Anna Ivey gives you ruthlessly practical admissions advice
Is there a type of essay that annoys admissions officers so much that they'll stop in the middle of reading an application to vent? Yep. Here's what just hit my inbox:
I doubt you'd let your clients do this anyway, but the most annoying kind of essay I see is the "Why I'm so perfect/how I've ticked all the boxes. Can I recite my resume for you?" essay.
It takes the form of: "Since early childhood, I have been an over-achieving perfectionist.
Are law schools and business schools, as well as applicants, obsessed with interdisciplinary education? In my experience, yes, and I have cautioned against what Judge Easterbrook called "Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse" ("put together two fields about which you know very little and get the worst of both words"). Getting interdisciplinary education right is hard.
Now Jeff Lipshaw, a professor at Suffolk Law School and all-around smart guy, has published a paper arguing that interdisciplinarity isn't enough anyway, because someone has to make the judgment call about what goes into that intersection, and how to solve those complexities:
The relationship of pure and mixed business and legal judgment can be modeled in a Venn diagram.
Some of you probably waited until the last minute to complete your CSS Financial Aid Profile on the College Board's site. If you did, you may have found yourself caught in severe slowdowns and intermittent outages on Sunday, January 31st. According to the College Board, the problems started at about 5.30p EST and were not resolved until midnight (in other words, right at the February 1st deadline).
If you were one of those students affected, you need to confirm with each college that your PROFILE application was processed and submitted by the deadline.
How much do things like determination and grit correlate with future success? It's a big question, and one that intrigues me as a former admissions officer. After all, the gatekeeping function of admissions is to scour all these imperfect proxies (some might say tea leaves) to try to predict the future success of all those wonderful applicants.
On that subject, a recent article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic Monthly caught my eye.
The NYT reports today that the number of people taking the October LSAT in 2009 represented a 20% increase over October 2008, for an all-time high. Law school admissions professionals quoted in the article think it's a delayed reaction to the economy:
"There's a bit of lag time between when people start to worry about the economy and when they get their applications going," said Wendy Margolis, director of communications for the Law School Admission Council, which administers the L.
We received a question about how the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) converts applicants' undergraduate grades. (I have posted on this topic before, because it's tricky!) The prospective law school applicant wrote:
Is it true that if I re-took some courses while in college to raise my GPA, the original scores will also be factored in for my LSAC GPA when I sign up for the service?
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In a previous post we discussed the general rules to follow when assessing when and how to disclose a criminal issue in your background.
My colleague Alison, who heads up our college admissions pratice, just wrote this great blog posting about overcoming writer's block when trying to write your personal essay.
Since many law school applicants are working on their resumes for this year's admissions cycle, I decided to follow up on my June 29th article, Top Tips for Legal Resumes and Cover Letters, and provide resume DOs and DON'Ts specifically for law school applicants.
What you should DO:
The Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) converts applicants' undergraduate records to a standard 4.0 Grade Point Average system, so law schools can compare candidates according to a uniform standard. Applicants often have questions about how their GPAs are calculated by the LSAC, and they may see differences between their undergraduate GPAs as calculated by their colleges, and their LSAC GPAs.
One potential law student wrote to us as follows:
I have a very strong undergraduate GPA (3.
Yesterday we received a question regarding letters of recommendation:
My son is applying to law school. I am a senior civil services officer of the Delhi Government in India, and I wish to know whether, if I write a recommendation for my son, it will be accepted and considered seriously. I think I know him better than any other person and I can be very objective in my assessment.
It's not surprising that this mom -- like many moms-- wants to do everything she can to help her son with his application But a letter of recommendation from mom or dad is not going to help this student, at least with U.
I received an email recently about my advice in the column “Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, and Test Prep.â€Â In it, the writer asked a very important question: “How does one truly study one’s wrong answers?†He elaborates:
My problem is that I choose a wrong answer and then I look at an explanation and I don’t really take much away from it….
We received the following question from a blog reader and future law school applicant:
I have some concerns and don't know who to turn to for some solid honest advice. I am starting a one year program at a youth centered clinic predominantly focused on family planning and reproductive health. I will be a health educator there who will see the patients before they see the doctor.
Will more conservative law schools be hesitant to accept me based on such endeavors?
