Grad/law school chances? Columbia history grad [3.71 college GPA, 3.62 in history]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Demographics

  • US domestic
  • Columbia University graduate
  • White woman

Grad school/law school chance me?

  • I am a Columbia University graduate with a major in history. I have been doing sociology/history research for all four years of college and have built strong relationships with academics as a result. Wrote an 80-page history thesis this year, but did not get honors (my thesis was pretty boldly left-wing in a way that I don’t think was appreciated, but I ended up getting an A-). I am wondering what I should do in the next year or so before applying to history PhD programs and/or law schools. Any advice appreciated. I would also love pointers for schools with good PhD programs for women’s and prison history. Also, would love to hear people’s thoughts on even attending a PhD program–I’ve heard that the job market for history professors is not great, but I have a lot of ideas for a dissertation based on my undergraduate thesis so I think I have a pretty good pitch and really want to continue writing. My dream is to do a JD/PhD at NYU or UCLA but that is obviously very ambitious! I would love Harvard or Yale but I think my GPA prevents me from attending their law schools…

Coursework

  • 3.71 overall GPA, 3.62 history GPA. Haven’t taken the GRE or LSAT yet because I am still figuring things out, but would like to know if I can get into any good schools. I am a really good standardized test-taker so anticipate to get high scores once I study for a few months. Before applying to grad/law school, I am working as a history museum research assistant. I have some extenuating circumstances–class of 2024, so my entire college experience has happened during COVID, and have had many traumatic experiences in college (two deaths of close friends, many friends who were s/xually ass/ulted and I personally had an experience close to that, campus shut-downs and police brutality on my campus, and had bad insurance in college so didn’t get assessed for ADHD and some other health conditions but plan on doing so ASAP once my new job’s insurance starts), so my low GPA can be explained in a letter. If I apply to PhD programs, I plan to study U.S. women’s/prison history/critical theory/feminist theory. I will be applying next year at the earliest, but plan to take my time in the real world and build my career a bit more before entering into the world of grad school.

Extracurriculars

  • two internships, one at a major history museum and one at a nationally respected public defender. spent most of college doing research. have also worked as a writer/editor for two arts publications, one undergrad and one “real.”

Essays/LORs/Other

  • Excellent writer, not worried about essays. Can get 3+ letters of rec from respected academics/historians/attorneys from Columbia. Great writing samples.*

Cost Constraints / Budget

  • Looking for a fully-funded MA or PhD, ideally law as well, but who knows

Schools

  • Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UMich*
  • Still figuring out safeties… unsure if I should pursue graduate degrees at all so this is all very tentative.
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Law school comes down to two numbers: GPA & LSAT

zero chance at Yale Law and not worth the app fee. An above median LSAT (174+) will get you a good look from Harvard law. Berkeley Law favors GPA over LSAT, so that is a reach; OTOH, Cal love apps from students who have overcome adversity.

PhD programs are all about your undergrad prep and research. Ask your Dept advisor/Chair for doctoral programs where you might be competitive.

The job market for ALL professors is not great.

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You have to decide what you want to do - and if you don’t know yet, take a year or two and work. Many law schools are seeing kids with work experience today.

Law has scholarships but not necessarily funding. I know someone at a private in Florida on full tuition but was full pay at Vandy, as an example.

After you decide what you want, you’ll have a better idea - or you can take the LSAT and see if that points you toward a direction (if you take it and feel ehhhh about law, then you know it’s not right…but if you take it and are exhilarated, it might be the right thing.

No need to rush…take time and grow your post college resume in the meantime.

PS - going to Columbia doesn’t necessarily help you get into a top law school - the top schools have kids from hundreds of undergrad colleges. It’s GPA and LSAT, not the where you went necessarily.

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Are you comfortable sharing the name of the PD clinic ?

Then you need to prepare for & take the GRE.

As presented, your “extenuating circumstances” are not a valid excuse for any deficiency regarding you (they are for the victims, however).

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Your GPA will make it difficult to get into the law schools you mentioned. You’ll probably need around a 174 (maybe higher) on the LSAT. That’s extremely ambitious.

Unfortunately, your plan to explain your low GPA probably won’t have the same impact as it may in an undergraduate application.

Good luck.

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This is important. There are very few tenure track jobs - most are adjuncting which often does not pay a living wage nor offer job security. In my personal opinion, a PhD in the humanities is generally a bad idea unless you really love your field (like borderline obsession), would feel personally unfulfilled without it, and have a solid back up for a non-academic career following graduation.

PhD programs are often fully funded; MA and JD programs are rarely so.

