Writing Tips for Law Students... and Everyone Else

Law professor and blogger Jeff Lipshaw reads a lot of student essays and term papers, and he has graciously written a great piece on the three biggest problems that trip students up when they're trying to get their ideas across on paper. Read his post about the "Elevator Speech" failure, the "Peeling the Artichoke" failure, and the "Presentational" failure.

More thoughts on the subject here.

 

Former Dean of Admissions at the University of Chicago Law School and a recovering lawyer, Anna Ivey founded Ivey Consulting to help college, law school, and MBA applicants navigate the admissions process.

MBA or Something Else?

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.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would find myself paying a seat deposit to a school in the top ten"

When I first started preparing my law school applications, I hadn't a clue where to start. I knew I needed a solid GPA and LSAT score to be admitted to some of the best law schools in the country, but I didn't know how to put together a comprehensive application that highlighted my strengths while minimizing my weaknesses.

I didn't know how to craft well written resumes or personal statements because I didn't know what schools desired.

How Not to Write a Law School Application Essay

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.

Kicking Interdisciplinary Legal and Business Education Up Another Notch

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.

College Financial Aid: Were You Stymied by Computer Problems?

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.

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Do You Have Grit?

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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.

Number of LSAT Takers Reaches All-Time High

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.

Re-taking Classes: How are multiple grades calculated by the LSAC?

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?