The Verdict

Now I can die happy. 10 seconds from now, when Calculon kills us. -- Harold Zoid.

Ladies and gentleman, the die has been cast, and the (e-)letter is in the (e-)mail. Next year, I will officially join the University of Chicago's class of 2011.

I've been vague about how this whole law/grad school thing was playing out. Didn't want to jinx anything. But now that it's over, I can give y'all the full run down.

In terms of success rate, I batted a solid 8/20 -- 6/9 law, and 2/11 Ph.D (so, less solid on that front). I was admitted at the law schools of UVA, Michigan, Berkeley (Boalt), NYU, Columbia, and Chicago, and rejected at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford (no waitlists for me!). As for the Ph.Ds, I got in at UVA and Berkeley (Jurisprudence and Social Policy for the latter, Political Science for UVA and all the others) and was turned down at (*breath*) Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Michigan, Brown, and Princeton. As my roommate said, potentially this was sign that law school was the better place for me. Or as Phoebe and Amber would say, maybe I'm just not bright enough for Ph.D work. As for me, I'm blaming my "interesting" (in the wrong way) statement of research interest (that was by a prof at Berkeley's JSP program -- one of the programs that admitted me!).

But that's old news now, and law school was really always my first choice over grad school. The J.D. I know I need for what I want to do, the Ph.D I specifically hope I don't need.

So why Chicago specifically then? Well, I was always making my choice based on what would best get me positioned to enter legal academia. In the interest of not agonizing over too many choices, I let that cut the list down to NYU, Columbia, and Chicago. NYU had the Furman Academic Fellows program, which looked interesting, but then they didn't admit me to it, which was demoralizing. They also put a time limit on their financial aid offer that expired well before I was ready to make a decision (ironically, it appears they extended the deadline until today without telling me, but by now I'd already dismissed them as an option). That left Chicago and Columbia, the only two schools I actually visited.

Both, it should be said, were fine schools and I felt quite happy and comfortable at each when I visited. When I asked if anyone had any inclination towards one or the other, my adviser at Carleton (who, I believe, is starting to sicken of me) told me: "David, flip a coin if you have to." I didn't quite do that, but I did end up making my decision on very "soft" factors: namely, that something about NYC rubs me the wrong way, and that Chicago's smaller size just felt more comfortable to me. Chicago in general had a "vibe" that I liked -- it reminded me much of Carleton, in fact. Really, I had nothing to go on but my gut instinct, which (very tepidly) leaned towards Chicago. With the deadline looming, and no stronger reason to go one way or the other, I went with it.

So that's that. But I can't resist giving a few superlatives at the end of this process.

The Silent Treatment Award goes to Stanford University, held onto my application wordlessly for about five months before denying me. Harvard took just as long (well, actually they denied me one week before Stanford did), but at least they sent periodic emails letting me know I was still on the planet (not to mention their wonderful J.D. admissions blog). And when I wrote them an email, they wrote back (albeit, to tell me that they don't accept emails, so please mail them). Stanford maintained a studious silence throughout the whole ordeal. I actually wondered if my rejection had got lost in the mail (I assumed rejection, because I figured if I had been admitted they would have followed up at least once to insure I was still alive).

Most Enthusiastic: UC-Berkeley. The Berkeley people were very helpful whenever I wrote to them, but that's not why they get the award. Around the time I got admitted to Berkeley, a spammer got ahold of my telephone number and started making bogus calls to me for about one week. During that week, I got four calls from the spammer -- and five from Berkeley. Advantage, California.

Most Guilt-Inducing: UVA. First, they admitted me to both their J.D. and Ph.D program. Second, one of my former Carleton professors (who now is at UVA) specifically went to bat for me come selection time -- responding to the specific objection that I likely wouldn't attend (prescient, that one). Third, the political science department nominated me for a very prestigious fellowship. All of this occurred with it being extremely unlikely that I'd attend. And then, when I turned down the law school, they asked me to fill out a survey explaining why, which was very awkward.

Oh, and you might be wondering about the Futurama quote at the top of the post. That's because I'm expected PG to send trained assassins out to kill me now. She's graduating law school, she can afford it. So, it's been quite a ride, and nice knowing everyone.

Latecomers

For those of y'all who have been through the law and graduate school process, I have a question for you.

