Advice?

So I’m a recent college graduate. I studied bioengineering and philosophy at a top25 undergrad, and my original intent was to go into public health with a focus on health policy and law, but now I’ve been thinking about just going for a JD/MPH. My cumulative UG GPA is a 3.498, but my philosophy GPA alone is a 3.91. I also took the LSAT a few months ago and got a 174.

If anyone has any advice on what to do next, I’d love to hear it. All of my internships/work experience so far is in health care and public health (a lot of public health/clinical research community work).

First post on here so I apologize if I’m infringing on any forum rules. Thanks.

-runny

Wow, that’s an amazing LSAT score. If you plan on working in healthcare and public health after law school, I’d spend a year or two working in the field before law school. Work experience + a track record of doing what you love (if that’s the case) will be helpful in getting in. You should get in somewhere in the top 10.

Thanks! A lot of my philosophy studies were in classical logic systems so that ended up coming in handy. But will I still have success with a mediocre GPA?

Yes, you will get into good schools. Your GPA isn’t great, but very few other applicants are going to have a better LSAT score, so congrats!

You can look on this site to get a sense of how you might do: http://mylsn.info/tu5x75/

So according to that data, Harvard, Yale, Stanford might be a stretch but you have a good shot everywhere else. You also can probably get some good scholarship offers. Your high LSAT and low GPA makes you a “splitter,” so it’s a bit harder to predict how you’ll do.

As a general rule, you shouldn’t care about how good a particular school is in any speciality area. But if you’re sure you’re pursuing a joint degree, then I think it makes sense to narrow your search to schools that have a good MPH program. I would recommend though that you do some research into exactly what kind of career paths are opened up by a JD/MPH and whether they’re what you would be interested in. You can reach out to people who have both degrees and see whether they think the dual program was worth it.

Obviously HYS would be the dream, but Penn, Columbia, Cal, and Michigan all have great MPH programs so they will definitely be top of my list. Also, I noticed there is an option for including URM. I’m first-gen Hispanic (fluent in Spanish), so does that count as underrepresented?

Thanks so much.

I don’t know a ton about URM admissions — my understanding is that some forms of Hispanic count more than others. But yeah, that should be a boost for you. So if you want HYS, it seems like they’re worth a shot. (I got into S below both medians — you never know!)

The other advice I have is just to apply to a lot of T14 schools, even if you’re not that interested in going (because of location or the lack of an MPH program or whatever). The best way to get scholarship money is to use an offer from another school as leverage. More applications mean more shots at scholarship offers. Also, it’s definitely possible to get into health law and policy without an MPH, so that might be something to consider. I can’t really speak to all of the pros and cons though.