Giveaway Alert!

“Financing Law School” Giveaway: Twitter Contest!

Enter for a chance to win a free copy of Accepted's essential guide to “Financing Your Future” in our Twitter contest!

We’re giving away three copies of Accepted.com’s new Ebook Financing Your Future: Winning Fellowships, Scholarships and Awards for Grad School, by Linda Abraham and Rebecca Blustein. In Financing Your Future, an instantly downloadable Ebook, Linda Abraham and Rebecca Blustein reveal practical, hands-on advice to help you complete your fellowship, scholarship, and award applications and obtain those critical funds. Linda Abraham is president and founder of Accepted.com, and has advised literally thousands of successful applicants over the last fifteen years. At UCLA’s Scholarship Resource Center, Rebecca Blustein assisted students at all levels with their essays and personal statements for scholarship, fellowship, and grant applications, from newly-admitted freshmen to graduate school, professional school, and Ph.D. students.

All you have to do is sign up to follow Law School Podcaster on Twitter (LAWPodcaster) and tweet about our new show “Financing Your JD,” mentioning LAWPodcaster! Then email info@lawschoolpodcaster.com with a copy of your tweet and your preferred contact information. Remember to put “Book Giveaway” in the subject line. You will then be automatically entered in our contest.

All entries must be received by January 4, 2010 at 11:59 pm EST to be considered eligible for this contest (but we welcome your tweets about our shows anytime after that too!). We will contact winners by email within 3 days.

This is a game of chance. Odds of winning are based on eligible number of entries. Winners will be selected at random using an independent auto-generated selection process available at http://www.random.org/integers/ .

Good luck! And thanks in advance for the Tweets!

Making Your Law School Wish Lists? Make sure To Weigh The Costs and Benefits!

It’s a given these days that a law school education is expensive, just about any way you look at it. As you begin to draw up that list of law schools you are considering, you just can’t afford to ignore how cost affects your analysis. That issue came up as we prepared our show, Choosing the Right Law School: Understand the Factors That Will Affect Where You Want To Go To School.

Law School Podcaster Host Bonnie Petrie spoke with Linda Abraham, Founder, Admissions Consultant and Editor at Accepted.com. Accepted.com guides and advises applicants on gaining acceptance to law school. While Abraham says that the undergraduate GPA and LSAT score is the starting point to determine which law schools you’ll want to consider, there also “has to be a weighing up of cost and benefit.”

Abraham advises applicants to calculate the cost/benefit of attending a particular law school. “Look carefully at where graduates of [a] school are going and getting jobs and what is the typical salary they get when they graduate vis-a-vis what’s it going to cost you to attend.” If you go to an expensive private school and it’s not going to get you a job, you’ll have a lot of debt to pay back and not the means to pay it back.” She gave us the basics on how to approach this calculation.

Petrie also interviewed Wendy Margolis of the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), the non-profit corporation that provides admission-related services to legal education institutions and also administers the LSAT. Margolis also suggested that applicants research thoroughly the placement rates from particular law schools and dig a little deeper at those schools and see what type of placements those are, what kind of jobs people have gotten after graduating from those law schools.” Given the current economy, placement rates are likely to be down, so this type of research may be more important than ever.

In this show, we also hear from Hewlett Askew, Consultant to the American Bar Association (ABA) on Legal Education. Askew gave us the low-down on the ABA accreditation process and what it means to attend an ABA accredited law school as well as when it might make sense for an applicant to consider a non-accredited law school or a non-accredited online school.

Tune in to the show to hear the full discussion of the factors to consider when choosing a law school.

You Law School Application: It's Not Just About Your GPA and LSAT Score

Wouldn’t you like to go behind-the-scenes and hear what the admissions committee really looks at when evaluating all those law school applications? We did that for you in our show titled “Creating the Killer Law School Application: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating the Best Application.” Our host, Diana Jordan, spoke to top law school admissions deans about what they look for in a candidate.

Andy Cornblatt, Dean of Admissions at Georgetown University Law Center advises applicants to “take ownership” of the application and “work hard on that essay” because the admissions committee looks at the total package, not just the GPA and LSAT score. He says that even where the GPA and LSAT score are not quite strong enough, students who present themselves in a particularly compelling manner, can gain admission. One way an applicant can maximize his or her chances, Cornblatt says, is to grab the attention of the admissions committee in “the first paragraph of the personal statement. That’s the one that sort of catches our eye or doesn’t. And that’s really in the applicant’s hands. And so I would say that working on the personal statement is very important in this process in catching our attention. That’s the most important piece of this.…” Cornblatt also shares with us some great tips on timing to submit an application that can really make the difference in getting accepted as well as some of the mistakes that cause an application to “miss the boat.”

What does the admissions committee really want to see in a “killer” personal statement? Ann Perry, Assistant Dean for Admissions at The University of Chicago Law School says that one type of personal statement that tends to stand out is where the applicant focuses on an individual experience that shows what they have accomplished (like an internship or even a single day in an internship) and one that shows how the applicant grew from that experience. Perry suggests that applicants “use that [opportunity] to show how they realized that “law school is the next step.”

We also get expert advice from Accepted.com Senior Consultant, Paul Bodine, author of Great Personal Statements for Law School about how to distinguish your personal statement from others, what to include and what not to include in this important part of your application. Derek E. Meeker, Senior Law School Consultant for AdmissionsConsultants, Inc. and former Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at University of Pennsylvania Law School also weighs in on how to nail those stellar letters of recommendation.

Check out the full show to learn more about the specific things that can make or break a personal statement or a letter of recommendation and that transform your application into a “killer” one.