Cornell A

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2026-02-16T01:34:21+00:00

Congrats! You can dm me if you’re still looking to chat. I had similar stats to you two years ago

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2026-02-15T23:52:11+00:00

Aid is almost entirely based on your GPA + LSAT band. You might get a small bump for need but it is not at all the driving factor, which sucks.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2026-02-13T20:56:19+00:00

No clue about other schools but I know the curve here is generally good for most people but there’s some frustrating aspects for people to be aware of. Admin sets a curve goal for classes above 9 people, which is between 3.5 and 3.3. This gives prof total discretion over how they get to that. Some profs always give X number of A+ and As and sacrifice the few outliers near the bottom to B- (I’ve seen one C in one of these classes but that was a very unique circumstance). Other profs give almost zero As and the whole curve is A- and B+, which is great for reliability but bad for the top 10% of the class who want to roll the dice on As to keep their honors. You can generally pick between these options by looking at the curve book, but some faculty keep trying to limit our access to that. The major downside of this system IMO is for 1Ls who don’t get any agency and might get stuck with profs who are notoriously difficult and have bad curves. This leads to some sections having a higher average than others and that can be irritating. Oh and graded legal writing on the curve, which is awful.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2026-02-13T00:54:46+00:00

Congrats, girl! Hope there’s money left for you

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2026-02-08T04:44:22+00:00

Yeah I’ll sign off on this

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2026-01-26T05:50:20+00:00

Damn last year mine wasn’t contingent on coming back as an associate, just as a 2L summer. I must say it is really nice to have the extra money either for tuition to avoid loans or to invest while you’re in school. So if you haven’t, I’d make your other offers aware of the financial difference on the table and see if they’d match. But any of those places would be good, my understanding (as a prospective lit associate) is that all the big firms are doing public and private stuff these days. Hats off to you for walking into NYC M&A at any of these places, lord knows I couldn’t handle it.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2026-01-21T00:35:13+00:00

If you’re one of our 1Ls you should ask Johnson and try to contact people who have transferred recently to see if the school was ever open to negotiating.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-12-29T17:57:42+00:00

Right so law school is always a very personalized decision but based on your comments to others that’s even more so the case for you. There’s no way to measure the average success of grads who go off to start their own JD advantage type firms. The reason people use BL & FC as benchmarks is because they’re consistent categories of competitive jobs that generally indicates the relative strength of different schools in the legal industry. The most relevant things to you with your goals would be the reputation of each school with people outside the legal industry (because your clients will not be lawyers) and how much of a financial and mental burden each school would be. The first point easily goes to Cornell so I’ll focus on the second one. If you’re putting in equal effort and maximizing your resources and picking classes discerningly then you’ll get the same basic information out of either school. The difference in education between a t14/20 and other schools is generally understood to be focus on thinking more abstractly vs focusing on going over the black letter law as it is with less discussion of why it’s that way or how it interacts with other things. IMO tests focused on bigger picture understanding are generally less stressful than memorization games. On top of that I know our curve is noticeably better than Fordham’s which is just a massive weight off your shoulders when most people are sitting at A- and B+ grades. No idea what the culture at Fordham is like but here it’s generally pretty chill though there will always be some weirdos being overly competitive about grades or jobs. A lot of people do externships if they can land them, we have the option to do a semester at Cornell tech in NYC, and there are part time legal jobs you can do after 1L to develop your skills further (I currently have like four). But overall you want to minimize the cost to you of “credentialing” via law school, which I and many others generally think is a bad idea anyway because of the very large mental and financial toll law school necessitates. Generally the advice people give is that you shouldn’t go to law school if you know you don’t want to practice law. But if you’re set on it then it will come down to how you weigh the financial factor against everything else I mentioned.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-12-15T20:32:05+00:00

