khigh

I didn't either. Here's to better writing samples next time!

They're in NYC ;). You aren't going to go from a T20 outside NYC or DC to biglaw in NYC or DC. If you do, it's rare. That's like saying someone with a UW-Madison History PhD is going to go straight to teaching Ivy TT. It's possible, everything is, but it's not going to happen in any reasonable world. BigLaw at those schools are also still less than 10% and most are less than 2%. LSAT is required by the ABA unless specific conditions are met (less than 10% of entering class is admitted without LSAT, GRE higher than 85%, and SAT/ACT scores higher than 85%, etc). The ABA is where the LSAT bias comes in. https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/governancedocuments/2015_s503_guidance_final.authcheckdam.pdf

I'm in the same boat as you- history PhD or Law School. Honestly, law school is it. 3 years, a little more debt, and a much better job placement rating? Sounds good to me. Start a pro-con list. Write down what you would miss by going the LS route. Take the June LSAT (apply for a fee waiver if you can, it also waives a lot of applications). Law Schools will reply within days or weeks instead of months. You don't have to go biglaw (I don't want to) and there are a lot more opportunities if you speak a foreign language (international, international business, UN, NGOs, immigration). I'm a sports fanatic and speak/read several European based languages, so I've been looking at labor and contract law and hope to get on with a baseball team or a sports firm to recruit foreign players for MLB. There are, however, cons to the law school route. It's more expensive unless your numbers are good (pretty much all law schools look at is GPA and LSAT). Biglaw is almost impossible to break into unless you are HYS (Harvard, Yale, Stanford). Law is a regional field. If you don't go HYS, you will likely stay in the place where you go to LS. Networking is key- if you are an introvert, it's not going to work too well. It's competitive. Your grades aren't based on what you do on your own, but are curved with your class. If you are out of the top 10%, you won't get into a big firm. Outside the top 25% and you likely won't get a good summer internship (some I have seen will pay $40-$60k for the summer!). Non-profits and government work means you likely won't be able to pay off your loans.

Got accepted, but I am going to decline and reapply in September because of funding. They had already given out their big scholarships and I should get a full waiver for the next cycle. It seems to be all about the numbers. They don't really care about anything other than your LSAT score.

Just an FYI if any of y’all are thinking about Law School as a backup, I turned in my application on Friday and got a response today. They don’t mess around!

Thank you for clarifying your position, but others in this thread have taken it to PM to tell me exactly how they feel. I have no cross. I am upset and angry. I’m dropping this now too.

Aaaand, I’m done. You could have taken this to PM like others have to vent their frustrations on me. I thought I could find support here, but I guess not. Very few of you actually know what this is like, so I was wrong in assuming that any of you know what it’s like to get rejected from everywhere. Thank you to those that have offered support. Your PMs have helped immensely and the same within this thread. At least I could feel happy for a day before having to deal with all this. We will see what next cycle brings.

The game makes me bitter. My team came so close and now all we get up here is traffic. Lol!

And then there are those of us that get frustrated with this line of talk. People here UNDERSTAND all sides of it- the anxiety and planning and admissions and rejections and alternate plans. You may come from a family of people who have gone through the process or have friends that have, so they understand. Some of us have no one outside this forum that actually gets it. This thread saved me from many breakdowns the past few days. So, I would honestly suggest starting another impersonal thread where you just talk numbers and stats or maybe, just maybe, appreciate that there are real people on the other side of the keyboard.

Thank you so much. I realize now that my SOP was wrong in explaining what I exactly wanted to do. I wasn’t clear enough in it to convince them that it is something I could do at the U. I had written about wanting to study grassroots political movements of the Dutch Republic in het rampjaar, but I found other documents that are better and more interesting and do fit with the fields that the U has. I want to do a phenomenological study of travel accounts in the Mediterranean. They have others doing Mediterranean that focus on people that came from outside the geographical regions that the profs study (Russians, Turks, and Moroccans). I am going to take this as a hard and expensive lesson and reapply next year and apply to the law school. Some, even you, may disagree with it, but location is more important to me than anything else I finally have roots I’ve never had roots anywhere, even my hometown of 29 years. Here is where I want to raise my family and sit by the lake as an old retiree. I have only felt home here and two other places- Groningen and Rome. I truly do thank all of y’all for your help and support this cycle and I will be sticking around.

I’m rooting for y’all!

i transported three rabbits from Oklahoma to Minnesota. They are horribly mean and destructive, but they're keeping me sane.

I love, love, love Cersei, but Littlefinger in the books was my hero. "Knowledge is Power"

I live in Minne, but I'm from Oklahoma, so I mix my y'alls with my dontcha knows, ya know? I can say "ain't that just fer cute." I love it here, so I'm going to polish my app and try again next cycle. The worst thing in the world would be to get discouraged and end up some place like Sconi.

What field? 3000 words is only about 12 pages, double spaced Times New Roman. For the humanities, that's not even close enough, but for some sciences it may be good.