From psychology graduate to trainee solicitor: how I passed SQE1 while working full-time

What’s your background, and why did you decide to do the SQE?

My undergraduate degree was in Psychology, so I came to law as a non-law graduate. After finishing my undergrad, I decided I wanted to qualify as a solicitor and enrolled on the GDL. Before the course even started, I found someone on Reddit who was kind enough to pass on their old ULaw textbooks, and I spent the summer working through them on my own — just to get a head start and feel grounded before the formal teaching began.

While I was studying I was also starting work full time in a corporate law team, which meant my days were spent learning practically at work and my evenings and weekends were spent studying. It was intense and I won’t pretend otherwise, but having that real-world context made a genuine difference. When you’re reading about a legal concept during the day and then seeing it applied in practice by experienced lawyers, things land in a way they just don’t when you’re studying in a vacuum.

The SQE felt like the right route for where I was. It’s a modern, structured assessment that doesn’t require a conventional path into law — and coming from Psychology, that mattered to me. It felt like a route built for people like me. I knew I wanted to go into Law when I was at university - I have a immense love for learning, and I knew a career in Law would be intellectually stimulating, and I wasn’t wrong!

How did you prepare, and what made the biggest difference in your success?

I prepared largely through self-study — a combination of textbooks, revision apps, and question banks. I was working full-time too, so being deliberate about structure was important. I couldn’t just follow someone else’s timetable; I had to build my own.

One of the most useful things I did early on was download the SRA’s official SQE syllabus and use it to map out all the topics. It sounds simple, but it gave me a clear overview of everything I needed to cover and — crucially — helped me see how the different subject areas connect to each other. That cross-subject thinking made a real difference to how I understood and retained the material.

I also had to get honest with myself about how I actually learn. I know I retain things best when I write them out and read them back, and when I watch videos on a topic to reinforce what I’ve already read. Once I stopped fighting that and built my study sessions around what actually worked for me, things started to stick properly.

My team at work was incredibly supportive too. They gave me flexibility where they could, and being surrounded by practising lawyers throughout the process meant theory and practice were always feeding into each other. I was very lucky in that regard.

What was the hardest part, and how did you push through it?

Honestly, doing everything, everywhere, all at once! Working full time in a demanding environment, studying outside of work hours, and trying to maintain some version of a normal life alongside all of that — it’s a lot to sustain, and the fatigue does catch up with you. There were periods where I was genuinely running on empty and had to force myself to stop and rest rather than push through.

I also made the mistake early on of spending too much time reading the SQE “scary stories” online — the forums and threads where people post about how brutal the exam is, how many times they retook it, how much of it is luck. I had to consciously step back from all of that. I found it wasn’t helping me at all until I was about six months out from the exam, and even then I tried to take it as information rather than something to internalise.

What genuinely helped me push through was treating rest as part of the preparation — not a reward or a concession, but an actual component of doing well. You cannot retain information when your body is depleted. Memory recall is so central to SQE1, and your brain simply doesn’t function at the level it needs to when you’re exhausted. I had to really believe that before I started acting on it. Sometimes you feel you don’t deserve it, but I found that after a good night’s sleep I was always more productive and energised with my studies!

If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?

More mocks. Full-length, timed mocks, completed much earlier than I did.

I did practice questions consistently throughout my preparation, but I didn’t commit to proper full mock exams as early or as regularly as I should have. The SQE is a genuinely long and arduous exam — not just in terms of content, but in terms of what it demands from you physically and mentally on the day. That stamina and concentration piece is its own challenge, separate from whether you know the material, and you can only really train for it by simulating the actual experience. Just bite the bullet, you’re not going to get impressive marks the first time, but you’ll get an idea of where you stand and how far you have to go, which is arguably more useful.

When I eventually started doing full mocks I realised how much I still had to learn about pacing myself across the full paper, keeping my focus going through the later questions, and managing the ones that trip you up without letting them throw you off entirely. None of that came from short practice sets. I’d tell my past self to start proper full-length mocks much earlier — ideally several months out — and to do them regularly rather than saving them for the final weeks. The mock experience is genuinely different from question practice and I think it’s underestimated by a lot of candidates until they’re in the room.