Well, these are (like everything else here) just my subjective and rambling impressions and advice, so take them with a grain of salt. I’ve already covered some of this information here and there, but thought I’d jot down what thoughts I’ve retained about the process before they started fading. In addition to being a record for myself, I hope it may prove useful some future applicant.
Start early in the cycle. Register at LSAC. Sign up (and start studying for) the earliest LSAT you can take. Begin picking a few schools based on geography (each school basically caters to its city/region, except for the very top schools) and send out for brochures and applications so you’ll have something to look at. Begin reading up on application essays, choosing a law school, etc. You’ll learn that you have gray areas on your mental map that when filled in would have caused you to approach things differently. Best to get those out of the way early rather than late. (Although I didn’t have a disastrous go of it, I wish I’d started earlier).
LSAT: I didn’t take a LSAT course (no cash) but did buy the Princeton LSAT prep book, and a bunch of prior LSAT exams through LSAC. The test changes over time, so get the most recent tests you can. I spent a good while studying for the test, as I have a particular difficulty with certain types of math. If you identify something you’re good in (I got perfect scores on the reading comp section) start concentrating on the sections you’re not so good in. Whatever study pattern you have, keep applying it until you’re consistently happy with your scores. I was scoring in the upper 160s and lower 170s.
I took my first test sick and didn’t concentrate as well as I should have. When I got the results back (156) I was somewhat disappointed and was faced with the choice between going with that score and applying to schools or waiting until the next testing round was over to apply (obviously you can’t actually apply to some schools if your score falls below a certain bracket.) The trick was that if I took another test, my application would be completed and read later in the cycle. Who knows if that’s good or bad. Perhaps some schools select marginal but quirky and promising candidates early on, perhaps they select solid choices first and the marginal candidates later. Regardless, if you’re a solid candidate at a school, you’re a solid candidate.
I decided to take the next test (December) and apply later in the cycle with (hopefully!) higher scores. I got a 169 on the second test, which put me in another dilemma – some schools look at the average, some look only at the second score – which were which? There’s not a lot of information on that. It made my possible spread of target schools wider and more uncertain than I had expected it would be.
In retrospect, I should have a) begun earlier, b) canceled my first score when I knew I had under-preformed (no matter what the degree.)
Applications: Some applications ask for weird info. One wanted my SAT scores. Imagine that. My 15 year old SAT scores! It didn’t ask for my 10 year old GRE’s though. . .Others will require specific forms to be signed by your former schools. Some want letters of recommendation written or printed on their own special form. It’s best to carefully read the applications and make a list of just what the school needs sent to them. Send out requests for information and forms as early as you can – then call your former schools to make sure they’ve forwarded your information on to the lawschools. One of mine was late with a form, resulting in an application getting completed very late in the cycle.
The general application advice found on the web and in books is very good.
I noticed that the applications are geared towards undergrads. For non-traditional students this poses a bit of a problem – how do you account for “summer employment” when you’ve been out of school for 5 years. In a similar vein, does it really matter exactly which extra-curricular activities you did as a freshman 13 years ago? How do you insert relevant post-graduation activity into the application? Should you "swap" info into fields that seem to ask for it?
In the end, I took the grin and bear it approach – I answered every question they asked, even if there was a more elegant and obvious way to provide the information they were looking for. So I broke down my "summer earnings" from my regular earnings. I listed all those freshman activities. (Your High School will probably have your SAT scores on your transcript, BTW).
I also supplied additional information whenever I thought I could do so without being obnoxious. For example, I submitted both a resume and a CV – I figured that the school would want to know about my professional poetry activities and publications, along with the dayjob information. I made sure all my addendums/attachments were unified. That meant I put my name, SSN, and the school name on every single page as a header. I titled each document and provided a cover/index page that listed the attachments and provided a brief rationale for each of them. Sometimes it was simply, “Requested per question 14.” Other times, when the document was not specifically requested, I provided a short paragraph explaining why I had included it.
You’d think that law schools would have a simple field selection approach – such as “Fill in the employer information on the right and select the box which bests describes the type of employment.
Letters of Recommendation: I asked 4 people to write letters, but only 3 came through in the end. I had suspected that might be the case and hedged my bets. The general advice on LORs is pretty good - and you might want to forward that advice on to the people writing the letters. It's a delicate thing, but, I think, if done tactfully, worth it to remind people just what's at stake. If you have an application packet ready, I'd also send that to your letter writers; no harm if they already know everything on it, but you may jog their memory or help them to focus their writing.
Personal Statement: Most writing on the subject recommends that you specifically target the schools. I didn’t, apart from a single sentence. I figure that school X knows what they offer, should hopefully be able to see from your general application what you’d like to do, and that a single line saying “Hey, I like this about the school” was enough. You have to figure the committee are relatively intelligent people and can make connections for themselves. Given that, I also figured that schools saw enough targeted “form/template” statements to instantly spot them. In terms of content, I didn’t want to write something that sounded like one of those awful Olympic Bios: “Athlete A. Athlete A suffers A Truly Devastating Loss or Totally Pointless Loss. Athlete A now realizes their mortality and has something to prove via a mature and sustainable effort.” Life isn’t about big epiphanies, and I’m always slightly suspicious of people who have them – “I was a clueless fool, then I saw the light when (insert Big Moment). I’m probably just as clueless about other things, because I haven’t had ‘em whacked into the forefront of my brain by other Big Moments, but hey, I now have a great story.” In my statement I just talked about who I was (via poetry), what I’ve seen and experienced, and how that had formed my desire to study law.
I’ll post up the generic version if anyone wants to read it. I wouldn’t really advise anyone to follow this approach though.
