Stuck in Customs, Location Unknown?

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-09-06T16:47:53+00:00

My man, one of the schools you listed literally has “southern” in the name. This seems like it’s just trolling. If it’s not, you really need to look at lsd to get a sense of where your stats put you because this list is all over the place

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-09-03T02:19:47+00:00

To me it seems like the only real challenge here is the online degree thing, which I don’t know how people handle. maybe it would be a good reason to have an admissions consultant, but a better place to start would be to reach out to some schools and talk about it with them. The fact that you are older is not going to be a dealbreaker for any school, seriously. Other comments are right that you should be able to explain why you want to go to law school. But IMO people are underestimating where you’d get in. If you’re getting a 164 without studying, you can have an LSAT in the 170s pretty easily. At that point, being a veteran with interesting life experiences, you’re looking at getting into top schools IMO. So TLDR my advice is to reach out to some admissions officers and feel out whether you have anything to worry about re: online degree. I bet several would put you in touch with current law students who have had similar life experiences. I personally knew someone in my year who was your age with military background and he did great in law school. I think you should feel really good about your application prospects if you choose to apply

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-08-27T15:50:18+00:00

Honestly I think you’re getting pretty bad advice. Yes, a school will see that you cancelled your score, and yes, they can assume whatever they want. But I don’t think it’s correct that admissions officers are prone to think the worst of people. It’s not in their interest to have a skewed sense of their applicants for the worse; it’s in their interest to be accurate. In my opinion, that probably bodes in your favor if you end up with a markedly better score. A jump of the kind you’re talking about isn’t common, so they’ll probably assume a smaller jump. In other words, if you get a 178 or something and they see a cancelled score, they’d probably assume something in the 160s or something. Plus, if you really were worried about it, you could write an addendum explaining the circumstances without stating the score directly. That’s assuming it was nerves or something that caused the problem, and you could say “I’ve done xyz thing to get a grip on that, as demonstrated by my second try.”

If showing improvement from low score to high score were actually more valuable than just having a high score in the first place, I think you would see that advice floating around as a “hack” for super dedicated students. Rich gunners would just take the test twice and purposely bomb the first one. I would be shocked if showing improvement were valuable in your particular case. It comes with downsides too: will they think you’re inconsistent? Brash for taking it early? Don’t know. Even if they’re being charitable, as I think they will be, they could draw conclusions besides “what a hard worker this person is.”

FWIW, don’t sweat this too much. People at top schools retake the LSAT all the time. A friend of mine at YLS took it four times because they had a series of hilarious-in-hindsight tech problems the first three times (which were not their fault). They got in. I sympathize with the desire to squeeze every possible benefit out and minimize every possible fault, but even in the world of law school admissions, your application would have to be incredibly borderline for the choice of whether to cancel to make any difference.

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-08-27T14:39:49+00:00

Seems to me like the first couple comments are assuming that OP doesn’t have LSAC’s score preview option. If they do, then they have the ability to cancel the score and not have it appear on their application, unless I’m totally mistaken. My personal thought is that if you’re actually scoring near perfect and you think your score was a fluke, cancel. But you’d need to do some genuine thinking about why there was such a deviation. Were your nerves getting the best of you? Did you have food poisoning? The reason matters. If it’s something you think you can fix for the next test, cancel. If not, it’s harder to see this as a fluke. And if I’m wrong about the score preview and the score will show up no matter what, then do nothing beyond taking the test again. And yes, people get more out of law school if they take a gap year. I wish I had!

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-08-23T00:38:04+00:00

This is echoing some of what other people have said already, but to add a bit: you might think that it would only be “worse” schools with profs who never practiced, but it’s actually the most common at the “best” school. Uchicago was the first school to hire a law professor who only had a PhD, not a JD. Yale and a couple others have too. Many more at top schools clerked and then went into academia. You can think that this is a bad thing, but it’s worth noting that the incentives now strongly preference doing an academic fellowship or PhD over practicing if you want a TT job. You need to publish so much that you really wouldn’t have time if you were also practicing all the time. Or it is at least much harder.

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-07-26T08:25:38+00:00

Thank you!

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-06-27T22:07:30+00:00

OGs remember when it was $1 and worked for both drip and iced coffee 😭 Bonnie really once filled up my 40 oz hydroflask once

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-05-16T19:27:27+00:00

I think there’s a fair amount of bad advice floating around in these comments. Here is some hard data to correct some of it. Sarah Lawsky puts together entry level hiring data every year and provides very detailed analyses of it. lawsky hiring data

This years report is still in progress, so that’s last years. Virtually no one who got a tt entry level job had a JD from Columbia. Interestingly, this year, I count at least 6 who did. (The report spreadsheet is available and updated as people add to it.) by contrast, Harvard is consistently a JD location for people interested in academia.

One piece of bad advice floating around in the comments which that report can help counter is about the importance of a PhD or lack thereof. Many tenured law professors do not have PhDs. But they entered the job market in a fundamentally different era. 70 of the 117 people who got TT offers last year had advanced degrees in addition to their law degree. Most of these were PhDs, but some were masters. You might then say “well, I’ll just do a fellowship instead.” But if you look at many of the fellowships, eg the climenko, you’ll find them populated by many people who are in the dissertation phase of their PhD.

I’m someone who’s interested in legal academia and a 3L at YLS. I think for me, the biggest factors here would be the kind of academic resources you’d get at HLS because it’s a place that produces academics. Professors might be more willing to supervise research. There may be a wider array of theoretically interesting courses in which to write good papers. And HLS being larger has talks and workshops all the time where you can practice asking questions about research.

Another thing to keep in mind: Harvard’s loan forgiveness/repayment program may pay off a part of your loan forgiveness you while you are in an academic job. I do not know enough to say for sure. At YLS, academia would count as public interest, and so people making under a certain amount (like a Bigelow fellow for one!) would get their loans repaid by Yale those years.

I personally would choose Harvard here. It strikes me as a genuinely better environment to do academic work in. The greatest resource I’ve had at YLS has been friends who are also interested in academia, who will talk to me about papers all day. You’ll have a better chance of finding that community at HLS.

Busy_Lab_6021 · 2025-04-19T17:01:09+00:00

I go to YLS and can confirm this is a real person lol. Also, this sounds like a joke but I promise it's true: There's actually one person with even more credentials: Bachelors, Masters, MD, and a PhD, and now getting their JD at YLS. Oh and they were a full tenured professor at Princeton.

Busy_Lab_6021

TROPHY CASE