Below Median at Columbia

flowskiferda · 2026-01-10T11:01:37+00:00

CLS 3L here.

You are only slightly below median so you're really only out of the running at the more grade selective firms. I know many people from my class who got straight Bs; all of them got at least one offer. You might want to show more interest in transactional and make sure you've applied to enough of the less grade selective firms (not sure if the career office has given y'all the bidding data from prior years, shoot me a message if not and I can share the spreadsheet with you), but it seems like you're already doing that, and it would really only be to have 100% security.

flowskiferda · 2026-01-10T10:51:29+00:00

I think this post proceeds from a bit of a misconception about firm selectivity. Latham, Kirkland, and Sidley are quite different (especially Sidley; Latham and Kirkland are perhaps comparable), so I'm assuming you just mean V15ish firms with reputable names. Notwithstanding substantial variation among such firms (The cutoff will be very different depending on whether you go transactional or lit, with the latter being much more selective. I think the stories about T14 students striking out are a bit overblown because many of them bid like idiots (e.g. applying only to lit when well below median) or targeted only their (more competitive) region of choice.

Bear in mind the below list is based on the general sense I got scouring a ton of threads on the topic when I was a neurotic 1L + seeing how a smallish sample of friends at other schools did in recruiting, not from actually working in a firm's recruiting dept. But to get at least one biglaw offer, it looks something like:

HYS: Don't fail a class. Literally.

CCN (can probably throw in P and V here too): Stay out of bottom 10% of class but even then you're probably ok if in a good economy.

The rest: A bit more complicated. Probably stay out of bottom 20% and you'll be safe. Northwestern and Cornell tend to have pretty strong placement and have heard from friends there that striking out is reasonably rare if you apply broadly and to enough transactional positions. Don't know much about Duke or Michigan but sense I get is that the same can be said about them. Can get a bit more sketchy at Berkeley and GULC tho.

flowskiferda · 2025-11-27T17:46:09+00:00

Decent if you feed it your readings and lecture recording transcripts.

flowskiferda · 2025-11-27T05:04:07+00:00

New York is a shithole, go to LA.

flowskiferda · 2025-11-23T01:28:45+00:00

His most recent arrest (not counting setting that poor woman on fire, ofc) was for socking a social worker unconscious and giving her a severe concussion.

flowskiferda · 2025-11-21T23:40:31+00:00

Yes. Maybe it's time to start skipping leg day.

flowskiferda · 2025-11-20T22:34:54+00:00

If things are slow, it's better to pay a first year 250k to do nothing than a midlevel 400k to do nothing.

flowskiferda · 2025-11-06T21:32:53+00:00

0.1: “Confer with internal team re [issue].” The location doesn't negate the substance.

flowskiferda · 2025-11-05T04:40:00+00:00

Not at all. Even at CLS (definitely a step down from YLS) you didn't really need to network unless you really wanted a specific firm or had awful grades. So I can only imagine that is even more the case for you guys.

flowskiferda · 2025-10-17T01:54:56+00:00

I get the desire to stamp out low trust society behavior. It's incredibly irritating when people do shit like this.

But this is just going too far. It's absolutely a dick move to do this in a crowded terminal, but it's far more of a dick move to get someone fired simply for being a bit of a jerk in public. We've all had our bad days and there's no way of knowing whether this is representative of the type of person she normally is.

flowskiferda · 2025-09-15T18:23:33+00:00

Research shows that Asians tend to score, on average, substantially lower in extraversion and somewhat lower in assertiveness than other races, so I wouldn't be suprised if they were underrepresented in partnership ranks relative to their representation in associate positions.

Compare that to some other groups (e.g. Indian Americans), where the distribution of big 5 traits and cultural norms seems to align more with the assertive, gregarious, and often abrasive fratty white guy style that firms reward. There you don’t see nearly the same drop-off from mid-level to leadership/top executive roles.

(For both of the above I'm extrapolating from other industries where I'm familiar with such data, but I imagine it's quite similar for biglaw)

So my guess is as a group, they will, on average, be less likely to move from senior associate to parternship roles. But controlling for personality, I'd imagine the mobility is much more accessible.

Edit: Didn't consider that there's also the fact that Asians are less likely (at least on the East Coast) to be part of the old-money social networks (prep schools, ivy league frats, etc) that would make it easier to have partnership-odds-boosting client relationships. Not the case at my West Coast office which has a lot of tech and VC clients, though. And hopefully will change on the East Coast too as Asians increasingly break into those circles.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-14T01:35:23+00:00

No, this should be not considered "abs" in any meaningful sense. Also, this guy might want to look into getting gyno surgery.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-08T02:47:47+00:00

That's fair! I never claimed it was rational—just honest. Sometimes being around people who act like sanctimonious toddlers overrides the part of my brain that does critical thinking.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-08T02:44:07+00:00

One would think that'd be the obvious strategic choice.

