Awards are fine but doing things just to get them is made up and hollow.
Don’t start a club. I’m sure many existing can use your help.
You are not going to get into a college because of an award or not.
But you do want ECs where your accomplishments and their impact can be demonstrated.
Most people list Deans list or NAational Honor and AP Scholar as awards. They are meaningless. The accomplishments that led to the award are what matters.
For T14 law school admissions, pretty much any core major will work, as long as you get really good grades. In terms of law school preparation, anything where you do a lot of difficult reading and some writing is obviously good, including History.
In terms of colleges with good law school placement, you have a lot of choices. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap in terms of per capita placement in the most competitive business positions and T14 law schools. I note this is not necessarily indicative of value added–the sorts of people who want those placements and are generally good students go to a lot of the same colleges, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the college they chose made that happen for those people.
Anyway, not needing an undergraduate business program means you actually have a huge range of choices. In fact if you look at per capita T14 lists, you will typically see a lot of stand-alone liberal arts colleges mixed in with the LACs embedded in research universities:
A lot of these also showed up on the IB list too. And just like with the IB list, publics tend to feature much higher on the total list, and simple per capita not really controlling properly for different self-selection at privates versus publics.
Given that you have a wide range of good choices, you would need some other filtering mechanisms. Like, do you have a preference between standalone LACs, medium-sized colleges inside private universities, or large colleges inside public universities? And there are some variations on these combinations too.
How about region? Setting (urban, near-urban, small town, rural)? Culture/vibe?
You can afford to be pretty specific in at least one or two of these areas, because that will likely still leave many reach/target/likely options to consider.
Thanks for the info, I really appreciate all this.
Texas is outside my usual “jurisdiction”, but stating the obvious–Rice, University of Texas, and TAMU. This also sounds like “name the best colleges in Texas” but that is sort of the point–business is such a common destination for college graduates that good colleges placing a lot of people in good business positions is the norm not the exception.
As mentioned previously, I knew about SMU having a big business presence before this conversation. And then somewhere around the point you would be asking if TCU or Baylor is better for business placement, I would want to call in a legit state/regional specialist.
Yeah, I like to think of US colleges as being on sort of a massive family tree, and certain colleges are kinda on the same branch of that family tree. To me, Georgetown and BC are on one of those branches, so it doesn’t surprise me if you liked Georgetown, you would also like BC.
Just to fold this together a bit–if you like Georgetown, BC, and SMU, the next Texas college I would normally think of would be Rice. Not quite on the same branch as any of those, but closer than, say UT or TAMU.
Fordham was a good suggestion and not so reachy. Villanova. Wake Forest and Rochester. Tulane. Lehigh. I’d think all of these are potentials for filling out a list a bit.
Or, just go to SMU! Like I said before, it is good enough for your purposes such that you don’t necessarily need a long list.
Although the vibe is slightly different, I think that someone interested in SMU should at least take a swing by TCU since they’re a 43m drive from one another. Another Texas possibility (besides Rice) is Trinity U in San Antonio.
If you like Georgetown & Boston College, check out another northeastern Jesuit, Fairfield in Connecticut as well as Loyola Chicago in Illinois. If you liked Michigan, then I agree about checking out IU, but also think about Wisconsin-Madison. I know that those 3 have partnered together for various reasons (including study abroad programs).
Just realize as u you look at law school feeders that kids in top law schools will often be the same as from top undergrad because they were top students to begin with.
I’m not sure the school itself matters - but if you go to Harvard or Princeton then you are an elite student and can be again. But the fact that Harvard has 174 in its class including many from no name or non elite schools shows you if the student is brilliant and a great test taker as you are, that where they go either didn’t impact or had little impact.
The reality is that the average Harvard grad is better statistically than the Wyoming grads but if the Wyoming grad delivers on gpa and lsat, like the Harvard grad, they’ll be fine. It’s just that the amount of that type student at Wyoming is less. But that elite student could be anywhere - so it’s the student or you moreso than the UG attended.
Yale shows 169 if I counted right from
2020-24 - schools such as West Texas A&M, DePaul, Goshen, Lewis & Clark, Quinnipiac, U of Idaho, Redlands, Utica College.
Again, they come from anywhere if they deliver on gpa and lsat (which you’d clearly do on lsat).
So the top schools feed because they are mostly top students to begin with. But if you have the goods, you make it from anywhere. So don’t panic if you don’t attend a top school and frankly your odds will likely be the same at UTK as an elite.
Good luck.
Yes, the amount of value-added from the mere name of your school is quite hard to measure and may be quite low.
I will say that I think colleges which regularly place a lot of grads in top law schools tend to have quite good advising, formal and informal, for the students with such ambitions, and indeed starting really even before you matriculate. Obviously that is replaceable with some effort and foresight. But much like with “feeder” high schools to the most selective colleges, making that sort of high-quality advising easily available is likely a significant part of the observed statistical relationships.
Like, a “trick” you will generally know about if you go to a T14 feeder college is to try to quickly identify a major and other courses where you will get really good grades. Again, this process can start before you even matriculate, and certainly has begun as soon as you start getting any evaluations in your classes.
And this is important because just banging your head against the wall in a major you thought you would like but is not really your best subject in college for a little too long can have permanent consequences for your college GPA, which is a critical input to T14 admissions decisions.
Combine this with the fact the T14 law schools do tend to go somewhat deeper into the classes at prominent T14 feeder colleges even controlling for test scores, and there is a much higher chance the people who know this “trick” will get the ultimate GPA they need at a T14 feeder. Whereas at a non-feeder college, the people at the very top of their class who do go to T14 law schools may essentially have all gotten “lucky” in that they were in one of the best subjects for them from the start, even without knowing this trick.
Now again, I just told everyone here the trick, and there is absolutely no reason you cannot apply the same trick at any college. But still, I think this sort of thing is the source of some of the differences we see, including determining who will be the 1-2 people at a top law school from a large non-feeder college and who will not.
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