Many of Blueprint’s classes start today (lookin’ at you, Houston) or tomorrow (my Northridge babies, for example), and so it’s time to get down to work. (Still plenty of time to enroll, if you’re on the fence or whatever!)

This post is geared toward those students, but it also applies generally to anyone who’s starting around now to study for the September LSAT. Studying for the LSAT is an overwhelming amount of hard work. Any LSAT prep company out there that sells it as anything LSAT — one crazy hack that lets you ace the LSAT! — is not worth its salt. Unfortunately, after teaching the Blueprint course exactly four-zillion-and-two times, I’ve found that many of my students don’t come to grips with this fact until the course is already well underway.

Don’t let that happen to you. We’re just about two months out from the exam, and, if you plan to be ready on test day, it will be a sprint every day between now and then. The first three Blueprint lessons lay the theoretical foundation for the rest of the exam, as well as imparting the basic analytical tools — diagramming conditional statements, argument evaluation, and analyzing/tagging Reading Comp passages — that are necessary building blocks for the more targeted instruction that occurs later on in the course.

Incidentally, even if you’re studying with some other prep company or materials besides Blueprint and just visiting MSS to say hello, your studies should be structured similarly, i.e. with the first lessons giving you the building blocks.

The upshot here is that you must commit to learning and understanding those fundamentals now. By test day, they ought to be second nature for you. For the Blueprint courses beginning now, you’ll have Lesson Three either Monday or Tuesday of next week. Then Lesson 4 will be upon you forty-eight hours hence. Then you’ll have four full days before Workshop 1. (I’ll explain what a workshop is in just a second.) You should use that time to make sure that you have a firm grasp on the fundamentals from the lessons you’ve already taken. Not comfortable with conditional diagramming? Do the drills and maybe watch the lesson video portion explaining it. Can’t quite remember what kinds of things you ought to be tagging in a passage? Your solution is the same.

When you roll into Workshop 1, then, you’ll be prepared to suck the marrow from its education-rich bones. The purpose of the three workshops that occur throughout the Blueprint course is to reinforce and practice concepts taught in the recent lessons. So, if you’ve done the review I recommended, you’ll be able to apply the material in a classroom environment with an instructor in front of you to answer questions and guide you through the process after you’ve learned it. This is very important, and very useful. If you walk into each workshop thusly prepared, you will know you are on track to slay the beast on 9/24.

To have that sort of arsenal already at your fingertips two weeks from now, you’ll need to use every day wisely. Do your homework. Ask questions. Use the online resources. You’ll be glad you did.

Questions or comments? Drop ’em off below.