Please share your stories

I'm very happy to see that people are using this blog to inform their law school applications. I would love to expand the content to make it even more useful, but I am not actively engaged in applying to or attending law school. You are. I invite any visitors to leave a comment offering to share some insight into how being a PhD has impacted your law school application cycle. The comments are moderated so nothing is visible on the site until I approve it. I can repost a comment as a stand alone post or you can leave some contact information and I'll follow up with you to get your perspective posted so it can help others.

Thanks for reading!

An Explanation

You can't hear the bitterness that I feel when I read my statement about not going to law school. Law would be an excellent move for my career. Unfortunately, my wife's job has gotten a little too unstable for me to give up my salary and benefits for 3 years. There are no part-time programs that are close enough for me to attend so that means putting aside my law school ambitions.

I envy everyone placing seat deposits and getting ready to start classes in the fall.

Thanks for reading,

phdboost

Conclusion

I was waiting for W&M to sent out their denials to see how people with my numbers fared, but I get the feeling most people will get accepted. Why? Because it really is all about the LSAT score, with some element of GPA. Other things may weigh in one way or another, but ultimately, that 3 or 4 hours you spend taking the LSAT will seal your fate. A PhD will help you get in if you have the numbers, but it won't help if you don't.

Focus on your LSAT, that's all that really matters.

I'm not going to law school. Good luck to everybody in their studies and careers.

So long,

phdboost

How much is a 168 LSAT worth?

WashU sent me a scholarship offer email last night. They're offering a Scholar in Law scholarship of $10,000 a year (or $30,000 distributed evenly over three years in their terms, I guess they want me to be impressed by the larger number). That only leave Mason and U of R outstanding in terms of scholarship offers. Alabama has not offered me any money so I'll take a look at the impact of the various scholarships on the tuition of each school.

Here's how the offers impact tuition (The Marshall Scholarship from Richmond is in italics to indicate that my application for that scholarship is pending):

	Tuition	$$	Tuition - $$	% $$
WashU	$40,436	$10,000	$30,436	24.73
Minn	$35,089	$18,000	$17,089	51.30
W&M	$20,146	$6,000	$14,146	29.78
GMU	$18,732
W&L	$36,297	$17,000	$19,297	46.84
Richmond	$31,510	$25,000	$6,510	79.34
IU	$37,373	$15,000	$22,373	40.14

That Minnesota scholarship really makes a difference. The W&M offer is nice (I have in-state tuition) too. The Marshall scholarship would really give Richmond an edge. I've heard that the scholarship money is basically used to buy LSAT scores. I guess we can see which schools want a 168 more than others.

A quick review of LSN shows that other people with numbers similar to mine are getting pretty much the same offer, with a few exceptions (two people with similar numbers have been waitlisted at IU). No PhD boost for merit scholarships. Maybe it will make a difference with the Marshall scholarship

Linchpin Lawyers

I started reading Seth Godin's new book Linchpin yesterday. One of the chapters is titled Indoctrination: How we got here. He argues that schools have been designed to generate compliant and obedient workers for the factory (and his definition of factory is pretty broad, I have no doubt that a law firm would be considered a factory for the sake of his argument). There were several passages where I felt like I was reading a description of law school. Compliance, obedience, following the prescribed path to a socially accepted prestigious career (where it's more of the same compliance and fitting in to get to the top). That's the essence of law school. Law school isn't about processing information in an insightful manner, it's about regurgitating as much as you can during an exam (at least that's what I've been told by two reasonably successful law students, they're both 3L's with job offers at good firms, that's the defition of success for law students right now). The path to a BigLaw career is clear from my position. Go to X law school, get Y grades, be on Z journal, and you'll end up in one of these firms, bill a couple thousand hours a year, and you'll be partner making big bucks in no time. I think that clarity is one of the things that attracts successful students to the law. If you're good at school, that kind of clear path is appealing. The requirements of a successful academic career are clear. It's not much of a jump to apply that same approach to a law career.

Law has a bit of a brute force element to it. You plug away for hours reading casebooks in law school and work crazy hours as a lawyer delving into every little detail of every document. It falls into the idea that if you show up and do the work, you'll be rewarded ideas of career that Godin discusses early in Linchpin. I like to take the smarter not harder approach myself. I have always considered law school as a means to a new stage in my career, but I will have to get lawyer experience at some point to make the transition worthwhile (especially as being in law school does not teach you how to be a lawyer). Maybe there is a better way to access the business develop side of the industry.

There is a PhD boost for something

I talked to a PhD 3L a couple of days ago to get a little more background on how the PhD plays in the legal recruiting process. He has had no trouble getting interviews and offers at every stage of his legal education. The advanced degree places somebody like me in a special category for applicants that law firms really want. PhD lawyers are rare (who doesn't want to got to school for 7 or 8 years after finishing college). I may be in an even more special case as I am a PhD who has also worked in the pharmaceutical industry. This eases one of the biggest concerns that I had going into this process. There is so much bad news out there about the legal job market, I have always wondered if there are better ways for me to spend 3 years and who knows how much money than getting a degree that may not lead to that next move in my career. Assuming I don't tank as a law student, I think things will be alright now.

My Personal Statement

I was waiting for the completion of my application cycle to post my personal statement. The decision from Indiana completed my cycle. Here is my personal statement.

Dr. John Fenn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry during my first semester at VCU. During his press conference, he confessed that he had not set out to revolutionize mass spectrometry with his development of electrospray ionization. He found an interesting problem and performed a few experiments to see if he could solve it. He characterized this process as kicking over a rock and finding something interesting underneath it. I was just beginning my Ph.D. research, and the suggestion that such a significant development was due to a fortunate accident clashed with my conception of how revolutionary discoveries are made. Seven years later, I know Dr. Fenn described the process perfectly.

My initial attempts to kick over a rock resulted in more stubbed toes than interesting discoveries. It was not until I began to concentrate on making the smallest details of my experiment the same from one trial to the next that I started to make progress. One point at a time, a small peak began to appear in my data processing software. It did not look like much, but our analysis revealed that the origin of the peak was a metal ion that my advisor and I had added to the system. We had been curious to see if the metal ion would change the system, but we did not know what effect, if any, it would have when we began the experiments. While working on the paper describing our discovery, I realized that I had kicked over my first rock.

Other discoveries followed that first success. Initially, I felt fortunate to be performing experiments that were leading to publications, but each experiment gave me a greater appreciation for the process of observation and engagement with the data that directs a research project to unexpected insights and discoveries. When we took a closer look at what we initially thought were background signals, we gained new insights into the properties of an important material. We observed an unexpected phenomenon when we tried a new experiment on our electropolymerized porphyrin films. The experiments were not part of a carefully planned strategy that we were sure would lead to interesting discoveries. We were simply looking at our data very closely and probing our materials with interesting experiments. We were kicking over rocks with something interesting underneath them.

To a novice researcher like me, Dr. Fenn’s comments made it sound like he had just been lucky. My graduate school experience has taught me the wisdom of his words. Discoveries are made when we challenge our understanding of a system. We may have an idea of what we will see, but the only way we will ever know if we are correct is to perform the experiment. Sometimes nothing interesting will happen, but every now and then, challenging an assumption or taking a second look at some data might lead to a surprising discovery. We just have to kick over the rock.