Easier than Clearing IEDs – Winning Admission to Law School

After you’ve done route clearance in Afghanistan, Letters of Recommendation just don’t seem as tough.  But, having the courage to face a challenge and the knowledge needed to succeed can be two different things.  Wonder how to get into a top Law School? Should you consider the Funded Legal Education Program?  Yale and Harvard Law School Admit (and Service to School Ambassador) Brian Czarnecki tells us how he did it.  For further Law School advice, check out our interview with Dan Areshenko.

After Action Review – Applying to Law School

Applying to law school is considerably different, and in many ways simpler, than applying to business school. Most notably, all law school applications are submitted through the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), essays and letters of recommendation can be recycled for each school, and most top-tier schools do not have an interview associated with the application.

Certainly, the streamlined process reduces the amount of work regardless of the number of schools you apply to. I made it a goal to submit each of my applications within the first week of the application window opening, and with the exception of Yale (which had additional components I did not anticipate), I met that goal. Since most schools have a rolling admission process, applying early can give you an edge, and at the very least it reduces stress through the admissions cycle.

LSAT. I took the LSAT twice: once in Sydney, Australia while on R&R leave from Afghanistan and a second time in Munich, Germany about two weeks after my deployment.

Due to the timing, I was not mentally prepared for either test, and scored much lower than I did on practice exams. On R&R I took the test after ten days of standard R&R activities, and after the deployment I took the exam while trying to reintegrate in to Germany. Both times, distractions and other priorities hindered performance.

If possible, I would have tested in the United States. While the proctors overseas were American, the atmosphere was very different from what I was used to with standardized tests like the Fundamental Engineering Exam (FEE) that I had taken stateside.

Like any other standardized test, the LSAT can be learned. There are only so many ways to ask an LSAT question, and repetition leads to improvement. To prepare for the LSAT, I used the Logic Games Bible and Logical Reasoning Bible to get a basic understanding of successful strategies for these sections.

After working through these books, I took as practice tests several previous LSATs purchased from the LSAC website. These practice tests were by far the best preparation I had. Further, it helped that I timed myself on the tests and reviewed my mistakes.

I never considered taking an LSAT prep course because I lived in Germany and had an extremely variable schedule, but even had I been stateside I don’t think I would’ve taken the prep courses. In my opinion, individual study is as effective as an expensive prep course given the nature of the test.

Application Approach.  I attempted to approach my application holistically. I knew that I had a very competitive GPA and a less competitive but not bad LSAT score. To me this meant I’d probably at least by looked at by any school that I applied to. For this reason, I tried to present an application that created a picture of me as a complete individual.

Your resume will likely speak briefly about your academic accomplishments and extensively about your actual military career (things like leadership, tactical and technical competence, combat experiences and so on). Having re-enforcing letters of recommendation won’t necessarily hurt, but having letters that can add depth to you as a person, specifically your intellectual capacity will help round you out as a candidate. In the same way, a personal statement rehashing how great you did at school or rewording your military experience bullets will not add anything meaningful to the application.

Letters of Recommendation. I reached out to two of my professors from West Point in the spring, well before the application window opened. When they agreed to write letters of recommendation for me, I put together a packet which included my ORB, academic transcript, a note about what I had been up to since leaving West Point, and samples of work from their particular classes.

I felt very confident about my professors writing the recommendations on time and effectively, and I waived the ability to look at their recommendations. If you are less certain, or if you are particularly weak in one area, requesting a recommender address that area and reviewing the recommendation could be helpful.

Yale’s Admission Dean explains in her blog that at Yale your chances of admission drop to almost zero in the absence of two letters of recommendation from faculty who have taught you. (As an aside, read through each application’s instructions, read the school’s admission blog, and read the school’s website. If the Dean of Admissions makes a recommendation, take the recommendation. She isn’t trying to trick you, and I suspect that a lot of applicants run into trouble by failing to follow directions.)

I think having two academic letters of recommendation holds true for most of the top law schools, and I would only use a letter from a commanding officer as a third letter of recommendation when that option exists and when it substantially adds to your application. The only exception to this rule would be if you are applying to a program like Northwestern where work experience is heavily weighed.

Resume. Ensure that the resume meets the criteria for the law school you are applying to. If it says one-page then do not have a second page (really, you probably don’t need a second page no matter what).

Also ensure that the resume is comprehensible to civilians. This seems obvious, but I was surprised at how poorly my attempt to civilianize my resume went. Fortunately, I asked civilian friends who knew little about the military to identify the terminology that was confusing or meaningless to them.

Personal Statement. The personal statement was the hardest part of my application. I wrote a dozen drafts, before creating one that was acceptable. As I mentioned before, one advantage of applying to law school versus business school is that you can recycle personal statements much easier since the prompts are basically the same. Accordingly, I used variations of the same statement for most of my applications.

I think my personal statement’s strength came from my not reading any example statements from other law school applicants. There are books, blogs, and websites that have an ample selection of statements, but I believe reading these creates tunnel vision and limits creativity. Copy-paste-paraphrase is a poor strategy.

The second piece of advice with the personal statement is to be humble. You did not win the war in Afghanistan; you probably will not end global poverty. Be humble when describing your accomplishments and realistic when describing your goals.

Additional Essays. With the exception of the mandatory additional essays in the Yale application, I did not write a single additional essay. I wrote drafts to several of the optional essays, but I did not think any were of the same caliber as the rest of my application. I found it better to leave things as they were than to add something that might detract from the overall application.

FLEP. I considered applying to the Funded Legal Education Program (FLEP), and I spoke to a few JAG officers who went that route. For officers who want to stay in the Army while earning a JD, FLEP is a great program, especially from a financial perspective. While in the FLEP program, officers continue to earn their military salary and benefits while having all of their tuition paid.

I chose not to apply to the FLEP program for two reasons:

1. FLEP can restrict school selection based on available funds (usually officers are required to attend a public law school). I did not want to risk being accepted into a program only to have the Army redirect me.
2. I wanted to remain as flexible as possible both with my summer internships and also my post-law school career options.

Again, this is a personal preference, and I think that FLEP is one of the best routes to attend law school for the financial security and job guarantee coming out of the program.

Final Notes.

• A good start point for researching law schools is Top Law Schools.com. This site gives overviews of the different schools as well as interviews with several deans. This will give you a broad idea of what the school is like. From there, I’d recommend exploring school websites in-depth and attending information sessions if possible.
• To get an idea of the likelihood of acceptance there are a couple “Law School Calculators” and data charts based on prior applicants. Both should be used in context, especially self-selected data sampling like Law School Numbers.
• Avoid participating in threads like those on Top Law Schools.com. I have read through many of them (some admissions deans openly do as well, and I suspect most read them). Reading them is fine, but I have been highly unimpressed with the products, advice, and general communication on these sites. As an aside, one nice difference between the advice given on Service2School and advice given in peer threads, is that here, advice is coming form people already accepted into a program versus advice by someone who you are competing against.
• I was accepted into both Harvard and Yale (along with other schools). If an applicant is interested I can go into detail about how I approached my interview with Harvard (which did not go nearly as well as I would have liked, but still seemed to work), as well as how I approached my 250-word essay for Yale and the other parts of the Yale application.