Controlling a big variable

I knew going into this that I needed to find a single resource that will give me some insight into the law school application process. I would hate to do something stupid that would kill my application regardless of my numbers. This is a single replicate experiment so there will be no second trial. I read plenty of forums and follow a few blogs. Ann Levine's book seemed like the best choice for my go to guide for how to navigate this process. Her book is short but the information is dense. She has a nice breakdown of the relative importance of LSAT score and undergraduate GPA. The book is more guidelines than specific steps. I like that. I recommend taking a look at it if you are so inclined. You can buy it her site or Amazon.

Heavier than my GPA?

I will be using two big soft factors to sell myself to law schools. The first is clear from this blog. I am relying heavily on my PhD in chemistry (physical chemistry if you want to specific. Ultrafast laser spectroscopy is you want to get really specific) to cancel out my undergraduate GPA. I did my graduate work at VCU, which isn't the most famous university, but I have five papers in very well regarded journals. I even managed to get a paper into the Journal of the American Chemical Society. JACS publishes very high impact papers. (I asked my adviser to tout the impact factor of the journals in his letter of recommendation, it didn't feel right to do it myself.) I also have a publication from my undergraduate research. I have done some research in connection to my projects at work (work experience discussed below). I'm giving a poster at a big pharmaceutical conference in November, and I'm working on a paper with one of the senior scientists in my building. I am hoping that it is developed enough for me to at least include it as an in progress entry in my resume.

My other big factor is my career. I worked in industry before I went to grad school. I went back to the same company when I finished my PhD. I've done well in my job. I have a meeting with my manager tomorrow. I have to update her on some projects that I've been working on, but after I've filled her in on all the progress I've made, I am going to talk to her about writing a letter for me. I really have no idea how she will react. We're in a bit of a transitional phase right now so I'm hoping she will have that in mind when I talk to her about this law school plan. I am going to approach it in a very careful manner and provide plenty of rationale. We'll see how it goes.

I have a few other interesting facts about myself. I'm married (10 years next month) and I have two kids. My job and family keep me pretty busy so I don't have any other activities. I have a good reason why I am pursuing this crazy plan too.

Personal Statement Help

The hardest thing about the personal statement for me is all the doubts that enter my mind about the topic, the tone that is used in the essay, and saying something that will actually help my application. There is some great advice about writing the personal statement at the about.com law school guide. The best part is an offer for free help with the statement. I have sent a draft PS to Michelle. She replied a couple of days later with some very helpful words. It was reassuring to have somebody with some experience give me positive feedback on what I had written. Her feedback is actually why I started working on second statement as soon as I got her feedback on my first one.

Personal Statement Topic Trouble

I have one good personal statement prepared. I took a look at it a few days ago and was satisfied with what I had written. I've been trying to a second one that deals more with my motivation for applying to law school. For whatever reason, every time I've tried to write about this I get off on totally unrelated tangents that add nothing to my statement. I think I've been focusing too much on the external factors on why I've been thinking about becoming a lawyer with a science background rather than a pure research scientist. Maybe that will be a good place to start. My identity as a scientist and how that identity formed. Maybe I can note a couple of things that made me start to take a second look at my career and what I want to achieve. I switched to this venue to break my brain lock over in word. Maybe it actually helped.

The Sample Set - Take 2

I am not satisfied with my list of schools. The selection process was too arbitrary. I want to apply to schools where I have a real chance at being admitted, but I would also like to have some kind of gauge to rank the schools by how likely I am to be admitted. The deny/weak consider labels on lawschoolpredictor.com are just too broad to separate the deny where I have zero chance from a place where I have a small but realistic chance of admission. Well, the index calculation that is used to make that deny/weak consider prediction provides information that has allowed me to select schools that are nicely spread out on a scale of admissions probability. A little bit of data entry into Excel and a few simple calculations later, I have a number that gives me an idea of which pile my file would end up in on the admission dean's desk. Here's my "percentile" the top 30 or so schools. I stopped doing the math after most of the predictions were admit or consider/strong consider. You can click on the image to make it easier to read.
I think the predictor puts you at a weak consider if your index number is at the 25% percentile value (the "percentile" is given on the y axis in the graph; I can send you my spreadsheet if you would like to try this exercise yourself. I just calculated the equation that describes the line made by the index values at 25,50, and 75%. I used this equation to calculate the "percentile" that my index value would have on this scale to give myself an idea of how far out of or inside the acceptance window my numbers put me.). Looking at my number like this allows me to see that my deny at a place like Texas or UCLA is actually very close to a weak consider. I have looked through these new numbers and changed my mind on which schools I will be applying to in the next couple of months.