As you might already know, I applied to 20 programs -- 9 law, 11 Ph.D. Of those, I have as of today heard back from 12 (6 law, 6 Ph.D). We're entering March now -- getting towards the end of the process.

My thought process thus far regarding the late places has been essentially that I am, in some ways, a difficult candidate. My test scores place me a good bracket or so higher than my GPA does -- in fact, for the remaining law schools, my GPA is well below their admitted 25th percentile while my LSAT scores are comfortably above their 75th. My non-numerical profile is strong, but not invincible -- I can see how it'd be really appealing, and I can see how it'd be run of the mill. So, I assumed, the delay was simply that I'm a tough choice, and they're putting it off.

Now I'm wondering if there isn't a more mundane explanation: schools are simply not in as big of a hurry to get back to those they rejected (or, to be more charitable, they are less excited to reject folks than they are to accept them). This is, to some extent, anecdotal -- I started the process off red-hot, but four of the last six decisions I've received have been denials. That could be explained by lots of things or nothing or paranoia on my part. And I want to stress that the places I have been admitted to are fantastic programs -- I am in a great situation even if I don't get into a single other school.

But I do wonder -- do programs still admit folks this late? Or is what I see all I've got? I just don't want to put off thinking about where I should go next year in the vain hope that I still have a chance in the tardy schools.

Advice appreciated.

The Travails of Tommy Lasorda

"When we win, I'm so happy I eat a lot. When we lose, I'm so depressed, I eat a lot. When we're rained out, I'm so disappointed I eat a lot." -- Tommy Lasorda, former Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It also applies to blogging, in times of extreme bipolarity (as when admissions and scholarship decisions come flooding back).

Variety is Nice

I just got admitted to my first Ph.D program (in political science). No details for you (email me if you want them), but it is a school which has also admitted me to its law program.

Head Scratchers

Interesting digression in class today. We were in small groups taking about whether we, if we were residents of America in the late 18th century, should have voted to ratify the constitution. I pointed out that at least some members of the group didn't have the right to vote at all.

"Yeah," said one, "because I'm a woman, I couldn't vote at all."

A guy responded, "and half of me couldn't vote." The professor raised an eyebrow and asked "are you half woman?"

"No, I'm half Black."

[Pause]

"Though, I guess I'm half woman also."

I never thought of it that way, but he's right, isn't he?

***

In other news of the bizarre, the unnamed law school which admitted me on January 1st, sent me a nice email today, January 16th, informing me that they've received my application and I should expect a decision by April. I'm on the edge of my seat.

Also, neighboring law school of already-admitted U asked to see my fall term grades. This isn't an unreasonable request, except that they already have my fall term grades. I didn't submit my application until my fall term grades were available. If they have any grades at all, said grades include my fall term grades. I sent them a polite-but-puzzled email to that effect, and am waiting for a response.

Guess What?

I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow of every admissions decision I get. But I did want to let you know that today, I did get into a law school (the first I've heard back from). So next year, I will, in fact, be attending somewhere.

Happy New Year!

Musical Lure

I assume it would be hideously immoral to apply to a law school solely for the $20 iTunes gift card they're offering to applicants?

Finished!

It's been three and a half months of work. And the fun part is just beginning. But as of tonight, I have completed all my applications. Nine law schools and eleven Political Science Ph.D programs.

I've got to get into one, right?

Law School Brochure Blogging, Part II

Positive ones today, kids.

I got a nice thick envelope from Michigan Law School today. At first, I was really excited -- until I remembered I hadn't actually submitted my application to Michigan yet (soon!). A nice counter-balance to the thin envelope I received from a school "acknowledging" my application. Anyway, I give Michigan full marks on its brochure. It was jammed full of information, and it came with a personal note at the bottom ("We love to get Carleton grads!"). The author even underlined "impressive" in "credentials as impressive as yours." Am I a sucker for having my ego stroked? You better believe it. But actually, it was the "Carleton grads" note that really made me happy. I like it when my school gets recognition, one of my close friends from Carleton just got into Michigan, and my adviser is a Michigan alum (undergrad and Ph.D -- she got her law degree at Boalt Hall).

Also with a good brochure was Chicago-Kent School of Law. While my eyebrows did hike slightly when they said they were "among the top three law schools in the Chicago area" (true, but I think there's a real gap between them, and Northwestern and Chicago), I did think they did a good job pitching their Honors Scholars program. I was particularly impressed that their LSAT cut-off for the Honors Scholars program was higher than their 75th percentile LSAT score (which isn't too shabby itself). That tells me they're a) truly gunning for top students and b) trying to improve the quality of their student body overall -- both good signs.

