to study in undergrad but ones I’ve always been interested in,” she continues. “The LLM course is only a few months longer than the diploma and I thought I would get something really interesting out of it, so I thought – why not?” says Yamahata.
Yamahata won scholarships to study her LLM SQE 1 & 2 with BPP. She tells me how much she values this financial support. “Scholarships are really important to me as a self-funded student: prep courses can be expensive and the SQE exams themselves are expensive too so funding was my main concern and I really appreciate the assistance.”
Now that Yamahata is successfully through SQE1, I am keen to hear about her revision strategies and top tips for the exam. “Leading up to SQE 1, I focused a lot on practising multiple choice questions (MCQs),” she reveals. “BPP provided loads of resources to practice MCQs, which were really great. They separated the practice questions by topic as well which was really helpful because I could see which sections I was weaker in.” Practising MCQs also helped to hone Yamahata’s exam technique, and she was able to improve her timing as well as understanding the sometimes-tricky wording of this style of question.
“BBP also made these great refresh videos for all of the areas of law that we were being assessed on, including the underlying law that we didn’t have classes on, like contract, criminal and public law,” Yamahata recalls. “These videos gave a really good, big picture, like overview of the entire subject area,” she says.
This resource was particularly valuable for Yamahata, who had spent two years focusing on different interests since graduating from her LLB. “Criminal, contract and public law were subjects I studied in the first year of my undergrad – that’s five years ago now!” she says. “I had a lot of classmates who had just graduated from their bachelor’s in law, or they just finished their conversion and they were all coming in fresh having just studied all these things, so I was very, very worried,” she says.
However, to those in a similar position, Yamahata would stress that many of her worries were unfounded. “Once I started revising the underlying law for the SQE1, it did come back naturally. In that sense, it wasn’t as big a challenge as I thought it would be – no matter how long ago it was, no matter the gap, you will recognise familiar terms and familiar concepts. You’re just reminding yourself of what you already know,” she says.
As we wrap up our discussion, I ask Yamahata for the advice she would give to students who are about to approach their SQE. “Be organised and stay on track as much as you can,” is her response. “When you fall behind, it can be hard to catch up.” She adds, “I’m saying this as someone who did fall behind at some points. I would get ill, and miss a few classes – It just can’t be helped. But it’s so important to work hard to catch yourself up.” She also stresses the importance of a healthy work-life balance. “It’s easy to get bogged down and let your whole life become the SQE – but then what happens is that for the next stage of the course, you’re severely burnt out. You’re too drained and exhausted to study and focus properly. You have to think about the big picture and prioritise balance,” she concludes.
Join us TOMORROW for our virtual student event: SQE: How well can you tackle MCQs? — with BPP for more insider knowledge on the SQE!
