"Tier 1" Law Schools Admissions Cycle Recap
7 rejects/waitlists and 2 eye-opening admits later...
A friend at Harvard Law School lamented that one of her peers was not in law school for the right reasons. That peer had said something along these lines:
“‘I just came to have the [Harvard Law School] name and then I want to go into the entertainment industry.’”
How had she corralled an ‘admit’ from the HLS Admissions Office, despite not intending to be a lawyer upon graduating? At the end of the admissions cycle, this question no longer confounds me. At the heart of the answer lies the key to crafting your law school application.
My “stats”
Graduated from Princeton University (magna cum laude) with two years working experience in tech
Majored in History with Certificates in Applications of Computing, Cognitive Science and East Asian Studies
Strong teacher recommendations (the same faculty helped place me as a Gates Cambridge finalist and a Sachs Worcester finalist – these are prestigious postgrad fellowships)
GPA: 3.88 (overall)
Note: Harvard and Yale admissions offices (and likely others) review your transcript carefully because a GPA might not say very much
LSAT score: 173 (1x)
non KJD (kindergarten through JD)
non URM (underrepresented minority)
Outcomes
School - Outcome - Time from Application ‘Completion’ to Result - Merit Aid
Yale - Reject - 7w
Harvard - Reject - 5w
Stanford - Waitlist - 2w
Columbia - Reserve - 9w
NYU - Admit - 4w - 30k/year
Penn - Waitlist - 6w
Duke - Waitlist - 13w
UVA - Waitlist - 12w
Cornell - Admit - 8w - 45k/year
Achilles heel: Applying “to be a lawyer”
While I applied to law school, the question “Should I really become a lawyer?” burned in my heart. I would be leaving a well-paying, comfortable career trajectory in technology to take on over 100,000 dollars of graduate school debt and a two-year delay on starting my family. As the first in my family to attend law school, I did not know what I would gain from this tradeoff. Besides this, I was inundated with lawyers (and non-lawyers!) trying to dissuade me from becoming a lawyer – a ‘culture of regret’ shrouds the legal profession.
As the first in my family to attend law school, I want this blog to demystify the legal profession and the law school application process.
My law school application obsessively defended why I should be a lawyer. From one of the last iterations of my personal statement, I stripped a sentence justifying why the law made more sense than professions like counseling and music production. I wasted space explaining that reading documentation about software was similar to reading legal cases. I mulled over the “Why Law” question in every other component of my application: My diversity statement showcased my penchant for advocacy, while I trimmed down my resume to include only law-relevant activities. This “narrowing” of my application greatly weakened it. I had applied to be a lawyer, whereas I should have been applying to law school.
You absolutely need to answer the “Why Law” question in your application. But you only need to answer it once. Don’t waste space on something that is a prerequisite but not the admission-clincher.
Questions I cared about:
Do I have what it takes to be a lawyer?
Why should I be a lawyer over another profession?
Am I becoming a lawyer for the right reasons?
Will I persist in this profession to justify the school investing in me?
Questions schools care about:
What interests you about the law?
What unique skills or background do you have, unrelated to the law?
What future do you envision for yourself with a law school education, not necessarily as a traditional lawyer? Will you be someone interesting?
Do you see the difference? I needed to widen my application beyond the “Why Law” question and answer the question of “Why I ought to be a member of a law school community.” It is my conviction that Admissions Offices of Tier One schools are as interested in crafting a diverse body of students with unimaginable futures as churning out lawyers in the traditional sense.
And they can handpick. Acceptance rates at Tier 1 law schools are higher than undergraduate Ivy League schools, but law schools have tiny class sizes of 200 to 300 students (Harvard and NYU go up to 500). They won’t accept two applicants of the same kind. Even someone with flawless LSAT and GPA scores can appear vanilla.
Your key to admission: Highlight your idiosyncrasies of substance
I’ll explain an element of my application that was a “hit” or “miss” – and what I would have done to improve it. I hope that by pointing to specific examples in my application, you might see what I mean by “highlighting your idiosyncrasies of substance.”
Miss: Choosing the wrong topic for my diversity statement.
