Law School Discussion

Are you sure the higher-ranked schools you wanted to get into didn't average your LSAT scores and treat you as a 3.9/170? Boalt seems like a good fit for those numbers, and I can't imagine how you wouldn't crack the top 5 with a 176 unless you wrote your personal statement in crayon. Being young's not that big a deal.

What are the Gropius bathrooms like? Are showers and everything communal? Are there curtains?

One single-sex bathroom per floor, each with a separate area with four curtained shower stalls off to the side. Basically the same as the dorm bathrooms we had in college, but be sure to pick a floor with the right bathroom - I know more than a few people who have to go up and down stairs and through locked doors every morning to take a shower.

thanks for your responses.  Are any of you familiar with Hopkins' biomedical engineering program?  I recall in high school that a few of my classmates applied to their program and weren't accepted - I wonder what would have happened had they put electrical engineering or mechanical engineering down as their proposed majors (I guess this analogy is probably better than what I used before)  Hopefully the both of you are right, because I'm going to just be truthful anyway and put down that I'm interested in international law.

Keep in mind that a lot of (probably most) 0Ls think they want to do international law and go work for the UN or whatever, just like a lot think they want to do environmental law for Greenpeace or civil rights law for the ACLU. The admissions committee knows that your interests are going to change as you learn more about what practicing in each area is actually like, and I don't see them putting that much stock into which boxes you check before you're admitted. Like dash said, there aren't majors or programs in the undergrad sense.

The new set of international law classes that just got added to the 1L curriculum this year should be a good primer if you're interested in the subject, though.

A faculty member is probably sitting on a plane right this minute, en route to your house so that he can laugh in your face when you answer the door and confiscate all your acceptance materials. He may or may not have already called your mother and delivered the bad news; they like to do these things promptly, but you never know.

Sorry, dude.

Law schools may not find out if you say 4 years spent squirrel-fishing instead of 3, but if the bar examiners catch you making stuff up on your law school applications, they won't be too happy. And neither will you, after they tell you how unhappy they are.

The "engineers are/n't smarter than everyone else" debate is largely moot because engineers are eligible to sit for the patent bar and inherently more employable than your average polisci/philosophy grad. Law schools know that, even if there isn't a way to quantify the GPA cushion you'll get.

Even if you don't make it into HLS, with an engineering degree and a JD from Duke (or any T14), I imagine you'd be walking on sunshine after graduation.