I am not going to apply anywhere that my index "percentile" is negative. As I said in my first sample set post, I live in Virginia so I was happy to see that I'm just on the positive side for UVA. Here is my new list with the "percentile" value that I calculated.

Here is my new list of schools along with the prediction and the calculated "percentile" value.

School	"Percentile"	Prediction
Duke	5.9	Deny
UVA	1.0	Deny
UCLA	20.6	Deny
Vandy	11.8	Deny
Minn	31.3	Weak Consider
Notre Dame	25.7	Weak Consider
W&M	34.1	Weak Consider
GMU	47.1	Consider
Cinncinnatti	>50	Strong Consider
Tennessee	>50	Admit
Lewis and Clark	>50	Strong Consider
Richmond	>50	Admit

I would like to apply to Cornell and Georgetown, but my application fee funds are limited. At this point I have a nice mix of schools that combine my desires for a law school and a nice range of admission probability, at least using my admittedly arbitrary and potentially totally meaningless way of gauging my likelihood of admission to different schools. At least I was able to come up with a non-arbitrary way of seeing where I fall in the deny continuum for the more competitive programs.

I did a quick check at LSN. My numbers fall right in a thicket of deny and waitlist spots for places like Duke, UVA, and Vanderbilt. There is nobody in their system with my numbers so I don't have the ideal control, but there are enough people with numbers near mine who applied to some of these schools to confirm that there aren't very many acceptance letters going out to people with numbers like mine. We'll see if my big softs, the PhD and my work experience, will get me over the edge. Maybe there will be somebody else in this cycle on LSN with a 168 and 3.0ish GPA.

The Sample Set

Here are the schools to which I plan to apply. I've also listed the prediction from lawschoolpredictor.com. Seeing that this blog is an effort to provide insight into how a PhD is evaluated in the law school admissions process, I wanted to select schools where I had very little chance to a good chance to be admitted. I might think about adding another weak consider. I would like to apply to every school ranked 10-20 by USNWR, but I don't have $1500 for application fees.

Ranking	School	Prediction
6	Cal-B	Deny
10	UVA	Deny
10	Duke	Deny
13	Cornell	Deny
20	Minnesota	Weak Consider
28	W&M	Weak Consider
41	GMU	Consider
52	Cinncinnatti	Strong Consider
59	Tennessee	Admit
61	Lewis and Clark	Strong Consider
77	Richmond	Admit

I picked these schools for a number of reasons. I've been really fortunate with application fee waivers. I'm interested in environmental law so I was happy to have a waiver to Lewis and Clark, a top environmental law program. Minnesota is an up and coming program, I really like the area around Cincinnati, and I like Tennessee's emphasis on practical experience. I live in Virginia so UVA, W&M (which is my undergrad alma mater), GMU, and Richmond (the most local school for me; it's where I took the LSAT) were easy selections.

What really matters about my selections is where the numbers say I will get in and where I am actually admitted. I feel like I have a reasonable chance at the four deny schools. I'm in state for UVA, that's a plus, and they seem to really emphasize the entire application, at least that's my impression from the interviews I've read with Dean Jason Trujillo at TLS and LSAT Blog and the statement on the UVa website about how applications are reviewed. I will apply early and I'm going to try to visit if I can get a Friday afternoon free.

I'm a real long shot at Cal. The interview I've mentioned in some previous posts gives me hope that with a really good personal statement I could crack the door enough to at least make them think about me long enough to look at my recommendations and consider how somebody with my experiences would contribute to their program.

My index score is very close to being in the weak consider category for both Duke and Cornell. (There is a column on lawschoolpredictor.com that shows how far your index score is from the 25% numbers for each school. My numbers are 3.05 and 168 if you would like to see how I stack up at each school.) If you round my GPA up to 3.1, I actually become a weak consider at Cornell. They're another school that emphasizes how they evaluate the entire application. In a statement that really caught my interest, Dean Richard Geiger told TLS that they focus more on success at work or other major accomplishments for people who have been out of undergrad for 10 years (is he talking about me or what!). Duke is a school that titles applied to with a 167 but was put on the waitlist. I have a strong opinion about the waitlist (which I will express in a future post). Duke is an interesting test case for the impact of the PhD and other softs. Oh, and they have a good IP program.

