I am an Asian female who went to MIT for undergrad and double majored in math and computer science. My undergrad GPA is a 4.2 (3.2 on the 4.0 scale). It wasn’t because of a bad semester or anything, I just got mostly B’s in my classes. I am finishing up a 5th year master’s in CS and my GPA for that is going to be a 4.5/3.5. I’ve done several tech internships at Google and Facebook and one sales and trading internship at JP Morgan.
I recently decided to apply to law school and took the LSATs and scored a 178. What do you think my chances are for top law schools given a low GPA and no law-related activities? And is there any way to improve my GPA?
Nobody can say no chance- or slam dunk. Your 178 puts you in the top 25% of accepted students, your grad school GPA puts you in the bottom 25%.
Just as an aside, half of the incoming law classes at Harvard these days have at least a year of work experience in a law firm. If I were on the AdComms (which I’m not), I would wonder about your motivation (all CS until a brief dabble in finance then a sudden major turn to law) and your basis for thinking that law is for you. If you really, truly think that law is for you (and not just a good way to get another fancy name on your resume and make a ton of money), I would suggest working for a year at a law firm- pick one that is strong in a specialization that you are interested in- for a year and applying to Harvard then. Your LSAT score will hold, and your practical experience (and the LoR that you would have) should make you a very attractive candidate.
Not as instant gratification, but likely to pay off not just in getting into the law school you want, but in knowing what you actually want to do.
Actually, any work experience is valuable. Working in a law firm is in no way a prerequisite for admission to law school, including the T14. Neither of my kids worked in a law firm, but both went to law school (1 at H, and 1 at Chicago) two years after graduating from undergrad after working in a variety of jobs.
Fair point, @runnersmom. But I would suggest with the overall info we have so far on the OP that work in a law/similar office would probably be useful- and not just for admissions. Many law school applicants have done humanities based undergrad degrees, so have been used to reading/writing in volume- skills that get rusty easily!
I polled my HLS (alumni) classmates about whether or not working in a law firm vs. working somewhere else, pre-law school, would help with law school admissions or law firm hiring, since I’m often asked the question by undergrads.
Surprisingly, the answer that I got was a strong NO.
Work experience in a law firm will help you decide whether you really want to be a lawyer. So many people apply and go to law school without any idea of what it’s like to be a lawyer. At a wedding between 2 lawyers, I met quite a few Stanford law grads (classmates of the groom) and only one was still practising law. The groom is now a college professor in architecture. Yes, he worked as a lawyer for a few years and went on to architecture school.
While I understand the points being made here, I respectfully disagree. Being a lawyer is not one thing, and the experience of working in a law firm is not uniform. In addition to the two children referenced above who have and are attending law school, I am a lawyer as is my husband. No amount of working in a local law office where I lived before law school would have prepared me for my Biglaw experience post-law school. While I recognize that many people go to law school not really understanding what lawyers do, I’m just not sure there’s any way to really know the extent of things lawyers do. The summer after 1L I worked for a small office that did primarily criminal law - I have not stepped inside a courtroom since except to be sworn into the Bar…oh, and to see my son sworn in. Being a lawyer, to me, is about thinking, analyzing, evaluating, negotiating, and finding solutions to problems. Experience in any sector that exposes a person to these skills, in practice, will be good preparation for being a lawyer. As I said, just my opinion.
Also, to address the point about getting reading/writing experience in volume, many of my D’s friends who have been Biglaw paralegals would say their organizational skills are those that have been most highly developed during their experiences.
I agree with your points @runnersmom, and of course we don’t know very much about the OP. But the OP is looking at the tippy-top law schools with a super LSAT and a not so great GPA (albeit from MIT). She has been a math / compsci person for 5+ years and has just recently developed an interest in law.
I’m not saying that it’s necessary for her to work for a year in a legal office/practice, but I do think that it might help her- both for getting in to Harvard Law and for being ready for it if/when she gets there. Although MIT does have a humanities requirement, it can be pretty minimal, meaning that it’s possible that the OP may not have done any substantial reading/writing classes since high school. I am guessing that would not be true most of the paralegals you reference.
Why in the world do you want to go to law school? I know many top law school students who are trying very hard to go into tech! It seems like you have tech fantastic experience, why let all of those technical skills go to waste?
@runnersmom: Working in a law office will show you what law is like a lot better than watching TV, which is where most people get their impression of law, or being told law is appropriate because they “like to argue.” Substantively, the brief writing I did interning at a criminal defense firm isn’t really any different from brief writing now in biglaw. Research is research. The point of interning in a law office isn’t to get a complete understanding of what all lawyers do, it’s to dispel the myths surrounding law.
If you think you HAVE to go to Harvard, Stanford or Columbia, then you need to reexamine why you want to go to law school in the first place. You will get into a top law school and will get a job at biglaw if you work hard in law school and impress them in your clerkship. But law schools of all stripes are filled with students just like you who are brilliant and deserve to be there as well.
Well, you don’t have to go to H, S, or C, but in today’s legal environment, if you want to work in Biglaw, it certainly helps. I defer to those who have worked in law offices as interns (prior to law school) and who were allowed to research and write memos and briefs. In my experience, I did intake interviews with clients at the local jail and wrote up my notes. The firm’s lawyers were not relying on my uneducated legal research. Your perspective may be different, so again, I defer to your experience. Why OP is now interested in law may not be clear to us, but both my D and my S have had classmates whose STEM/tech experience has made them very sought after as attorneys. To me, law is a business…it’s not any more like LA Law or Boston Legal or the Good Wife than medicine is like Grey’s Anatomy or ER.
