LSATs and associated babble
Sep. 24th, 2007 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenDo I want to restore from saved draft, asks LJ. I say yes and get this:
"Linguistic peculiarity of the day: cups of coffee are hot. They radiate heat. Katee Sackhoff and Paul Gross are hot. They radiate hotness. Why is this?"
Er. I don't know either. I haven't been getting much sleep lately.
That's not, amazingly enough, what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the LSAT. And it's a very dull topic of conversation, forgive me, but it is five days away and talking about it is sort of becoming imperative.
Also, for the first time ever, I get to explain something for the benefit of the Brits on the flist and not the Americans, which may or may not be a harbinger of things to come. Anyway. The LSAT is the Law School Admissions Test, and it's designed to help American law schools decide whom they want to admit. As I have discovered over the last few months, law in the States is a post-graduate degree that requires a BA, but is all you need - i.e., none of the British stuff that follows an undergrad in law. You just take the bar exam.
And, well - American law school. Is this something I really want to do? I don't know right now. I find law interesting. I think I'd make a good lawyer. But I'm not ready for the real world yet; I want to be a student, I want to learn, for longer. And it's time for something different. I went to the same school for seven years, I've been in Oxford two years, and it will be three - I've always lived in England, I've always been surrounded by British culture. The thought of moving countries, moving continents, being a cog in a different system - it's a lovely thought, exciting and scary in equal proportions, and that's what I want.
There are disadvantages. One of them is, of course, that in three years from now I'd have to make a very serious decision - do I want to spend my life in Britain or America? (And it would be more important for me than most, because an American law degree entitles you to practise law in America.)
The other disadvantage is, of course, financial. It's a whole huge ginormous amount of money, and I wouldn't be entitled to any type of financial aid. But this is, actually, less of a problem than it could be. My parents can support me - and are, shockingly and reassuringly, keen to support me. (There's the culture I was born into rearing its pretty head.) And more than that, if I then go forth and get the sort of job that most people who graduate top American law schools tend to get, then I can pay them back, without difficulty and with interest, whether they want me to or not.
All in all, there are more pros than cons. And the thought of it - it makes me smile. And that's a pretty decent argument in favour of applying. Whether I decide to go on with this plan, I don't know for sure. But I'm applying.
But that was the question of is this something I want to do. Is this something I can do? And this here's the problem. One of the things I've been saying from the beginning is that with this amount of money, this many thousands of miles, is that I want to only apply to law schools that I really, really want to go to. And because I am the way I am - and probably always will be - this means that I'm applying to law schools that are exceedingly difficult to get into.
Basically, Harvard, Columbia and Yale. I'm not picking a "safe" school, I'm not making this easy. And here's the battle between my head and my ego. Can I do this? I honestly don't know. I don't have a lot of the indicators at my disposal - I don't have a university transcript, god bless Oxford, I don't have a GPA (er - still not sure what a GPA is), I don't even have what the Americans call a high-school diploma. (In America, you graduate high school! This is the source of a pretty bitter dispute between me and my cousin Nupur, more of which at another time. Briefly: she wants a huge family focus on her and big ol' reunion because she's graduating high school in 2008and she's being a brat. Er. I'm kinda doing something important during the summer of 2008, too. Okay, enough on that.)
Where was I? Yep - I don't know if I can do this. I'm too ordinary. I'm just - me. The highest score I've ever got on an LSAT paper - hopefully, with five more days' practice, it'll become my average score - is 170, which is still quite average. (It was actually my magic marker - if I couldn't hit 170, I told myself, I'm being delusional about my chances.) I don't think it's going to get much better. Basically, the LSAT is Verbal Reasoning for the eleven-plus scaled up by ten years,and appropriately harder. If I may be egotistical a moment, I'm one of the few people to have ever got into Merchants' with a perfect verbal reasoning score, but you see, that's a problem - some of it is non-verbal reasoning, and I kind of sort of really, really suck at that.
And in addition to all of that, I'm likely to be the youngest applicant for each law school I apply to. Is this a good idea? I have no idea.