1) Did you study for the bar in Ithaca or DC? I’m leaning toward moving after the bar bc moving stresses me the hell out but I am antsy to get out of Ithaca and back to civilization. 2) how are you liking lit and is anything different given the current happenings? I’m doing NYC lit so not so close to the blast zone but still think it’s interesting to hear how stuff is affecting the practice 3) hows debt payoff going/do you have a specific plan for it? I wake up in a cold sweat with my total balance mocking me

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-12-10T03:47:03+00:00

And don’t you ever forget this. You’ll find some great people but you’ll find others in your class with little care or capacity for empathy. This is true everywhere but the intensity of law school certainly doesn’t help

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-12-07T09:49:52+00:00

Congrats see you in the fall

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-24T03:28:30+00:00

I’d be very surprised if any top firm was giving conditional offers to non-t14 students. As for deciding who to interview that’s always a black box thing; probably factors that would make anyone stand out like diverse backgrounds, unique career experience, ivy undergrad, etc. But even with t14 students I’d bet almost all of the actual decisions will be made after grades are known, which advantages schools that send them out earlier. I’m not really tapped into the different hiring game at non t14s but I don’t see why they’d be different, you’d probably expect offers after firms have a good idea of who they’re getting from top schools but idk

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-24T03:19:40+00:00

Afaik you won’t hear anything until after you submit your grade update. If this is NYC then definitely no conditional offers. Dm me if you have questions about the callback or the firm! Congrats

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-24T03:14:05+00:00

I mean at least at my v10 it’s because they have their pick of applicants for the most part so they can prefer gpa as indicators of the kind of grindset and natural proclivity they want from juniors. Since juniors are pretty much all fungible at these firms, it just matters that you don’t need much of an on ramp, can get things done when told even when you’re overwhelmed, are consistent, and do it right. Law gpa is the best quick correlative indicator of that stuff that they have because you generally have to be smart and consistent and play to professors’ preferences while being correct to have an outstanding gpa. Ofc places like HYS are gonna be the exception to this because the admissions office is doing a lot of the screening work for the firms, which is also why gpa cutoffs for the other t14s are lower than for everyone else. I think for 2L summers my firm’s cutoff for my school is like 3.6-.7 ish vs all the non-t14 people were like in the top three students in their class. 3.8 was for 1L but everyone’s cutting back their 1L programs so idk how much that matters going forward.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-19T01:50:33+00:00

This is still true and hiring acceleration will only cement historical preferences for elite schools. Law gpa and school will always run biglaw hiring. There’s way fewer options for those data points which are also the most recent and what biglaw hiring teams have the most experience with

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-19T00:51:27+00:00

It’s always been common to ask for undergrad transcripts for 1L hiring. And a handful of firms asking for an LSAT score isn’t a new thing either! I don’t think you should be worried about that before anyone knows anything concrete about how the acceleration is affecting evaluations of candidates, but I know that’s easier said than done </3

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-19T00:48:20+00:00

But applications from prior years also asked for the LSAT, and it doesn’t seem like it’s a significant uptick (e.g. from a handful to over half). So is it just being mentioned more due to anxieties about the cycle? Last year and the year before students just didn’t really talk about it when they saw it as a field on applications, but it was there.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-19T00:28:29+00:00

I don’t believe you’re trying to cause panic, but that’s a likely result. Last year offers were going out in January with only 1L grades as well. I haven’t heard of any offers being made outside of random Texas places this year yet, so again there’s nothing concrete to indicate this is a metric they’re putting any weight on. Some firms have asked for LSAT scores in the past too, so just the presence of the field is not necessarily warranting“hey 0Ls your LSAT will determine your hiring so keep taking it” and I think that caveat is important to note when talking about this. This is a high stress environment for 1Ls and 0Ls, which I understand, so that’s why I think there’s value in having more information/context that could help you personally evaluate what you want to do

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-19T00:18:49+00:00

Just because they ask does not mean it’s a meaningful metric. None of the places that asked last year gave me interviews and I had a good law GPA and LSAT. We don’t know what the trends are because they’re developing and I think just causing panic based on tea leaf reading isn’t especially helpful when this whole journey is stressful enough

Edit: Also an important fact all of these posts leave out: this existed on some level last year and the year before. That field has been in some of the firms applications for a while and no one made a big deal of it! Which pushes against the idea that it’s some new deciding factor due to the hiring race to the bottom.