Indiana came today too, but it was pretty forgettable.

See Part I.

Admissions Office Evil

One of my hobbies during application season (first undergraduate, now graduate) was to fantasize about all the evil things I would do if I were a director of admissions. Normally, when I'm faced with a stressful or unfair situation, my mind turns on how to alleviate the burden for the people who will come after me (this is why I like judging debate). But for some reason, the application game brings out my sense of malice.

Previous entries in how to be an evil admissions director include posting "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" above my office door, stuffing rejection letters with packing foam, and making interviewees make their best case for why they shouldn't be admitted. Today, courtesy of a school-that-shall-not-be-named, I have another example: send me a nice thin letter a few weeks after I submit my application, then, after my heart has stopped, reveal that it is merely an acknowledgment of my application.

Heart restarted, but I'm keeping a wary eye on you now.

But Does It Work For Law School Apps?

Orly Lobel links to this funny rejection of a rejection letter:

Herbert A. Millington
Chair - Search Committee
412A Clarkson Hall
Whitson University
College Hill, MA 34109

Dear Professor Millington,

Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite Whitson's outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then.

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,

Chris L. Jensen

I suspect this will be useful to have in my back pocket in the coming months.

Law School Brochure Blogging

[This post deleted by the author. It was the product of high stress, it wasn't being taken as humorous, and not being particularly wedded to it, I've decided to take it down]

Tripping Out

I'm leaving for Maryland tomorrow afternoon -- then turning around and immediately going to Rhode Island for Thanksgiving. So until after that, I'm probably going to be effectively out of touch.

My graduate and law school stress level, incidentally, is climbing rapidly, and it is not making me happy.

Mis-Match Mish-Mash

Earlier today, I linked to Professor Katherine Barnes' article debunking the claim that affirmative action causes minorities to be "mis-matched" at law schools above their level, and thus under-perform compared to how well they would do at a school more "appropriate" for their talents. Digging into the statistical data more deeply (Barnes has a Ph.D in statistics from the University of Arizona), she found that a more likely explanation for performance gaps by Black students is an environment hostile to students of color at our nation's colleges and universities.

Discussing this article, PG wonders how much, if at all, affirmative action contributes to this environment.

[I]f students and professors believe that African American and Latino students are less capable than white and Asian students, because the former were admitted under an affirmative action program and the latter on a "merit-based" system, this itself may be a significant source of discriminatory attitudes that impede minority students' learning. Even more disturbingly, if affirmative action programs cause minority students to believe themselves less capable than their classmates, the stereotype can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There's probably something to this, but not all the much, primarily because the "stigma" attached to minority students as under-qualified doesn't really seem traceable to affirmative action. As PG herself notes, when affirmative action is eliminated, conservatives simply convince themselves it is still occurring in disguise -- even when the Black population of a university drops precipitously. More generally, as Richard Delgado has noted, negative perceptions and stereotypes of students of color in America have, by and large, dropped over the 30 year period in which affirmative action was most active. Admittedly, it's certainly possible that these trends were at cross-purposes, and that the overall rising racial progressivism of the past few decades masked the harmful effects of affirmative action. But for that thesis to hold, you'd have to argue that the greater positive (or at least, not negative) perceptions of African-Americans was largely disconnected from their increased visibility in elite institutions and universities, which strikes me as implausible. It's tougher to be racist when a quarter of your college is Black -- when you can see for yourself that they can, in fact, do the work and speak proper English and are not hyper-sexed bestial maniacs. And by contrast, racist stereotypes of Black inferiority are clearly reinforced when they are largely absent from the institutions that you yourself take part in (institutions which are, of course, perfectly "meritorious").