But still. I'm gonna try. And this is where I need your help, American denizens of higher education. Most of these things want me to provide a personal statement. What the hell do you write for one of these things? I did a personal statement for UCAS, which I think was a very different sort of thing. I don't know what to write! And Yale want a 250-word essay on a topic of my choice (and the choice itself, they say, can prove illuminating for the admissions committee) and I'm at complete loss. Some of you guys have done this, right? Please to be sending help. Pretty please.
Okay. Enough, really. I should go away and actually do some work for the bloody thing.
And now for something completely different, while I'm here. Over the last few days,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
foulds and I have been finishing off our (mostly his) OULES script of Virgil's Aeneid done as a musical comedy without the music (paraphrasing PG Wodehouse there, but you know what I mean). Reading it through the other night, I paused on the infamous beginning of the flashback scene, where Aeneas and his Trojans have just arrived in Carthage and are being given dinner by Dido and her court. Tell us the story of the fall of Troy, she says.
Aeneas hesitates, and begins. And into my head, fully-formed, appeared the phrase: "I first arrived in Carthage on the trail of the killers of my father..."
foulds says I can put it in. And, okay, Anchises is dead by this point, but it's not accurate so I'll have to alter it (suggestions of what the phrasing should be are gratefully appreciated). Still. I feel good about it. I want that fact to go down as a matter of record.
Okay. Back to work. Tomorrow I have to get up early, go and yell at the DSA, buy a scientific calculator and go into work to explain why there is a piece of paper in the till that reads "oh god oh god just kill me now." I lead a very exciting life.
"Linguistic peculiarity of the day: cups of coffee are hot. They radiate heat. Katee Sackhoff and Paul Gross are hot. They radiate hotness. Why is this?"
Er. I don't know either. I haven't been getting much sleep lately.
That's not, amazingly enough, what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the LSAT. And it's a very dull topic of conversation, forgive me, but it is five days away and talking about it is sort of becoming imperative.
Also, for the first time ever, I get to explain something for the benefit of the Brits on the flist and not the Americans, which may or may not be a harbinger of things to come. Anyway. The LSAT is the Law School Admissions Test, and it's designed to help American law schools decide whom they want to admit. As I have discovered over the last few months, law in the States is a post-graduate degree that requires a BA, but is all you need - i.e., none of the British stuff that follows an undergrad in law. You just take the bar exam.
And, well - American law school. Is this something I really want to do? I don't know right now. I find law interesting. I think I'd make a good lawyer. But I'm not ready for the real world yet; I want to be a student, I want to learn, for longer. And it's time for something different. I went to the same school for seven years, I've been in Oxford two years, and it will be three - I've always lived in England, I've always been surrounded by British culture. The thought of moving countries, moving continents, being a cog in a different system - it's a lovely thought, exciting and scary in equal proportions, and that's what I want.
There are disadvantages. One of them is, of course, that in three years from now I'd have to make a very serious decision - do I want to spend my life in Britain or America? (And it would be more important for me than most, because an American law degree entitles you to practise law in America.)
The other disadvantage is, of course, financial. It's a whole huge ginormous amount of money, and I wouldn't be entitled to any type of financial aid. But this is, actually, less of a problem than it could be. My parents can support me - and are, shockingly and reassuringly, keen to support me. (There's the culture I was born into rearing its pretty head.) And more than that, if I then go forth and get the sort of job that most people who graduate top American law schools tend to get, then I can pay them back, without difficulty and with interest, whether they want me to or not.
All in all, there are more pros than cons. And the thought of it - it makes me smile. And that's a pretty decent argument in favour of applying. Whether I decide to go on with this plan, I don't know for sure. But I'm applying.
But that was the question of is this something I want to do. Is this something I can do? And this here's the problem. One of the things I've been saying from the beginning is that with this amount of money, this many thousands of miles, is that I want to only apply to law schools that I really, really want to go to. And because I am the way I am - and probably always will be - this means that I'm applying to law schools that are exceedingly difficult to get into.
