synthla

I can second ridgey - I actually got an 800V/790Q/6.0W and you can see that my results were 50/50. I'm sure it didn't hurt, but it certainly didn't get me accepted to places where my interests weren't a great match and/or other attributes didn't match up.

strike "business" and insert "law" and that's exactly what I'm doing... i'm looking forward to being a graduate student again, but not having to be a broke one.

I'd think that as long as you're above 600, it won't really hurt your application. I had a verbal experimental last year, thankfully - I ended up doing well on the math side of things, but if I'd been confronted with another math section, I may have walked out.

Yep, in the right places, there are some really good deals. I went with a 30-year fixed mortgage on the house I bought and my combined mortgage, tax and insurance payments are less than $850 per month. Property taxes are very low in my area and my interest rate is under 5%. Obviously it doesn't make sense for everyone and people have different financial (and spousal) situations, but for me this will be a much better way of spending my housing money than a similar amount (or more) for an apartment or university housing that would be half the size, without a yard, and 20-30 years older.

Congratulations and good luck! I'll finally be moving across country and into the house I bought soon... very excited about that.

I had almost ten years off and got into 2 of the 3 top-20 schools where I applied. For what it's worth.

I was in a lull at work last summer so had a lot of the legwork done early on. As a result I had all of my applications in by late September, but I don't think it made a bit of difference, except allowing me to stop worrying about it and move on. Although I have to say that I'm very happy I didn't discover these forums until after the deadlines had all passed.

I currently practice law full time but am going back to pursue a history Ph.D beginning this fall. Just click on my name and search my posts because I have discussed my perspective on law vs history in depth, and don't have the time at this moment to go into it again. Suffice to say that law school is not a guaranteed route to a job these days, and for many people it never was. It sounds like you got into decent schools where your odds would be good, but I can say as someone who graduated from a top 10 law school, I have many friends who have been laid off over the last year and the market is flooded with high-quality resumes of people who were making well into the six figures and are now jobless. I'm very thankful to be in the position that I am. I think it's safe to say that if you're questioning law school before you get there, you shouldn't go - most people don't start questioning it until they're a year in. The practice of law in contemporary society is a business, not a profession, and there is a dramatic difference between slaving away over the minutae of a contract for some mega-company, and spending hours in an archive researching a topic you love. :wink:

When it comes to "formal" training, I actually had 0 years of my primary language and only 1 semester of my secondary language on my applications and was still admitted to two top-20 programs. I didn't even explain myself really, just said I was proficient in the latter and working on regaining proficiency in the former (which is now the case). Both true, but no one asked me to prove it.

If only I could develop an interest in either area...

I just bought in a college town that hasn't seen huge drops for that reason, but I also don't think there's any reason to expect that those drops will suddenly come because the academic population isn't going anywhere. I also found that the rental stock in town wasn't that great for similar reasons - mostly student/relatively-short-term rentals in not-the-best condition. My all-in mortgage/taxes/insurance payment is at least 30% less than what I would pay in rent for something of similar quality. That was with 20% down, but it would still be very competitive even if I'd had to make a much smaller down payment.

I kept pretty much everything from undergrad, which ended nearly a decade ago. I was aided and abetted in this by the fact that all of my moves until this point were employer-paid, so I had absolutely no incentive to trim down because it wasn't my dime or effort to get the stuff from point A to point B. That being said, a couple years ago I was doing some de-cluttering and came very close to ditching my old undergrad materials because I hadn't opened the boxes since I left college. Of course then I finally decided to go back to graduate school, and was never more thankful that I didn't follow through on something becuase without those boxes of documents, I would have had a much harder time putting together my application. And for purely sentimental reasons, it's nice to have the stuff - it's the kind of thing that your relatives will get a kick out of looking through someday and once you throw it away, it's gone forever.

Well I'm not entirely convinced I can beat the odds, but I would like to spend a number of years studying history full-time. I often think it would have been better had I gone straight to graduate school in history after undergrad rather than pursuing another career first, but at least that career is there to fall back on if I don't beat the odds.

I would probably have gone with 3 academics, if a 3rd had been readily available, so even though I had a non-academic, I wouldn't say it's a sure fire way to go. I tried to look at it from an AdComm perspective though - if you're applying nearly a decade out of undergrad, how relevant are your undergrad professors observations? On the one hand, if you stood out sufficiently that they remember you all that time later and like you enough to write strong references, that says something; on the other hand, it would seem that hearing from someone who can assess the type of thinker you are today, ten years on, would seem more meaningful to me, but that's why I'm not on an AdComm. We definitely took different approaches on the SOP; I don't think I went into as much detail, although I probably should have in retrospect. Yet one professor I met with post-admit said that my grasp on the historiography of the field (based on our in-person conversation) was much greater than what they expected from an entering MA student. And I don't think said grasp is all that great - in fact, I have a growing unease as the end of August approaches. But at least there's one program out there that doesn't expect their newly entering MA students to be masters of their field. In any case, I don't want anyone to think I'm presenting my application as perfect - certainly 50% of the schools to which I applied found it lacking - but as someone who struggled with applying after a long break from academia and an intervening profession, I'm just describing how I did it and that even a flawed application can succeed. Thepoorstockinger's advice is probably better in terms of making your application the best possible.

I DID do that, which definitely has merit. Most of law is research and writing after all. Which is also why I had one non-academic LOR - someone who had seen me research and write for years. And even better, there were clients who actually paid for my written results, unlike academia.