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Your professors will be the best source of info about doctoral programs. And I’ll bet you dinner that every single one of them tells you not to do it. The job market isn’t horrible…in some fields it is non-existent. As in 6 openings per year in the entire country (that’s thousands of colleges). But your professors can tell you where you fall in the academic sweepstakes and which programs are possible for you.

Law school…it’s gpa plus LSAT. Your extenuating circumstances won’t move the needle. Growing up with an incarcerated parent; personal experience with homelessness or being in foster care…these are things that contribute to your understanding of the legal system in a way that can overcome a subpar GPA. Having a tough go of it in college? Not likely to help much.

So go to any of the online sites which shows where students with your GPA end up and what LSAT score you’ll need and that will help you target.

A few years in the workforce will help you figure out what you want to do when you grow up. Grad school is a terrible place to do that figuring out so kudos to you for getting a job and launching!!!

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Depend on where she wants to do he PhD. Many PhD programs no longer require the GRE.

It is miserable, and the advice that most responsible potential advisors give is “don’t do it”.
Even if you are accepted into one of the top PhD programs in the country, the majority of jobs will be in colleges where funding for social sciences and the humanities are constantly being cut, where most of the new jobs are as part-time adjuncts for ridiculously low salaries, and, in many cases, you will have politicians sticking their noses into what you teach.

There were 274 Tenure-track jobs posted a year in History last year, and 268 non-TT jobs, while almost 900 new PhDs were bestowed. This has been going on for about a decade, so you can imagine the glut that there is of PhDs looking for jobs. Some of those TT positions are actually senior positions, so they are looking for somebody with tenure. New PhDs will also be competing with people who already have positions but want to leave their present position. In most case the position that they leave will be replaced with a non-tenure track position, so the fact that they are leaving doesn’t open up a new position for anybody else.

As for your chances at being accepted to a good program. You have a HUGE advantage in that your undergrad is from an Ivy. When applying for PhD programs at another Ivy, that is one of the basic requirements. You can be accepted from other college, but you would need to have done something amazing.

The issue is that at the very top programs, like Columbia, Yale, etc, what they like seeing is a GPA of over 3.75. However, some programs, even good ones like Georgetown, are fine with GPAs over 3.5. Check what the requirement of each program that interests you are.

But, really, if your plan is to get a PhD and then get a faculty position, don’t do it. Maybe if you can get into Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, U Michigan, Chicago, etc. If you are thinking of attending a lower ranked one, your chances attending up with a TT position are tiny.

Columbia has one of the top history programs in the country, and their placement rate of students who have received PhDs 2000-2021 is 54% who ended up with Tenure Track positions. Yale writes that around 50% of their PhDs end up with TT positions. These are the programs with the highest rate of PhDs who are hired to TT positions.

Most graduate programs will write “we have excellent placement statistics, and here are 20 graduate who got TT positions”. They never provide the statistics, though, which tells you that they are not objectively good. I mean, if, on average, 20% of all History PhDs get a TT positions, a rate of 30% is pretty high. But few graduate students will apply if they knew that only 30% of the graduates of that program end up with a TT position.

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I’m a history professor, so I can probably advise here on history Ph.D. programs (not law school, beyond what others have said).

You’ve heard right about the job market in history. It is beyond terrible, except in a few fields in which departments are trying to add breadth to their faculty and course offerings, either due to student interest or driven by new directions in scholarship and/or equity-driven initiatives. But even for those fields, the job market is still pretty bad. It is also extremely difficult to get into grad programs for that reason. Lower-ranked programs will take more students than they can place, but higher-ranked programs don’t want a lot of unemployed Ph.D.s running around, so they limit admissions significantly.

Because of the state of the academic job market, you should look for programs that offer some training for non-academic career paths. I’m not talking about MAs in public history (though you might eventually consider that as an alternative), necessarily, but rather academic programs that offer resources and support for students who decide to pursue non-traditional paths like museum work, editing, archival work, digital humanities, etc. You’ll want options.

Your grades might make it hard to get into a top program, unless your GPA within the history major is higher than your overall GPA. However, even if you get in, GPA and scores are the most important factors in determining funding levels. Not that you won’t get funding, but it might be delayed, or it might not be the top funding package.

You don’t apply to universities so much as programs. So look for programs with strengths in women’s history and gender studies (sometimes, women’s history might be housed in a more interdisciplinary department like gender and sexuality studies, with faculty who have joint appointments with single-discipline departments). UW Madison, UCLA, Minnesota, and Rutgers should be on your list. I don’t know if there are programs that specialize in prison history, which isn’t really a field so much as a topic that falls within other fields – for that area of study, you should look for professors with overlapping research interests. But the best scholars in prison history are not necessarily working in top graduate programs (or in departments that offer Ph.D.s). So when you’re thinking about that level of specialization, it’s fine if an advisor’s specific areas of interest don’t match perfectly with yours. It’s common (once your own graduate work is underway) to reach out to scholars in your area of interest at other universities. It’s also possible to ask them to serve as an outside reader for your dissertation, depending on your department’s policies (I teach in an undergrad-only department but have served on dissertation committees for Ph.D. students at other universities).

