First of all, it's good that you actually work in a law firm right now for two reasons: 1) you've been exposed to at least some of the stuff you'll be exposed to in law school and 2) you've had an opportunity to work in the real world, which can be an invaluable experience in law school. Following are my responses to your specific questions:
Admission: Figure out what you want to do after law school and what type of school you can get into. You don't need to waste your time trying to get into Harvard if you don't have the grades or test scores to get in, or if you don't want to jump right into some high-powered job. The best advice I ever got about law school was this: If you want to go into public sector law, go to a cheaper school or get a really good scholarship. If you have your heart set on one of the top schools, you better have a perfect LSAT score or be ready to whore yourself out at a big firm for a few years so you can pay off your debts.
As far as actually being admitted goes, you need to do pretty well on the LSAT because that pretty much determines where you're going to go. I didn't do any of the Kaplan classes, but bought a bunch of the books with sample tests and did those for a month beforehand. You can score them and get a decent idea of how you'll do on the actual LSAT. My actual score was about the same as my score on the last sample test I took.
You'll have to write some sort of personal statement/essay. The caveat is that each school will have different requirements: some want two pages, some four pages, others use a word count. You may have to re-write the essay for each school. If you know someone who is a good editor, have them look it over for grammatical errors.
Start early. While it's not too late to start applying for next year, it's getting close (assuming you've taken the LSAT). Figure out which schools you really want to get into and do early applications for those schools. For any school, get your application in as soon as possible. A lot of them use rolling admissions (I know the University of Wisconsin does), so the later you apply the more difficult it is to get in.
Getting through it: My god, where to start? I had been out of school for a while before I started law school, but my job was the kind where I always took work home with me and I read all of the time. That made the transition a bit easier. The biggest struggle is getting everything done and not burning out. Usually, I hit a rough patch (utter exhaustion; my eyes start to twitch/flutter; I get so tired that I literally cannot sleep; I come down with some sort of cold) at the end of finals. This year (my third), I hit the rough patch about a month into classes. Not cool. Fortunately, I was able to carve out a day or two to get me out of my zombie state. So, my advice would be to study all of the time, but give yourself some time to screw around on the internet or watch E! or some other mindless activity. The balance should be heavily in favor of the former. Many of my classmates do the latter DURING CLASS, which I just cannot get my mind around. I'm not paying $35,000 per year to read People magazine during class.
Liking my job: I'm not out of school yet, but I did an internship my first summer and then worked for two professors this past summer. I loved both jobs. I wouldn't be in law school unless I really wanted to do it for a living. If you're thinking about doing it because there's nothing better to do or it ';seems'; like a way to get a better job, don't do it.
Would I do it again: Yes, although I'd probably do some things differently.
No comments:
Post a Comment