<p>I am a varsity athlete at Stanford with a major in economics and a 3.2 gpa. This summer I will (hopefully) be interning at a prestigious law firm. Assuming I score well on the LSAT what law schools should I be aiming for? Will schools consider the 30+ hr weekly time commitment? </p>
<p>Thanks for the insight</p>
<p>it is impossible to tell you where to apply if you can’t give us a concrete LSAT score. the only thing that is for sure is that with your gpa and assuming you are not a underrepresented minority, you will have no chance at the top six schools for sure since they do not take GPAs that low no matter what LSAT score you have.</p>
<p>they will not care about your time commitments. they will use your LSAT/GPA for 95% of their decision.</p>
<p>“From the perspective of someone who has reviewed more than 30,000 applicants for admissions to law school, I can assure varsity athletes that their significant commitment of time will not go unnoticed by admissions committee members”
-Charles W. Roboski
Director of Admissions, Notre Dame Law School</p>
<p>angryelf, dude you seriously need to stop posting in the law school section. it is so obvious you are clueless when it comes to the law school admissions process and your harmful and ignorant posts are misleading applicants. you have been misleading posters for quite some time now.</p>
<p>it is common sense that every law school adcomm is going to say that they will look at extracurriculars since they do not want their school to seem shallow. it is also common sense that what adcomms say does not equal the truth. their goal is to get as many people as possible to apply so they can raise their selectivity ratings. just do some basic research and you will see that law school is 95% a numbers game. unless the soft is curing cancer or something truly prestigious, it will not sway adcomms’ minds unless you are within their school’s median numerical range.</p>
<p>There is some truth to what angryelf says. I know that in my “kid” attorney’s class, the Div 1 athletes had somewhat lower gpa’s than the norm. </p>
<p>I agree, however, that nobody can tell you your odds without a REAL LSAT. </p>
<p>And ask at Stanford, which can give you better, more targeted advice than anyone on this board.</p>
<p>I agree that there is some truth to what angry elf says. That said, there are many varsity athletes with high GPAs applying to law school. </p>
<p>You never want to have to spend time making excuses on a law school application, absent a truly extraordinary situation (like a serious illness during a particular semester). It is one thing to have lower grades during an aberrant semester, but quite another to have a lower GPA overall. It is better to have accomplishments that will speak for themselves.</p>
<p>I merely posted a quote. I made no indication as to whether it was factually correct.
If there’s widespread data indicating that this is not the case, why not post it?</p>
<p>wow, just wow. you think it is ok to post things without checking to see if it is factually correct?</p>
<p>the reason the some people may get away with “lower than norm” gpas at schools is because they will have a LSAT score “above the norm” to compensate. even if their gpa is below the norm, it won’t be much below like a 3.2.</p>
<p>OP has no reason to ask Stanford since it is widely known that universities know less about law school admission and will tell everyone they have a shot to try to up applications. OP should instead listen to my advice or go search on other law school admissions sites.</p>
<p>In this context, absolutely. Let me remind you that you are straight up accusing the director of admissions of lying with absolutely no empirical evidence to suggest otherwise.
