PatheticMakeshiftJellyfish '22–'23

if you have a lot of work experience, it is fine to lean into it on your application. Do your best to tie it to how it prepared your for law school and as a lawyer. If significant work experience, I’d recommend at least one of them come from a person who supervised you, if possible.

Taking January LSAT and applying at end of Jan or in Feb is not a cycle killer if you want T14 but it makes it harder.

If you can apply early and apply to many. Underemphasized is that applying early likely means you’ll have all your offers on the table so that you can request reconsideration with your best offer by that school’s deadline. You could potentially bounce a higher reconsidered offer back to a different school in hopes of maximizing aid – something I didn’t have the luxury of doing.

Make sure that everything in your application highlights a different part of YOU (experience, identity, academic achievement, interest in law school etc).

Write a Why Law School statement in the addendum if it doesn’t flow off the personal statement. Helps prevent typo errors (referencing wrong school). I didn’t write a Why Law School statement because it felt weird to write what I love about each school for a couple reasons: (1) I don’t know everything (or even most about the school) and I don’t want to come off as if I’m narrowly focused on those things, (2) I think it was hard to come off as genuine when elaborating what I liked about their law school program based on their website and other search results. I wrote about 4 statements but scrapped them for those reasons. HOWEVER, if really like that school and what I just said resonated with you then please, please stomach the feeling and try your best to write a Why Law School statement. (a big reason why I didn’t was an interview the UVA Law Dean of Admissions gave in an interview about detecting sincerity and being suspicious of those who didn’t say they visited the school when they live nearby/had the means to do so and that the essay should mention references to those visits or something like that. It got me into thinking that the whole charade of “good” Why Law School essay statements is a measure of privilege. This made me feel gross about the entire prospect of writing “Why Law School”

Personal Statement polish is important. I wrote a personal statement only and did not write a diversity statement.