That’s pretty much how I think of it. And there’s honestly not a ton of variety in the sorts of questions they tend to ask, so after enough drilling and practice tests you’ll have a pretty good sense of what you need to focus on and what’s just noise. Either way, putting up a -1 a week into studying it is a very good sign and if you can get to a point where you’re doing it consistently then you’ll be set.
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. It’ll be easier to know for sure once you have an official test in the books, but assuming that it keeps trending the way it has been, you’ll be a very strong candidate. You have a really strong set of softs and it’ll be easy to turn them into a cohesive narrative about why you want to go into law.
Meh. Mainly going off of GPA here. Below a 3.5, which still had me like top 15% of my class, but academy curves are brutal lol. Ik it’s somewhat accounted for, but below median is still below
That’ll be the biggest hurdle to get over, but service academy grade deflation is a known factor for them (especially since you were also in a STEM program). If you end up as a splitter then you’ll be the exact sort of splitter they like to take. You’ll also probably want to write a GPA addendum.
Oh yeah. Like, im an honors graduate, a montor scholar, and and my GPA is still garbage by your standards lol
Edit: actually, wonder what ya think of something. I have zero interest in big law. Honestly, just not on my radar. Not knocking it, but it ain’t for me. Part of my wonders if that would actually look good on a T14 application. Sort of a “hey, I know everyone wants these schools to get the big bucks job and become rich. Im not worried about income, wanna go into a field I feel is impactful, which… Idk makes me a special starflake lol”
It helps insofar as it’s much easier to write a compelling-sounding narrative about not-biglaw than it is to write one about biglaw, and it shows that you’ve done your homework about the field and what prospects exist out there within it. But they’re aware of the fact that lots of people (scrupulously or otherwise) write about wanting to do X and end up doing Y, so they take it with a grain of salt. I would definitely frame it as “I want to do X” rather than “I don’t want to do biglaw,” though.
The exception to the rule there is that several T14s have a named schoalrship that requires you to commit to a certain number of years working in public service (NYU’s RTK, Penn’s Toll, etc.) and if you apply for one of those then you are actually commiting yourself to doing the work.