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<li>career services is abysmal, ABYSMAL. the erecruiting website has an incredibly crappy selection of jobs, and there aren't really that many companies that come on campus. i'm not sure if gigi simeone is associated with the career services office, but she's even worse - she coordinates law school applications (and i think med school applications too). one former classmate who's about to graduate from stanford law contacted her with the idea that he could come back to campus to give a presentation for stanford. she grudgingly accepted, even though "no one from swarthmore could get into stanford law." there are, i think, five swatties in my friend's graduating class. i have a friend who left her office in tears after talking to her about med school applications - a year later, she was accepted into nyu's md/phd program. there's a weird tendency to discourage future plans like that.</li>
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<p>I'm very interested in Swarthmore (either first/second choice, maybe ED), but I'm also interested in going to law school. The Swarthmore website mentions that 9% of Swarthmore alumni have a law degree (Swarthmore</a> College :: Pre-Law Advising :: Guide to Pre-Law Studies) so things can't be that bad can it?</p>
<p>My S just graduated ('09) and while it was a very tough year for graduates to find jobs (or interim placements prior to grad school), I felt the advice and direction he received from career Services was superficial and unhelpful. He did find a summer internship which eventaully led to a permanent position, but this was done through the networks he had built during his summer and extracurricular positions, unrelated to the College. I also have never felt the Swat alumni network, strongly touted by the administration, is useful for job hunts. I would love to be enlighted with a different perspective.</p>
<p>My question now, though, is about the pre-med advising at Swat, esp in light of the comment from PBailey: can students or parents speak to the quality of the advice given? My D is interested in pursuing a career in medicine.</p>
<p>If you read through all the guides at the Pre-Law Advising site, what did you think about the quality of the recommendations and advice provided? Did the information seem “crappy” or did it seem complete, detailed, and useful?</p>
<p>If you have specific questions, why not e-mail or call Gigi Simone and ask?</p>
<p>From the senior exit surveys, here’s the list of graduating seniors who were going immediately into law school and the schools they listed. I don’t know if any of these are considered “good” law schools or not. This does not include the large number of students who do something else for two years before law school including all the Fulbright, Rhode, Goldwater, and other scholarship winners, those who travel overseas, do public interest work, etc. This is really, really common now to wait a few years before law school, so this is not a comprehensive list. Gigi probably has a better list:</p>
<p>NYU
NYU
BU
BU
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard
Harvard
Cornell
George Washington
UCLA
Columbia
Columbia
Columbia
Columbia
Georgetown
Georgetown
UMaryland
UMaryland
UMaryland
UConn
UPenn
UPenn
UPenn
UPenn
WUSTL
Yale
Yale
U Miami
Duke
Vanderbilt
Berkeley
UMich
William & Mary
Tulane</p>
<p>Here’s the link to the Pre-med advising website. There are pages and pages of informationa nd guides linked on the left side so that you can review the advice Swarthmore gives and judge the quality of the pre-med advising. </p>
<p>PBailey: I don’t know how good the advising is. The websites can be misleading. For example, the Career Services website is impressive, but people at Swarthmore have told me that Career Services isn’t great. You should try to find a way to talk to someone at Swarthmore who is pre-law, or talk to the dean in charge of pre-law advising and talk to her about what resources Swarthmore has for people who are interested in going to law school.</p>
<p>All you need to get into a very top Law school is high GPA, high LSAT score, and two great LORs. There are no required classes, no “preferred” majors, or anything like tat. Frankly, I am not sure what a pre-law adviser is supposed to help with…</p>
<p>Swat alums have offered me jobs and internships, have taken me out to coffee to discuss career goals etc, and have hired me to tutor their children. Swatties are generally very interested in helping younger swatties, and I think this is true in a wide variety of professions.</p>
<p>I generally found Career Services rather helpful for the field I was looking at (consulting). The main issue is that very very few non-non-profits seem to schedule trips to campus. My brother goes to Williams, and all the major consulting firms had massive recruitment there—only one, small, consulting firm seems to recruit at Swarthmore. And I was the only McKinsey hire in the past two years—though there may have been 1-2 students who went to Bain/BCG.</p>
<p>Still, Swarthmore is a <em>powerhouse</em> for any kind of graduate school.</p>
<p>Williams has always been a Wall Street feeder school. Alas, the job market for investment bankers seems to have gotten a little soft here lately.</p>
<p>One of the reasons for scheduling fewer campus visits is that Swarthmore students are only 2 hours from NYC. It takes bus, a wagon train over the mountain, and a dog sled team to get to NYC from Williamstown!</p>
<p>But, overll, Swarthmore is not a big i-banker/Wall Street school, although many Swat grads do end up in finance – including some famous names like T. Rowe Price and Jerome Kohlberg.</p>
<p>The quaility of pre-law advising should not influence the decision of which undergraduate institution to attend. Unlike medical school, there are no preset requirements for admission other than graduation from an accredited school with an “academic” major (i.e. no PE or home ec major), strong grades, a decent LSAT and great letters from your professors. </p>
