<p>Besides making the grades and scoring high on LSAT, what does it take to get into 1st tier Law school? What kind of extracurriculars make u look good? Do law schools value work experience? Do you need to be an editor for a law journal? I am a naive potential pre-law student trying to make a decision on where to go. I'm looking at Cornell, emory, casewestern, and american university. Any input is appreciated.</p>
<p>I think many would echo that if you have a high GPA and great LSAT as long as you have some ECs you should be able to get into a great many of "top schools".</p>
<p>Internships and other things aren't as important for law school admission as say med school where no matter what your stats are you have to have some internship experience and other "soft" factors.</p>
<p>LSAT makes an undergraduate stand out. The vast majority of law school don't care about your ECs nearly as much as undergraduate colleges. The few exceptions to this rule may be the very, very top law schools like Yale and Stanford.</p>
<p>Of the colleges you are considering, the college that will put you in the most comfortable position for law school admission is the college where you think that you'll get the highest GPA, assuming that your LSAT score is unaffected by where you attend.</p>
<p>Public nudity charges, violent criminal history, declarations of terrorist sympathies are all things that will make you very memorable to admissions committees.</p>
<p>The same things that are valuable in an undergrad application will be valuable in a law school application, but...less so.</p>
<p>Leadership. Dedication. ECs/internship related to your future goals and interests. Great essays. Great recs. Yes, law schools value work experience (especially post-college). No, you do not need to edit a law review. You should pursue things that interest you and that say something about who you are and what you want to do. You definitely shouldn't hole up in your room for four years, studying and prepping. At the very least, if two people have identical stats, then the one with a pile of ECs has an edge, if only by demonstrating commitment and time-management. Yes, it's a slim, slim edge, but you can't guarantee yourself a test score, so you may as well do what you can. Furthermore, you might just enjoy yourself ;-)</p>
<p>Bear also in mind that some schools (not enough, in my opinion, but hey), even among the T14, pride themselves on a "holistic" evaluation of applications.</p>
<p>
[quote]
declarations of terrorist sympathies
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This doesn't seem quite like the others. Because while I agree all three will make you stand out, this one's probably a positive while the other two are negative.</p>
<p>...care to clarify, bluedevilmike?</p>
<p>The exaggerated insinuation was that the political climate that reigns in academic institutions may not be entirely hostile towards certain brands of extreme political activism.</p>
<p>To suggest that law schools would positively seek to admit terrorists is an exaggeration of my belief that universities are often not the best place to go when seeking political moderation.</p>
<p>Gotcha. Thought that might've been in, but the sarcasm wasn't translating for me. Just checking :-)</p>
<p>As other people have mentioned, your ECs really don't matter much. You really don't have to worry about law school at all if you're not even in college yet.</p>
<p>I'm deciding between Grinnell, Hamilton and McGill for college but I will apply to law school, does anyone know which school has a better rep/higher GPA?LSAT that will help me get into law school?</p>
<p>Umm . . . your school doesn't take the LSAT, nor does your school have a grade that law schools decide between. Go wherever you'll be happiest and most successful - it will work out better in the end because you'll be able to concentrate on your studies and do well in college, which is all that really matters.</p>
<p>What are the chances of me getting into a T14 law school graduating from a 4th tier college for my undergraduate studies? Assume I had an adequate GPA with LSAT scores in this range 168-175. Would a person from a forth tier school have the capacity to handle the work load of a T14 law school? Assuming one was admitted to one of these schools, coming from a 4th tier school, would it be more prudent to go ahead and aim under the radar and go to a lower ranking school, say in the top 35, or so.
I guess my question is, does the LSAT show an acurate measurment of one's aptitude to handle the rigor of top law schools? I might be over analyzing, but I cannot believe, even if my scores were adequate, that my acceptance to a T14 would be near as likely as someone coming from the Ivy League, Georgetown, Berkeley, or even a places like Orberlin, Tufts, and Fordham with comparable scores. I would think that a majority of people that apply to these T14 schools come from tier one and tier two colleges, so most likely the ones accepted are going to be from this pool of applicants.</p>
<p>Being at a 4th tier school has nothing to do with having a "4th tier" level of intelligence. As long as your writing is up to par and you can handle the long hours, my guess is that you'll be fine. I'm under the impression that workload is at least comparable most places (looking at the "average hours/day spent studying" stats given by the Princeton Review, which may or may not be near useless, the numbers don't really correspond to rankings, so difference in difficulty should be more or less limited to the qualitative, and that's really a matter of your own skills and strengths more than of your undergrad preparation. Sure, the two may correlate, but that's not necessary).</p>
<p>Note also that 168-175 is quite a broad range for top schools. A 175 coupled with an otherwise strong app should override the name of whatever school you go to and give you a fighting chance at any T14, while a 168 is certainly strong, but not quite the eye-catcher and not quite the "guarantee" (noting, of course, that nothing is truly a guarantee).</p>
<p>Yes, the majority of applicants to T14 schools come from strong undergrads, but that doesn't necessarily mean what you seem to think it does. A T14 law school will have many more applicants from top undergrads than from 4th tier undergrads, largely because the average Ivy student is more qualified than the average 4th Tier U. student for T14 law schools...more likely to score in-range on the LSAT, more likely to apply. My guess is that yes, you'll have to prove yourself a bit (make sure your essays are impeccably well written), but you won't be automatically closed out from anything that you're qualified for. And if you have the numbers to get into a T14 school and you have any desire to go, then shoot for it. Sure, you'll probably struggle to stay afloat, but as far as any law student has told me, so will pretty much everyone else, and you'd likely be working just as madly at a lower-ranked school, but with less flexible job prospects (you might even work more madly in order to stay at the top of your class). You say that more 1-2 Tier undergrads will apply, so you imagine that more will be accepted, and that makes sense...but it doesn't follow from that info that a qualified lower-tier applicant won't be considered.</p>
<p>I visited a T14 this weekend (so note that most of this is conjecture based on my own very recent application experience) and met people from Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, and also people from Rutgers, Wisconsin, and Kansas State, not to even mention those who had been out of undergrad for fifteen years. It's not about whether a person from a lower-ranked undergrad could handle the workload at a T14 law school; it's about whether you could.</p>
<p>Bluedevilmike,</p>
<p>There's no shortage of political moderation in law school.</p>
<p>I think you underestimate the value of a 175. Assuming the original poster has a respectable GPA, the applicant would likely have many of the t14 outside of HYS throwing money at him/her.</p>
<p>EDIT: How bad is a tier 4? Is it just above community college? Still, it's hard to believe that the weight of a 175 would not override the school's lesser reputation.</p>