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Messages - cisforcookie

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anyone crazy enough to want to practice at a big law firm who gets into a top14 school should have no compunction about passing on a scholarship to a lower school. you're pretty much guaranteed a job at a large law firm unless you screw it up coming out of chicago. the same is not true at wustl. taking scholarships is for people like me who want to come out with no debt and hate the idea of working for a law firm.

Where should I go next fall? / Re: WUSTL Admitted Students Day
« on: February 25, 2008, 11:44:27 AM »
What do you mean by difficult job searches? I don't mean to be patronizing, but job searches in general are fairly difficult. Did they indicate that they were upset at not getting a job through OCI? Did you get the impression that any of these students had ever held full time employment? If, at most, 30-35 percent of the class there gets a job through OCI, which seems entirely reasonable to me, I would expect that maybe half of the student body will reach their final semester without full time employment secured. That doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me.

Law School Applications / Re: Am I doomed for Law School in 2008
« on: February 24, 2008, 09:37:54 AM »
I subscribe to the policy of laziness first, last, and in between. still, the traditional path of undergrad directly into law school strikes me as seriously flawed. it's not like undergrad where you can come out with an engineering degree and happily go to finance or marketing if that's what you decide you want to do. a law degree fairly pigeonholes you both with debt and in your general outlook. without some real full time work experience, and some distance from the momentum that is 16 straight years of just going to school all your life, it's easy to not stop and think about whether law school is actually what you should be doing. this advice assumes that the original poster is coming out of undergrad, which I took from their rather panicked post. if they are a non-trad, then they'll probably be fine anyway since they already have a job that they could probly hold onto for another year anyway.

« on: February 23, 2008, 10:08:30 PM »
If you had an lsat score already, they might look at that and decide based on that. I think I recall hearing that schools will take note if you tell them that you have a future lsat score pending and will set aside your app til then. Don't worry about it. If your cycle goes poorly, just take a few years off and work. It'll make you a much better law applicant if you decide to try again, and it's good for your mental health.

Where should I go next fall? / Re: ITT: A WUSTL 3L answers your questions
« on: February 22, 2008, 10:53:56 PM »
You say that WUSTL has a very laid back environment where people don't talk about grades or rankings. What do you think it is about the students that makes them so?

Perhaps the notion of going to budweiser university attracts lazy fratboys?

Perhaps the large scholarships they offer attract a large number of stereotypical humanities majors with no other job prospects who are very ambivalent about law school in general and like the idea of delaying entering the real world while also not collecting 150k in debt?

Perhaps the friendliness toward people with high lsats and low gpas means alot of smart people who have trouble applying themselves or just don't concern themselves with external measures of success?

Perhaps its location in the midwest discourages many of the more obsessive gunnerish students from even applying?

Being as I am strongly considering enrolling in the fall, I am very interested in the general makeup of the student body. The huge binder I just got in the mail didn't really cover this subject very well.

Well, if law school didn't have the financial risks, and this caused more people to sign up, what would be the harm in that? Since none of them would be coming out with 150k in debt, I think there would be an explosion in small law firm startups. You would also see a very large number of people with law degrees decide not to practice law.

I imagine that the competition for the best paying but least fun jobs would diminish significantly. The impact this might have on large law firm hiring and culture would certainly be earthshaking. I've always gotten the impression that people are much more concerned with money when they're in debt than when they're in the clear. Probly would drive hours billed down significantly. Can you honestly say that you would turn down a job paying 90k that required 1400 hours billed for a job paying 160k and a 2100 hours billed requirement? I think that alot of people would begin to take the first job over the second if they weren't concerned about debt.

I am always amused when my friends in law schools argue that the only way to get a good job that has nothing to do with a large firm is to work at a large firm because it's assumed that if you had any talent you went to work for a large firm. I think in the poll hypothetical that this echo chamber effect would be significantly reduced.


Where should I go next fall? / Re: schools with weak competition
« on: February 14, 2008, 09:52:45 AM »
Your replies find me very confused. Good grades are not free, and there is no certainty to any of it. Nobody is disputing this. The question was about the aggregate. The existence of the LSAT and GPA measures is because they have been statistically shown to have significant correlation to first year law school grades. They are not perfect, but they do mean something. And if they mean something, and if there is no other good leading indicator for law school success that is weighed heavily in admissions (certainly having a juicy life story isn't one, though it helps in admissions) it seems likely that those schools which have a tighter band of students in the middle of their accepted classes will have less variability in the law school academic potential within their class. This might (MIGHT) lead to a more competitive (numerically, not necessarily how hard people work) situation. That's all I'm saying.

To the poster who wanted to know if he should go to BC over Loyola, I would suggest he go to BC. I do not think that this type of analysis would be at all a good reason to go to a markedly worse school over a better school. At the most, I think it might be a useful consideration when choosing between schools which are otherwise very difficult to differentiate.

Where should I go next fall? / Re: What would it take to turn down T6?
« on: February 12, 2008, 04:23:30 PM »
I would take Michigan, Virginia, or Penn over NYU.  WIth no money too.

penn is a dump. at least nyu is in a nice place in new york. i get claustrophobic in manhattan, but i can see the appeal. from a distance.

« on: February 12, 2008, 03:28:02 PM »
yeah, I get that. It just seems like a somewhat absurd question. There's going to be a ton of good reasons. If you really wanna be an ivory tower type, you probly should go to yale. But if your choice is columbia or nyu vs something else, I can imagine a whole lot of really good reasons to go with something else. Outside of academia type stuff that is hugely good-ol-boy driven, there's not really any difference at all between the top 14 that is going to matter as much as who you are and what you do with it.

my pepsicola joke was merely a reference to corporate law. I work for a huge corporate gorilla as it is, and they suck. I don't want to be their lawyer or lawyer for anyone like them.

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