"No one cares what school you attended after you pass the Bar." I think it's more accurate to say "No one cares what school you attended after you land a prestigious, stable job." The difficultly, of course, is how to get there.

Taking a wider perspective about jobs and not just LSATs and getting into the T14, the paths I've seen work for peers over the past 20 years:

Go to top tier programs and work hard in a prestigious firm or government job (the easiest to envision though no small feat)

Have connections

Have special skills that make you particularly desirable

Jump into a new field when it's just starting and they are hiring like mad

Be mobile so that you can land a position at the drop of a hat in a place you wouldn't otherwise consider that will give you awesome work experience

Have a spouse that has a high paying job so that money isn't a factor for your lifestyle and you can take lower paying interesting jobs as you climb the ladder

The more you have of all the latter, the less it matters that you don't go to a top tier program. This isn't just true for law either.

Of course there is also social cache for the rest of your life of saying you "went to Harvard."

According to this chart, the number of applicants overall is up by almost 10%. According to LSAC the number of tests administered last year was up by 18%. So, yes, multiple retakes is probably a factor here.

But this chart just looks at applicants and not total test takers. A reason this chart may be more skewed towards more higher scores for applicants is because people are getting more savvy about not applying unless they get a higher or target score.

Not just that people are getting better at taking the test overall. And it's not just that high scorers weren't going to apply before but now bc of politics they suddenly are applying. My guess is more overall are bothering to take the test because of politics and a subset of them (with high scores) are pulling the trigger and applying.

@, sadly, I think it probably is true that those who can afford to retake it multiple times are better off especially with the new rules, since they are more likely to have an "optimal test day" and now law schools can more easily pick and choose between a 175 and a 179 (both phenomenal scores). Hopefully schools will be sensible and weigh the rest of the application more for these folks.

Yes, I did last month and heard back with an acceptance a week later. However, I presented it as an update with my Feb LSAT score (it was marginally better than my Dec score), but if there was anything to update on your resume you could probably use that. I also hadn’t sent them a Why School X essay before so I referenced and attached it to my brief email.

Definitely not too old! I'm in my 40's. Some advice: if you took time off to have a child, describe it as a simple, positive, intentional choice (don't make excuses for it or go into details): "I did this and it was awesome and now I'm eager to jump back in the game." I took 5 years off with my kids years ago and then went back to work. Big Law is a mixed bag with families. My honest take is that it's still easier for a guy to mention that he has a family than a woman when applying for competitive jobs. It's more often seen as a plus for guys (stable, traditional) and a minus for women (lack of dedication). Take it one step at a time - do well in law school and many more options open up. I'm not planning to go to Big Law, btw, though many of my friends and colleagues did in their early 30's and I've gone through interviews at big firms in the past.

I missed this one since I got lost in all the terminology and missed the distinction between CPU vs computer speeds, but on BR I thought of it this way: The conclusion is that "computers cannot currently be made significantly faster." But the only thing the premise tells us is that ONE WAY to make them faster (by reducing CPU size without reducing sophistication) is not a possibility. So to eliminate the possibility that OTHER ways of currently making computers faster exist, we have to chose A, that reducing CPU chip size is the ONLY way to accomplish faster computer speeds.

Just turned 46, and also a single mom. My kids are just old enough that I can now manage to leave them at home for a few hours at a time (no need for after school care, such a relief). I have a very non-linear path as well - was a PhD scientist, did well in research and teaching, then decided to become a stay at home mom for 5 years, then passed the patent bar and went back to work as an IP manager and contracts negotiator. I have wanted to go to law school for over 10 yrs, but the time was never quite "right." At this point, it feels that I've already done the "unthinkable" so many times career-wise, that going to law school seems pretty tame by comparison. I also have many non-traditional role models. My best friend had a high profile finance career, decided to go to law school four years ago, didn't like it after the first year, switched to social work grad school and loved it. She's now working again and loves every day she goes to work (she's the same age as me). Another friend of mine graduated from law school at age 50 and was voted the top IP law student in the nation her graduating year by the American IP Law Association. Honestly, for me, going to law school at 20 would have been too soon. I would have been settled in my career earlier, but I would not have been emotionally prepared for it all and probably naive about what type of law I was studying and why and where. Plus, the comfort of having had kids already is pretty substantial (I know a lot of people grappling with not being able to have them or not having the chance to be around them much). I have much more of an idea of what I want to do now and why, and no regrets about all the other cool stuff I got to experience along the way. I feel for those starting off young as well as old. Neither path is easy, and if the youngsters need to switch things around along the way, hopefully they'll understand it's going to be ok. Good luck to us all!

A) None of the coolest brown dwarfs has ever been [some other type of star that was] cool enough to destroy lithium

It seemed like it was just refuting the premise, but it came down to the difference between "is/are" and "ever been". Tricky.

I'm from Cali mostly and I'm staying here because of my kids and house. That said, I did do grad school before on the East Coast. Even though I didn't wind up wanting to live there (9 months of Boston winter every year wore me down ultimately), I have to say I'm honestly glad I lived there for 10 years (grad school + some yrs of work afterwards). I like many things about the East Coast and having connections there and being familiar with it, especially when you are young (so many colleges in a small area) was awesome. Personally, I think the 3 years in law school is a great opportunity to try out living in another part of the country if you are okay with working there for a few years afterwards since your work connections will likely be there too.

