Doubts and Alternatives

[khigh]

2 hours ago, fortsibut said:

This is completely inaccurate.  My sister went to Brooklyn Law and she and a number of her classmates from up and down the school's GPA rankings ended up with BigLaw jobs.  One of the summer students she did her summer program with her second year was from NYLS which is very, very lowly ranked and that student also scored a firm job.  These were not isolated incidences.  I'm also not sure why you're arbitrarily leaving out the other Ivy law programs; you think Columbia and Cornell don't place most of their students (who want to work there) in Big Law jobs?   The further you go down the T14, the lower your chances may be at being able to easily move to a different location and score a BigLaw job there, but those schools still do just fine.

Additionally for anyone looking at law who might not know this:  LSAC (the body that administers the LSAT and handles collecting transcripts and other elements of the application process for many schools) averages every grade you've ever made at every collegiate institution.  That might not matter for many of you who went straight through college your first try with a 4.0, but my first college experience ~17 years ago was three awful semester with a lot of F's.  That 1.7 will probably bring my 3.86 from the school I actually graduated from down to the low 2's.  And if you took a class and failed it twice then got an A, your school may cancel out those Fs with the A, but LSAC will not be as forgiving and averages it all in.  Something to keep in mind, although I'm sure most schools will look at your most recent history more closely than the overall gpa given how it's calculated.

Also for the first time, some schools (including Harvard) are letting students submit their GRE scores rather than taking the LSAT.  I'd imagine that you'd want to really kill all 3 parts of the GRE (I'm pretty hopeless at math) to actually opt to go with that over the LSAT though, and who knows how Harvard would actually weigh a candidate who had a perfect GRE score vs. a perfect LSAT score.  That LSAT bias might be built in pretty deep.

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

[Ragu]

30 minutes ago, khigh said:

 You aren't going to go from a T20 outside NYC or DC to biglaw in NYC or DC.

Let the record reflect: what is quoted above is not true 

Edited February 9, 2018 by Ragu

[astroid88]

1 hour ago, Ragu said:

Let the record reflect: what is quoted above is not true 

Don't disagree with you, but it let's be honest...it's nowhere near the norm.

[Ragu]

@astroid88 I’m basing my opinion on my experience at a flagship state school not in DC or NY where my classmates had excellent results on the job market whether in big law, public interest (which is highly competitive), government etc. I’ve also seen similar success from people who attended the flagship state school in the state where I now practice. The school where I now live is ranked around 50, I believe, in the US News law school rankings. I know several people who work for Skadden Arps and other top law firms from there. This is of course not to say that getting a fancy law job is guaranteed wherever you go to law school. The job market in law like in most prestigious fields is very competitive

[fortsibut]

2 hours ago, khigh said:

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%.

Now you're just moving goalposts.  What you said was "Biglaw is almost impossible to break into unless you are HYS (Harvard, Yale, Stanford)."  If up to 10% of students from mediocre NYC-region schools make it to BigLaw firms (I'm actually extremely skeptical about this statistic but I'm too lazy to go pull numbers for Brooklyn/Fordham/CUNY/NYLS/Cordoza/etc. so I'll just let it go) then it's hardly "almost impossible" to break into-and those are not highly ranked schools.  Never mind the fact that you're leaving out schools like Columbia and NYU...are you seriously going to tell me that they don't place high numbers into BigLaw firms?  Cornell doesn't place in NYC?  How about Georgetown in DC?  Of course you're right about the role that regionalism plays in BigLaw recruitment, but that's just common sense; if you wanna work at a Vault top 10 firm in NYC, you probably don't want to go to Ohio State.

This is just a poor argument on your part and you should really just drop it.

[Ragu]

I also just want to add that the most prestigious/competitive thing to do out of law school is to clerk for a big name judge not work for a firm. With that the caliber of your law school does start to matter more. If you’re trying to eventually make it onto the Supreme Court then yes most likely just the people at the very best law schools have a shot. 

[fortsibut]

3 minutes ago, Ragu said:

I also just want to add that the most prestigious/competitive thing to do out of law school is to clerk for a big name judge not work for a firm. With that the caliber of your law school does start to matter more. If you’re trying to eventually make it onto the Supreme Court then yes most likely just the people at the very best law schools have a shot. 

That's a good point.  From a hiring standpoint, I wonder what how the job market is coming out of a clerkship.  I'd imagine those who scored federal clerkships would have a pretty easy time getting a good firm job after the clerkship if they wanted.

[Ragu]

31 minutes ago, fortsibut said:

That's a good point.  From a hiring standpoint, I wonder what how the job market is coming out of a clerkship.  I'd imagine those who scored federal clerkships would have a pretty easy time getting a good firm job after the clerkship if they wanted.

Yea I think that is the case generally and anecdotally the people I know who’ve had federal clerkships easily got jobs in firms after. 

Edited February 9, 2018 by Ragu

[Manuscriptess]

Guys, there are other law jobs than just non-profits, gvt, and corporate, especially ones that can make $100k+: real estate, matrimonial, personal injury, etc. Pretty sure that Celino and Barnes didn't go to top law schools....

