Why cornell??? Any answers???

mikeyc765
Tue, 20 Nov 2012 08:52:32 +0000

For top law schools, it’s fairly well-established that a high GPA, regardless of major difficulty is what matters most. Ideally they would control for difficulty, but really all that means if that if you get an A in a hard major, your chances are higher, but a B in that same major won’t be adjusted accordingly because admissions wants A’s. That said, my advice wasn’t to pick an “easy” major, but merely one where it is manageable to get a high GPA. For example, I would not advise someone pursue engineering as a pre-law track because you can be an excellent engineering student, and still have a GPA under 3.5. If you are passionate about both law and engineering, you may have to temper your expectations of the type of law school you will get into, or work extra hard to get A’s in your engineering courses, which for some may cause excessive stress. It’s important to be realistic and weigh the trade-offs between goals. If law school was my priority, I would not also go for engineering. It also means that when you are picking your elective courses, you may want to bias your choices a bit towards ones with higher grades…

I’m glad I didn’t want to do law school and confront those trade-offs. Some of my favorite courses were hard electives where I didn’t put undue stress on myself to get an A. As an example, I took a 300-level music course and got a B yet I probably worked harder in that course than any other at Cornell. I woke up at 7am every weekday and listened/analyzed music for 2 hours. At the beginning of the semester I was completely lost in the subject, at the end, I got an A- on my final paper. The pre-req for the class was the ability to read music, but really music theory should have been necessary. Nonetheless, I learned a lot and I will carry with me for the rest of my life better skills to appreciate a greater variety of music.