grad / law / med school applications

Hey guys,

I'm posting this because I am finishing up my junior year of undergrad (UMD) and post undergraduate admissions are al I have been able to think about for the last year. I'm looking to get my Masters in Criminology at UMD and go to law school.

Wanted to use this thread to talk about my situation, hear about your guys situations, discuss LSAT / MCAT / GRE, answer questions from younger guys, give / receive advice, etc. Didferent types of admissions are very different, and much more varied (and important) than undergraduate admissions. For example, Law School is all about hard numbers like GPA / LSAT whereas PHD and MBAs want you to have more experience.

My situation is I'm looking at a 3.65 GPA by the end of this semester (thus cemented for the upcoming law school cycle) and am taking the September LSAT (day after my 21st birthday lol). I've only taken one practice LSAT diagnostic and got a 158. Not good but I'm absolutely confident post studying I'll pull a 173+, I don't get nervous during those tests etc.

My plan right now is to apply for both law school and my Master's in the fall. I will get into my Masters no problem, so if I don't get into the law school I want to, I'll accept UMD (and do the program in a year, boost my GPA my senior year, and apply again next cycle. Otherwise, it depends on what law schools I get into. I'm looking at T14s, obviously Yale / Harvard, but realistically I'm thinking like UVA, Columbia, and Georgetown.

What about you all, who are currently experiencing this Hell, have questions, or have successfully applied to a post secondary institution and have advice?

GO
 
Interested in reading some replies here too. I'll be graduating next spring and I expect to finish with a 3.8~ GPA. I don't plan on attending grad school until a few years after earning my bachelors but most of the schools I'm looking at are respected schools with great programs in information security and the like. That cost tho...
 
I'm still going through high school, but I'm at the point where I'm looking at colleges and applying in the fall, and I have a question. What exactly is grad school, and what sort of majors would require grad school? For reference, I plan on doing computer science or physics in college, it might change, but I'm certain I'll do something along those lines.
 

Jimbo

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I'm still going through high school, but I'm at the point where I'm looking at colleges and applying in the fall, and I have a question. What exactly is grad school, and what sort of majors would require grad school? For reference, I plan on doing computer science or physics in college, it might change, but I'm certain I'll do something along those lines.
"Grad" school is anything after your Bachleror's Degree. Usually when I hear people use the unspecific "Grad school" term it's for PhD or Master's (or MBA? But I guess that's Business school). "Professional" School encompasses Law, Medical, Dental, Pharm, etc.

As for your major... Nothing REQUIRES Grad school but with some majors (Ex. Bio/Chem) you can't do too much in terms of a career without at least a Masters. You can def get an Engineering job or Econ/Accounting/etc without doing any Grad school, but anything helps.

Computer science definitely does NOT require grad school - Most of the time you can get a great job right out of undergrad, with some companies even paying you to get your Master's part time.

---

That said, I'm currently in Medical school. Studying for the MCAT sucks, taking the MCAT sucks, and applications... suck. Med school itself though hasn't been bad at all. I can field questions for any Pre-meds!
 

Aldaron

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The only real piece of advice I'd give at this point is actually somewhat of a precursor to the whole admissions process for grad school.

Namely, are you absolutely sure you want to do it, and how do you know? You could tell me "it's been my dream to be a lawyer since my dad is a lawyer and I've dreamed of it since I was 12", but that doesn't mean you know the actual realities of being a lawyer (or a doctor, or a whatever).

I'd strongly recommend anyone who wants to go to any of law / med / mba for their post grad experience get a legitimate, direct working internship / co-op sometime around their junior year in undergrad. By legitimate, direct working internship I don't mean getting coffee, I mean doing as close to the real work as legally possible (you obviously won't be allowed to try a case as an undergraduate intern at Goldman-Sachs' legal internship program, but you can ask for paralegal type work) and making sure it's what you actually want to do.

The reason I stress this is because, especially in the current economy, most people's perceptions of these professions are often off the reality.

Incoming med students don't realize that, while sure, currently they might be able to get 100-300k jobs upon "finishing", that "finishing" means 4 years undergrad (and often a year or 2 more to get a masters to get into a med school), 4 years med school, 3-7 year residency, 1-2 year fellowship, for a range of 11-19 years to finish. Of course, that itself doesn't include the legitimate fear that doctor's salaries could very realistically drop significantly in the incoming 5-10 years (for various reasons I won't get into here), that quality of life all of from med school to after finishing is very, very low for most doctoral professions (high stress, always on call), and that your perception of "my time" gets skewed to the point where you don't believe "my time" exists anymore (ask any number of currently practicing professionals).

Incoming law students don't realize that salary projections for law graduates often only show the higher curve in a binodal or trinodal graph, that the recent influx of law schools has drastically saturated the market and that law graduates from even the T14 are failing to get jobs, let alone acceptable paying ones. That ignores the disappointment in realizing that most of your work as a lawyer isn't anything remotely close to the glamor seen on tv and is mostly paper pushing.