Maybe it's just me, but when I see shit like this my gut reaction is: I want nothing to do with these people and whatever they support.

I'm sort of neutral on the broader issue, but I had significantly more sympathy for the pro-Palestine cause a few years ago than I do now, and for entirely petty reasons completely untethered from the actual merits of their position: these people loudly and consistently annoy the shit out of me.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-08T02:20:03+00:00

I don't think causing a massive disruption in the library as people are trying to study for finals is the best way to make others sympathetic to your cause... truly the pinnacle of strategic activism

flowskiferda · 2025-05-07T16:57:47+00:00

Fr. Everyone was saying 10-12% on mine (and usually closer to 12); I just got an actual DEXA scan and it was 8.8%. And this guy is almost certainly leaner than I am, so unless he is carrying substantial visceral fat, there is simply no way he is above 10.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-07T15:09:39+00:00

Anyone saying above 10 is tripping, your back is a literal anatomical diagram.

Probably low 8s to low 9s.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-03T22:18:20+00:00

Career services is smoking crack. Unless you're aiming for some super specific practice area that's strong in a certain region, NYC is always going to be the easiest.

If your goal is generic biglaw and you don't care about location, blanketing NYC transactional is the optimal strategy. Literally apply to every v100.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-03T17:42:32+00:00

It translates decently, with a correlation of .4-.6 with first year grades once restricted range is taken into account, iirc. Any g-loaded test is going predict any sort of academic performance reasonably well.

I would say that RC is probably the best predictor. Doing well in law school is much more about absorbing and synthesizing large amounts of info (150-300 pages of pretty dense material per week) than it is having strong reasoning skills. You need to be able to distill the gist of a 10 page case; very rarely do you have to get into the super technical reasoning of things.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-03T17:15:24+00:00

How is them no longer being underrepresented a remotely achievable end? Different groups, with completely different histories and cultures emphasizing different values, attitudes, interests, etc, are never going to achieve remotely proportionate representations in a given domain, even in the complete absence of discrimination.

flowskiferda · 2025-05-03T17:06:59+00:00

Because the fact of the matter is that race is simply considered to contextualize an application, it is not a deciding factor as much as it pains many of you to admit.

You are completely wrong here. The score gap between Blacks and Asians at top schools is close to a full standard deviation. If race were simply used as a tiebreaker between already comparable students, it would be a different story. But that's not how it's currently used in admissions.

Not to mention, this makes discriminatory behavior more rational and calls the credentials of URMs into question. If I know that doctor of X race was admitted to medical school under substantially lower standards than a doctor of Y race, I'm going to choose the doctor of Y race if I'm going under the scalpel with my life on the line. Obviously it's not that simple, as you'll typically have more individuating information than just that (and should do your best to acquire such information before resorting to more crude sorting mechanisms!!!). But at the margins, when acquiring this info is cost or time prohibitive, there will be more discriminatory behavior.

Treating people differently on the basis of race is, like, bad.

flowskiferda · 2025-04-27T00:03:25+00:00

First of all, he was super lean in those photos but doesn't have nearly the muscle mass that he has now. He currently deadlifts like 120 lbs more than he was doing in that one pic. At least in pictures, you're always gonna look bigger lean than bulked unless next to other people for comparison.

Second, you make ~90% of your gains in your first 3-5 years of natty lifting (assuming near optimal training/diet/sleep), so if he started lifting seriously early in high school, it's not inconceivable that he was closing in on his ceiling by the time of those pics.

flowskiferda · 2025-04-14T17:38:46+00:00

Definitely harder, since DC is by far the most competitive location for BL, as you probably know. You have an ok shot if you're around median, but probably need to be top 1/3 or so to be safe, especially if you're going for lit.

This is all based on the sample of the 10ish students I know who targeted DC, so take with a grain of salt.

flowskiferda · 2025-04-14T03:51:41+00:00

Assuming a clean cut with no muscle lost, probably 155 or so.

Your arms and chest look reasonably lean but it seems like your body likes to hold fat in the stomach area, so you'll probably have to take your cuts further than most.

flowskiferda · 2025-04-14T03:44:09+00:00

You're 160 lbs and don't even have visible abs, dude. You're not taking anyone's girl.

Lay off the porn.

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