W&M and Minnesota offer an opportunity to see if the PhD can get me into the accept category from a numbers position that is not strong for admission.

LSAT/GPA Ratio

If you scroll over to the right in the lawschoolpredictor.com results page, there is a column that provides the LSAT/GPA ratio used in the index formula by each school. There is a whole range of values, from ~1.5 for Boalt to 4.5 for Michigan. If you weren't planning to already, study hard for that LSAT as this number shows just how important this single test is in law school admissions.

In a related note, titles retook the LSAT and went from 167 to 170. This 3 point increase got him into Georgetown after being rejected with the lower score. I think this result is at the heart of his contention that the numbers are far more important than any advanced degree. Well, it just so happens that GULC has a LSAT/GPA ratio of 4.38. The large ratio undoubtedly results in a big jump in competitiveness when your score goes up by 3 points (from deny (basically no chance) to consider (good chance for admission) by the law school predictor, that's from no chance to getting in by getting 3 or 4 more questions right on a test. That's just crazy.).

My take away from this is simple. If you have a low GPA and decent LSAT score (that's me), your graduate degree is more likely to help than if you have a great GPA and a mediocre LSAT. But whatever your numbers, make your soft factors count. My impression is that people spend months studying for the LSAT (which makes sense based on some of the ratios used for admissions), but put much less effort into their personal statements and making sure they have the best letters of recommendation possible. If your LSAT score is in the 25-75% range for a school, those softs might be enough to get admitted rather than being put on the wait list. Make the most of them. That's my plan.

Thirds

I forgot an important comment in my justifications post. It's from the same interview with Dean Tom at Boalt that I referenced in that post. The quote

Hierarchy of Application Segments

TLS: Does Boalt have an approximate hierarchy on what is most valuable for admissions: GPA, LSAT, etc?

Dean Tom: “I know that there is a perception out there in the cyberspace world that we value GPAs a lot more than LSATs, and I’m not sure where people get that. Because if you look at our index formula, we are purposeful in weighting it so that GPA and LSAT are roughly equivalent. So, if I had to characterize our review process, it’s about one-third LSAT score, about one-third academic record – I prefer to call it academic record because GPA is just so narrow, whereas with academic record we consider all of the factors that impacted the GPA: work responsibilities, extra-curricular activities, rigor of major, and so on. The last third is the subjective factors -- what one says in their personal statement, and what others say about them in their letters of recommendation. So, no, I don’t think either of the two quantitative factors is more important than the other.”(emphasis mine)

If your subjective factors are weak (a crappy personal statement, unremarkable recommendations) isn't that just as bad as a low LSAT score or GPA? Conversely, couldn't a strong statement and recommendations give a mediocre GPA or LSAT score a boost? While you probably need all 3 factors to be strong at a place like Boalt, the comment demonstrates that the admissions committee definitely looks at more than the numbers. Soft Factors Count!

Justification for going after those deny/weak consider options

In my numbers set the ceiling post, I mentioned that I knew of a few comments by people in the know on how a graduate degree can help in the admissions process. Here is one of those comments. It's from an interview with Edward Tom, Dean of Admissions at Boalt (Cal-Berkeley) that is posted at TLS:

TLS: Boalt has a high percentage of students who already have a masters or Ph.D. Does a graduate degree increase an applicant’s chance of being accepted?

Dean Tom: “Having a graduate degree is a plus in the process. 18-20% of our students have at least a master’s degree. If you have a previous graduate degree, you should also send in those transcripts. Your graduate GPA is not factored into your undergraduate GPA, but it is definitely looked at.”

He says it helps. There is no mention of how much it helps, but it has the potential to help. (I recommend reading the entire interview. It is full of very useful information.)

There is a nice couple of pages in Montauk's book about credentials in the application process. He quotes deans from several schools who all say that a graduate degree or other soft factors can have a significant impact on how an application is evaluated. I'm not going to spend the money on the book, but I will try to get a few of the quotes written down so I can post them here.

