Replies to: College List for Transfer

• #1

  DreamSchlDropout Registered User Posts: 731 Member

  June 2016

  Much of what you are doing is overkill. No one is going to look at your LSAT or GRE scores for undergraduate transfer admissions. You will also have accrued enough credits by the time you transfer that your high school performance will be irrelevant as well. What matters most is your undergraduate transcript, which should be stellar if you continue your 3.9 GPA performance thus far.
  
  Given your admirable CC performance so far, make sure you do all of the following:
  
  - Find out if your CC has a Phi Theta Kappa chapter, and what it takes to get into it. Many schools have scholarships for transferring PTK students.
  
  - Read up on the MassTransfer program. You could potentially earn 2 years of free tuition at a public Mass university if you finish your AA at the community college with your GPA. Along with guaranteed admission, guaranteed credit transfer, and no essay required.
  
  - Talk to the counseling department at your CC about your transfer options. They may know about all sorts of additional programs I haven't mentioned here.
  

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• #2

  Dustyfeathers Registered User Posts: 3,078 Senior Member

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  Cornell takes transfers from CCs. You would need to know what you want to study there. You'd apply stating that you want to be in X program at Cornell CALS, if indeed that's where you want to be.
  
  IMO regardless of the school basically you would want to look into first what you can afford and then what you want to study. That will help you narrow your choices. Most schools take transfer students.
  
  The supermatch feature on this site may help you narrow your choices.
  
  It never hurts to include your LSAT score with your application. Your LSAT is stellar and you may want to see if there are joint law-school and undergrad programs. Barnard has one, but I sense that you identify as male, not female. You may want to look for other universities with joint undergrad and Law programs.
  
  Okay, I just googled it. As it turns out, it's not just Barnard with the joint JD degree, but Columbia. You may want to consider (if you can afford it) the Columbia GS program with joint degree law school. You'd need to contact each school's admissions department separately to see if the GS program and the Law School work together in this way. I should think that the homeless-to-harvard narrative that you have, potentially, may work for getting aid from GS, but that's entirely speculation. Aid would more likely be a matter of what's available and what you need. It looks like Penn also has one, but it's unclear if Penn LPS is included in that program--Pen LPS is the school (Like GS) for adult students. I've heard (with no way to verify) that aid at GS and LPS is sometimes spotty.
  
  One word of caution about law degrees, cost of law school can be quite high, even at low-tier schools. Universities that are struggling have used their law schools as tuition generators. (Google: An Expensive Law Degree and No place to use it, NYTimes) Schools below the very highest tier have pretty lousy employment records, meaning that you may not actually work in the field of law and you may have lots of debt. That doesn't mean that there are no jobs in law. There are, and there are good jobs in law, but as with many fields, getting those jobs is extremely competitive. Law used to be considered a sort of safety career, but no more. Your LSAT is extremely competitive, IMO. The ABA lists the employment records of various law schools. Top tier law schools can also provide debt forgiveness if you decide to go into public interest law, which tends to not pay as well as the private sector at least at first. Public sector law jobs can lead to all kinds of things, very well paying, high prestige, the whole shebang, just as corporate law jobs can lead to great things. The career is what you make of it, but make sure that you're getting a good start by choosing your law school wisely. They are not all the same!
  
  Here is a list of other accelerated JD programs.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_JD_program

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• #3

  Dustyfeathers Registered User Posts: 3,078 Senior Member

  July 2016

  Just googled how long LSAT scores last. 5 years it looks like. You may be able to slip right into law school, and a really good one at that, with a 176. Like that's (I'm guestimating) a Top 5 law school level, if you keep your grades up. For law school, you can pretty much major in anything as an undergrad. That being said, if law looks like a direction you'd like to choose, you may want to do an internship in your area of interest with law in the back of your mind. Engineers go to law school; nurses go; artists go and do arts-related law; theater majors; language and area-studies major go; Native American-interested people attend law school; advocacy-oriented people, such as for issues of gender, environment, global warming, immigration, homelessness, you name it.
  
  As you move forward, you may want to think about law and your area of interest and see if they combine well. Top law schools will embrace whatever your area of interest.

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