Edited February 9, 2018 by Manuscriptess

[OHSP]

13 hours ago, khigh said:

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.

This is just a very strange statement. I think if you're going into a history PhD with the primary goal of ending up as a professor at an ivy league school, you're probably going in with the wrong priorities--history's not just about climbing prestige ladders and the ability to go "straight to teaching ivy TT" isn't an indicator of the quality of someone's PhD... So I'm not sure what the point is of making this kind of comment on a history forum. Also though, see Margot Canaday (Minnesota PhD, tenure at Princeton), and Genevieve Clutario (UIUC PhD and currently TT at Harvard). 

[TheHessianHistorian]

1 hour ago, OHSP said:

This is just a very strange statement. I think if you're going into a history PhD with the primary goal of ending up as a professor at an ivy league school, you're probably going in with the wrong priorities--history's not just about climbing prestige ladders and the ability to go "straight to teaching ivy TT" isn't an indicator of the quality of someone's PhD... So I'm not sure what the point is of making this kind of comment on a history forum. Also though, see Margot Canaday (Minnesota PhD, tenure at Princeton), and Genevieve Clutario (UIUC PhD and currently TT at Harvard). 

Yes, I was just about to add: actually there are two history professors at Princeton who got their PhDs from Wisconsin.

Edited February 9, 2018 by TheHessianHistorian

[Ragu]

On 2/7/2018 at 12:25 PM, astroid88 said:

Though I think there is more flexibility in choosing where you live as a lawyer, I don't think it involves any less writing. In fact, there might a be a higher "production" rate when being a lawyer. Academics tend to write a lot but over a lot of time. When it comes to legal work, it seems like a lot of writing but in short bursts. 

Just giving you another way to look at your options. 

I agree with this. The style of writing and type of thinking required in the legal writing I’ve had to do at work is pretty different from academic writing though. So someone who is burnt out with academic writing might enjoy certain types of legal research/writing. 

Edited February 9, 2018 by Ragu

[Ragu]

3 hours ago, Manuscriptess said:

Guys, there are other law jobs than just non-profits, gvt, and corporate, especially ones that can make $100k+: real estate, matrimonial, personal injury, etc. Pretty sure that Celino and Barnes didn't go to top law schools....

I can’t upvote anymore today but I agree with this. 

Edited February 9, 2018 by Ragu

[psstein]

1 hour ago, TheHessianHistorian said:

Yes, I was just about to add: actually there are two history professors at Princeton who got their PhDs from Wisconsin.

One is a spousal hire. The reality is that where you get your PhD matters, up to a point. After that point, productivity and reputation take over.

Sue Lederer got her PhD here, at Wisconsin (with Ron Numbers), went to Penn State, then ended up at Yale for the better part of a decade. She was lured back to be the medical history department's chair.

@khigh, I've little doubt you mean well, but sometimes you should think about whether or not what you're saying is as broadly true as you make it out to be.

Edited February 9, 2018 by psstein

[Ragu]

Wondering if anyone has any insights about going from history to publishing? 

[Ragu]

@TheHessianHistorian Also wondering if you could talk a bit about your work as a professional genealogist and marketing/grant-writing professional? 

[TheHessianHistorian]

5 minutes ago, Ragu said:

@TheHessianHistorian Also wondering if you could talk a bit about your work as a professional genealogist and marketing/grant-writing professional? 

Sure. I'm 31 years old now, and I started doing genealogy as a hobby in high school. In 2011 I started having distant family and friends of the family ask me if they could pay me to do research on their own ancestry for them, so I started doing the work for pay at age 24. In 2013, I became a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists. In addition to running my own business, I have also contracted on-and-off with other companies like Genealogists.com, although I find that I can get better rates and have better communication with my customers when I "cut out the middle-man" and just fly solo. I taught myself to read and write German (along with paleography in Sütterlin and Fraktur scripts) in the process of doing research in old German records. I would originally have to mail requests to various German archives to send me copies of records (if the originals weren't available on sites like Ancestry, FamilySearch, Arcinsys, etc.), and a few years ago Archion.de was launched and they are well on their way to digitizing every extant church record in Germany.

All the while that I was working as a genealogist, I was also working as a political consultant for elected officials and campaigns, mainly on marketing, fundraising, and PR. I also worked as a hired staffer on a few campaigns (one presidential, several congressional, and a few ballot initiatives). The pay was atrocious, especially for the amount of hours I would put in--it was even worse than working as an adjunct faculty in the humanities!  Also, seeing so much dirty dealing behind the scenes in politics was just depressing/disillusioning. So, in early 2015, I decided to put my development-related skills to use in a "real" job and became Development Director for a non-profit that serves individuals with disabilities. I administrate all of their marketing, grant-writing, fundraising, event planning, public relations, business relations, publishing, etc. The pay is all right for a rural area (a little under $40k/year), but historical scholarship has been my all-consuming passion for quite a while now, so I'm willing to take a pay-cut to become a grad student.

[grubyczarnykot]

@TheHessianHistorian I should hire you to do my genealogy!