With classes having arrived at many law schools and the first week of classes under everyone’s belts, law school admissions officers are taking five minutes to sip their coffee and feel satisfied with a job well done for their excellent entering classes … before remembering that they need to get cracking on plans for this year’s recruitment and admissions cycle. We’ve already covered events where admissions officers travel to you. Those would be LSAC forums and law fairs. But there are also the events where you travel to the school. These can include actual live visits to campus as well as school-specific Zoom sessions. Just for the sake of efficiency, let’s lump these all together as “on-campus” visits, even if they’re occurring through the ether of the internet! So let’s take a few minutes today to talk about these kinds of events and provide you with some guidance on how to find out about them.
On-campus information sessions come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. At one end of the spectrum are those schools that simply will not host any unique programming on their campus. We won’t call any of these schools out by name—we don’t want to be accused of being rude—but don’t take offense if one of your top schools doesn’t offer anything. It’s likely due to a lack of staffing and/or the risk that they would be inundated with visitors. This is a rarity, though. Most schools want to welcome visitors because they recognize that this is a wonderful recruitment tool—the best advertisement that most schools have is to see their community in action, so why not welcome you to see it? Moving up one step are schools like Penn Law that offer minimal programming such as occasional student-led tours. Next up are the schools that offer regular information sessions. Notre Dame Law (in-person sessions every Monday) and Arizona State (in-person sessions every Tuesday) are two great examples here. Others may just try to host one or two open houses. The AdComms’ theory for these events is “why do smaller weekly events when we can just encourage our visitors to come for just one big day?”
As great as it is to see the in-person community, admissions offices recognize that fewer students are traveling to campus during this stage in the process than they used to. Campus visits can be a bit expensive and we’ve all grown to appreciate (while perhaps also just “accepting”) the utility of online visits. Offerings in this area have certainly expanded over the years and include sessions on specific school offerings (like UT Austin’s sessions with their Dean of Admissions), information about a variety of different facets unique to the school (such as Yale’s expansive schedule of sessions), and even sessions that go over application “best practices” that can be applicable to all schools (like Stanford and Chicago’s “Dive in with the Admissions Deans” sessions). These kinds of sessions can be wonderful if you are still in the “information gathering” stage of the admissions process and haven’t yet honed in on one or two top targets.
As a brief note, please know that most AdComms will take attendance at both in-person and virtual events. Part of this is simply a matter of gauging each event’s return on investment. After the dust settles from one recruitment cycle and schools look ahead to the next, they’ll want to assess their successes and what can be improved next time. That’s difficult to do without data, and you can’t have data if you don’t track attendance, tag prospect and applicant records, and then note how many event attendees eventually applied, were admitted, and deposited at your school. As a prospective student, you can then use this knowledge to your benefit. If you have a list of your top schools, be sure to attend a few of the events that they offer (and/or attend a law fair—they track attendance there, too). Not only will you probably learn a thing or two that will help either further strengthen your belief in the school being a good fit for you (or will gently—and unexpectedly—nudge that school down your list), but you can then incorporate that information into your application. For example, if a school offers a “Why Us?” optional statement, you can mention information that you learned from attending the visit. Heck, feel free to state directly: “As I learned when I visited campus….” This seems simple, but it signals to AdComms that you’re serious enough about their school to have attended their specific info sessions and that you actually paid attention during the session.
As for how to find out about these events, you have a few different tried-and-true methods. The first is the easiest—bookmark this page on our website and check in regularly. We’ll continually go through schools’ visit pages to aggregate visits. We’ll also provide links to this page in subsequent blog posts and will highlight any upcoming (i.e., this week) sessions at the end of each blog. We’ve got you on this one!
But—admittedly—we may miss an event, or two, or three. If you have that target list of schools, another easy way to find out about events is to go to their admissions office website and look for their “Visit” page. If you go there now in late August and don’t see anything, that’s probably just because they haven’t yet updated the page for the academic year. Maybe give it another week, check back in, and then give them a polite phone call to ask if they’ll have any visit options for the coming months. You’ll probably be pleasantly surprised at what you discover!
Last, schools will advertise their events not only on their websites but also through LSAC’s candidate referral service (CRS) system. While admittedly not encouraging anyone to open up their email inboxes to spam, hopefully getting a few emails from your top schools overrides any worries about getting tons of messages from schools you’re less-than-enthused about.
So go out there and start doing your research and enjoying those visits! You’ll improve your apps and you’ll also keep AdComms busy (which they like!).