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.

PhD Boost....for getting a job

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had two interesting conversations last week that provided some concrete information on what it means to have a chemistry PhD in the legal market. The PhD patent attorney I talked to gave a couple of examples of how having a PhD has been an advantage for her. Firms like having PhD's. They're good for business. On a more personal level, she mentioned that working with clients is much easier when you have a PhD. The real meat of the discovery is more obvious to somebody with a research background than somebody with a bachelor's degree. What she said is even more rare for patent lawyers, are PhD's with real research experience. Understanding how the research process works makes it much easier to work with other research scientists.

All of these advantages, while great, don't amount to much if you can't find a job. Fortunately, it sounds like technical people have a distinct advantage over the larger body of law students when it comes to finding a job. Getting a summer position after completing 1L is talked about like some kind of holy grail type of quest, but I was told that patent types are the ones who usually end up with those positions. It makes sense. If there are a decent number of positions with nobody around to fill them, it's going to be easier to find one of those positions. If there is a position that any law student can fill, the competition will be much more intense. There are also plenty of firms looking for patent attorneys. At GMU, about a third of the firms that do OCI are looking for patent associates. There seems to be more of a applicants market for patent attorneys, at least based on my initial conversation. I'm going to keep following up to get a better idea of the state of the patent job market, but I have to confess that things seem much better than I had anticipated.

Indiana University decision

My big envelope from Indiana came in the mail on Monday. I've been hoping to hear something from them soon. I was a little nervous about my application after I forgot to attach my resume to my application. At least I realized my mistake soon after I submitted my application. I emailed my resume to them and asked that it be included with my file. I guess the resume made it.

With the Indiana decision in, my cycle is complete. While I have to confess that I have flirted with the idea of looking through LSN and finding a school where my numbers are borderline just to see if the PhD gives me an edge, I will not likely do that. For one thing, I don't want to pay an application fee, but the flash drive that had my personal statement and other application files on it broke a few weeks ago. (I just got a new one from WashU so I don't need to replace my old one.) I could pull up my submitted apps and complete my application with those, but I just don't think it's worth it. That probably won't stop me from looking around LSN after I'm finished with this post though.

A detailed analysis of my application cycle will be coming soon. I'm focused on another project right now. More about that later.

Are lawyers hunters or farmers?

Seth Godin has an interesting post today about how some people are farmers and others are hunters. With thoughts of law school constantly floating around in my mind (my law school future keeps getting murkier. It's exciting and aggravating at the same time. More details in a later post), I was trying to decide if I'm a hunter or a farmer and whether or not that disposition has me on a path for legal success or (the all too common) legal morass. The law requires plenty of persistence and planning and patience, all traits of a good farmer, but lawyers also deal with plenty of crisis situations that need the skills of the hunter.

Maybe a better question is what makes for a better law student, a farmer or a hunter, and what makes a better lawyer? Would the answers be the same?

Breakthrough Day?

I had two very informative conversations today. I will give more details later, but here are the juiciest nuggets from each conversation. I work with a PhD patent attorney, and I had a conversation with her today about what it means to have a PhD as a patent attorney. I asked her if having a PhD was an advantage. She went on to give me an example of how a PhD was an advantage in law school, getting a job, and working with clients. I also talked to a career services rep at Mason. While the entire conversation is worth discussing, the most telling exchange came when I asked her about OCI for IP firms. Every year people tell her that they wish they had studied science. IP is in demand, but a good number of the people in the IP program are already working and don't want to leave their job for a summer associate position.

Both conversations were very informative. I will try to distill the best insights from each and share them here in the next few days.

One Year

It was a year ago this week that I downloaded the free LSAT from the LSAC website. My journey to law school started when I realized that I could do well on the LSAT. A good LSAT score could get me into a good law school, which, coupled with my experience, should allow me to make the transition from the laboratory to a leadership position in a pharmaceutical company. I really had no desire to go to law school before I started looking into the LSAT, but as I've thought more about the opportunities that a JD could provide, law school has begun to feel like the right thing for me to do. I just can't do it full-time. The opportunity costs, in tuition, lost wages, and missing out on three years of significant leadership experience in a pharmaceutical company, are just too high.

