congrats
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Off topic
You have any recommendations when it comes to studying for the LSAT? I’m trying to start, planning to apply to a few schools this fall, so targeting a June-July test date. Turning 30 this year, so god knows I’ve been out of the classroom for a bit, and most of my serious academic stuff sense then has been nuclear, so I gotta get back into it lol
Hardly off topic, at this point I tend to have more school updates than lifting updates. I have a ton to say about admissions stuff across the board.
For the LSAT, the most important resource will be the official practice tests. LSAC (the company that runs the test) has about 100 of them available, you can get access to all of them for a year for ~$100. Most other prep services will require you to have them. Step one before you start prepping in earnest will be to take a timed diagnostic to give yourself a baseline.
I used 7Sage’s base subscription for my initial prep. It’s a ton of recorded lectures about the sort of logical reasoning that’s on the test, as well as question types, strategies, and a ton of worked examples. I’ve also heard good things about LSAT Demon, but I can’t personally vouch for that one. Once I made it through all the lectures (or at least, enough of them that they began to seem redundant) I just started taking about two full timed tests a week and review/drill all my wrong answers. They’re about 2.5 hours start-to-finish. Most people seem to underperform on the test itself (I was averaging about 177 on my practice tests and scored 174 on the day of), so try to push your score a bit above where you want it, and schedule around the assumption that you’ll be taking it twice. Applying early is seen as a good thing, but anything before Thanksgiving is considered early. So maybe consider planing around June + August or August + October (assuming it’s offered those months. There tends to be about 7 offerings per year).
Take it in person if you have the option. The people who proctor the remote tests are notoriously inconsistent because they work for some outsourced company rather than LSAC.
Your application profile is pretty much perfect (law schools love military service, and they love STEM degrees because they make you eligible to practice IP law—you may even want to consider taking the patent bar before you apply if that’s a field that interests you). But the whole process is first-and-foremost numbers-based, so every point counts. Spend some time scrolling around the website LSD.law (it stands for “Law School Data,” not the drug), it’ll show you the results + scholarships from past years for different GPA/LSAT/work experience combos, so you can get an idea of the numbers you’ll need for the schools you want.
Also, you may want to spend some time reading around r/lawschooladmissions and r/LSAT over on Reddit, or at least their intro posts/wikis. It has some pretty major downsides (the people there are incredibly neurotic, even compared to me) but most of what I learned about the process before beginning myself came from just lurking there.
If you want to stay in the DC metro (I think you’re still there-ish? I haven’t been keeping up with logs as closely as I used to), I’m told Georgetown has a four-story gym on their law campus lol.
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Thanks for all the advice, I seriously appreciate it.
Georgetown is actually my target. I have to stay near the DMV, just because my wife will be stationed out here throughout my timeline for law school. Thinking I’ll also apply to George Washington as a backup, and UVA since it’s the next closed T14. Maybe Penn? It’s far, but the trains decent.
I’m gonna be the classic splitter application. Service academies have WAY lower average GPA’s than most schools these days, so that’s a mark against me, though I’ve read a few admissions panels where law admissions said they recognized the GPA gap for us, so hopefully that won’t hurt me too bad. Military+nuclear engineer will prolly help, and I have a few other softs that should be beneficial, so fingers crossed!
I’ve looked at the reddits… definitely neurotic lol.
So we will see. I’m fairly confident I can do well on the LSAT, but actually was planning GRE until just a few days ago. Law was on the table, but I was planning to apply to some other programs too, now leaning more to throwing all my eggs into the law basket.
I’ve heard of one or two people who go to Penn commuting from DC by train. Both tried to take all of their classes Tuesday/Thursday so that they don’t need to do that daily. It’s possible, but definitely not a good time.
If you want another safety, take a look at GMU (Scalia) Law. They’re ranked similarly to GWU, they’re pretty close (Arlington,) and they have a metro station. You at UVA would also be really cool for obvious reasons.
Service academies, UChicago undergrad, MIT undergrad, engineering degrees, and a few others are notoriously grade-deflated. Admissions committees are familiar. They only (or at least, mostly) value GPA for instrumental reasons—because it’s part of their ranking that’s relatively easy to boost compared to something like hiring more professors. But the rankings are based on median GPA, so you affect them the same whether you’re 0.01 or 0.8 below—that’s where the logic of being a Splitter comes in. The admissions committee knows that slightly under half of their acceptances will go to people below the GPA median, so your goal will be to stand out among that group with a stacked resume (done,) above-median (preferably above-75th percentile) LSAT, and good vibes
You’ve probably already figured this out, but most schools favor the LSAT pretty dramatically over the GRE. UVA only accepted two GRE applicants last year, for instance, in a class of 305. GWU accepted 12 in a class of over 500. There’s some debate over whether this is because they’re bias against them, because there’s proportionally fewer GRE applicants, or because GRE applicants are proportionally worse/less focused on law specifically, but whatever the reason is it seems easier to count on being in the group of 303 than the group of 2.