Also on the mis-match thesis, I'd echo Professor Delgado's argument that it seems to have a rather confused idea of how people view the opportunity to attend "elite" schools. The mis-match argument

presupposes that exposure to first-rate education is not good for you but bad. Going to a school with a favorable student-faculty ratio and studying under nationally acclaimed professors is good for whites, but not for blacks. This is truly paradoxical, and I am surprised bright people assert it. Rich people of all eras have been sending their sons and daughters not to the worst, but the best schools they could get them into, sometimes bending the rules to do so. There is little reason to believe that what is true for whites is not true for blacks, Mexicans, and other minorities. [Richard Delgado, Ten Arguments Against Affirmative Action -- How Valid?, 50 Ala. L. Rev. 135, 142 (1998)]

I'm currently applying to law schools. Some of them are, without a doubt, "reaches." Harvard, Stanford, and Yale (which I'm convinced doesn't actually admit anyone, but is just engaging in a high-yield racket of applications fees) all have entering class profiles which are stretches for my numbers (for all three, my LSAT score is above their 75th percentile, but my GPA is well below their 25th percentile). By contrast, I seem to be a better "match" for NYU, Columbia, or Chicago, where I am right in the numerical wheelhouse. Nonetheless, I do not want to be rejected from any of these schools (to repeat, if any admissions officers from the aforementioned schools reading this blog -- I very much wish to be admitted!). I want the opportunity to test my ideas against the very finest minds in the land. I thirst to be taught by the most talented professors in the land, and work with the best and brightest students around. How is this not a good thing?

Back when I was applying to undergraduate schools, I was told by an admissions officer at Cornell that they could admit an entering class comprised entirely of students they rejected, and it would not look any different from a "normal" Cornell class. Past accomplishments, performance, potential -- totally the same. The reason, she told me, was that 90% of Cornell applicants have the tools to be successful at Cornell -- they are "qualified" to be there. They would not be mis-matched. Once you can past that first hurdle of capability (and the vast majority of students -- of any color -- who are applying to schools like Cornell, Yale, Harvard, or Stanford are extraordinarily capable and thus "qualified" in this sense), the question ceases to be about effectiveness, and turns into what each individual student is bringing to the table vis-a-vis his or her peers. That subjective, that's contingent on the vagaries of the applicant pool, and that's very difficult to map on to the concept of "merit". In a sense, it's unfair. But it certainly doesn't lead to mis-matches, unless something goes badly, badly wrong.

Observations on Applications

As I finally start to get ahead of the endless torrent of applications I'm filling out, a few observations I wanted to get down on virtual paper. Most are recommendations and/or complaints to the shadowy cabal that designs these cursed things.

- The more you can let me send in online, the better. Making me send a thirty-five page writing sample by mail, rather than upload it, is ridiculous. However, I do actually give Chicago a minor exemption here, because they require it to come in with my transcript -- meaning it's the transcript office that has to deal with it, not me.

- Exception to the preceding rule: transcripts should not be submitted online -- at least until colleges start providing a mechanism for transmitting them. Until then, it's just awkward.

- Admissions office mailing addresses need to be reasonable. Name of office, street #, city, state, zip code is fine. Name of office, name of person, hall, room #, street #, city, state, zip code is not. Stanford, I'm looking at you.

- The more information you can give me about my chances of admission, the happier I'll be. Yale Law School, for example, breaks down its last three years of admissions into a grid matching LSAT scores to GPAs. I am gratified to know that my 177 LSAT raises my admissions chance from about 5% to 10%. Depressed, but gratified. The University of Virginia also scores points in this category. Places that just say "higher than this score", by contrast, are useless -- I don't know if being higher than that means my chances are good, or that they won't just use my application for paper football. This is particularly so when (as so often is the case for me), my LSAT/GRE scores are on opposite side of the cut-off from my GPA.

- The degree of centralization the LSDAS has managed to put together is truly impressive -- and welcome. I can do nearly everything online (except, oddly enough, submit recommendation forms, which seems to be a gimme). Grad schools are sort of following suit, and there appear to be a variety of different online services that manage applications. So Brown and Princeton are with one group, while Yale and Columbia are in another. However, if you're going to use an online service, make sure it's stable. Nothing is more aggravating than being in the middle of an application and having "Embark" crash on you. Like it does about once per session, on average.

- Also, be intelligent when designing your applications. NYU wouldn't let me preview my application until I checked the box acknowledging I had previewed my application. I do not appreciate being forced to lie, NYU.

- December 1st deadlines are really inconvenient for a college whose term ends on November 20th. December 15th is fine, though.

- Finally, at this stage in the game, I'm feeling roughly equally positive towards the schools that let me know their decision promptly as am towards the ones that actually admit me. This might change if I start the Winter Term on a five school rejection streak.