Law School

So, its been a crazy couple of days!

I had a big paper due in my Conduct of War class on Monday. I got it done with one of Tom's Patented All-Nighters and I think it turned out well, but I really don't want to think about it anymore, to be honest...I can't remember a time when I've been more frustrated with/annoyed by/generally really over it the whole thing about an assignment.

But the real craziness has all come on the law school front. I got my LSAT score back a couple of days ago and achieved a 170, which is obviously very good but I wasn't really all that thrilled about it. Like I said in my last post, I thought I had done slightly better than that. Still, a 97th percentile score is nothing to sneeze at, and I quickly came up with the list of schools I would apply to. Here is that list, sorted by my personal preference. The number to the left of the school name corresponds to that school's US News and World Report ranking.

-6. Berkeley

-12. Duke

-7. Penn

-16. UCLA

-9. Northwestern

-9. Michigan

-15. Vanderbilt

-18. USC

-14. Georgetown

-20. GWU

-19. Washington University in St. Louis

-22. Emory

-38. UC Hastings

-38. North Carolina

I was really comfortable with my list...I had a couple reaches into the top 10, some schools in the lower end of the T14 and in the top 20 that I thought I was pretty good for, and some safeties in the lower end of the range that I would be comfortable going to if I bricked everywhere. It was balanced, logical, and like I said, very comfortable.

There was just one problem: I was thinking like a white person.

I've since been told by multiple people that I trust that African-American students with an LSAT score like mine are an absurdly rare commodity - less than 100 of us with a 170+ per admissions cycle, apparently...in 2004, there were only 29 black students with a 170+ out of 10k black LSAT takers, against 1900 white students with a 170+ - and that as a result, the sky might literally be the limit for my prospects. They say that if I want to be, I should "expect" to be in at at least one from among Columbia/Chicago/NYU (ranked 4,5, and 6), expect to be in with money at Cal and every school ranked below them, and that though they're still a reach, I even have a chance at the top-3 schools - particularly at Harvard, which apparently is known for going out of its way to promote diversity.

So, basically, my head is spinning right now. There's a part of me that's jumping for joy because I haven't thought I had a Democrat's chance in November (sorry, sort of bitter about Election Day right now) at schools of that caliber since my sophomore year of college...even during my days of absurdly inflated self-image in high school I didn't think I was all that likely to wind up at a top-5 law school. There's another part of me that simply doesn't believe it and frankly doesn't want to believe it...it just seems absurd that my race could or should give me such an enormous bump, particularly when I haven't come from an economically-disadvantaged background or anything like that. There's another part of me that worries about my ability to compete with the true best of the best and wonders if maybe I shouldn't go to one of the top-top schools that I now apparently have a chance at. And there's another part of me that is sort of overwhelmed by the choices and wondering about the implications of those choices; could I really turn down Columbia/NYU/UChicago if I got in chief among them.

But mostly I'm just excited, and my excitement has been stoked even further by the unsolicited application fee waiver emails that are coming in. So far, I've gotten them from three schools that I'll actually apply to (Virginia, Georgetown, and UCLA) and several more that I have no plans of applying to (Minnesota, Temple, Penn State, St. Thomas, William & Mary).

I've also learned that 97% of Northwestern's student body has at least 1 year of work experience, so I'm scrubbing them from the list...bad weather + likely to get into better schools + much harder to fit in socially = 100% not gonna go, so its not worth bothering with an app.

So anyways, I think this is my new list of schools I'm applying to, again sorted by preference with US News and World Report rankings.

-3. Stanford

-2. Harvard

-1. Yale

-7. Cal

-11. Duke

-4. Columbia

-7. Penn

-9. Michigan

-15. UCLA

-5. Chicago

-14. Georgetown

-6. NYU

-10. Virginia

-17. Vanderbilt

-18. USC

-19. WashU

and maybe GWU and Emory...haven't decided about them yet.

This is all extremely fungible though. I'm not convinced that if it came down to a choice between Cal, Duke, and Columbia, for instance, that I'd be able to resist the Ivy League even though Cal and Duke are in locations that are infinitely more appealing to me than New York. Similarly, if it came down to being between UCLA and Columbia or Duke or Penn, I can't guarantee that the possibility of being in sunny Los Angeles with my friends (at least one of my best friends from high school will be in LA, and there's a distinct possibility that the whole gang may wind up there over the next two years) wouldn't overwhelm my desire to be at a top school in New York/Philly/North Carolina. It's very hard to say.

Exciting times, though!

On another note, I'm heading up to Scotland tomorrow to celebrate the 21st birthday of my lovely girlfriend Alex Cassanova. Even though its ABSURDLY cold up there (low 40s with wind chill are you kidding me?), I anticipate having a good time :)

Cheers,

Tom