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Nothing

Nothing

I wrote an email updating them with my interest and new LSAT score (it was marginal, so not a big change, just an excuse to be writing to them), and then attaching a referenced "Why School X?" essay since I hadn't sent one previously. Seems to have helped bc they sent their offer a week later after months of no feedback. I should add - I was within their medians already, so I was hopeful but impatient. Hope that helps!

The comments are always so helpful (thanks everyone who contributed previously). It took a while for me to realize what was confusing me personally about this question but I think I've figured it out finally. I kept placing the information in the "since..." as part of the accepted premise in the argument rather than seeing it as part of a flawed counterargument. When I did that, I'd restrict myself to just looking for the logical flaw in all the premises that lead to the conclusion that the statistician is mistaken. If I instead separate it out to the argument by the statistician and then look to see if the counterargument presented actually properly addresses the statistician's concerns, it is more apparent that the counterargument tries to deflect or dismiss the points made by the statistician by introducing the idea of survival, which is not in the statistician's claims or argument at all. The same process for finding flaws holds for counterarguments where you don't address the initial argument or data presented and instead introduce an outside authority who simply states something is wrong.

Are you planning to do IP law? And do you live within a good commuting distance? They are basically across the street from the amtrak station which is awesome, but it is expensive to take the train each day and alternatives from other parts of the bay (BART or driving) are limited/painful. Honestly, I visited a couple of weeks ago and it seemed like a decent place for IP.

I feel that most places can teach you what you need to know about law and will expose you to professors that are well-respected (they all seem to sabbatical at each other's schools anyway!) I know someone that wound up outcompeting people from the T5 in their IP recognition who came from Santa Clara (and, no, their tuition wasn't paid for by a company and they didn't have a job lined up with that company afterwards; they were really smart and hard-working and being from SC didn't hold them back and the tuition assistance was a huge factor for them). However, they also dealt with the fact that: it's pretty impossible to transfer to a T14 school from SC even if you do great, and the networking and recruiting are more limited. You'll be connected to uniformly more successful people through your classmates in the long run going to a higher ranked place. And recruiters won't show up as much to SC events. If you have a special background or work experience, that negates some of these factors when competing with folks who just have a JD and minimal work experience.

If you're in IP, SC is really pushing to be stellar in that area. This year they are starting a pilot program - Tech Edge - where they partner with local attorneys and companies to give a select group of students a chance to get some marketable work experience while in school during the year.

As for bar passage, it seems most of these places run into the problem that they have a bimodal admission pool: they admit people that are very good with scholarships and have no problem passing the bar and then they accept people who are barely meeting their margins that pay full tuition and those folks do abysmally on the bar. So a 50% passage rate often reflects more about the people that were probably never going to do well no matter which school trained them. Anyway, that's all my random thoughts for the day and I know it's a tough decision. I think SC's ASW is this weekend, so go and hear what they have to say....

Well here's my perspective, which is no doubt coloring my opinions: I'm the ex-wife of a Boalt grad (we were together during his law school years and three stints in different big law firms. I have spent way too much of my life thinking about law, it's safe to say :smile: ). 20 years ago, the full tuition was around $15K/year (which students complained about, haha) and cost of living in the Bay Area was about half of what it is now, and he started with a $265K big law salary at a time where even I walked into his firm and the hiring partner asked if I wanted a job on the spot (they were desperate for scientists in our field at the time). Now I wouldn't be able to cajole them into an informational interview bc there is a glut of applicants with my background. (Fortunately, I'm not looking for a big law job). My ex's in-house salary is now around $150K at a company and he has decades of work experience. He got to work in his choice of locations and pay off his debts bc of the timing of his schooling and job searches. Now tuition is tripled and it's harder to land big law jobs in his field and cost of living has gone up. I'm not convinced my ex would land a job in the Bay Area out of law school at this point especially with an increased debt load to repay (so he'd need a net higher income or lower cost of living). And it used to be you could bow out relatively easily from big law if it turned out it wasn't what you wanted to do, but now it's quite a big investment.

My assumption is that you folks (particularly the HYS crowd) will be very employable. I'm not at all trying to dissuade you from thinking that's the case. The only folks I know that were unemployed from among my T14 friends 20 years ago chose to be unemployed. I just worry about the students that go into any law school nowadays not understanding that $200k-300K really means you've invested in a particular long-term goal (landing a big salary job for which you would be paying $1-$2K/month above your cost of living to repay the debt over 10 years, which seems ok until you add a $3-5K/month mortgage or rent and $2K/month private preschool for each kid in the big cities), so either commit to doing all it will take to repay it (casting a wide net with your job search, hustling/networking, probably not going for PI jobs, maybe living lean for a while or marrying someone else who also works all the time or has a trust fund), or if you want to have the flexibility to do something else, do all you can to maximize scholarship money (better LSATs, or lesser schools counterbalanced with prior work experience/connections). People who chose either one of the scenarios in the latter camp aren't necessarily making a bad decision.