It’s great that you can blindly repeat what the masses say, but untill you add any objective evidence to back up your points, your posts are absolutely no different from the posts you make a point to attack. </p>
<p>Also, I think it’s important to add that you haven’t actually provided any advice to the op, so I’m not really sure what they have to listen to.</p>
<p>you are unbelievable. judging by your post history, you don’t even attend a top law school nor have you even applied to one so why don’t you give it up. you have no qualifications for even being in this topic let alone copying and pasting some misleading quote. i know you think you live in a world where everyone tells the truth and has no hidden agendas but you need to wake up. i already applied and attend a top law school so i think i am credible. you want empirical data?</p>
<ol>
<li>lawschoolnumbers.com go here and look at the top schools and look at the graphs of applicants and tell me how many of those ppl with low numbers who got in (low in comparison to the schools numerical ranges) were not underrepresented minorities.</li>
<li>top-law-schools.com go here and browse through the forum where tons of law school applicants are discussing admissions.</li>
<li>after you do research there, come back here and apologize for putting your foot in your mouth.</li>
</ol>
<p>if that empirical data isn’t enough, why don’t you do some light thinking. why would a law school dean admit someone with low numbers when their job and their schools financial situation depends on raising their school’s numerical medians for the us rankings unless that applicant either boosted their ethnic diversity profile or was truly extraordinary (ex. mckinsey analyst,etc.). this isn’t undergraduate admissions anymore.</p>
<p>I think the 3.2 GPA is low by top law school standards. Even a very high LSAT won’t guarantee a T6 acceptance with that GPA. </p>
<p>Having just watch DD and some of her friends go through the process, here is my observation. Law schools are driven by numbers. GPA and LSAT rule. But, when people say numbers are everything, that is a little misleading, but not in a way that will help a lower numbered candidate. </p>
<p>If your numbers are below the schools range, great softs won’t likely help you. However, what people don’t always grasp is that strong numbers won’t guarantee you to get in. They just get you into the “look at” pile. At that point the softs do come in. So to say it is only about numbers and not softs I think is misleading. Numbers can be hard and fast for rejecting you, but it is combo of numbers and the rest of your application that will get you in. </p>
<p>There is a site that is very informative for people considering law school, where you can track how people with your numbers did with their application cycle. There is one applicant this year that you might find interesting. He has a lowish (3.5) GPA and a high (176) LSAT score. He is what people refer to as a splitter and you can see here how that is working out for him this cycle.</p>
<p>[JammasterJ</a> | Law School Numbers](<a href=“Recently Updated J.D. Profiles | Law School Numbers”>JammasterJ | Law School Numbers)</p>
<p>I have browsed through lawschoolnumbers, but none of the numbers specifically adress athletes, so that alone does nothing to further the cause.
Let me remind you that the magnitude of how much neighbor an athlete helps has never been discussed so even if the median gpa at a given school for atheletes was 3.6 as opposed to 3.7, you would still be wrong.
Relatively Small differences would be nearly impossible to observe without any indication as to who is an athlete and who is not.</p>
<p>As to the rationale of why athletes would be given a preference, this one should be obvious.
30+ hour a week of practices, workouts and travel is no insignificant task. The amount of time that it sucks away from academics is immense. Maintaining a repectable gpa takes excelled time management skills and a lot more hard work than it does for the average candidate.</p>
<p>There are also multiple studies demonstrating varsity athletes have a higher success rate in law school. Once I’m off my phone, I can link you to them if so desires.</p>
<p>What is DD? I would understand what D meant. But DD? I’m assuming it’s some modifier on Daughter.</p>
<p>LSN is great. Thank you.</p>
<p>Huh? The OP is an undergrad at Stanford. Most universities keep records of the law school admissions stats for their own students. I’m not suggesting the OP ask Stanford LAW school; I’m suggesting that he ask the pre-law adviser at the university he attends. </p>
<p>There is no reason for the adviser to mislead him. It’s probable that there are other Stanford athletes who have applied to law school in the recent past. Knowing how they fared would be useful to the OP.</p>
<p>OK, so lets just say for argument sake that the 30 hours a week an athlete spends away from his/her studies is somehow more impressive than the person who works 30 hours a week at a job or some other extremely time consuming effort. Now, lets just look on LSN at Stanford’s numbers for last year and this year. Are those amazing athletes such a rare breed that none of them have applied to Stanford in the past two years? If so, then my info won’t help. But on the off chance that at least one athlete has applied in the past two years, a 3.2 GPA will still not get you in. The lowest GPA accepted last year was a URM with a 3.4 and a 170 LSAT, this year so far, the lowest listed are a user who is obviously fake because there “green spot” has been there since before the cycle even started and even they listed a 3.5 URM GPA and another user who suspiciously appeared the same day as this thread. BTW they are also listed as a URM with a 2.8 GPA, still higher than your 3.2. </p>
<p>Now, feel free to spend you money and time applying because hey, you never know. But if you are asking about your prospects, they are not great. And repeating that you are an athlete will not make your 3.2 THAT much stronger if at all. Being a URM will have much more of a bump that being an athlete and even URM at 3.2 is a tough chance.</p>