I came home to an e-mail congratulating me on my acceptance to my first choice school. I was shocked! It was a follow up e-mail; one meant to be received after the acceptance letter. This made us wonder if my acceptance letter really was lost in the mail but sure enough it came the next day. The best part is that I was offered a very nice scholarship! I was hoping for one but thought it was a long shot. So our weekend was spent looking at housing, the employment market for The Janitor (my loving partner who is an attorney) and reviewing the school's program. And now onto the little things. We are planning on flying down to visit the school next week. I have several questions regarding student life and the city in general. It's a large city with a population of approximately 500,000, much larger than where we currently live. One aspect that bothers me is that there are no images of students on their website. It is important to me to see students interacting with each other and have some idea of the academic environment that I wish to partake in.
So these are my questions:
- What are your thoughts regarding your first year?
- Is the faculty friendly, open, and available for questions?
- On a scale of 1-10 how competitive do you feel the environment is?
- Do you have any recommendations for new students to this school? Any thing you would do over again?
- Where will you be working this summer? Were there several opportunities to choose from?
Labels: 0L, application process, choosing a school
As for things to ask, when I visited UIUC I asked the students why they chose this school over the others they were accepted to. There was a general consensus when I asked different people, so I felt comfortable that they were telling me the truth and not just BS to get me to go there.
You may want to consider asking about things like the curve, how the OCI works, computer policies/assistance, socializing events for students, various library policies and things like that, if they're important to you.
Really, there's so much about individual law schools that aren't covered on their websites that the best thing that I found was just to go on a tour with a student. They will more than likely jump from subject to subject and talk and talk and talk . . . eventually something will come up that you weren't even thinking about or aware of! Enjoy the visit.
See, that's what I get for thinking I should read your blog from the beginning without checking for updates on topics. Oh, well. Really, congratulations. It's always nice to know what will be going on for your future.