If you are a prospective law student, this article will give you the inside scoop on gaining admission to one of the best schools. These questions should help you frame exactly what we’ll accomplish together in this article. Are you researching possible law schools to attend by looking at catalogs and visiting the websites of each school? Have you spent money buying guidebooks, report cards, and other materials? How about the time you spend online looking for the perfect school? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are already involved in the process of finding the perfect school. You will now master the law school admissions process.
First, you’ll need to carefully consider which schools are right for you. This doesn’t mean the schools that are closest to home, the easiest to get into, or the one your girlfriend goes to. Your search should also not focus on finding the schools that you think will accept you. Chances are, even if you have a mediocre LSAT score and undergraduate GPA, you’ll still be able to get into some great, highly rated schools. Take an extra minute and try to find the school that best suits your needs. In the future, this will pay you back with interest.
Your acceptance into one of the best law schools will be based on an excellent application that establishes your skills, interests, and desires to fill a specific need for a certain law school. For example, your passion for public interest law could carry great weight at a school like CUNY, because they are a law school built on public interest law. So getting into the best schools is more about finding out what kinds of students your favorite schools are looking for, and then positioning yourself to meet that need.
How are these schools identified?
Search Google News about the school. Look at the news coming out of the school. Perhaps a professor is proficient in a field that interests you, or your moot court team is winning nationally. If you find interesting, news-worthy things happening at school and then plug them in, you’re giving yourself a big head start.
You will also be able to do some comparative analysis. For example, if one of your top choice schools doesn’t seem to make the news at all or at least regularly, you might want to think twice about going there. If a professional school like a law school isn’t news, it’s probably a symptom of a lackluster faculty and alumni body that aren’t very successful with their law practice.
Independent law schools, that is, those that are not part of a larger university or college system, also deserve special attention. A thorough Google news search will help you find out exactly what is happening at that particular school. Is it a scandal? Do you have a new dean every few years? Are students suing the school? Independent law schools deserve your special attention because of all these problems.
Thus, from something as simple as a search for news on Google, you will have armed yourself with very important and valuable information. Keep copies of what you find and create folders for each of the schools you’re looking for. Be sure to send school catalogs early enough to give yourself enough time to weigh all of your options. Put these catalogs in the same folders. This will make your planning process and final decision-making much easier in the long run. Go back to the clip files frequently and review them. Which school would you like to be associated with? Why? Has any school lost some of its shine? You will reap the rewards of doing such a thorough search. Those rewards will come in the form of identifying a school that really interests you and you’ll be armed with powerful knowledge that will help you write an application that will really matter to the school.
In future articles, I’ll discuss some of the additional factors you need to consider when choosing a law school. For now, creating your clip folders will be a great start to your successful career as a lawyer.