One more resource I forgot to mention in that first post—try listening through “Navigating Law School Admissions with Miriam & Kristi,” or “Admissible.” Those are podcasts made by the Harvard/Yale Law deans of admission, and the UVA Law dean of admission, respectively. I’m not much of a podcast person, but there are tons of little things throughout there that are good to know. Most of the episodes have a specific focus, so I listened to them as they became relevant (e.g. the interview episodes after I got offered an interview) rather than just binging the series.
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I’ll definitely check out the podcast!
Yeah, everything I’ve seen online says Law Schools get the grade deflation from Service Academies, but it definitely doesn’t do great things for the confidence knowing my GPA isn’t above average. I’m fairly confident I can hit that 75% LSAT, just gonna be a grind lol. I think I’ve got a decent pitch, especially since im really gunning for conservation/environmental reg law, which I think ties pretty well with nuclear given the expense of SMRs currently going on.
Never even thought of GMU, I’ll prolly throw in an application there too. Honestly, heart is kind of set of Georgetown, to the point where I don’t get it prolly do a year somewhere else then try to transfer.
Penn is a great school, but I don’t wanna do the Philly commute if I don’t have to lol. My wife’s family is from CT, so I am kinda considering throwing an application in to Yale, but no idea how I’d realistically make that work. UVA would actually be a crappy commute too lol, but I could make it work. (Idk if I ever told ya this, my cousin did UVA law), works in NYC now.
It was pretty recently that I realized HOW much the GRE was looked down on lol. I’d just checked that all the schools accepted it, and spoke to some admissions people who all confirmed it was fine, wasn’t until I looked into just Google searches that people told horror stories about it
Georgetown was a top choice going into my cycle, too. Especially since I could have commuted from home pretty easily, and saved on rent (Charlottesville rent isn’t terrible, but it’s a lot more than Tuscaloosa. I’m only paying 485/month to live here, which is doable even off of my little grad stipend). Them and UVA released scholarship info within three days of each other, and that pretty much made the decision for me. Nothing but good things to say about them, though. Their Dean of admissions is a really nice guy, and attaches a personalized congratulations video to every acceptance email he sends.
I think the one piece of school-specific advice I have for them is that their application doesn’t have a “Why do you want to go to this school specifically?” supplemental, like most other places do. But I wanted to really stress that I grew up and had all my family in the region, so I wrote an addendum that was about a page long and they seemed to like it. They also have a really weird interview format, but that’s something to worry about a year from now.
Your pitch is cool. A lot of your competition will just be undergrads who want to go into corporate litigation / transactional biglaw, so the hope is that you’ll stand out pretty dramatically.
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My wife will actually actively be in grad school at Georgetown at the time, not for law, but still I do intend to let them know that I need to be accepted or face a lifetime of trash talking in my own home lol.
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Press: **217.5x1 PR**, 185x2/2/2/2
Pulldowns
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Had a paper accepted to NYU’s bioethics conference. This is WAY out of my league. They’re the #1 philosophy school in the world. They do this conference yearly, and every year they set aside one slot for a graduate student (with an accompanying cash prize + travel stipend). The past ~5 years, it has gone to final-ish-year PhD students from Oxford, Cambridge, and so on.
This year, it goes to a first-year M.A. student from Alabama :]
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Congratulations!
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More good updates Re: school stuff
- My thesis has been accepted to conferences at UPenn and UChicago. Lots of driving/flying around in my near future.
- Several interviews for summer internships. One at UPenn’s Center for Ethics and Rule of Law, one for the Federal Public Defender (EDVA), one at Latham & Watkins (!!). I already have one lined up, but it’s unpaid and a pretty shitty commute so I’ll probably reneg if any of those options come through.
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Holy 
! Ivy League and Chicago! I believe U of Chicago is/was the home of Nobel Prize winners. I remember reading an essay by Norman MacLean (who was lecturer of the year three times at Chicago) talking about playing pool with Nobel winners during lunch break. Rarefied Air!
Tell us how the pool tables are.
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