Basically, Harvard, Columbia and Yale. I'm not picking a "safe" school, I'm not making this easy. And here's the battle between my head and my ego. Can I do this? I honestly don't know. I don't have a lot of the indicators at my disposal - I don't have a university transcript, god bless Oxford, I don't have a GPA (er - still not sure what a GPA is), I don't even have what the Americans call a high-school diploma. (In America, you graduate high school! This is the source of a pretty bitter dispute between me and my cousin Nupur, more of which at another time. Briefly: she wants a huge family focus on her and big ol' reunion because she's graduating high school in 2008
Where was I? Yep - I don't know if I can do this. I'm too ordinary. I'm just - me. The highest score I've ever got on an LSAT paper - hopefully, with five more days' practice, it'll become my average score - is 170, which is still quite average. (It was actually my magic marker - if I couldn't hit 170, I told myself, I'm being delusional about my chances.) I don't think it's going to get much better. Basically, the LSAT is Verbal Reasoning for the eleven-plus scaled up by ten years,and appropriately harder. If I may be egotistical a moment, I'm one of the few people to have ever got into Merchants' with a perfect verbal reasoning score, but you see, that's a problem - some of it is non-verbal reasoning, and I kind of sort of really, really suck at that.
And in addition to all of that, I'm likely to be the youngest applicant for each law school I apply to. Is this a good idea? I have no idea.
But still. I'm gonna try. And this is where I need your help, American denizens of higher education. Most of these things want me to provide a personal statement. What the hell do you write for one of these things? I did a personal statement for UCAS, which I think was a very different sort of thing. I don't know what to write! And Yale want a 250-word essay on a topic of my choice (and the choice itself, they say, can prove illuminating for the admissions committee) and I'm at complete loss. Some of you guys have done this, right? Please to be sending help. Pretty please.
Okay. Enough, really. I should go away and actually do some work for the bloody thing.
And now for something completely different, while I'm here. Over the last few days,
foulds and I have been finishing off our (mostly his) OULES script of Virgil's Aeneid done as a musical comedy without the music (paraphrasing PG Wodehouse there, but you know what I mean). Reading it through the other night, I paused on the infamous beginning of the flashback scene, where Aeneas and his Trojans have just arrived in Carthage and are being given dinner by Dido and her court. Tell us the story of the fall of Troy, she says.Aeneas hesitates, and begins. And into my head, fully-formed, appeared the phrase: "I first arrived in Carthage on the trail of the killers of my father..."
foulds says I can put it in. And, okay, Anchises is dead by this point, but it's not accurate so I'll have to alter it (suggestions of what the phrasing should be are gratefully appreciated). Still. I feel good about it. I want that fact to go down as a matter of record. Okay. Back to work. Tomorrow I have to get up early, go and yell at the DSA, buy a scientific calculator and go into work to explain why there is a piece of paper in the till that reads "oh god oh god just kill me now." I lead a very exciting life.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2007-09-25 03:35 am (UTC)More so than Oxford? *wry smile* Is such a thing possible?
I don't know much about Oxford. But I know that if Harvard is even half like what I've heard, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But I tend to think that kind of hostile academic environment should not exist.
Ah, thank you for this. My main interest right now - probably will change, given my propensity for being interested in everything - is jurisprudence. I think Harvard are good for this, but I probably should check.
Oh, man, I so understand the problems with being interested in everything.
But, seriously, the rule of thumb here in the states for post-college schooling (be it grad school or med school or law school) is you really need to be sure you want it. You have to want to be there, want the degree, and want to use the degree to do something. At least in my grad school experiences, people who take a year or two (or more) before grad school and do something else are MUCH happier and more content with there post-college programs. Much more sure it's what they really want.
And, yes, it would help a lot if you can be fairly certain what type of law you want to do and find schools good at that. Because there might be a smaller, less known school out there that's actually excellent in that field and where you'd be much happier. [I'm speaking vaguely from experience here. I went to a science and engineering college that is on par with MIT and Caltech but is smaller and younger and less known and I got as good, if not better, of an education as I would have at those places with better name recognition, and was much happier than I would have been if I'd accepted Caltech's offer. It really is worth exploring those other options]
Good luck! I'm sure you'll do awesome however you end up.
no subject
on 2007-09-27 06:32 pm (UTC)You have to want to be there, want the degree, and want to use the degree to do something.
That's the thing, though, isn't it? I'm not sure what I want, so I'm applying to see if this is something I can want. I don't know anything about my future plans right now, except that I need them - I leave Oxford in a little less than nine months, and that's it.
Well, we'll see. Thank you for the good luck wishes! I'll probably need 'em.