It’s great to have ideas for new research directions based on your undergrad thesis, but leave yourself open to exploring new fields or new paths of inquiry within your broad field of interest. An undergraduate thesis is a very shallow step into very deep waters. You don’t know yet what you don’t know. It’s far more typical for a dissertation to grow out of an MA thesis or a graduate seminar paper, because those projects are more likely to engage the field in a more sophisticated and scholarly way.

The best people to help you out are the professors and undergrad advisers in your department, so you should ask them the questions you’ve posted here.

Finally, I would absolutely support the idea of taking a few years off and working before entering grad school. Doing so would allow you to pursue graduate work with more maturity, focus, and stamina. and it would give you some time to think about your next steps. (I did this – five years between my BA and my Ph.D. program – and have never regretted it.)

This is not necessarily true. I know lots of people who’ve gotten Ivy (and similar) Ph.D.s who did not attend Ivies as undergrads. Many of them got their BAs at top LACs or top flagships (UCLA, UNC Chapel Hill, Michigan, etc.), but plenty of them came from other, lesser-known programs. You’re right, though, that any accepted student to a top program must have been a pretty top-notch undergrad and must write a standout personal statement for their application.

This is absolutely true. Tenure-track faculty positions are disappearing faster than they are being created. That trend will accelerate once we hit the “demographic cliff” in a few years. Not only that, but most new Ph.D.s can expect to do some time in a non-TT position before landing a TT job, if they ever do so.

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OP: prepare for & take the GRE as it is accepted by both law schools & by other graduate programs.

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I don’t know how much things have changed in grad school and law school admissions, but maaaany years ago, I got into grad school and law school with from a similar university with a similar GPA. Differences and unknowns: my GPA in my major was higher and my grades showed an upward trajectory; my GRE and LSAT scores were great. I join others in recommending you plan to work for a year or two or more to figure out what you want to do. If you’re leaning toward law school, I recommend looking for work as a legal assistant or paralegal or similar to get a better sense of the options. I ended up in law school in part because the job market was a lot better than the job market for social science PhDs - and it sounds like it’s only gotten harder. Don’t go to law school because you don’t know what else to do - but if you think you like the work and are willing to stay in law at least long enough to pay off loans (which obviously can be significant), it can be a great career.

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Why do you want to go to law school? It’s not clear from your OP. Will you need loans to pay for law school?

If yes, then you will need to get a high paying job on graduation. (Which means you need to go to a top 10-ish law school, or be at the top of your class at other schools). Many find BigLaw to be soul-destroying, and a majority of lawyers are depressed. So I think it’s important to really know that you want to be a lawyer.

Accordingly, I think it’s a good idea to work as a paralegal in a big firm so you can see what it’s really like, from the inside.

And, if teaching is what really interests you, you might consider a teaching fellowship position at a boarding school. These usually are for 2 years, have a lot of support and mentoring, and some have you earning an almost free masters at the end of it (from UPenn or Mt. Holyoke, there may be others).

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You’re right, of course. A PhD from Berkeley or U Mich has the same cache as most Ivies, though HYPS have their own sub-brand of “super-prestige” to a certain degree. I also didn’t mention the fact that there are a dozen LACs which have better placement in top PhD programs than any of most prestigious undergraduate programs. An undergraduate from Swarthmore graduates has the same cache as an undergraduate degree from Yale at many top PhD programs.

Actually there was a person on the GradStudent forums who did the legwork in 2018, figuring out where PhD students at the top private PhD programs did their undergraduates. He didn’t include the the top PhD programs at public universities like Berkeley, UNC, or UMich unfortunately, even though these are the equivalents of at least a few of those programs.

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All of this analysis is well and good. But doesn’t change reality on the ground- a college looking to hire a history professor is likely NOT going to view every candidate’s skills and interests as fungible. So if the department chair is replacing the retiring expert in Pre and post WWII/Cold War/European History, the OP’s interests don’t align with the vacancy, is likely not even going to be considered whether as a post-doc, adjunct, or tenure track. The discipline matters. The subject matter expertise matters.

I’m going to guess that if the OP’s professors were enthusiastic about the chances at a solid doctoral program, OP would know it by now. Professors don’t wait until graduation week to tap someone on the shoulder to say “stop by my office so I can hear about your future plans”. I saw this- even 45 years ago- when I was on the “non-receiving” end of the tap. Not history- Classics. But the job market in Classics was about as abysmal as History is right now. I had just won a major departmental award (papers were submitted anonymously so the faculty judges did not know who belonged to which piece of research and they were supposed to recuse themselves if they had supervised or recognized the work in question).

