Law School Discussion

If you prefer to write vs type then it seems to make sense to me, provided writing on a tablet gives you the same memory benefits of writing on paper (which I think it would). Writing by hand for me is an unpleasant thing and best I can tell does me no good in terms of retention, but I have poor and slow penmanship and arthritic fingers.

A desktop type screen is probably a good idea with a tablet or ~<14" laptop. A quality 15" laptop can be had with as much or more resolution as you'll likely find on  destkop monitor (my 15" toshebia laptop is 1600x1200, but its also a bit large to lug to class I think).

I will probably have a SFF (toaster sized) desktop/file server at my home (built it a few months ago as I needed more storage than my laptop could reasonably support), my 15" laptop for serious, away-from-home paper writing and a basic, 12" laptop for note-taking.

For the record.
I built my little desktop from mostly used parts and added a couple of new, but discounted ($80 each) 400gb hard drives configured in RAID 1. Its got 3000 series AMD-64 processor (slow compared to most current stuff, but still more than fast enough for me) and a gig of ram.

My laptop I bought new in 2001. Its a toshebia with a 15" screen, 60gb HD and 512mb of ram. It got me though undergrad quite well as my only computer. At a little over 7lbs its a bit portly/bulky to tote to class, but not completely unmanageable. Its big and fast enough to be a desktop replacement unless you happen to be into serious gaming, have a zillion high res pictures or need to do video editing. The picture thing is what necessitated the desktop for me (my wife is an amateur photographer and got a new digi-slr for Christmas....)

Its also wise to think about backup, you'll want something pretty safe and painless, an external hard drive is probably the best option, but certainly not the only one. I currently backup my laptop to my desktop and my desktop (rarely I'll admit) to an external drive. My desktop runs a RAID array that will not loose any data should one drive fail so its a bit safer than most.

I visited UVA, Stanford and Harvard (and have previously been to duke). Stanford easily takes the cake for me. Its just fantastic, both its buildings and the equipment/furnishings inside them. The surrounding area is breathtaking as well. UVA is ok, perhaps its because I live and grew up not so far away, but its just kinda bland and state-schoolish to me. Not bad and I'd be perfectly happy going there, but it doesn't do anything for me aesthetically speaking. Their biz school is very nice, but the law school looks like it got all the hand-me-downs from the biz school. Harvard was a huge let-down in terms of aesthetics. Quite plain and unimpressive. I dig gothic buildings, but after studying in Oxford all the US attempts I've seen seem a half-hearted copy.

Anyway, here's some pics:)











Near by roads









Near-by beach and hiking


















Pretty cool place. Library is huge, the main room is over a 100yrds long (on the inside)!

I'm also very interested to hear your response Chucky's questions. If you could draw any comparisons between HLS and SLS that would be great too:)

Quote from: BikePilot on May 23, 2007, 08:44:15 AM

Duke, so bad I didn't even apply!

Interesting...I thought they were great.

What happened?

Really more just a personal dislike of their general approach than any particular incident. I'm sure there's lots of great people there and that overall its a fine place, but it just really rubbed me the wrong way.

There was that WSJ article a while back (not law school specific that I remember) where someone from the Duke Ad-com openly stated that parental wealth and expected contributions to their endowment were major considerations for admissions. This seemed a bit extreme to me, but then the Duke application was the only one I looked at that required that students submit parental financial info. I also interviewed at their biz school years ago and found them quite condescending (different people than the law school I know). 

Then it seemed a bit desperate when they sent me loads of unsolicited information and offered a 10 day acceptance decision turn-around after my lsat scores became available. Anyway, I'd already resolved not to apply to any schools that required submittal of parental info of any type if at all possible. As it turned out, duke was the only place I looked at that cared about such stuff so they got instantly cut from the list.
 

Weird, I got all sorts of cool stuff from UVA