For my diversity statement, I wrote an uplifting story about overcoming my eating disorder and advocating for women to weightlift in the gym. This was a familiar refrain sung to the tune of feminism, women’s health and medicine, and gender and sexuality studies. If I could redo it, I would have written about being a woman and Christian leader. That experience is rarer. Devoutly religious people are a token in today’s secular University contexts. What held me back from choosing this topic was struggling to relate this identity back to the law, even though I did not need to – my achilles heel.
Your takeaway: You need to write a diversity statement, even if you are not an underrepresented minority. How do you know what quirks make you stand out? Seek advice from your school’s career counseling offices, which may see dozens of law school applicants each cycle.
Hit: Almost as a fluke, I enclosed an admit-clinching essay in my NYU application. In hopes of landing the Jacobson Family Social Entrepreneurship Scholarship, I added two extra pages narrating my experiences as an entrepreneur who started a social media app and then a socially-minded weightlifting program. I did not touch the “Why Law” question, in fact, I spoke of an alternate identity – being an entrepreneur. NYU was my fastest admit.
Your takeaway: Find space to say more. NYU did not require any supplements; I snuck more in with a scholarship essay enclosed directly in my application for all readers.
What I would have done better: Yale and Harvard Deans of Admissions repeatedly say in their podcast that a personal statement needs to have forward movement. Knowing now that I did not have to ‘be a traditional lawyer,’ I would have, in the scholarship essay, revealed my goal of starting and directing an employment center that holistically tackles job scarcity in economically depressed areas, offering not just legal aid but job advising and community works programs.
Miss: Every barebone application.
My applications to Harvard, Penn, Duke, and UVA looked the same. The written components consisted of a one-page resume, two-page personal statement, and one-page diversity statement. It is no coincidence Harvard rejected me fastest and the other three schools waitlisted me.
My acceptances to NYU and Cornell resulted from additions to that skeleton: I contributed the aforementioned essay on entrepreneurship at NYU, and I composed a heartfelt answer to the “Why Cornell?” question that wove in the story of my husband’s Vermont roots and my concern for rural communities.
Of the YHS (top three) schools, Yale rejected me slower than Harvard did. Stanford waitlisted me. I firmly believe I stuck around in Yale’s pool longer because Yale had more information to mull over: I contributed four extra pages of content on my employment and extracurricular experience, plus the Yale 250. Stanford tossed me a waitlist because I wrote in my optional supplements about my forays into music production and designed a cooking class about the making of knowledge. (The highly specific prompts – “List three songs we can listen to as we read your application” and “If you could teach a class, what would it be?” fit my interests perfectly, and it became a lowkey way of showcasing unusual experiences.)
Your takeaway: When schools request additional optional statements, complete them all! Some even welcome personal statements longer than two pages. All this space provides an opportunity for you to add dimension and highlight your idiosyncrasies of substance. (It seems obvious now, but it was not to me at the time.)
Some schools ask the “Why X School” question. With the power to handpick admits, these schools need to know that you are not just ticking a box – as I was for Penn, Duke and UVA, and it showed. To craft a notable “Why X School” answer, you should visit the school. (I decided to apply very late, so it wasn’t an option.)
Why visit the law schools? Subscribe to read about my visits to Cornell and NYU for Admitted Students Day and how much you can learn from being on campus.
My advice should absolutely be weighed alongside others’. In the presence of many counselors, there is victory. My certain takeaway is that God provided exactly what I needed to fulfill his will. I applied late in the cycle (early January for all schools except Stanford, which I submitted on February 14), yet I had faculty willing to write recommendations and a decent LSAT score on my first try: there is high variation for test takers not only because of test material but because of technical problems encountered in a remote testing environment. I knew nothing about the law, but I had kind souls from top schools reviewing my application and talking to me about being a lawyer (thank you so much RW, NL, JZ, CM and AT – you are such a blessing). Thank the Lord!
Consider subscribing to my Substack to follow my journey as a J.D. candidate and lawyer-to-be. It’s free!
Tell me in the comments what article you’d like to see next!
Why I chose Cornell over NYU (and my impressions of each when I visited)
How I plan to finance law school
Negotiating financial aid: It is more personal and network-y than you think!
The key to logic games (my worst LSAT section)