Law School Application Time

[eviljeff]

recon, I predict a mailbox filled with small envelopes of pain, but you might luckbox a callback or two.

[XXXNoahXXX]

recon, I didn't find my summer job until April. I worked at a small in-house type firm that did weird things and had ties to Enron and weird religious groups. But I made $20/hr which is like double any previous job!

If you want to work at a big firm then mass mail to every firm that hires 1Ls starting Dec. 1

or you could take the workstudy 4k or whatever it is and do public interest stuff and get a second job. that sounds fun!

1L firms won't know/don't care about your grades, just past work experience and/or science background.

no clue what texas is like for getting jobs.

[recipro]

[ QUOTE ]
Civil Procedure was the most boring class I've ever taken.

Civil Procedure is the only class that practicing litigators have told me is useful.

This frightens me.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am nearly finished the first half of Civ Pro, and I, and everyone else in the class love it. Mostly because the teacher is awesome.

I could see how it could be boring, but with a great teacher, that class is my favorite.

[XXXNoahXXX]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Civil Procedure was the most boring class I've ever taken.

Civil Procedure is the only class that practicing litigators have told me is useful.

This frightens me.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am nearly finished the first half of Civ Pro, and I, and everyone else in the class love it. Mostly because the teacher is awesome.

I could see how it could be boring, but with a great teacher, that class is my favorite.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah interviewing with people that graduated from my school was really awkward because they'd say who'd you have for 1L profs and when I said X for Civ Pro, they were like "oh, you had X for civ pro?" and half the time it was because they absolutely loved him and half the time because they couldn't stand him, so i just sat there with a deer in the headlights look til they gave me a hint.

[Hey_Porter]

[ QUOTE ]

If you want to work at a big firm then mass mail to every firm that hires 1Ls starting Dec. 1


[/ QUOTE ]

The big firms in Portland (including firms with a national presence) only hire 1Ls who qualify as "diversity fellows," i.e., minorities. Pretty darn good deal, actually, as they seem to hire back for the second summer and then permanently.

I had a really attenuated "in" with a federal district judge, and he hired me on as a summer extern after my first year. Best job ever. I really don't know how much my "in" helped me, or if it was simply because I asked. Grades might be a factor, though. I didn't receive a response until after I let him know about my first semester gpa.

[Riverman]

Affirmative action in law schools is ridiculous, especially at the top schools. A classmate of mine at Princeton got in at Harvard with a 158. I know a number of white/asian kids with 170+ LSATs who were rejected.

I'm all about a leg up for disadvantaged kids, but that kind of gap is ridiculous and it guarantees poor performance relative to classmates.

Nobody wants to admit it, but the # of african american students cracking 170 on the LSAT is in the single digits annually. De facto quotas mean they have to dig pretty deep.

[XXXNoahXXX]

RM,

I will say that at my school there is not a single URM on the main law review of almost 60 students. law review members are chosen either based on their (anonymous) grades or on their (anonymous) writing competition.

I'll give the standard anti-racist disclaimer that I had a lot of very intelligent minority students in my classes, but there is a lot of evidence out there that since minority students are getting into schools that their numbers alone would not get them into, they are having a tougher time of it. I guess it doesn't really matter though, because firms seem to also have lots of diversity programs and diversity scholarships, etc. so I don't really know when, if ever it catches up.

There was a study that tried to link poor minority performance on the CA bar review to AA in law school admittance, but I read that it received a lot of criticism, so not sure how valid of a study it was.


Definitely a bit discouraging to punch your numbers into lawschoolnumbers.com and see "Wow, ok, 80 people got rejected with my numbers at Harvard, but 20 got accepted, i got a shot!" then you realize you didn't check off the "exclude URM" button and that number goes down to "75 rejected, 0 accepted."

kinda depressing when your from a poor background where your family didn't all graduate high school let alone go to college, and then you see minority students whose parents are CEOs getting the AA boost. guess those are the breaks.

[Riverman]

A few more thoughts:

1. Everyone who applied to law school with a pulse knows about the huge URM advantage. It's impossible to then ignore that information after you enroll. In this respect, I think AA actually exacerbates racism. This is particularly true given the reality (documented in the book The Bell Curve and elsewhere) that a rich URM gets a massive bump while a poor white/asian kid is actually penalized. This is contrary to every possible explanation for AA and inconsistent with basic notions of fairness.

2. This references the study you mentioned: http://www.cir-usa.org/articles/158.html

[Hey_Porter]

[ QUOTE ]

kinda depressing when your from a poor background where your family didn't all graduate high school let alone go to college, and then you see minority students whose parents are CEOs getting the AA boost. guess those are the breaks.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's what makes me laugh about the Big Law diversity fellowships: all of the students I know that got them were close to the top of the class, and probably would have gotten a Big Law job anyway, just a year later. It's a win-win for the firms.

When I was a 2L, one firm in town hired five summers, and I believe four of the five were Asian women.

[FlyWf]