I just wanted to come back and update you on how my cycle went. About a week after I posted about my frustrations, one of my two outstanding applications offered me admission with a full tuition scholarship. It felt so good that a school had finally acknowledged my value as a student. It is not in the T-14, but close. I visited the school and then created a spreadsheet with all the things that were important to me in a school, including things like location and price of living. Then I created an equation to weight the items according to importance (i.e. career outcomes is more important than whether the school has good hiking nearby). I then filled out my spreadsheet for all 9 schools I applied to and had Excel automatically run the calculation for each school. This gave me important information about which waitlists to drop immediately and which schools to stay on the waitlist for. I don't want to go into BigLaw so my attitude isn't T-14 or bust. Also, I have a lot of confidence in my ability to succeed at any of the law schools I applied to so I'm not expecting the name brand of the school to do the heavy lifting of launching my career.
Ultimately, I visited the University of Minnesota, where I was offered the full ride. It felt really good to me and I deposited. I found that I was no longer motivated to write letters of continuing interest to the schools who waitlisted me. There's just something about being someone's first choice that feels better to me than begging to be let in off the waitlist. After their second deposit deadlines the waitlist schools checked in to see if I still wanted to be on their waitlists. I asked one of them to remove me and told the other two that they could keep me on until June 30th, but was clear with them that I would expect a substantial scholarship to compete with what I had on the table. As we got closer to the end of June both of them told me that they weren't expecting many if any spots to open up on their waitlist and closed out my application. And that felt good to me.
I am very excited about attending the University of Minnesota, especially on a full ride scholarship. I worked hard on the LSAT with that goal in mind. AND they are adding a clinic in appellate law, which was really the one thing that was keeping me interested in the schools I waitlisted since appellate law is my goal. Sometimes in life you have to set yourself up for success and then allow that success to manifest, even if it doesn't happen as quickly or in exactly the same way that you envisioned. A school that started out as one that was interesting but that I wasn't crazy about turned out to have everything I wanted in a school and gave me the message that I would be an excellent fit with their scholarship offer. Thank you to Powerscore for your excellent training that helped me set myself up for this kind of success.
Also, Dave and Jon, thank you so much for including my question in your Student Questions Mailbag: Law School Questions Part 3 here
https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/podcas ... ns-part-3/. It felt good to hear you acknowledge my concerns as being common this year. And it turned out that you were right, good things were on the way for me.
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This year's slow and competitive cycle is an aftereffect of
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