Thoughts on a GPA addendum for non-traditional student? (some very specific questions)

mynameislilz

I'm 9 years out of undergraduate and 6 years out of graduate school. My GPA is the same from both, but I don't think it reflects what I am capable of now for the following reasons:

1. I had extraordinary obligations during both: for undergrad, I was working 30 hours a week, and added a business minor late, meaning I had to take up to 25 credits some semesters. I was a music major so I dedicated 3-5 hours a day to practicing, leaving not a lot of time to study. During grad, I left a semester early to start a full time job and complete my degrees from the other side of the country while working full time, and prior to that had a mentally ill and emotionally abusive live-in boyfriend (strong lean toward excluding this part--too personal).
2. A lot of time has passed, and I have become much more mature and better at managing my time. My work performance reviews are all stellar, and I have gotten As in the two extension classes I have taken (finance and law related).
3. I know I want to study law, whereas I was not ready to make that same decision about my areas of study of study in U and G.

In addition to that, I ended up taking an extra year to complete my graduate program. Basically, I signed up for "independent study" (my job) for a few semesters until I had the time to thoughtfully complete my final paper. It will look like I took three years to complete the program (which, to be fair, ended up in dual degrees). Does this warrant an explanation?

Anyone have any thoughts as to what would be worth including, if anything?

OneFortyDotSix

I would absolutely mention the 30 hours/week of employment commitments - schools definitely consider that sort of thing heavily and a lot of applications actually have a portion asking specifically how many hours/week you had to work during school.

The other stuff - questionable. First because extracurricular commitments theoretically apply to a lot of other applicants, and if they happened to have produced outstanding elements of your background that are indicated in your resume/application, the additional commitment is self-evident, at least in my estimation. For instance on my resume I indicate positions/titles achieved in races and competitions, rather than the 20 hours I spent per week on endurance training

Same with the uncertainty around what you wanted to study - this is the case with a huge chunk of students, and in many cases is self-evident.

I would also personally exclude relationship stuff or anything else for which an admissions officer could theoretically assume/conclude/infer that such hardship was a result of personal choice, whether such an attribution is fair or not.

Finally, the fact that it is 9 years later means that as a soft factor, adcoms will weigh slightly more what you did in the last 9 years than the soft conclusions they may draw based on academic performance. I stress the fact that this will be a strictly soft consideration because it's important to bear in mind that Law Schools are still evaluated on the average GPA of entering students, so to protect their stats/rankings extenuating circumstances aside GPA is still regarded as very much a hard factor. I'm currently facing the same challenge; ultimately the best thing you can do to overcome that hard demerit is optimize your LSAT score as much as humanly possible.

Hope that helps - 7sage Admissions folks please chime in if anything in your experience suggests deviations from the above

mynameislilz

Thank you so much for your really thoughtful feedback. This is super helpful. Particularly it makes sense that the admissions officer will probably know that given my major was music, I was probably spending quite a bit of extra time practicing or in rehearsals. I think I just have to keep asking myself the question of "would they know this from elsewhere on my application," and omit things that fit that.