More thoughts later, when I have time.
Personal Statement
When I graduated High School, I had vague notions there might be a living poet or two still writing, but after memorizing the blackboard scansion of iambs and spondees, and enduring interminable classroom discussions on “what the poet was really trying to say,” I certainly wasn’t in a hurry to read more of the wretched stuff. Five years later, inspired by the power of the word, I would choose what I considered a more challenging and morally-relevant path and leave a doctoral program in English Literature to pursue the muse full-time. The actual practice of poetry proved a serious study, demanding as much discipline as mastering a musical instrument. My time was spent pouring over texts, teasing out the assumptions and insinuations of rhetoric, committing terms and examples to memory, and becoming familiar with the major works and theories that have lead to our current poetics.
I was drawn to poetry in no small part because I wanted to speak for the underrepresented, and much of my poetry mobilizes these contemporary voices and concerns (often considered “low art”) via the devices of “high art.” While a solid understanding of theoretical poetics and practiced tradition (called “craft knowledge” by poets) is necessary to write good poetry, successful poems also depend on how you implement that learning via your understanding of “the real world.” There is no finer feeling than writing a poem from, for example, an Alzheimer’s victim’s perspective, a poem which attempts to distill the entire experience of the disease, and then at readings to hear Alzheimer’s victims, their friends and relatives, say, “Yes, that’s right; that’s exactly how it is.” Writing this kind of poetry demands an intense and unmediated engagement with the world – research in the most pure and primal form. To write effectively about gardening, even if only as metaphor, requires that you know about gardens, that you speak to gardeners, that you become aware of the crinkling sound of seed packets, the different types of earth, just where your hands are apt to blister, and the particular scent of a sun-warmed garden hose.
After a year and a half, realizing I needed to work under the guidance of those poets I most respected, I enrolled in the M.F.A. program in Writing at XXXX. The program focused on close reading of primary and secondary sources, written analysis, oral presentations of the same, and round-table workshop debates on the merits of any particular change to poems-in-progress. I graduated in XXXX and have been successful as a young poet; publishing three chapbooks, headlining readings, sitting on panels, actively shaping the current generation of on-line workshops, teaching private classes, editing three journals and serving as an advisor for two others.
With poetry claiming the foreground of my intellectual life, I felt wonderfully free to move about the country, to take different “day jobs” and thus gain experience in whatever interested me. My hunger to learn how to practice law grew as I kept encountering people and situations that “fell through the cracks” either because they could not afford legal representation, were socially or culturally isolated, or were the very real victims of situations that were simply “accepted.” I cannot honestly say that any one incident crystallized my desire to follow such lawyer/poets as Francis Scott Key, William Cullen Bryant, and Wallace Stevens, but these three serve as examples:
§ While working for XXXXX, a non-profit corporation that helped undocumented immigrants organize their paperwork and register under 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, I met people who had been repeatedly cheated and swindled both by unsavory employers and self-serving “community advocates.” Fearing deportation, none of these individuals felt they had any legal recourse, a point that was not lost on their victimizers.
§ While working as [edited to remove a rather horrible story about overt racism in the Southern US].
§ Five years ago, a friend left graduate school to have potentially dangerous cysts removed. Although the school demanded a full-time commitment from her, they did not provide adequate medical coverage; still swamped by medical debt, she has not yet returned to her studies.
My studies in poetry have led to a personal maxim – that the universal is always (and only) realized in the particular. While it is appropriate to commit to such abstracts as the pursuit of a just and equitable society, and while such goals remain necessarily elusive ideals, I believe that the hard work, the specific labor in the service of the law, requires something of a poet’s mentality -idealism balanced by an intense focus on the particular, the local, the often unglamorous– in an effort to ensure that the broad legal framework of our country functions effectively, that the common resident of our nation has full and equal recourse to the protections of the law in economic reality as well as in theory. This end is the reason why I wish to study and practice law.
No one can say with certainty which legal and social issues will be most urgent four years from today, let alone ten years, or thirty years (four years ago I was visiting friends in (literally) the shadow of the World Trade Center, discussing the ramifications of Y2K bug). Regardless of what new situations arise, my experience suggests there is (and will be) great need for people who will advocate for the disadvantaged, who will counsel the underrepresented, and in doing so will act as a stay against the inertia of privilege and myopic self-interest.
As odd as it may sound as a bare statement, I believe poetry has both led me to and prepared me for legal studies. Poetry has developed my sympathies and understandings; it has taught me to listen, then question, then listen further. It has led me to expect that practicing law will be mostly “work” and that creative moments or inspired insights succeed or fail largely on what one does with them – namely hour upon hour of research and refinement. After years of laboring for excellence in an esoteric, almost forgotten art, I have internalized my drive to “do things right,” and am capable of spending long hours turning complex arguments this way and that on the crux of individual words or individual details. Poetry has taught me a practical humility before the language which I believe will serve me well as a lawyer – one has to learn to accept judgments, to work within boundaries, and yet to always keep alert for a new insight, a new application, a new way of addressing problems. In a related sentiment, I believe my experiences as a teacher and an editor will enable me to be useful to my classmates; I view education as a cooperative activity, not a competitive one, for in helping others learn, I clarify and define my own understandings.
I do not expect to abandon poetry for the law (both reputedly jealous lovers), indeed – I don’t expect that would be possible for me. However I understand I must radically scale back, if not completely sacrifice, my teaching, editing, and workshopping activities. This I will do with a glad heart, as it will be necessitated by my moving forward, my, in the most classical sense, education.
I am hungry to learn. I am ready to begin.
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