Shutting this one down; will continue to keep up the personal blog.

I think the pursuit of law school has made for an interesting story to tell. I’ve enjoyed writing about it at least, and I get enough hits per post to keep me blogging about it. The pursuit itself is over, though. I wrote about the LSAT experience, about the application cycle, about choosing which school to attend…but what’s left now?

I’ll definitely write up a trip report for the road trip east at the end of June, and anything of interest that comes to mind before that time, but I just don’t know how much content I’ll have at my fingertips once school gets going. The day-to-day class stuff won’t probably be blogworthy, and due to my lack of anonymity I would be purposefully vague about how I was doing academically…with everyone graded on a curve, and consequently competing with each other for grades, getting specific would be bad form. In other words, if I said I “did fine” on my grades, that could mean that I was slightly above the median and maintaining my scholarship, or it could mean I was pulling grades at the top.

It seems that most relevant stuff that I could and would blog about would just be personal stuff and could be put at my personal blog. As I originally just made this additional blog as a way of staying under the radar from my employer (since I was exploring leaving the company, but it was far from official), it seems like I may as well just shut this one down and consolidate back into writing all of my posts on the original one.

So…the link to that blog is on the right side of this page, but here it is again: Link. See you over there.

Update – one month until quitting day.

This being May 18th, I’ve got exactly one month to go before my last day of work.

I’ve been lacking for content to post about lately. I largely dealt with a lot of moving stuff last month, I got my moving dates set and all of that, and moving logistics don’t make for great writing or reading material anyway. I dread the move itself anyway, so I’d rather not spend more time pondering how “fun” it’s going to be to pack and unpack my stuff.

Still, only 19 more working days to go, and only 32 days total until I depart for Bloomington. I’m sufficiently excited.

Kind of a funny story from before I committed to IU.

I’ve always subscribed to the theory that you shouldn’t put anything online that you’re not comfortable with anyone in the world seeing. As such, I always make sure to be careful about what I post on my blogs, my Facebook page, etc. Thankfully, I really don’t have much to hide, so I can be something of an open book on here (there’s a lot of freedom in just being honest as often as possible in life)…but if nothing else, I make an effort to keep my language clean and to not say anything that might give potential future employers (or anyone else) pause. A couple of months ago, I got reminded exactly why I bother to take these measures.

About a week before my trip to Bloomington, when I officially committed to IU, I got an e-mail from a name I didn’t recognize with the subject line “Indiana Law.”

I sure am lucky I didn’t completely confine my search to the west.

I didn’t bother posting about it, but UNLV and San Diego waitlisted me a couple of weeks ago. Now I received a waitlist offer from Santa Clara also, making a whopping seven waitlist offers that schools have issued me out of 17 decisions (for some odd reason I still haven’t heard back from Wyoming). That brings my record to 6 acceptances, 4 rejections and 7 waitlists. As I anticipated, my odd combo of undergrad GPA and LSAT score being so extremely opposite made for a lot of schools that didn’t know what the heck to think of me. Thankfully I was able to compel Indiana and Wake Forest to offer me acceptances early on; it’s amazing how much brighter the picture became because of just those two decisions.

Obviously when you look at the list of schools I applied to, I was heavily biased in favor of staying out west. Out of 18 applications I sent out, 13 were from western or mountain states, and of the five I applied to out east, two only received my application because they sent me a fee waiver (Illinois, Cincinnati). Indiana, Wake Forest and Notre Dame jumped off the page at me enough to make me want to apply there…despite the fact that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t end up moving that far away. It seems pretty random that I picked the University of Indiana out if I was being so selective out east, by the way…particularly considering that I had never so much as set foot in that state until I was accepted there, and knew nobody out there. I studied up on dozens of states from out east, and that was just one that looked like too good of a fit to ignore.

If I had confined my search to the 13 schools I liked (and thought I could get accepted to) out west, I’d really have had a gloomier outlook.

Happy to be escaping the isolated corner.

I love Washington state. It will always be home to me, regardless of exactly how long I stay away once I move. With that said, I don’t love how isolated it is from most major cities and tourist attractions. You can’t go very many places by car within a day, something I imagine that people east of the Rockies probably take for granted.

From Bellingham, I can drive to Seattle in 90 minutes, and…that’s about it for significant places you could make a comfortable round trip in a day to. Portland is another, but if you’re north of Seattle there’s almost no reason to ever go to Portland; it offers almost nothing that Seattle doesn’t. It’s mostly just that other city you drive through on the way to California.

Okay, so forget a one day round trip…what about a place that will take a good bit of driving time, but you can still have a decent trip there in three or four days?

Top 10%

Indiana is a great school. From what I can gather, someone can be around the GPA median and have some good career options, in the immediate area if nothing else. However, this isn’t Yale, Harvard or Stanford, where you can land just about anywhere in class ranks (I actually don’t think Yale ranks its classes) and have truly great choices at your disposal. To open the biggest doors, it seems like you have to land in the top 10%. I have no doubt that there are exceptions, where a person networks remarkably well and opens doors that way, or is well-connected (which I’m not, in the legal world) and opens doors that way. In general, though, to maximize chances of success…top 10% has to be the goal.

