The time you have been waiting for has come. Decision season is about to crescendo. In the next ten days, the last round of decisions from “regular decision” applications will be released.  What do you do now?

Warning: The advice that follows is not of the “warm fuzzy variety” that you might expect.

We recently received this awesome testimonial for our colleague Greg. In lawyer circles, we call this an "excited utterance":

GREG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got into Upenn law early decision!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So i will be withdrawing from all the other schools.

My co-author Alison and I are thrilled to announce that our college admissions book is officially up on the Barnes & Noble site and ready for pre-orders. It won't hit the shelves until August, but it's starting to feel real! We're very excited and will post more updates as they happen. Stay tuned!

Today’s Boston Globe ran an interesting story that you should read if you are hoping to secure a job in the future. So that means pretty much everyone.

The takeaway: your online footprint is easy for people to discover, and potentially very dangerous for your future.

It’s great to hear that schools like Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, and Northeastern are taking the issue seriously.

What are admissions officers looking for when it comes to activities? They are looking for evidence of the “Core Four” – passion, talent, initiative and impact. That’s why we encourage you to always look for opportunities that would allow you to show admissions officers that you’ve got the Core Four. 

For many students, how to show “initiative” is a bit of a stumper.

What am I supposed to be doing about college right now? This is a GREAT question and it is one of the questions I get asked all the time.  As you are returning to school following the winter holiday, here are the “To Do’s” you should add to your list – organized grade-by-grade.  Get these done by the end of the school year and you’ll be right on track! 

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What a week it's been, so much wailing and gnashing of teeth about October LSAT scores.

Every year I talk to lots of people who are absolutely certain they'll score in the 170s until, boom, they get their scores back.

NYU is planning some major changes to its 3L curriculum. Here's the nutshell from the NYT DealBook:<!--break-->

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Labor Day has passed and that means it is time to get serious about completing your college applications.

Here's a question I hear all the time: "Should I write about [topic X] in my law school application essay?"

That's the wrong question to be asking, but I completely understand why people ask it: essay prompts in the applications can be bewildering.

Here's a real example of what a non-bewildering essay prompt looks like:

I took my first LSAT last year in Oct and got 157.

If you're applying to law school this coming fall, you probably already know that you'll have to submit recommendations for most of your applications. When you're setting up your LSAC account, though, you'll see references to "recommendations" and "evaluations," and you might wonder why they're using those two different words.

It's important to understand the distinction between an "evaluation" and a "recommendation," because when you enter information about your individual recommenders in your online account, you'll be asked to label each one as an "evaluator" or a "recommender.

I'm trying to figure out my timeline for applying to law school. Harvard, e.g., opens their application on September 15. Is there any advantage to submitting on the 15th rather than the 22nd? If not, at what point in the calendar does the "earlier the better" maxim become relevant?

Great question, and I know you hear a lot of conflicting advice out there.

As part 5 of my series on getting yourself into tip-top shape to apply to law school this fall (you can catch up with parts 1, 2, 3 and 4), I bring up a topic you'd probably rather not deal with: disclosures. And for that, you'll need to get a head start on thinking like a lawyer.

As future lawyers, one of the tasks you will get really, really good at (and very, very bored with) is called document review.

Marching forward in my little series about preparing yourself for killer law school applications this fall, here is a post devoted just to recommendations. (If you missed the previous installments, here are one, two, and three.) Judging from the emails we receive for the blog, this is a very popular topic.

Early summer is the right time to start thinking about whom you're going to ask for your recommendations, because recommendations can take a while to wrangle.