Finally, if you watch the tutorial video for lawschoolpredictor.com on YouTube, they give a little guide for how to interpret the results of the accept, various consider, and deny results provided by the site. For deny, they say that you will likely be an auto-reject unless you have a compelling non-LSAT or non-GPA characteristic. Surely a PhD is a compelling characteristic (ie, soft factors) that would give what would be an auto-reject application a second look.

My brother is an illustration of the power of compelling soft factors. He is a rising 3L at BC. When I put his numbers into the law school predictor, BC was a deny. While my brother does not have a PhD, he does have a graduate degree and some interesting experiences (he spent quite a bit of time in Kenya). Those factors clearly worked in his favor during the admissions process. He's doing very well at BC. He's in the top 25% of his class, he's the Editor-in-Chief of a journal, and he's a summer associate at a top DC firm. This second look at people with some experience is justified.

The numbers set the Ceiling

Here is more of that internet chatter. This post, coupled with what I took away from the Aspiring Lawyers with a Science PhD FAQ, leads me to make the preliminary conclusion that the conventional wisdom regarding the benefit of a PhD (or any other significant soft factor) is that undergraduate GPA and LSAT score set the ceiling for where you may have a shot at getting admitted. A PhD will not make somebody competitive at a school where their GPA is well outside the 25-75% range. I've read some comments in other places (I'll discuss them in more detail in a later post) that make me think there might be some chance that, if packaged correctly, there could be a chance to overcome a mediocre GPA with a compelling story and solid LSAT score (that's me).

I plan to explore that area right at the deny/weak consider line. titles was there with a couple of his schools. The result was the wait list. Could he have done something differently to get admitted? A more interesting personal statement topic? A clearer diversity statement? If the admissions process was totally numbers driven, submission of a transcript and an LSAT score would be the only things needed for an application. As it is, we have to submit personal statements and letters of recommendation. We are given a chance to comment on how we will impact the diversity of the student body and address a few bad grades or a lousy LSAT score. Why would admissions committees want to read all of that stuff if they didn't use it to make decisions? How can I maximize the impact of my soft factors in my application?

Breaking Down titles

I took a closer look at the numbers titles posted in the TLS thread mentioned in a previous post. I used the law school predictor to verify that titles's assertion that he (the tone of the post sounds like a dude to me so I'm going to use male pronouns) was accepted where he should be accepted. These are the schools applied to, the prediction, and the reported result:

School	Prediction - 167	Result
Wake	Consider	Accepted
W&L	Consider	Accepted
Emory	Consider	Accepted
GW	Consider	Accepted
Vandy	Deny	WL
Gtown	Deny	Rejected
Cornell	Weak Consider	WL
Duke	Deny	WL
Boalt	Deny	Rejected

The point of titles's post was that a PhD will not get you in at places where your undergraduate GPA and LSAT score predict that you will not be accepted. He got in at places where he should have gotten in (a little LSAT practice; what assumption would you have to make for that argument to be valid, answer - consider=accepted) and denied at those places that should have denied him (even though there are 3 waitlists, I know that's cutting hairs, but being on the waitlist is not being rejected). But how would an applicant with the same numbers but no PhD have fared at the same schools? I tried to look for an answer to that question at LSN, but there weren't enough people with similar numbers who applied to the same schools for me to feel comfortable making a strong conclusion. I did however find one profile that supports the general conclusions drawn by titles. The graduate degree was in engineering so it was most likely a master's degree, but that's still a valid comparison for our purposes.

I will use this information to help me decide which schools it will be worthwhile for me to take a shot at and those that I should just save my time and money and not bother applying. I have made a preliminary list and it looks like I have a couple more "weak consider" predictions in the schools I am interested in applying to than titles did. (I told you that I was an ideal candidate for this investigation.) I think this category is the most interesting because it could go either way. This is where the PhD (and other soft factors) could make a real difference. I have also found some profiles at LSN that look like nice controls. These applicants and I have similar numbers but they do not have a PhD. I will discuss the schools where I plan to put in an application in the next post.

Aspiring lawyers with science backgrounds FAQ

Thanks to titles over at TLS for sharing his/her law school admissions with a PhD experience. The post shares some very useful and interesting information. There is also a nice list of LSN profiles to see how science types fare against those liberal artys.

Mixed Opinions Abound

This forum provides some interesting perspective on how the PhD is viewed in the legal community. I just finished up a trip to one of my employer's manufacturing sites (I work in Big Pharma). A technician that I was working with made a crack about PhD's coming around and messing everything up. That view seems to be pretty common.