Kind of a nice footnote about the ranking bump

I was looking into what statistic caused IU’s ranking to go up, since any number of things can make that happen. The one that jumps off the page is a pretty significant decrease in acceptance rate…for years, it consistently stayed around 40%. For last year’s entering class, the statistic suddenly dropped to a 25% acceptance rate. Selectivity is one of the factors that USNWR judges by, and that’s one noticeable improvement that IU made.

So, when push came to shove…

It certainly involved some luck, but at the end of the process I ended up being accepted by, and attending, the school tied for highest-ranked among all that I applied to.

In case you ever wondered why I didn’t reach any higher with my applications, the reasons are basically these…

I had absolutely no shot at a top 14 school (the top 14 is the elite tier of schools…the same 14 schools have comprised the top part of the list for decades now, with Georgetown being specifically at #14 for 10 straight years). I might’ve taken a run at it if I had scored a 170 like I wanted to on the LSAT, but with a 165 I simply wasn’t going to get in. I’m obviously perfectly content with that 165 now; my disappointment at the time largely stemmed from a fear that my score simply wasn’t good enough to overcome my poor GPA, I knew I had scored well on the test. As it turned out, my score was enough to get to go to a great school at less than sticker price.

Texas, Vandy, USC, UCLA…none of those were going to happen either. With better numbers, I would’ve definitely applied to Texas and Vandy at least, not so sure about the LA schools. Los Angeles is not a place I aspire to live in. One of the funniest examples is #19, Washington University of St. Louis. Statistically I would’ve maybe had a shot here, but I wasn’t too interested. For starters, St. Louis is crime-infested and dangerous, even moreso than places like Detroit…so the location wasn’t a draw. Beyond that, as a Washingtonian, I didn’t want to have to go through explaining 20 billion times, “I’m going to Washington University.” “Oh, University of Washington?” “No…it’s this school in St. Louis.” “Oh.” That conversation would’ve happened so many times. Forget that, I didn’t want to put myself through it. My opinion would’ve differed if it was in an actually appealing location, though.

The other highly ranked school that I brushed aside was University of Minnesota, for weather reasons. That’s right, the viking you know and love flat-out fears the frigid cold of the Great Lakes region. That’s the same reason that University of Wisconsin didn’t see my application. North of Indiana is further than I wanted to push this cold weather thing.

At that point, you’re getting into the mid-20’s and the allure of high rankings starts to lose its luster because you start getting into schools that are pretty regional and don’t give you much mobility to move away from the area very soon after graduation. I knew I had to pick places where I could make peace with staying in the area for at least a few years after finishing the degree, and my choices reflected that going forward. Indiana seems to have some semblance of national mobility, but we’re just going to have to see how things shake out in a few years. I’m really not worried about that right now; at this point I just have to pull the best grades possible, network as well as I can, and hopefully things fall into place for me. In the meantime, I want to enjoy the ride.

Sheesh, really?

That post with the new USNWR law school rankings has been up for all of 12 hours, and it’s easily my most viewed post ever that I’ve written on either blog?

The obsession with rankings is pretty amusing, honestly. How much this jump means for IU Law is up for debate, it might not make that much of a difference in the long run (though I obviously hope it will), but the fact that these rankings inspire so much traffic and interest seems like a pretty clear signal that they shouldn’t be dismissed entirely.

Some argue that outside of the top 14, schools 15-50 will largely place the same. That certainly oversimplifies things a bit, as schools like Vandy, Texas, USC and UCLA certainly offer better prospects than going to University of Maryland (for instance). For that matter, statistically Illinois and Notre Dame are both schools that place significantly better than those at the bottom of the top 50…can Indiana’s career prospects match those schools as its national reputation improves? That remains to be seen. I’m skeptical on that front. They might well be like University of Minnesota, ranked 20th and highly respected but not having the same national reach as some of these others.

If it compels more firms to conduct on-campus interviewing there in the near future, that’ll be a really good thing. That’s what I care about. I’m already confident that I’ll get a great education there, and that I’ll enjoy the time I spend there; I’m just looking for the possible effects on career prospects. Regardless of how much or how little the effect is…this can only be good news, it certainly can’t be bad.

Nice! Indiana makes a big jump in the newest rankings.

Yes, I used an exclamation mark.

My law school, which was ranked 36th nationally when I committed to it, has jumped all the way up to #23 in the newest U.S. News and World Report rankings. It shares this #23 ranking with two other schools that I was trying to get into but was rejected and waitlisted at, Notre Dame and Illinois. This was one of the biggest jumps throughout the rankings, and nobody else moved up anywhere close to this much within the top 50 (the only thing that came semi-close was UC-Davis jumping from #44 to #35).

Didn’t really expect to see such a jump, but I’m more than pleased to see that I’ll be entering a school ranked in the top 25. If they can keep this high of a standing over the next few years, it can only be helpful to my career prospects; as silly and arbitrary as people might think these rankings are, the very fact that law firms care about them means that they absolutely matter (whether they should or not). Besides my own selfish interests, I’m really happy for the people who work there that I’ve met over the last couple of months…great people, all of them, and I’m happy to see them get this kind of recognition for their efforts.

For anyone interested, here are how the rankings shook out with the amount of spots schools went up or down in them. I didn’t do this legwork of figuring out how much schools went up or down, but I’ll bold the ones I applied to.