Anna Ivey gives you ruthlessly practical admissions advice
I'm intrigued by Brian Leiter's rankings of law schools based on the success rates of its graduates in the 2006-2008 law school teaching market. If you don't want to read the rankings, here are some take-aways:
1. Yale was the most successful school (45% placement rate); Chicago was second (43%), followed by Stanford (41%), Harvard (37%), and UVa (35%).
2. Harvard and Yale accounted for 40% of all new faculty hires (90 out of 231).
3.
Justice Blackmun may be famous for having authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, but he's also famous for the "sappy" 1972 baseball antitrust decision Flood v. Kuhn, which exempted baseball from antitrust laws just because baseball is, well, special:
[Flood v.
One of the hardest things to sort out in law school is whether to choose a litigation or transactional career. Law school training (at least the required part) is notoriously biased in favor of litigation, so the burden is on law students to figure out whether they want to default into a litigation career or seek out training for a transactional practice.
Prof. Jeff Lipshaw has some great postings on how to go about deciding whether transactional law is a good fit. Check them out here and here.
The headline says it all: "Strain on all sides as students put off college selections"
The front page of today's Boston Globe has a story about how July is just around the corner, but "a startling number of incoming freshmen are still torn over their college plans," and "some waitlisted students still hold out hope they will get into their top-choice school, while others who have already been accepted are not sure they can afford theirs.
Always the innovator in one of the most sclerotic and hidebound industries on the planet, Northwestern Law School will be offering a 2-year JD, as reported in today's Chicago Tribune.
Even more exciting is that the 2-year JD students will be the first to take newly required classes in accounting, finance, and statistics. I have long told rising 1Ls that the best class they can take while in law school is financial accounting.
The ever-excellent Kristina Cowan over at The Salary Reporter has a great posting about ways recent college grads can avoid flubbing their job interviews. Read it here.
It's an interesting day when a fifty-something federal judge commits the same sins as the Say Everything generation. Remember this awesome article from New York magazine a while back?
Kids today.
Our college counselor Christine reports from Silicon Valley:
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“I would give my left testicle for my son to get into Harvard.â€
Appalling? Absolutely. Actually said? You bet.
Madeline Levine, a psychologist in Marin County, California and author of The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected, Unhappy Kids, shared this quote from a patient’s father during a recent talk I attended in Palo Alto, California.
Today's New York Times reports that Harvard is planning on making offers to 150-175 people from its college waitlist, with Princeton and Penn followingly closely with projections of about 90 each. The article discusses the ripple effects (or what I have called the "musical chairs") that makes the summer so unpredictable for admissions officers and waitlisted candidates alike. Read the NYT article here, and my "musical chairs" discussion here.
Most college seniorsand recent graduates haven’t had very glamorous jobs. That’s OK – everyone has to start somewhere. If you’ve done internships or other kinds of entry-level jobs, focus on what you observed or learned about the industry or profession rather than on what you did. “Observed the inner workings of a high-paced PR firm†sounds more interesting than “answered phones and updated calendar.â€
1. Let Your Major Pick YouA lot of college students ask me what majors will look best on paper when it comes time to apply for a job or to graduate school. At this point in your college education, you really have no business committing to a career yet. You should be exploring – different classes, different internships and part-time jobs, different activities, different professors. Take a wide variety of classes, even if variety is not mandated by your school’s graduation requirements, and you’ll figure out pretty quickly which ones you’re passionate about.
Today's NYT writes about how insanely competitive the college admissions process has been this year ("Elite Colleges Reporting Record Low Admissions"). It's never easy getting into an Ivy or Ivy equivalent, but this year has hit a new level off difficulty. The admissions rate at some of those schools for the 2007-08 year (so far):
Harvard: 7.1%
Yale: 8.3%
Columbia: 8.7%
Brown: 13%
Dartmouth: 13%
Those statistics are in large part a function of demographics.
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.
The topic of graduate school admissions can pop up in the most unexpected places. I'm a fan of Salon.com, and one of their advice columnists (Cary Tennis) recently published a letter from a 20-year-old called "I'm wasting my semester abroad watching TV in my apartment." Subtitle: "Could I really be blowing the definitive period of my college life?" Tennis's advice in this column is spot-on: humane, productive, sympathetic. He gets it. I love him. I want to send him flowers.
