Friday, February 26, 2010

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

Thursday, February 18, 2010

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.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

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.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

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.

Friday, February 12, 2010

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.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

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.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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?

Monday, February 1, 2010

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.