I won top prize. It was a big deal in the insular world of Antiquity. So I figured “I’m good at this. I’m going to get a PhD”. So off I went to the chair of the department to sit down and map out my future. He was very sweet and very kind and poured me tea and told me gently that “the list” of students who were getting enthusiastic and table-pounding recommendations had been established months earlier (I was not on the list, prize or no prize). And that of course I could apply, and he’d be happy to help figure out a good match for me (implying that Chicago, Berkeley, Oxford, i.e. the top schools would not be on that list) and that perhaps getting a job and figuring out an alternative path might be the way to go. I already had a job for the next year-- just hadn’t had time to worry about grad school senior year, but I was pretty surprised to hear that there was a pecking order in the department and that I was sitting WAY down on the ladder.

So the first step is a candid discussion with professors who know the OP. If the message is “the job market is bad but if anyone can crack it, it’s you and I’d happily pick up the phone to call a colleague at any of the top programs”-- then ignore me as an old cranky boomer that doesn’t know anything. But if the message is a polite version of “we have a list and you aren’t on it” then that’s a really good reality check.

I’d have been a terrible fit in academia btw. (I am one of the only members of a very large family without a PhD so I see it up close). Business school was four semesters- and I got impatient with that taking too long. The years devoted to a dissertation on an esoteric field that 14 people in the world cared about would have been torture. And now in retrospect, my professors saw that impatience even though I didn’t see it in myself. My brain is wired for the business world. Analyze a problem. Propose a fix- sell the fix to the people who need to be sold on it. Go do it. If it works- fantastic. If it doesn’t work- try something else. You’ll get it eventually. Boom boom boom. Speed counts. Being decisive counts. Being a good cheerleader and salesperson is key, no matter what role you’re in.

None of these qualities would have moved the needle on my career comparing “The concept of the deity in Greco-Roman theology compared to Akkadian-Sumerian belief systems”. Or whatever I ended up doing as a dissertation topic.

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My PhD is from Berkeley and getting back to the job market question…Very, VERY few of my former classmates currently have TT jobs…So a big name doesn’t really help when the jobs just aren’t there.

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From reading the OP’s post, it seems like she is looking for a full scholarship. Based on her description, a career path in public interest and not Big Law.

I would not associate Big Law with “pretty boldly left”.

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Other than the big firms which have enthusiastically embraced Jan. 6 defense, the Supreme Court’s tilt to the right, represent folks like Steve Bannon, etc. I think many big law lawyers (and their firms) tilt left. Some extremely left.

I don’t think this is a good reason (or a “good enough” reason) to avoid Big Law. Lots of different firms in lots of different places representing all kinds of clients. And the incredible work that folks at the Innocence Project have done representing people who have been wrongfully imprisoned (many of their clients are indigent and members of minority groups who had “public defenders” who proved to be incompetent) has a huge assist by Big Law lawyers who work on these cases pro bono with the full support of their Big Law firms. Yes, it’s easy to represent death row clients for a few hundred hours in a final appeal when you are raking in millions representing deep pocket corporate interests… but the fact remains that some of the big wins the Innocence Projects have lodged would not have been possible without the work of the big firms. When a mid-level associate gets flexed onto one of these pro bono cases it could be one of three different matters they are handling. The public defender might be handling 60 at a time.

Nobody should avoid BigLaw because you “think” you might not like the politics of your co-workers. Avoid it because you aren’t interested in corporate law, M&A, or whatever. But you’d be surprised by the politics of many of your colleagues.

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Absolutely. And you can’t predict it year-to-year. The trick is to have a marketable dissertation topic in a marketable field, but it takes a long time to write a dissertation, and when you’re starting out, you can’t predict what will be in the most demand when you go on the job market.

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That’s 100% true. However, what few jobs there are will go to applicants with PhDs from this small set of programs. It’s not “attending one of these programs will likely result in a TT position”, it’s “if you want any cha nce at all of getting a TT position, attend one of these programs”.

It is also easier to get non-academic jobs that prefer somebody with a PhD if the PhD is from a prestigious university. However, unlike academic jobs which look at the prestige in the field, these places will look at name recognition. So while a search committee will be more likely to invite a person with a PhD from Berkeley than one with a PhD from Dartmouth for an interview, a non-profit may prefer the person with a PhD from an Ivy.

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Im just reading between the lines that the OP may be more interested in Public Interest full time and not Pro Bono work on the side while racking up tons of billable hours representing big banks.

I’m also not sure ADHD and law school is a great combination either but I could be completely wrong.

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