Applying to Law School Video Script
MATT K: Applying to law school was at first a little daunting.
NEDDA: Definitely a new experience for me.
MATT K: I didn’t know exactly where to first start.
HELEN: There’s just so many parts to it.
CHRISHANA: I made a bunch of charts. I made a bunch of lists. I knew exactly what I needed to do. I had a timeline for everything.
MATT P: I’m sure I created a spreadsheet of the schools and all of the relevant deadlines.
RENEE: You really want to think about where your career may take you, where you dream for it to take you.
Applying to Law School
RENEE: Going to law school is an interactive sport. It is not something that just happens to you. Much of the learning occurs between and among the peer group, so what we look for from the admissions perspective is someone who is going to contribute a valuable voice to the classroom.
CHRISHANA: I think I was about six or seven years old, and I told my mother I wanted to be a judge.
MATT P: I always knew I wanted to be an attorney from a very young age, but I didn’t really know why.
NEDDA: My aunt was in the criminal justice field, and I would actually go to school with her. I remember I would go to college with her. And I would say, "Oh, you know, I really want to be in the legal field."
CHRISHANA: My mother is a foster and adoptive parent, and so daily I’ve seen her making a difference in people’s lives. So I knew that I’ve always just wanted to help people and be able to give back if I could.
MATT P: I took two years between undergrad and law school to do some volunteer work. And it was really in Sudan that I found the meaning for why I wanted to be a lawyer. The rule of law didn’t exist, really, in a way that I was used to, and it became clear to me there that law is important — lawyers are important.
BAYREX: I don’t think there is an ideal law school candidate. I think there are qualities that are universally sought in candidates, but very diverse people can bring those qualities.
REGGIE: We’re trying to put together a class that is reflective of our society, reflective of people that have different perspectives and different ideals and different goals, because in that exchange, we all are better.
The Application Process
RENEE: Once you have determined that law school is for you, I recommend that you talk to your trusted advisors. Talk to your faculty members; talk to a prelaw advisor. If you are a working professional, reach out to your network and try to find practicing attorneys to get an understanding of both what it means to be a law student — but more importantly what it means to be a legal professional.
REGGIE: Most law schools start accepting applications early fall, and, because of that, students should actually prepare before the application window starts.
BAYREX: A law school application — although it varies a little bit per institution — generally speaking, there is the LSAT, of course. There is going to be your undergraduate record. And you’re going to have a personal statement, which almost always is a free-topic essay. A lot of law schools will ask for letters of recommendation, a résumé. There is the application itself. It is very important to apply and to meet deadlines with each law school because, number one, you’re applying to professional school, so we’re looking for professionalism.
NEDDA: The LSAC website was definitely key to my success on my applications.
HELEN: I went to the LSAC website, and it was a wealth of information because it had essentially everything that you need to know, compiled in, like, one website.
BAYREX: You would be doing a huge disservice to yourself to not use LSAC.org. That should actually be your starting point if you’re looking to apply to law school at any point.
Tackling the LSAT
CHRISHANA: It was pretty difficult. I started studying for the LSAT when I was a sophomore.
MATT K: I devoted a summer to studying for it between my junior and my senior year.
BEN: The test is an integral part of the law school admission process. It provides a standard measure of acquired reading and reasoning skills.
MATT P: It was all self-study. I bought some LSAT books and sat at my parents’ house every day and took practice tests.
HELEN: I did take a course, and, although I was successful in seeing results, a lot of the course kind of depended on the LSAC exams themselves. So I just took practice tests.
BEN: At a minimum, you should take a practice test, including the writing sample, under actual time constraints.
BAYREX: The LSAT is very important. There's no question that it isn’t. First of all, it’s a test that everybody is going to take. So it’s an equalizer of sorts. It allows us to compare candidates from different institutions, different points in life, and it’s something that has proven to be very reliable in terms of predicting success, so it’s important in the sense that it will matter — but it's not going to determine the ultimate decision that a committee reaches.
Standing out to Law Schools
CHRISHANA: Standing out for me was ... I knew it was going to be not my grades, not my extracurricular activities, not the school I went to, but solely about my personal statement. And so I worked on my personal statement so much.
RENEE: So, your personal statement is the first thing that I'm going to read when I open an application. It is the most important piece, in my opinion.
BAYREX: The best personal statements are the ones either move me or interest me. In other words, they make me want to learn more about you.
RENEE: In five to seven minutes you are going to tell me what type of perspective you are going to bring to the classroom and why you are going to be a good legal professional.