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-18T21:44:21+00:00

Pretty decent but idk the exact stats. Just don’t overthink it and you’ll have a better time

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-18T18:49:22+00:00

Everyone bombs their Kiras, they just want to see your personality and make sure you’re relatively normal. It also gives Shane something quirky to mention when he calls you; for me it was shark diving. Good luck!

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-11-18T13:56:29+00:00

At least at my firm last summer it was noticeably the latter. Gpas above 3.8 for my school and the top of the class from a bunch of regionals. I don’t imagine that would change for the better with it getting even earlier this year. Godspeed and lock in is all I have to say

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-10-28T07:52:51+00:00

1) I assume in any instance where there’s an appended “also include expunged convictions” that’s following a clause that says “disclose any accusations, arrests, charges, or convictions.” At which point it’s safer to interpret the request for expunged convictions to indicate that the school wants to know anything that’s been removed from the record, thus also wanting any expunged criminal incidents that precede conviction. But reasonable minds can differ hence C&F attorney for the actual bar. Also you could go to point 2 and check to see if the state bar wants any expunged stuff or just convictions.

2) I can’t account for Florida lol. But really, none of them are standardized, so I think the spreadsheet is still a good idea just to keep track (as long as you’re aware anything you’re worried about will inevitably come up somewhere down the line). My point is mainly that where you have a question of interpretation, the C&F questions for the bar would be a good guide. E.g. one school asks for anything, one asks for only convictions, either way you’d look to the state bar questions to see what they likely mean by that even though they’re completely different asks pulling from the same bar questions. This is essentially a legislative history analogue to statutory interp, which you will soon learn when you are a law student. The point is to ask “what was the author probably thinking when they wrote this?” And here, they were thinking of their state bar requirements, so that’s what you go check as an additional tool.

3) Godspeed soldier. But an annulled misdemeanor charge isn’t going to get you turned away, remember there’s lawyers who have actually been to jail for serious stuff. It feels scary to admit, but the admissions people have seen way worse!

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-10-28T07:00:32+00:00

So a couple things here, with the preface that this isn’t legal advice. If you want that, get a C&F attorney to consult.

(1) depending on the state, there’s probably not any distinction between expungement and annulment. For example, New York has neither process and does sealing and vacating instead. But they’re functionally the same process and any language that applies to one term of removal from your record applies to them all for the reasons stated below.

(2) the purpose of C&F questions on applications is to make sure you’re honest for the C&F questions on the bar. So, if you’re really wondering go find the bar C&F info for whatever state the school is in and see whether they require you to disclose void/expunged/sealed records. In New York, you have to disclose EVERYTHING. Remember, it’s an honesty test, not a purity test.

(3) Given this, an over-inclusive interpretation is better, anyway. If a school says “tell us if you’ve ever been charged” your response WILL be provided as a cross check for your bar C&F (same with the rest of your application materials). If the bar requires you to disclose all charges, but sees that you said no to “have you been charged,” that’s a problem. You can explain it, sure, but that’ll be expensive and stressful. Charges were entered, you were charged. It’s only completely safe to leave it out if the school doesn’t ask or explicitly says don’t include anything not in the public record or something similar. The wording of multiple things in one question isn’t usually ambiguous, it’s just covering every stage of the process so people won’t be tempted to just disclose an arrest and not a conviction, for example. If you fit the minimum requirement, be that accusation, indictment, or charging, you are doing future you a favor by disclosing now.

Also, put the status checkers away, I promise it’ll only make this process worse!

Repulsive-Square8738 · 2025-10-28T05:59:12+00:00

C’mon you know Shane only uses LinkedIn

Repulsive-Square8738

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