<p>Hopefully I will get in to a to tier. My # 1 is UCLA #2 is USC and #3 would be UCDavis</p>
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<p>How? How do all of these 21-24 year olds actually know where they want to live? </p>
<p>Right after college, I took a job that required extensive travel precisely because I hadn’t seen the world and I wanted to find out. Yet even to this day, there are numerous places of which I haven’t the slightest idea of whether I would want to live there.</p>
<p>sakky, you’ve only exemplified the subjectivity of this matter. While many students DONT know where they want to live (i.e. you), many students, as the above poster says, DO know.</p>
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Do you know what the important part of this sentence is? “if the former has the right grades”</p>
<p>You’re right, if someone gets very good grades partners at good firms will want to hire them. This especially true if they attended the law school in question. The important thing to remember here is that only a small minority of students at these schools will have good enough grades to get a good job. That’s why you should attend a top 14</p>
<p>I wanna be a Judge Advocate then join the FBI…it would be overkill for me to go to a top 14 law school.</p>
<p>Not everyone goes to law school with dreams of being a Lawyer in a top firm making 200k a year.</p>
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<p>I would like to meet some of these students and ask them exactly how would they know. What sort of life experience can a 21-24 year old have such that they could actually know such a thing?</p>
<p>Well, some of them can be circumstantial demands: a spouse with a job in that location, or elderly parents who require care. Some of them can be incompletely informed but nonetheless legitimate: you might not know for sure it’s the absolute best, but you might know you really it and you might THINK it’s the best.</p>
<p>And in those cases, the future will usually bear out that suspicion, if only by self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think that’s okay.</p>
<p>Sakky- I’m at the high end of the range you’re talking about, but I have a fairly good idea on the kind of places I don’t want to live and, by process of elimination, a decent handle on the kind of places I do want to live.</p>
<p>My preferences are based on my experiences in moving around as a child, going to college in a completely different part of the country, living in the mountains during a gap year, and traveling abroad. Basically, it boils down to living in various parts of the country and various kinds communities (urban, suburban, rural, etc) for extended periods of time. I might not know exactly what it’s like to live in Chicago, but I do know what it’s like to live in a city. Based on a judgment on city life, I can make intelligent conjectures about how I’d fare in the Windy City.</p>
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<p>I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I have been through my worst and my best in this city. Growing up in the “inner-city” (east LA to be specific) I have personally experienced the faults in the city’s school system. Through my growing up and learning to research for myself, I have also learned that the education problems in LA are not only due to out-dated bureaucracies in the system, but also through problematic organization that originates as short-funding and trickles down through school teachers that consequently lack the tools to do their job, and eventually to students that will eventually cease to give a crap. I dropped out of high school and eventually returned to a continuation school all the while holding a part-time job in the LA public sector. I continued working in the public sector while I pursued a college education, earning a 3.8 thus far. I plan on finishing a degree in Public Policy and pursuing an education in law now.</p>
<p>At the moment I am 20 years old. Can you guess where I plan to live and work?</p>
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<p>Yet even then, things change. For example, that spouse with a job in that location might later want to switch to a different job in a different location. Elderly parents who require care often times later determine that they want to move to a retirement locale with lots of other elderly people such as Florida. </p>
<p>The upshot is that the United States is a mobile society where people relocate all the time. Nobody really knows where they’re going to end up and people’s tastes change when they mature and are exposed to new information. I certainly remember that the places that seemed so desirable to live in when I was 21 - when I didn’t know anything - don’t seem to be so wonderful anymore.</p>
<p>The concept of choosing a regional school over t14 is baffling in most cases. Unless you are confident (like jackamo) in that you prefer a particular career path that doesn’t require t14 pedrigree, it doesn’t make sense not to choose a school with national/cross industry placing power.</p>
<p>srqman: I don’t know where you get the idea that certain regions prefer top graduates of regional schools over t14, this is undoubtedly false for the top range of law firms, even the top range of regional only law firms. </p>
<p>If you did want to work in Indianapolis why would you choose IU over say NU when good NU grades would place you into almost every firm whereas IU would restrict you to a more defined range. </p>
<p>Plus all of this is even more compelling ITE</p>
<p>You would pick a regional school over a T14 so that you didn’t come out with huge debt and because you know you don’t want to work in NYC. I’m not saying T14s aren’t a good choice in many instances, but I assure you that UGA has every bit the weight (or more) of NU in Atlanta or Nashville.</p>
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I am in agreement. In most cases for 22 year olds just graduating undergrad, it would be odd to prefer a regional school over a t14. In my own experience, the only people who did that were those in the National Guard and could go to a public law school with state tuition waiver (law school for nearly free). Even then, I would have chosen a t14 school if I were in their position.
Like you said, there are a few cases where it makes sense to choose a regional school over a t14. These are usually the exception and not the norm. I fall under that group.</p>
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If you graduate in the bottom half of your class at UGA you will not get a job at a good firm. If you graduate in the bottom half of your class at NU you may not get a good job in those places, but you will get a good job (well maybe not now).</p>
<p>what is NU, do you mean NYU?</p>
<p>^NU stands for Northwestern University.</p>
<p>NU = Northwestern</p>
<p>(x-posted)</p>
<p>One of the highest paid attorneys I hire is a UGA grad. If you are picking between a T14 and a state school, I doubt you are going to be in the bottom half of the class at the state school.
I went to a top 5 law school. I’m glad I did. HOWEVER, it is a different economy now. I’m not saying people are going to “prefer” a state school or strong regional school over a T14, but I am saying that it might make economic sense and be a solid option. Not everyone aspires to Wall Street or Big Law. I didn’t.<br>
I sure wouldn’t want to come out with huge debt and be forced into Big Law so that I could pay it off. Oh wait, they aren’t hiring all that much right now…</p>
<p>^ Actually, from what I’ve read Big Law has actually increased their recruting at T14’s this last year, and decreased it everywhere else. </p>
<p>Meaning if you do want to go into BigLaw, your chances from a T14 couldn’t have gone down that much, if at all (bad economy canceling out with increased recruitment), while your chances from a state school definitely took a hit.</p>
<p>This is consistent with what I’ve been observing at my school. The logic is that they haven’t quite reduced their recruiting by enough to hit the top few schools, and they’ve reduced the rest of their recruiting to the point where it’s no longer efficient to send recruiters there.</p>