CHRISHANA: My personal statement was about why I wanted to go to law school, how I started thinking about law school. I guess the lessons I learned from growing up in such an unconventional household with foster children and adopted children and seeing, just, people from different paths of life and being nonjudgmental and all the lessons learned from sharing close space and having no privacy, and not ... and having to share my mother with strangers and how that transferred into me wanting to be a servant of the community as well.
MATT P: I think law and lawyers play an important role in upholding the rule of law, so I tied that personal experience that I had in Sudan with a reason for going to law school.
NEDDA: I am a single mom, I come from a different country, and I do have work experience in the legal fields. Most of my personal statements that I wrote to the schools were about my journey. I wrote about, you know, coming into this country and seeing the differences there and here and the opportunities that are given here, and, you know, wanting to make my mother and my children proud.
HELEN: In my personal statement, I just spoke about my experience of having, you know, been in the military and what that — how that — informed my decision to go to law school.
RENEE: There is no prescribed true and right thing to write about in your personal statement. What I encourage you to do is really think about who you are genuinely.
MATT K: The way that I actually opened up the essay was, “Overcoming my obesity was one of the biggest challenges that I faced.” And, like, I never mentioned the weight loss again. And then the rest of the essay was talking about getting my pilot license, about the struggles through that.
RENEE: Your essay can be as simple as writing about dinnertime growing up and what that meant to you to sort of sit around a table or cook for your family.
REGGIE: But beyond the personal statement, you have the letters of recommendation, which come from professors preferably — simply because you’re going from one academic environment into another and with that we would like to hear the perspective of someone who’s been exposed to your writing, who’s heard you critique and review information in the classroom.
HELEN: The hardest one was the one from my professor because of the fact that I had been out of school for quite a while. As an undergraduate, I had to write a senior portfolio, and I had a lot of interaction with one particular professor, and that’s the professor that I felt would best be informed to provide me a letter of recommendation.
CHRISHANA: I made sure that I gave them enough notice, and I made sure I followed up. And, of course, after I received the letter of recommendation, I gave a thank-you card.
Financing Law School
JEFF: If you’re thinking about going to law school, paying for law school really should be starting today. You’re looking at an investment that’s going to be over probably $150,000.
NEDDA: The cost of law school came into my mind, I guess, right after I finished college.
MATT P: In retrospect, I wish it was something I had considered more.
JEFF: Debt is not the only way in which you’re going to finance your legal education. The first and foremost way you want to try to finance it is what I call free money: scholarships and grants.
JEFF: The next option is going to be loans. That’s where you’re borrowing money, which, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing to do if it’s allowing you to achieve your goal more quickly. And you’re going to want to use federal student loans. They’re the most flexible and the safest form of credit you can use.
Selecting a Law School
REGGIE: LSAC has provided a wonderful resource to tell the students about researching law schools, resources on LSAT preparation. There’s resources on grants and scholarships to school. There’s information about financing a legal education.
CHRISHANA: LSAC was helpful because I used the website. It helps you filter out, based on your GPA and your LSAT score, what school will be in your target zone. And so that helped me narrow down the schools I should be applying to.
MATT P: I thought about geography; I thought about my application — trying to figure out where my LSAT scores and GPA would be competitive.
HELEN: The determining factor, once I knew what schools I was accepted into, first, was finances, obviously.
JEFF: If going to school A, for example, means you’re going to have to borrow $50,000, and going to school B means you're going to have to borrow $150,000, then school B is going to have more of an impact in terms of the repayment of that debt — not so much in terms of lifestyle, but how long you might be repaying it. But on the other hand, if school B is going to better position you to get the career opportunities that you want, then it’s probably worth that investment.
MATT K: So visiting a school is actually really crucial and really important. Being able to speak not only with the professors who are actually at the school once I was there, to get a feel for how they approach education, for how they approach the environment. It was also important to see the students that go there.
REGGIE: There’s one thing to see a school on paper, to know the facts about the school, to know the demographics of the school. But there’s information that you can only get from visiting, by stepping on the campus, by interacting with the students and the faculty and the staff, and really getting a sense of how you feel there.
Looking Back … and Ahead
RENEE: You want to approach every interaction that you have with the admissions office as if it were a colleague.
BAYREX: You want to present the best version of yourself throughout that entire process.
MATT P: Realize that your application process is not something that you do alone, because you do need letters of recommendation. Perhaps you want someone to look at your personal statement.
MATT K: The important thing, though, is that this is also a process that doesn’t and should not happen within a day or a week. You know, you should space it out well.
NEDDA: I do envision myself doing family law, but I also plan on possibly teaching.
CHRISHANA: When I look in the mirror, I’m proud. First generation. No one else in my family has graduated from college yet; no one else in my family is a lawyer. I said this is what I wanted to do, and I did it. I plan to be the best I can in my field, to be at the vanguard of this profession.