If you’re thinking about going to law school, no doubt you have lots of questions. Where can I get in? How do I get in? How will I pay for it? What’s the LSAT all about? Everyone, it seems, has answers. Professors, pre-law advisors, friends, law school representatives, books, and the Web all offer well-meaning but sometimes conflicting or, worse yet, wrong information. No one has all the answers, and I do not pretend to.
What I will do is provide answers to the questions most often asked by those who hope to someday be law students. I’ll also try to point you in the direction of more answers and additional information. If you are serious about going to law school, though, you must understand this: getting into law school is a process, one that involves planning, persistence and patience. What you learn here will help you create a plan and will tell you what you must do to carry the plan out. The real work is up to you.
- MCAT-TEST-CENTERS.COM: Offers a list of 2-year colleges in Illinois, covering private technical schools and public community colleges within Illinois state.
- LIUXERS.COM: Offers a list of Federal school codes for educational institutions located in Pennsylvania, covering FAFSA codes within Pennsylvania state.
Ideally, the process starts at the beginning of your undergraduate career. You should focus on building a well-rounded course of study and making good grades. As you will see, getting into law school is, in large part, a numbers game. One of the most important numbers is your undergraduate GPA. If your GPA is weak, you are at a huge disadvantage. In truth, a poor undergraduate GPA can be fatal to your law school hopes.
Work begins in earnest during your junior year, when you should start investigating law schools, register and study for the LSAT, and register with the Law School Data Assembly Service (LSDAS). During the summer after your junior year, you take the LSAT. In the fall of your senior year, you get and complete law school applications, arrange for letters of recommendation, apply for financial aid, and if necessary, retake the LSAT. Once your applications are submitted, you must monitor them to make sure all the law schools get all your information. Then the waiting begins.
By the spring of your senior year, if you’ve done everything right, you will have acceptance letters in hand, and then you can pick and choose. To get to that point, though, your work is cut out for you. We’ll start at the beginning, and take it step by step. Or, if you prefer, you can link to specific topics from the Table of Contents to find the answers that are most important to you.
Before Application
- Undergraduate Curriculum Advice
- Law School Rankings
Applying
- Law School Application at a Glance
- Law School Admission Requirement
- Law School Personal Statement (The Law School Essay)
- Law School Admission Test
- Law School Recommendation Letter
After Applying
- Law School Scholarship and Loan
