<p>I am currently a first year undergrad student and I am a political science major. I have goals of going to law school afterwards. I picked political science as my major because, for starters I am really interested in the classes needed to be taken for this major. And secondly, because I believe this major will really help prepare me for law school.
Now that that is out of the way, I really want to minor in something...only issue is that I don't know what to minor in. I don't know what minor would benefit me the most but I am very open to just about any minor that doesn't involve the maths or the sciences.
I am here in this thread to ask all current law students what they believe will be a good pick. I have played with the thought of minoring in philosophy or even international relations. </p>
<p>there is no minor in and of itself that will help for LS admissions.</p>
<p>Then, let me propose another question. Will it at all benefit me to minor in philosophy, or should I just stick to majoring in political science and not minoring at all?</p>
<p>If you enjoy philosophy and believe that you can do well in the courses, then take philosophy. Otherwise do what you know that you can do well as law school admissions comes down to two things; LSAT and GPA.</p>
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<p>Personally, I believe that Phil helps with critical thinking skills, particularly in comparison to other lit/hume majors.</p>
<p>Polisci will not in any way prepare you for law school. No major will, really. Philosophy, particularly the logic, will help you a bit on the LSAT, but that’s about the extent of it. Law schools care about GPA and LSAT only. You should therefore major in something you like and can do well in. </p>
<p>I recommend minoring in something that will provide you skills you can sell employers if law school doesn’t work out. </p>
<p>Anything to do with writing - creative writing, technical writing, English. The thing that slows a lot of law students down is writing papers. At our school, if you didn’t pass a writing assignment, you had to redo it but the class kept moving, so often students were working on two papers at the same time, plus all the other classes. Reading and writing are what law school’s about. Lots of reading, lots of writing.</p>
<p>LRW isn’t even graded at half the T14s. NWU, for example, grades it but excludes it from the curve. Even where it is graded what slows you down isn’t the writing part, it’s the research part.</p>
<p>I disagree. I used to type (yes, I’m ancient and I typed) papers for a friend whose undergrad degree was in civil engineering. He really struggled with basic grammar and writing. He was smart and did well in the other classes, just couldn’t write at all. He was always rewriting the past assignment while trying to do the new one, plus his other classwork. He just hadn’t written much at all and while the intro to legal writing was only graded P/F, it took a remarkable amount of his time to redo everything. He printed as all good engineers do (did) but in incomplete sentences with mistakes and no commas (they ‘hung below the line’ in his printing and he didn’t like them!).</p>
<p>Reading fast and writing well are good skills to have in law school.</p>
<p>If you had to write by hand, I’d agree writing well mattered. Nowadays everything is done in Word with spell check and grammar check. LRW papers aren’t terribly long - 10 pages or so at most. There just isn’t that much writing to be done for it to slow you down much. The research, on the other hand, can take considerably longer than you’d expect. I’ve heard stories from around the T14, and experienced it at my own, of LRW professors putting all sorts of odd constraints on research. It can take a lot longer when you’re forced to go through the library by hand rather than just use Westlaw.</p>