<p>I am a current high school senior exploring my options. I am interested in becoming a corporate lawyer and I know it will be a lot of work. I am not a super bright student (29 ACT if that matters). I can be smart when I want and get all As in high school but as of now my GPA is lackluster because I didn't really start trying until the end of last year. I also know that law school will require a lot of reading and writing both of which I excel at (35 ACT reading). so finally my question... do you necessarily have to be SUPER smart to be good in law school or is it all about how much work you put into it? I would like to go to NYU for law but I don't even know if I am smart enough to handle the course load. Any feedback would be helpful.</p>
<p>Being smart obviously helps. That said, law is quite learnable. More importantly, do you have any experience with the practice of law? If not, there’s no way you can know whether you want to be a lawyer. Keep your GPA above a 3.6 when you go to college and spend some time interning/externing for a PD/DA/law firm to see what the practice of law is actually like. It can be trickier to get experience doing transactional work (assuming that is what you meant by “corporate law,” and not simply BigLaw work) but big firms often are willing to take on interns if asked. </p>
<p>No, you don’t have to be super-smart to be a lawyer. There are plenty of people who aren’t academic superstars but who do fine in law practice, and who make it through law school.</p>
<p>However, learn from my mistakes and be sure that you’ve gotten a study system down pat NOW, when your grades don’t count yet towards law school. When I was in high school, I cruised through and didn’t try at all, and I didn’t “know how to study”. Then when I got to college, I had to figure out “how to study”, and it took a year of figuring out “how to study”, and my grades were only mediocre during that year. Then once I had the system down, I made all As. As a result, my GPA in college was only about a 3.82 when it could have been a 4.0 if I had figured out my study system before getting to college, rather than waiting to figure it out while in college. That GPA gap could have cost me admission to some schools. So don’t do what I did; instead, start making all As now all the time, and develop your study system now.</p>