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Breaking Barriers: Overcoming the 1L Emotional Roller Coaster
By now, I’m sure most of you have heard or read that super odd article by David Brooks. He tried to explain that the rich and powerful maintain a culture of separatism from other socioeconomic brackets in an effort to keep others from joining their ranks. A valid point, followed by the most asinine example of a friend too stupid to pick out sandwiches, apparently. I definitely side-eyed the hell out of that example, but I have to admit that he was right in that there’s a culture and code that is hard to break into. If you’re about to enter into law school soon, I don’t want to scare…
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Breaking Barriers: Selecting the Right Law School
Law school is different when you’re brown. It shouldn’t be, but it is. I mean, you already know that life is different for us. I think about this past summer when I did an outreach trip with coworkers and we traveled in southern Illinois. Someone wanted to stop to get a drink at a hole in the wall bar, but I became a wet blanket and encouraged us to just get to our next meeting spot. Not because I didn’t want a drink–hello, you must be new, but because I was so hesitant about entering a bar in the middle of S. Illinois. Whether that’s fair to those residents or…
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Breaking Barriers: FAFSA and Proving You’re Low-Income
April is Financial Literacy Month and I want to talk about financial aid for school. For the most part, I depended on FAFSA to help pay for college and law school. I was super thankful to have access to grants, scholarships, and loans but it wasn’t easy to navigate the financial aid system with little help. While I’m years removed from filing for FAFSA, I do recall the feelings of anxiety—would this year’s package give me enough to cover everything? How will my mom help pay the family portion? How much will I need to earn this summer? Can I find another campus job? I’ll be honest that I hella…
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Breaking Barriers: What’s Your Major?
I’ve received a few questions on what is the right program to major in while in undergrad if your ultimate goal is law school. The great thing about law school is that you can actually major in anything and still get in (assuming you meet all the other criteria, obvi). When I was in school we had a ton of different degrees in my class–from dance, to biology, to a former gynecologist. Of course, there were a ton of poli sci degrees and finance as well. I majored in sociology, but if were to do it again I think I’d consider maybe a double-major in journalism or some other degree that’s…
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Breaking Barriers: De-Mystifying the LSAT
We all know that I basically tripped my way into law school. Like, information was so inaccessible when I was applying. I kind of generally knew I had to take an exam, but didn’t really know the purpose or how important it was to the process. So I signed up to take it because a book I read said I should sign up for it in June before my senior year. Then I spent a semester before “studying” for it. Meaning, I had one practice book that I worked on sporadically and that’s it. I didn’t understand that this was not an assessment of how smart I was (like other…
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Breaking Barriers: Myth-Busting Law School
I hate sounding like I’m ancient, but when I was applying for law school there were so many unknowns. Seriously, how did the world even work before internet? Books? #cray. Anyway, when I started applying, there were a few online communities and older students that I knew that helped guide me. But the online communities, especially, were just hyper-masculine arenas. The commentators seemed so thrilled to tell people how they’d never make it to law school and how much of a waste of time it was to apply because they’d never get into a T-14 school, etc etc. And this was before the Recession, so hubris was at an all-time…
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Breaking Barriers: Racism in College
Starting college can be a real trip if you’re not used to being in mostly White spaces. If you’re lucky to attend a diverse college where you don’t feel isolated, that’s fantastic (fr fr) but most of us attend incredibly homogenous schools where your awareness that there are few students of color is super acute. This situation can create feelings of loneliness, a sense that you don’t belong, and in turn, can make you believe you aren’t capable of succeeding in that environment because there are few like you. It can feel overwhelming. And at the time, you may not understand exactly, why it is your feel that way you…
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Breaking Barriers: Cultivating Soft Factors
This series, Breaking Law School Barriers, tackles the big and small issues that come into play when you’re deciding if you’ll even attend law school. The purpose is to give practical advice for college students, and for current law students and attorneys to give suggestions about their real world experience. If you’ve researched applying for law school then you know that LSAT score and GPA is king. And if you believe most online forums, then you may think that you shouldn’t bother to apply if you don’t have Elle Woods type stats. I remember when I first started applying, I believed all the hype from the forums and became nervous because I…
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Breaking Barriers: Selecting a Law School
This series, Breaking Law School Barriers, tackles the big and small issues that come into play when you’re deciding if you’ll even attend law school. The purpose is to give practical advice for college students, and for current law students and attorneys to give suggestions about their real world experience. Applying for law school is an incredibly long process and it can be stressful, anxious, and tedious (and expensive!). For those that have just finished the application round, the next big step is deciding which law school you will attend. When I started my process, I constantly compared my experience to other students of mean, and saw that they were…
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Breaking Law School Barriers: Law School Essays
This series, Breaking Law School Barriers, tackles the big and small issues that come into play when you’re deciding if you’ll even attend law school. The purpose is to give practical advice for college students, and for current law students and attorneys to give suggestions about their real world experience. Nothing seems to stop people in their track more than having to write about themselves. It’s a hard endeavor. I see it all the time in clients who have to write statements about certain events in their lives. The client and I are going along just fine, and when we move on to the next step of writing their statement,…