Anna, I am an Iraq veteran and I have read that military service is anywhere from "extremely valuable" to law school admissions to something akin to any other job.  What is your take?  Is there anything I should do to highlight its strengths while also countering its possibly negative connotations?

As for another, more specific question: I am struggling with whether to include my platoon's "number of enemy captured/killed" on my resume.

Copying and pasting from Wikipedia in your college papers may seem totally normal to many college students, but this NYT article ("Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age") makes clear that (1) there is a casual attitude among many students about what constitutes plagiarism, and (2) copying and pasting and "borrowing" language is still considered plagiarism by any self-respecting university.

I love hearing from applicants with whom I crossed paths in years past. Here's an update I just received from a soon-to-be JD. It's a great reminder not to tack on graduate degrees willy-nilly, but to think hard about how a more general degree (like an MBA)  stacks up against more specialized ones.

In my last email I told you that I was considering getting a MBA because of my interest in working for the Justice Department or the SEC.

Having trouble finding a summer job? It seems as if everyone is, from high schoolers to lawyers-in-training. This Sunday's New York Times has an interesting article on the unemployment issue facing teenagers and college students.

To add to the list of things that can keep you from practicing law: taking on so much debt that you can't pay it back and get dinged by the bar committee.

Today's NYT has an astonishing story about a 47-year-old who started at Hastings Law School back in 2000, decided to throw in a master's degree, and then found himself trying to carry student loans of $230,000.

I'm enjoying a fascinating blog posting in the NYT about the value of a master's degree. Highly recommended.

A number of economists and education researchers say that the student debt problem, while real, has been overblown by the press and loan-forgiveness advocates, and that most students do not graduate with too much debt

But the debate presents difficult questions for young people, who face the most difficult economy since the Great Depression.

Could you tell me if schools gives applicants time to visit if they are admitted from the waitlist or hold category? Also, when do they make this decision?

Some schools give an option to visit (or at least give you a little time to decide), while others will give you only a short window to accept or decline the offer.

These are not the happiest times to be coming out of law school or business school. An article and a blog posting in today's Wall Street Journal jumped out at me:

"Recession Batters Law Firms, Triggering Layoffs, Closings" is a sad post-mortem of the once-venerable San Francisco law firm Heller, Ehrman, which closed its doors last year.

A huge thank-you to law professor Paul Caron for shining a public spotlight on a big problem.

Professor Caron has highlighted some astonishing bits of a recent podcast from a meeting of law school admnistrators:

AALS Committee on Research Program (Jan. 9, 2009), Citations, SSRN Downloads, U.S. News, Carnegie, Bar Passage, Careers: Competing Methods of Assessing Law Schools (podcast):

Bill Henderson (Indiana):

• 25:55: At 50 law schools, 20% of the students are either unemployed, flunked out, or are unknown, yet the ABA and LSAC disavow the use of data to rank law schools.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine who works (as I do) with lots of twenty-somethings. When we got around to the gratuitous praise to which Gen Y/the "Praise Generation" has become accustomed (phony praise that inflates their sense of achievement and rewards them for process rather than outcomes), he had this observation to share:

On all of this, I'll point out that, having worked with a literally never-ending stream of recent college graduates--half of everyone is 22 in my world--I notice that the people who consistently are the best to work with are ex-elite athletes.

Waitlists stink, don't they? I'm receiving a lot of emails right now from applicants agonizing about their waitlists. No matter what kind of program you've applied to -- college, business school, law school, public health, doesn't matter -- the process works more or less the same. Here's the drill:

You're on a waitlist because something about your file made you less than an easy decision to admit.

Maybe it's because one of your numbers is too low.