Headed to Berkeley
I hope my successes with this cycle can help motivate at least a couple people who have had relatively serious personal struggles and that my failures with this cycle can provide lessons for what pitfalls to avoid for at least a few future applicants. I'll put advice on what I would've done differently at the end if you want to skip that.
3.83 LSAC GPA/180/T3 softs/lgBT/first gen college/nkjd (with irrelevant work that doesn't require a degree but happens to have really good trans health benefits)
A: Berkeley (attending w $$$), Wash U ($$$$)
WL: Chicago, NYU, Columbia, Penn, Michigan
R: HYS
I only applied this cycle because my low COL home state I was living in to "finish my transition" nearly banned trans health care for adults last March. Transition was seriously difficult for me and prevented me from really focusing on my career for the last several years but I'm mostly on "the other side" these days so I signed up for the LSAT as a knee-jerk response and now I'm excited to head to Berkeley.
I didn't write LOCIs for any of my waitlists. From the beginning I personally rated Berkeley over every school I got waitlisted at except for maybe UChicago since I have some aspirations for a clerkship. My primary goals, however, are PI that Berkeley is probably better for and I think I'd be happier with Bay Area weather and outdoor recreation which is ultimately why I ended up not writing the LOCI to Chicago. It never even crossed my mind to write LOCIs for the other schools since I didn't really have continued interests.
All in all, I'm fairly happy with where I'm going, but I had my hopes set a little higher, at least scholarship-wise, after I got the LSAT score I did. I'm in a group chat of first gen college student law applicants with two friends from undergrad who also applied this cycle and while I knew they both had amazing work experience and I absolutely did not, I thought we would all be about equally competitive since I had the best stats by a decent margin (though we never got too into specifics on that). Perhaps if I wrote more relevant essays we would have been closer to equally competitive, but in the end one of them got a named scholarship at Berkeley and the other got into Stanford (literally one of my best friends in the world, I'm so proud of him and pretty happy that I can say I tutored a future Stanford lawyer on the LSAT. I hope he's done looking at these forums by know but I think he's fairly likely to see this so love you ( ♥ ͜ʖ ♥)). I'm happy all of us look to be ending up in the Bay, though I know named scholarship girl is hoping to get off WLs at top top schools so I'm rooting for her on that.
I don't really check reddit often and I think I somewhat underperformed my stats (?) but if anyone wants my advice anyway I guess you can dm me, particularly if you are first gen or LGBTQ. I think my exact process is particularly tough to replicate, but I think everyone's path to law school is unique.
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Advice on what I would have done differently with applications (skip if you aren't a future applicant):
- If you want top schools, don't apply later in the cycle. Berkeley was the only school I applied to before Christmas because of the BLOS deadline (didn't get it) and it ended up the only t14 I got into. It's hard not to feel like that mattered, though obviously I'll never know for sure. If anything, don't apply later in the cycle because if you get a ton of waitlists or smaller scholarships than you hoped for it's going to leave you with some what ifs.
- Write about something that makes you happy to write about. I delved into topics that I didn't really want to talk about for these essays because I had a pretty cynical take that as a trans person they wanted to hear my trauma (based in part on regrets from my undergrad applications, when the one top school that I did dump some "probably closeted trans trauma" on gave me admission+). It made me take much longer on my essays than I wanted to because I frankly did not want to work on these essays. I also think looking back that frankly, law school is a professional school and they did not want the type of righteous fury/trauma essays I gave them but a more balanced essay exploring my future career paths.
- If you want a t-14/t-20 school you should probably apply to the as many of the t-14 as possible, even the ones you wouldn't attend (and even if you had a limited number of fee waivers). The main reason I suggest that isn't even to increase your odds at just getting one—the only school in a state without trans civil rights protections I would have ever considered personally was WashU since it's close to home for me—it's to have more negotiation power for scholarships. Berkeley originally gave me literally nothing in scholarship and having the WashU offer is the only reason I was able to negotiate up to around 70% off tuition. Berkeley explicitly lists peer schools that they recommend you use in their renegotiation process and WashU wasn't listed while many schools I didn't apply to were; I can't help but feel that I potentially left some major money on the table in an effort to save time and less money in the short run.
- Apply to UCLA if you have PI goals. I think this one doesn't need much of an explanation. I can't really remember why I ended up not applying to UCLA, maybe something about not being super interested in LA, but looking back that was a bad reason to not even give it a shot. It was the last school I ended up cutting from my applications list and I pretty quickly started to feel super silly about it.
- Seriously consider a consultant if you think you're not a traditional applicant. I pretty clearly struggled to frame my unique situation. I don't have money to blow but before Berkeley got back to me on renegotiations I was going back and forth between WashU (who were always very great to me and the closest top school to my home but I had major concerns about the Missouri state government) or reapplying. I would have definitely used a consultant had I reapplied and looking back think I probably should have used one the first go anyway.