<p>Law schools attract and accept students from all walks of life and ages. For example, when I started law school many, many years ago, although the bulk of the entering class was made up of students who had either just graduated or taken a year off, there were also a number of “mature” students who were returning to school for various reasons. Among these, there were a priest, a doctor, accountants, nurses, stay at home moms and engineers, and one very interesting successful and retired contractor/developer who at 52 decided to attend to fulfill a lifetime dream. </p>
<p>Any student graduating with good grades from a reputable liberal arts school, like Swarthmore, will have what it takes to get into law school without the need of “pre-law advising.”</p>
<p>I agree with the assessment of Career Services that you cited. It is one of the weakest aspects of Swarthmore, and I’m pretty sure I’ve discussed this before. That said, I think getting into a good law school is something you can do if you work on it. You won’t get much help from CS on this front. You just need to do well on your LSATs and maintain a very high GPA. A friend of mine kept her GPA at 3.9 at Swarthmore and did well on the LSATs, but still didn’t manage to get into Yale. She did get into Harvard, though. I will say that she did all the work it took to get into a top law school on her own and that, beyond professor recommendations, she didn’t make use of any college resources to do this.</p>
<p>Years ago, a high GPA at Swarthmore used to be very valuable for law school applicants, as they made adjustments to GPAs of incoming college graduates based on their undergraduate institutions, and Swarthmore was consistently among the schools that received the largest upward adjustment. Unfortunately for current and future Swatties, though, this practice has been all but eliminated in law schools.</p>
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<p>I’m unsurprised Career Services was of limited use to your son. That has been the story I’ve heard from just about everyone who didn’t go into one of the narrow fields of focus where Career Services is known to be competent (consulting and certain types of non-profit work). The alumni network is what you make of it. If you’re looking to get a job, you may be able to finagle an interview that you wouldn’t otherwise. Or, you may be able to make inroads via your social network from campus, from your friends and acquaintances who you knew at school. For a person from the class of '09, his friends won’t yet be likely to be in positions where they can offer him jobs, but they may be able to connect him to someone who can. Either way, you have to hustle (especially in today’s economy), and nothing is just going to be handed to you. It took me a little while before I started taking full advantage of my alumni network, but I eventually started to, and it has been fruitful. I have managed to collaborate on several projects with Swarthmore alumni, and it has been enjoyable.</p>
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<p>I think this is common, and I can count myself among the people who have offered Swarthmore alums jobs. It’s nice because Swarthmore graduates can be expected to have a certain level of competence, and are likely to have ethical integrity. It’s convenient for employers when the Swarthmore admissions office has essentially done most of the work for finding candidates for employment.</p>
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<p>I believe consulting is one of the areas where Career Services is strongest, so there’s a good chance your experiences are not representative of that of the average Career Services user, who would probably have been less satisfied than you. I honestly don’t know anyone who didn’t go into a non-profit or consulting who has much positive to say about Career Services.</p>
<p>I’ll note, however, that despite the regrettably poor experiences of some with the Swarthmore career office, I’ll say that it seems Swarthmore is nearly tops for admission into graduate programs. From what I’ve been told, since there are so many very qualified applicants for graduate programs, connections Swarthmore professors have with top grad programs are very important, especially since a good word from a reliable source among a pile of seemingly identical applications can mean acceptance. Swarthmore students have had incredible success getting into top grad programs, and if that’s your ambition, there are few places, at least from what I understand, that can offer Swarthmore’s excellent grad school placement.</p>
<p>Additionally, I’ve had incredible experiences within the alumni network. In fact, I’ve spent both my summers with alumni. Their advice has been very helpful in figuring out what classes to take, how to prioritize my time, etc. For the grad school bound, professors in the associated field are probably THE people from whom to seek advice; not career officers. Even pre-law students would be well off to discuss their pre-law ambitions with public policy / political science profs, who probably know at least a thing or two about admissions. Although I’ll concede I don’t know much about pre-law at Swat.</p>
<p>Finally, it’s important to remember that our networks are very different and perhaps more useful than they used to be. It seems everyone is saying this, but Facebook truly has expanded our network and has brought us benefits beyond those like reminding us what we might have trouble remembering from previous nights of debauchery. This larger network connects us to friends who have specific experiences relevant to all kinds of inquiries. Accordingly, we might find a career office to be decreasingly important as our networks expand and mature. Jus’ sayin’. :o</p>