Columbia on my mind..

boston1993
Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:56:18 +0000

flowerhead:

They’re actually pretty good for public interest. I know this because I’ve seen the lists of people selected for fellowships and important people at prestigious public interest organizations. Again, I wouldn’t take them over CLS (or any other T14), but it’s not necessarily the death knell if one has to go to one of those schools.

Obviously you have the T14>all, which goes for essentially every prospective job. Unless, we’re dealing with situations where one wants to work in Texas, in which case it would be smart to go with Texas over basically everywhere except perhaps YHSC.

When we’re dealing with PI, the t14 is important, but you have to take some schools out. Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Penn, Northwestern, UVA, Duke, and Cornell are the more firm/business-oriented law schools. Not to say that you can’t get PI from these schools, you obviously can, it’s just that the LRAP here is less than stellar and there aren’t too many kids like you that want to go into PI. The best law schools for PI are Yale, followed by Stanford/NYU, followed by Boalt (Cal), followed by Michigan/Gtown. If you can get into Yale, you obviously would go with Yale over any of these schools, even if you get a full ride elsewhere. Yale’s LRAP will basically eliminate all loans. After Yale though, you can basically choose between the other five schools based on your geographic and personal preferences, as not one school would give you a major leg up over the other schools.

However, not everyone can get into the t14. After the t14, you basically want to go to whichever school allows you to graduate with the least debt. In no specific order, there is: Northeastern, American, Lewis&Clark, CUNY, Brooklyn, and UCLA. If you don’t like any of these schools, just go to whichever school will allow you to graduate with the least debt. I wouldn’t really include Fordham, seeing as how they exist solely to feed into NYC BigLaw – I’d go with one of the lower ranked schools I mentioned above where you will get more grants and more of a PI slant.



twinkletwinkle:

all advice and comments are welcome. I would just ask you that if you consider some advice terrible, then please mention some you find more suitable or better. A friend’s sister is currently in Fordham, but I haven’t heard much of her experience there… I’d like to ask her when she gets back though. Please do give me your opinion on good PI programs you know about.

The reason I would consider Fordham is mainly that I come from a catholic background and have attended catholic schools (although not jesuit, both my high school and current univerisity are accredited international catholic schools). But maybe in this line of thought I’d consider Georgetown. Any thoughts on this school choice as well?

I basically answered these questions above. But yeah, GTown is a great choice. I’d go with Gtown over Chicago/NW/Penn/UVA/Duke/Cornell (for PI), for example, but definitely go with Harvard or Columbia over Gtown – unless Gtown offers you a full ride or something like that.