LSATs and associated babble

[raven]

Do 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 2008 and 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, 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.

Comments

[nerves-patterns.livejournal.com]

Have you looked at any law schools in particular, in regards to financial aid/etc.? Lots of institutions are very willing to provide money/aid to students from abroad - it makes their stats look very good to have international students. I know when I was considering doing my grad work in the U.K., pretty much every institution offered regular aid, and then something extra for international students. But maybe America's not cool like that... ;)

Good luck, whatever you decide. You'll be brilliant, of course.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

America, from what research I've done, is decidedly not cool like that. And it's made worse by the fact that I'm my parents' only child - any aid I get will have to be scholarship-based rather than bursary.

Thank you! :) *loves*