Re: Transferring into JD/MBA programs as a 1L
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31 Jan 2010, 23:28
1) Personally I think your GPA/LSAT qualify you for all programs from 1-14 but keep in mind the Top 14 (in law it's the Top 14, btw) see plenty of kids with your scores. That said, law schools rely much more heavily on LSAT + GPA and are more open to people on the K-JD program. However, they are trying to move away from that model, so the less WE you have, the better your scores will have to be. I was 23 when I went to LS and I can say that nearly everyone who was on the younger side of proto-piranha had some sort of orphan deworming/lemur protection society/non-profit making handknit hats for disabled kittens type background (I worked for the Dems during the disastrous 2000 elections). Originally I thought I was going to be the only one who had committed to a year worth of public servic but I had classmates who had been in Afghanistan, teaching in inner-city classrooms...pretty much all forms of humanitarian work. If you're on the junior side, I'd set to do-gooding if you want to be able to compete with all the other Harvard-law bound 175/3.95 kids who spent the summer parked on the hillsides of Mt. Everest handing out Gatorade to overburdened sherpas. I mean, I'm joshing here but you do kind of have to prove to LS why you want to go there-I liken LS to the military of professional schools-people think they want to go there because they don't know what else to do with their lives and LS are very sensitive to that. Oftentimes the right amount of slaving for low wages actually puts you in a position where you can see how deeply the law can affect people/causes (and can help develop the right frame of mind to be able to explain "why LS"). All I'm saying is, paralegaling for a firm is not going to cut it for Harvard/Columbia etc. unless you have a really compelling story beyond "scores". Non-profitesque work seems to be the biggest story but I also met a lof entreprenurs, theatre kids (the dramaturg ended up winning moot court), engineers, minor sports stars etc. If you want to go to HLS/Columbia etc., you either need a 180/4.0 or r. scores + interesting essay.
2) Business schools, however, require significantly more work experience than law schools and I've noticed that the pursuit of filthy lucre is okay with them. That said, if you have less than 4-5 years WE, then I think score-wise, you probably stand a better chance of getting into LS and then applying for the b-school wherever you end up.
3) I'm just going to go ahead and say that a non-Harvard/Stanford/Wharton law school will never ever let you just gad off to H/S/W to do the MBA in conjunction with their law degree unless those schools have a special agreement with another university the way MIT lets you do an MPA (or whatever) at the Kennedy School or you work out some sort of special deal with them. As I said, you should get into a LS where you also like the business school. With your scores, I would also seriously consider Northwestern. It's a Top 14 with a highly ranked b-school. Other programs you might be interested in would include Michigan (though keep in mind that their law school is bloody incredible and you're going to need a good story apart from your scores), UCLA, NYU, Duke and Cornell. Probably the crazy top LS programs with good B-schools would be H/S/W of course, but also UChicago and Columbia. I would consider these "reach" because both the JD and MBA programs are extremely tough to get into.
4) You should have a really good reason for wanting both these degrees. First because you don't want to look like a degree collector and second because I can attest to law school being extremey rigourous. I mean, now I look back on it with sort of these hazy, fond memories but if I dig under the complacency I remembe how awful it was at times. First, unlike b-school,they don't have grade collusion and as I mentioned in my first post, they can have BRUTAL curves. I went to a B/B- curve school. The assumption is that the lower you get in the ratings that the worse the curve is-and to some extent, that's true as the Tier 2 schools and below really don't want you switching out. That said, UChicago and Georgetown are both highly ranked and it seems like everyone I know from there complains about the brutal grading. OCI is very difficult unless you beat the curve in the majority of your classes because you have to declare grades.
Good luck. My perspective from the lawyer-transitioning-to-finance path is to put your eggs in the MBA basket unless you a) really want to practice law or b) and if you want to practice law, just get the law degree. Put some research into the practice-I know a lot of miserable lawyers who thought the practice of law was going to be lot different. Most of the value in my law degree and experience in terms of business is the 5 years that I've practiced.
My knee-jerk reaction is that I can see why someone would want the law degree after working for a while with an MBA, or I can see why an attorney would want an MBA but I don't necessarily get why someone would want to do both at once and I think the chances of getting into any JD/MBA program (if you make the baseline scores) hinge on having a really really good answer for that.