I am currently a Freshman in college at UNT, however I have 30 hours of coursework from AP/Dual credit courses in high school. After this semester, I will only have 3 basic courses (plus my foreign language courses) left to complete, and after that I am only left with requirements for my English degree. I am planning to transfer after this school year to a small liberal arts college next fall, mostly because I feel that a small private school will provide me with more opportunities to connect with my professors and get internship opportunities and the stellar recommendation letters that I would want in order to achieve my goal of getting into a good law school.
However, with as many hours as I have, even if I transfer schools I would still have to take extra classes in order to be enrolled in school full time and meet the required hours in order to graduate. Consequently, starting next school year I’ll be faced with three options: just be enrolled part time and take only the courses I need, take several easy elective courses to help boost my GPA, or take classes that would apply towards a minor/double major.
Currently, I am contemplating minoring in Economics, as I decided to take Intro to Micro and have found myself extremely interested in the subject (which is weird, because I HATED the subject in high school). I love my professor–who just to happens to also teach intro to Macro, which I could take next semester.
I also considered Poli Sci, but that would require me to take stats, which is FAR too complicated for me to even attempt (I have heard from most of my Poli Sci friends that stats is awful and has such a large amount of homework that they wish they didn’t take it). Plus, I’m already taking a math class that fulfills my math requirement and don’t want to take any extra math courses that I don’t need.
There’s also philosophy or sociology, but I haven’t taken any courses that would fulfill the requirements for a minor, and I honestly don’t want to attempt to minor in anything that would prolong my college experience any longer than it has to.
I’m also open to any suggestions about what exactly I should minor in. Are there any minors that would look particularly appealing to law schools if I chose to pick it up that I’m missing out on? Please let me know so I can look into it!
You don’t have to minor in anything. You can just take classes that are interesting to you, maybe build up your expertise in various areas. You don’t have to minor in political science, but you can take a couple classes like constitutional law or American government systems if your college offers them. You don’t have to minor in economics but you can take macro and micro if you want to. You don’t have to minor in philosophy, but you can take classes in logic and ethics; and in sociology, you could take intro; race, class, and gender; or other classes.
You want to take classes that are going to develop your critical thinking and reasoning skills; your understanding of ethics and political systems; and your writing and reading skills.
And no, there’s no particular minor that will make you more appealing to law schools. Your performance in your chosen field is what matters.
Take interesting challenging classes for sure. Don’t drop to part time. You got some good ideas for fields to explor above.
Hate to break it to you but…
Stats is incredibly useful in a lot of fields, including law.
Economics definitely has math if you take enough courses to minor. A lot of the measures of the economy are statistical in nature.
Have you tried connecting with professors on your current campus? What makes you so sure none of them could write you a letter or recommendation? If you don’t want to add time to your degree, it’s safest to either not change schools or to stay in your state system so classes transfer easily.
You could either not get in or not get enough aid to complete your transfer to your dream LAC, so take classes that will be useful if you stay where you are. Also: join the prelaw club, meet the prelaw advisor if your school has one, etc.
For law school, you want rigor, a high GPA, and a high LSAT score.
You don’t need to minor in anything but take advantage of these circumstances to increase your knowledge in fields you’ll need later on.
For instance, Intro to philosophy and Logic are two essential classes for the LSAT and later law school. Economics is very useful. Classes in the American Constitution and constitutional law are also good. Behavioral, abnormal, and developmental psychology would also be good classes to take. (Stay away from criminal justice classes which are more vocational in nature and thus frowned upon by law schools).