Anyway, this is advice I'd give my own kids. Good luck to all of you...

$200K-$300K debt is risky for anyone, T14 or not. T14 is of course great overall if it works out financially, and pretty much essential if you want to be a law professor or high court judge. T14 or bust won't make sense for everyone though. For example, let's say you want to go to Big Law in SF in IP but you don't have an EE/CS degree. Even if you went to Harvard or Yale, for many IP jobs these days you would be easily edged out by a person from Santa Clara's part-time evening program with an EE/CS background who worked for a couple of years at Apple. There's pretty much no reason for that person from Santa Clara to forgo a huge scholarship in order to attend Harvard at full tuition in order to land that that kind of job. And once they're doing that job for a few years at a good firm, no one cares which school they attended. There's also a big sampling bias with the law school employment stats. The T14 attracts and cherry picks students that were employable based on their backgrounds alone. The problem with the lower ranked schools is they also admit a lot of students that they could pretty much guess would struggle but they need to make money to pay for the scholarships for the ones they are trying to lure in (sadly). It takes a bit of self awareness to know what you're really paying for in this admissions game and I think some folks just get wrapped up in identifying themselves with the schools/degree instead of what they ultimately want to do with their lives.

@ - I would SO love to hear that you found something interesting to do related to PI that you could write about in your next round of applications rather than doing a paralegal cert. It's expensive (>$10K for the program - I took about 9 classes in the past thinking along your lines before stopping) and it will give you a job that will likely be clerical if you're entry level. But if you went to work with a non-profit or even volunteered on the side with an organization, you'd get connections in the PI work world. It's easier to get your foot in the door with connections now before they have to consider you for an attorney-level job. This could be a blessing in disguise down the road.

Just a quick suggestion about the pressure from being from an Asian family...I don't know if it's relevant to your situation, but in mine it helped to try to get an older male that your parents would respect to advocate for your position. Sometimes in patriarchal societies, it makes a big difference. I know it did with mine when I was applying for programs back in college - which was about a 100 years ago :D. It's not "fair," but if that's all it takes, it's worth giving yourself a break to get through all this. Hope your recovery goes well...

After undergrad I was heading to a grad program to do research. So my senior year was not at all GPA focused. Even my advisor would say: "no one cares about grades, just get the publications." Lo and behold...

Thanks :) I'm checking it out but honestly I think it may not be practical (it's a farther commute away and I have a family). I was on the fence about applying with my numbers and sent in the application the last possible day an hour before midnight. It was definitely a surprise!

I received an acceptance yesterday from a reach school, so you just don't know. Hope you hear good news soon...

I stopped working for a little over a year and spent some of that time studying and applying. I wanted to get my life in order and be around my kids a lot before starting law school (I'm older, in my 40's), and I figured it would be my last chance to have that much freedom for a long time. My job and lengthy commute were also impacting my study time and alertness (I was chronically sleep deprived, much clearer to me now than then). In the end I probably could have been more efficient with studying and ended up in the same place, but it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do and I honestly kept falling asleep listening to the core curriculum on the weekends; once I quit I felt like I was finally understanding what JY was saying and it became interesting. I had enough work experience that I didn't feel that I needed anything more for my application. Although I was told by a couple of folks at a well-known admissions consulting firm that quitting would be a terrible idea before applying because it would look bad, I decided to ignore them because it didn't make sense to me personally. (The benefit of being older - you trust your intuition more and see other's opinions as just opinions, although they did freak me out at the time). My work history already showed I could work hard and I had a good excuse for stopping (kids). Fortunately, my gap made no difference at all to the admissions committees. I got into all the schools I expected to get into with my scores and even one reach school plus higher scholarships than I expected. Overall, it was totally, totally worth it. I'm in a much better place to start law school now. If I couldn't have stopped working altogether, I would have taken on a "fun" or "interesting" job just to pay the bills, because life's too short to be exhausted and overwhelmed all the time.

One difference could be strategy? Working with the 7Sage tutors (they are very very good, btw, and most are very reasonably priced for a single session where they can cover the basics of strategy), they were super helpful in helping me figure out which questions to tackle first so that I didn't miss easy questions bc I was spending way too much time on difficult questions, even though they both count the same. Do you finish the whole section? Do you use an analog watch to keep track of your time, and do you use it effectively? Do you try to finish 20 questions in the first 20' (or something like that) so that you can go back and have more time for the harder ones?

One of our proctors fell asleep in the back and started to snore really loudly during one of our sections, and the other had her cell phone go off during the second testing section. I took the June test at another location and the proctors were way more professional. But I don't think it was too distracting overall, just a bit surprising.

LR, RC, LG, LR, LG. LR & RC pretty straightforward. Panicked a bit on the LG's, unfortunately, so it's down to how well I forced out unvetted answers in the mad final few minutes. I'm guessing the LG will probably push my score below my target :( But we shall see..

I hope many of you are pleasantly surprised in Jan.! Glad it's over.

Wow, I thought I'd look silly bringing 3. I will throw in a bunch more now! Good question...

Just because I only have $10 in my bank account doesn't mean the ozone layer is only worth $10.