With this decision made, I will not be submitting an essay to U of R for the Marshall scholarship. Even that scholarship is not enough to get me to leave my job. I thought about applying for it as a way to improve my shot at some kind of part-time arrangement with them, but I thought better of it. I'm going to get in touch with the law school and put everything out there. If they come back willing to work with me on some kind of part-time deal, that's great. If not, I start studying for the patent bar and keep my eyes open for jobs in cities near law schools with part-time programs. Maybe Mason would let me switch to part-time if I could find a job up there in the next few months.

Regardless of my plans for the fall, my experiment continues on. Rejections are starting to go out so we'll see how other applicants with numbers like mine fair over the next few weeks. I started this blog to help other PhD's apply to law school. That mission will continue.

U of R info session - straight talk on the LSAT

I went to an information session at the University of Richmond yesterday. I missed the first 45 minutes or so, but I made it in time for the question and answer session. The program was definitely geared more towards people who are still thinking about applying or working on their applications. So it was no surprise when somebody asked about test scores. Dean Rahman came right out and said that the LSAT is the most critical part of the application because it carries so much weight in the US News rankings. A solid GPA is great, but the dean said that they are more likely to take somebody with a high LSAT and low GPA over somebody with a high GPA and a low LSAT.

During this discussion of LSAT scores, Dean Rahman mentioned that a good way to get off of the waitlist is to take the LSAT again. If you've made the waitlist that means that they're interested in you. A higher LSAT score would give them a good reason to offer admission. If I really wanted UVA, I would have started prepping for the LSAT as soon as I was waitlisted. I don't want UVA that bad, but it's an interesting insight into the admission process.

Given all of this talk of LSAT scores, I thought they might be open to me doing some kind of part-time program. They pretty much told me there was no way when I brought it up in the summer and they did the same thing yesterday. I can see their reluctance before the part-time numbers were used in the US News ranking, but I guess they have the part time option for people who start the program and for one reason or another can't stick with it full-time. Rather than seeing them leave, they give them the part-time option. Between my promotion and other events at work, I'm not sure that leaving is the right thing for me to do right now (especially as pay for a first year associate at a mid-level Richmond firm makes about $10K less than I make now, according to my tour guide yesterday anyway). I have a few more months to think about it. We'll see how things evolve at work.

In at WashU

I got the email that I had been accepted earlier this week. Only IU remains. If I hadn't gotten the late fee waivers from Wash U and IU, my cycle would be complete already. I will review my results and compare them to other applicants who do not have a PhD once I hear from IU. I also plan on adding some tags to make the blog a little easier to navigate.

John Marshall Scholar E-vite

I received an email today from U of R inviting me to submit an essay for the John Marshall Scholars program. There are two topics to pick from. I immediately dismissed one of them so I have been thinking hard about the other. I came up the seed for a pretty good topic at work this afternoon. I have until the 31st to submit the essay. That should give me enough time to write a solid 500 or so word essay. I have no idea how many people are invited to apply for the program, but a Marshall scholarship would make Richmond my choice for law school.

As for the criteria, the email reads as follows:

Applicants will be considered solely on their merit; need will not be a factor considered in the selection process. In determining merit, the Committee will review an applicant’s narrative statement, transcripts, letters of recommendation, community service, work experience and extra-curricular activities. Every effort will be made to identify applicants whose values, personal characteristics and academic credentials suggest they will make a positive contribution to the Law School, the legal profession and the community.

I hope they really look closely at the statements, letters of rec, and work experience because my transcripts won't hold up too well under close scrutiny (well, the grad school grades were alright, except for that damn engineering class). I have to wonder if the LSAT score is used to invite people to apply for the scholarship but is not used to determine who is given the award. Curious.