CeaselessImminentChamois '20–'21 app cycle Class of 2024 class year

Welcome to my profile! I come from a low-income background, and I benefitted greatly from the free advice I found researching the admissions process. I want to pay it forward by consolidating some of what I learned on this page. All of this advice is freely my opinion, and should not be considered granular truth. Please feel free to disregard, ignore, or consider at your own discretion!

I’m going to start out with what I consider the most important, but “hardest” to swallow/follow pieces of advice I’d give to any applicant, followed by more general and less controversial advice.

0. Always take law school admissions advice, from anyone including this post, with a grain of salt (and maybe most things in life in general).
We live in an age of misinformation, amplified by the ease of social media. It pays to be skeptical. Many people will have the best of intentions, but certainly not all. There will always be bad actors giving bad faith advice on Reddit/Internet for whatever tiny reason in their hearts. Even those with good in their hearts are usually speculating and relying on second or third-source material to base their recommendations.
Always consider the context of advice/information. Who is giving the advice (an admissions officer? a law student? a 0L? an attorney at work who graduated in ‘70?) Generally the most credible sources of information come from the primary sources themselves, the admissions officers! People who had good cycles can also provide good advice, but they too may not always know why they performed as well as they did (https://xkcd.com/1827/). Even admissions officers may not always be perfect in knowing exactly what is best for you. Dean Z of Michigan Law (I love you Dean Z!!!), for example, happens to take a more discouraging attitude towards LSAT retakes in her videos. One of her videos (at the time of this writing) suggests that unless there are strong exigent circumstances that interfered with your LSAT, you should not retake, as most LSAT re-takers do not measurably improve their LSAT scores on retakes. For most students, this advice would be pertinent, but there are a few applicants every year who improve on their LSAT scores (and gain better outcomes) simply by studying more and taking more practice exams. For those students, it may be more beneficial to retake the LSAT, even if they didn’t have any exigent circumstances on their first take. So always be critical in considering law school admissions advice and consider the context of advice and how it relates to you. Look for consensus - if multiple sources and multiple people are saying the same thing, that advice is more credible than a piece of advice only one person is touting.

1. Be confident beyond a reasonable doubt that you want to be a lawyer./Know the risks of pursuing a JD.
If law school didn’t occupy three years of your life and five figures in debt (for most applicants), this piece of advice may be less important. But sadly, that is not the world we live in. Because of the high degree of debt that most law school applicants will take on, because such debt can only realistically be paid through a limited number of elite

There are three elements that you should try to satisfy to answer the question of whether or not you want t be a lawyer.

A. You should know what kind of work an average lawyer does and be willing to do that work.
B. You should