I'm very familiar with the reader's plight, because it's a common one for college students and recent graduates.
I've decided that I need to be posting more of the discussions I have (largely by email) over the course of the day. I yak all day long about things that might be of interest to readers of the Ivey Files, and I need to get over the fact that reproducing things I've written in an email will by necessity offer up writing that is less than polished (although Lord knows that's true for blog postings as well).
So, just today, I was chatting with some people who were commenting on the habit of finance employers to ask job applicants for their SAT scores (as well as LSAT or GMAT scores, as the case may be). On the one hand, we laughed our butts off -- we're in our mid-thirties and can't imagine that a test we took back in, oh, 1989 (!!) could possibly say anything meaningful about us. Can SAT scores say anything meaningful about someone who just graduated from college? Maybe yes, maybe no. Some argued that SAT scores do say something about raw horsepower under the hood, while others argued that good SAT scores just prove you're good at taking the SATs. Either way, to people who aren't routinely dealing with recruiting practices in the the finance world, it seems weird to ask for the scores.
However, if employers are asking for the scores, then employers obviously see some value in that information, and I'm very curious where that value comes from.
From one of my emails:
This is, I suspect, also a reflection of the fact that college grades, and college transcripts as a whole, don't really mean squat [to the interviewer].
Unless you have very inside-baseball *and* recent knowledge of a school's grading practices, as well as knowledge of the grading practices and substantive difficulty of individual courses and professors, transcripts really mean nothing. When I look at a transcript, I have no idea whether PHYS 325 is string theory or "Physics for Poets" (as the gut physics class was called at Columbia in my day). And when I was still on the job market, I was bummed that my law school transcript didn't say who taught my Financial Accounting class at the business school -- it was Roman Weil, and that actually means something to some people, but I never got the benefit of that on my transcript.
The uselessness of transcripts also leads to over-reliance on the name brand of the school to signal something about the applicant.
We went on to discuss grade inflation more generally, and I recalled a Boston Globe article from the early 2000's about the fact that 91% of Harvard undergraduates had graduated with honors that year. (The rest of the ivies are pretty inflationary too, so I'm not just picking on Harvard, although it has seemed to be the worst offender.)
So I throw that out there, because transcripts are so unhelpful not just in the job hiring process, but also in the graduate school admissions process. When applicants complain about the seeming over-reliance on standardized test scores, understand that most transcript are in fact very, very hard to interpret in any meaningful way.
I was so excited to hear about Princeton's plans to formalize a Princeton-sponsored gap year for their students before they start college. In this case, the gap year program will be for applicants who have already been admitted to Princeton, but gap years are also a great idea for high school students who have not yet finalized their college plans.
I have almost daily conversations with parents in which I recommend a gap year for their high school students, and most of the time, those parents are resistant.
"A British researcher reports that the male ego is often larger than his actual IQ. But you might be surprised by what women think of men's intellect."
Curious? Me too!
Read the Newsweek article here. It's interesting to think about how this plays out in the classroom and in the workplace.
It's been a great day, hearing from so many of my blog readers! Here's another one that just came in:
Ms. Ivey,
I'm sure you've probably been emailed this recent article from the New York Times  ["Who's Cuddly? Law Firms"] multiple times today, but I felt compelled to share.
Practicing law sure looks great... on TV! Hollywood lawyers like Elle Woods, the team on Boston Legal, and any of the fantastically gorgeous and oft-rotating A.D.A.'s on Law & Order lure a lot of people to law school.
Despite what you may have heard about being able to do anything with a law degree, law school is, at the end of the day, a trade school. Sure, some of them - especially the top ones - are gussied up with an intellectual veneer, and their course listings make law school look like an advanced degree in the liberal arts ("Greek Tragedy and the Law," "Postmodern Legalisms," "Anthropology and the Law"), but you really have no business applying to law school unless you know that you want to practice law.
Can entrepreneurship be taught in the classroom? Many business schools (both undergraduate and graduate) seem to think so, and they are booming. In an article in the current University of Cambridge alumni magazine, some entrepreneurs weigh in on what makes them successful.