Internet Chatter

The purpose of this blog is to provide some hard data to give other law school applicants in my situation an idea of how to evaluate the importance or insignificance of their advanced degree during the application process. People comment on this situation in various internet forums, and the comments are usually in this vein.

"The bad news is that your Ph.D. won't boost your LS admissions odds all that much. It will help some, but not much. Reason? Your LSDAS gpa is fixed at the time you get your first BA/BS. That's the one used in LS rankings. Nothing you do in grad school will boost that #, so it's MUCH more important in LS admissions that your Ph.D. Seems silly? Agreed, but it's true. I remember an assistant philosophy prof at Fordham who applied to LS and was really upset with the results, which were exactly as predicted based solely on his UG gpa (which wasn't great) and LSAT. He said Ph.D. helped him very little." (Link to source)

This isn't an isolated example. Here's another post that says basically the same thing.


"There are a bunch of ex-PhDs on here, and you may want to search out amyLAchemist's PS sample for an example from someone who just got a PhD in Chemistry; I think it's on the main PS thread. I guess my advice is that it's important, but it's not quite as important as you might think. For example, the blue hair PS on another thread here... the OP got a lot of flack for it but if it was for real, it didn't affect the cycle - it worked out just like the numbers would have predicted anyway. The same goes for LoRs and a lot of other stuff. There are exceptions - if you're going for HYS or Berkeley, for example, maybe some other schools, but it really depends on your targets. It matters, but by orders of magnitude less than numbers + your PhD." (Link to source)

Both of these posts say that PhD's and other "soft" factors don't really have much of an impact on law school admissions. People get accepted where their numbers predict that they will be accepted. Besides that fact that there is usually a large area of uncertainty in exactly where the accept/deny line would be for a particular applicant at a number of schools, I noticed that both of these posters "knew" somebody who didn't get a boost from some soft factor that the applicant thought might be important. I don't want to base my law school application plans on hearsay.

The email from an admissions office that I have posted a portion of here suggests that graduate degrees and work experience can help sway the admission decision one way or another. I am going to try to determine just how much these soft factors can sway an admissions committee. I recognize that not every PhD is in my position, but any kind of reliable information is better than insubstantial rumors.

My numbers

So what are the two numbers that will define me through this process? I've already revealed my LSAT score. From what I've been able to tell by looking at the 25-75% numbers that are posted with law school rankings, 168 is a very competitive score. (You can read about a week of my LSAT preparation in the LSAT diary that I wrote for LSAT Blog: Ace the LSAT.)

My other number, my undergraduate GPA, is a bit less competitive. I wasn't sure of the exact number until I requested a copy of my unofficial transcript a couple of weeks ago. Brace yourself. 3.05. Of course, to keep all law school applicants on the same level, the GPA is adjusted according to a common scale. I was aware of this LSDAS adjustment a few months ago, but seeing that I didn't remember my cumulative GPA, much less any individual grades, I had no idea how my number would adjust when put into this new scale. I breathed a sigh of relief when I found out my undergraduate school, William and Mary, uses the same scale. (I used this calculator for the calculation.) I'm just happy to be above 3.0.

The Experiment

I spent a couple of hours last night trying to get some definitive idea about how valuable my PhD will be when I send in my law school applications. I couldn't find anything that made a clear case that it will basically override my UG GPA or that it is something nice to have but they really only care about those undergrad grades (that is what US News and World report really cares about after all). I've read snippets from different books about how adcoms look at advanced degrees, but the information is always too general to be of much value. I look at forums where people weigh in on this issue and for every person that posts one perspective (be it little impact or a huge impact), there are a few other people who post something else. Each person is probably accurately relating whatever information they've been given, but every admissions officer at every law school probably has a slightly different perspective on how to weigh an advanced degree and work experience against undergraduate GPA.

As I was thinking about this frustrating dearth of solid information, it occurred to me that I could do something about this lack of insight. Why not do a little research project to find out just how much value admissions committees put on experiences like mine? I don't think you could artificially generate a better experimental profile than what I already have. I have a good LSAT score (I talked about that here) but mediocre undergraduate grades (I'll talk more about my GPA in a later post). My LSAT score is competitive at all but the top 5 or 6 schools. How much will my PhD mitigate my undergraduate GPA in the eyes of admission committees? Finding the answer to that question is the mission of this blog.