Incoming MBA students don't realize that a majority of their jobs are moving overseas, that their salary ranges are ridiculous (something like 30k to 200k, with an obvious emphasis on the lower end of that range), and that almost all of their work is excel crunching / macro work in addition to meetings where the majority of their time and effort is spent on...bullshitting.

These are just examples and obviously the doom and gloom I'm projecting is only a small part of the story, but everyone thinking about applying to grad schools needs to 100% consider all the negatives and whether the positives outweigh the realistic negatives, because otherwise you are doing yourself a great disservice.

That said, if you come to the conclusion that this is definitely what you want to do, here is my #1 piece of advice: you know all those charts that show the stats for the incoming class? Don't make the mean for test scores / gpa as your baseline for saying something like "hey, my test scores and gpas are in line with XXX school's averages, they might be a realistic reach for me!". ALL of these averages are skewed, by a lot, by specialty admissions (senator kids, foreign king's kids, big business kids, etc.).

If harvard law says it's average gpa is 3.7 with a standard deviation of .1, and it's average lsat score is 173 with a standard deviation of 2, don't assume harvard is a viable reach unless you have both a 3.8 and a 175. All of the elite schools report scores that are skewed by privileged acceptances and you'll be fighting with tons of people who are the same as you, so make all your judgments based on at least 1 full standard deviation above the mean.

If you want my personal story, when I was in undergrad, I was in Case Western's pre-prof med program (basically, have a guaranteed seat in the med school without having to take the mcat). I decided to delay acceptance of the seat in my senior to pursue a masters because in the summer between my junior and senior years I shadowed multiple medical professionals in the Cleveland Clinic and realized, strongly, that I had 0 desire to work that hard (lol). I then interned at Jones Day lawfirm during the summer between my senior year and first year of the ms and also took the LSAT (I did very well on it). My mistake was taking the lsat before finishing the internship because...this time, while I didn't feel overworked, I felt extraordinarily...bored. So I basically scratched that.

I then finished my ms and went to work for JPMorgan in Columbus, with the plan being make them pay for my MBA and go in that direction. After a year and a half of working for JPMorgan I realized...that the sheer bullshitry of the industry and the business field in general was nearly unbearable for me, so I moved to New York and got a job at a start up instead :)

Long story short, make sure you get some practical experience in what you think you want to do, because otherwise, you're gonna be stuck in a field you aren't really interested in with a mountain of debt you did not need in the first place.
 
As someone who was very interested in Medicine, I can absolutely attest to every single point Aldaron said about Med School. You need to be 100% committed to it, because if you're not, you're going to fucking hate it. I know so many doctors and residents who say all the time "Don't do it, I hate my life and my job every single day". Granted, it could just be this specific area, but you should still be extremely passionate of it regardless.
 

Cresselia~~

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As someone who was very interested in Medicine, I can absolutely attest to every single point Aldaron said about Med School. You need to be 100% committed to it, because if you're not, you're going to fucking hate it. I know so many doctors and residents who say all the time "Don't do it, I hate my life and my job every single day". Granted, it could just be this specific area, but you should still be extremely passionate of it regardless.
I agree. At first, I was enrolled in veterinary medicine, but the work load and the dissection made me absolutely hated it.
So I quit in year 2 because I can no longer bear with it.

I originally wanted to apply for biology, but I did better in public exams than I expected, then I looked at the salary of a vet... and I thought it was a good idea to apply for veterinary medicine. I was completely wrong though. EPIC FAIL.
 

Ender

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Also a successful med school applicant and can answer questions about the application process if anyone is interested, either on here or through PMs.

Also, for anyone interested in pursuing medicine, the Student Doctor Network (SDN) is an amazing resource, though it does have its flaws. I will say that it helped me immensely throughout the application process and I would encourage anyone considering a career in medicine to look to see what they have to offer.
 

michael

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it's interesting to me how different grad school applications are in the US compared to australia. here, to get into masters by research or honours (a fourth year full time research undergraduate extension roughly equivalent in qualification to a two year masters by research degree), entry is based around a relatively low required average mark (which is calculated almost entirely from your final year of undergraduate and is equivalent to a gpa of about 2.6) followed by you talking to academic staff in your field and essentially asking them to take you as a student. the difficulty here is convincing the academic you're worth their time. i was lucky enough to take a third year research subject with my professor of choice, who then offered me an honours position, which i accepted at the end of last year, and told me he'd be happy to take me on for a phd, which i plan to start next year.

at my university (university of melbourne, ranked between 30-40th in the world), there's a strong focus towards only completing an honours course as a pre-phd course, and otherwise studying a masters degree. i chose to do honours because i'm certain that i want to start a phd next year.

of course, this is only for graduate degrees by research. application to graduate med/law is broadly similar to the case in the US. interestingly though, most med and law students here prefer to take undergraduate med/law degrees over five years rather than graduate courses, which tend to take closer to seven. most universities also offer an undergraduate engineering course, but melbourne only runs it as a graduate coursework degree, putting it in the same category as law and medicine, at least at my university.
 
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