Archive for the ‘Admissions’ Category
Welcome to Law School Success Stories, where we discuss 7Sage applicants who made the most of their GPA and LSAT score.
👤 Who: “Sarah,” an applicant who grew up in China and moved to the United States for college.
- 📈 LSAT: 169
- 📉 GPA: 3.33
Results:
- 🏆 Accepted at the University of Michigan Law
- 💵 $35,000 merit scholarship
🥅 Goals and Strategy
Sarah knew she wanted to take her law degree back to China, and the cachet of a T-14 school was important to her. Her parents, however, had a limited ability to pay for her education, and as a Chinese citizen, she wasn’t eligible for federal loans, so she was also hoping for a merit scholarship. Continue reading
Welcome to Law School Success Stories, where we discuss 7Sage applicants who made the most of their GPA and LSAT score. Please note that we changed certain details to protect this applicant’s anonymity, but we did not change his numbers or results.
👤 Who: “Neil,” a recent college grad of Southeast Asian descent
- 📉 LSAT: Under 149
- 📈 GPA: Over 3.8
- 🗞 Two-year résumé gap
Results
- 🏆 Accepted at a T-14 school
- ✍️ Handwritten note from the dean: "I loved your essays" (and more)
🌘 The Strategy: A Shot at the Moon
Welcome to Law School Success Stories, where we discuss 7Sage applicants who made the most of their GPA and LSAT score.
👤 Who: “Mark,” a Caucasian male in his mid-forties switching careers from the trucking industry
- 📉 LSAT: 166
- 📈 GPA: 3.9
Results:
- 🏆 Accepted at Northwestern
- 💵 Significant merit scholarship
🚚 Starting the Journey
Mark worked in the trucking industry for twenty years before he began a new kind of long-haul journey toward his JD. He didn’t know any law school applicants beyond the 7Sage community and had no family members who had attended graduate school. As a result, he had no idea where to begin.
At 7Sage, we have worked with hundreds of law school applicants from China, South Korea, and many more countries, and we have assembled the following FAQ to help international students gain admission to America’s top law schools.
Some law students consider transferring to a new law school because a change in their personal situation compels them to relocate; others want to transfer in the hope of earning a JD from a higher-tier school, and still others think they might just find a better fit somewhere else. If you fall into one of those categories, we’ve put together a handy cheat sheet of information, written as an FAQ.
A lot of people treat their law school applications like a long-distance race: they lope along, fiddling with their essays, and then sprint at the end.
These applicants have it backwards. You should sprint at the beginning, drafting your personal statement and other essays quickly, then slow down at the end. Why? Because you have nothing to lose but time at the beginning; you have everything to lose at the end.
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Law school personal statements matter for all applicants, but they matter most for applicants who look like toss-ups based on their GPAs and LSAT scores. We call such applicants splitters. The term usually refers to students with below-median GPAs and above-median LSAT scores, but in this post, we also mean the reverse: students with below-median LSAT scores and above-median GPAs. Admissions committees scrutinize the written material of splitters carefully because they can’t make a decision based on numbers alone.
In this post, we’ve rounded up five spectacular personal statements that helped splitters get into a T14 school. You’ll find these examples to be as various as a typical JD class. Some essays are about a challenge, some about the evolution of the author’s intellectual or professional journey, and some about the author’s identity. The only common thread is sincerity. The authors did not write toward an imagined idea of what an admissions officer might be looking for: they reckoned honestly with formative experiences.
What follows is one of the best and most honest personal statements we’ve ever seen. It’s worth reading as both a model of the genre and an essay that stands on its own. The writer was accepted to many top law schools and matriculated at Columbia.
Continue reading
A law school applicant recently asked for our advice about booking a hotel in Seoul. He was traveling there from Tokyo because the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) couldn’t guarantee him a seat at an LSAT testing center in Japan.
If only he had been taking the graduate record exam! The GRE is administered almost every day, often twice a day, at multiple test centers in Tokyo. Its accessibility is one of the reasons that so many law schools are accepting it in lieu of the LSAT. As of this post’s publication date, you can apply for the JD programs of Harvard, Columbia, Penn, NYU, Northwestern, Cornell, and Georgetown among other schools without ever studying for the LSAT.
But should you? Is it a good idea to apply to law school with only the GRE? If you ask admissions officers at Harvard, Northwestern, or many other GRE-friendly schools (and we have), they’ll tell you that all standardized tests are given equal weight and that there is no penalty for applying without an LSAT score. Nevertheless, there are some reasons to hesitate before you go all in on the GRE.