Lessons from Law School Applications...
This Friday I submitted the first and most important of my law school applications, to NYU. At dinner with my parents, and again with my friends, I toasted the NYU admissions officer who's going to be reading my application. Here are the lessons of rage that I've learned from the application process...
1. Toasting an anonymous admissions officer probably has little to no effect on their decision.
2. Affirmative action is everywhere, and I hate it. This is pure politics, but I'm going to present it as fact: I'm tired of people being judged on anything other than a meritocracy. Most of the applications invite a diversity statement to describe how you could enhance the diversity of an institution, and some, including NYU, actually specifically ask within their applications what ethnic groups you belong to that may potentially be underrepresented within the school or within society at large. That sucks. I understand if, given someone's underprivileged background, you may consider their B on the level of someone else's A. But I can't help it if I didn't have to struggle...my parents aren't about to give away their house to charity to put themselves in financial hardship so that my As count. I can't get anything better than As, but evidently, my As count less. So lame.
3. Luckily, in dealing with this affirmative action stuff, I have no sense of ethics, which is highly useful for the process on the whole. I totally milked the Russianness and Jewishness for all it was worth (yeah, cause there are no Jewish lawyers or anything). In my personal statement, my original draft talked about traveling. I was warned that this would make it sound like I had too much disposable time and income, while other people would be submitting deeply personal stories of hardship and struggle. Evidently, the most compelling part of my original draft had been talking about my parents being immigrants, so I should focus on that...and if I didn't have any hard luck stories of my own, I could always use theirs. So whereas draft 1 was bracketed by a narrative of me in a train station in Madrid, the final draft instead had my parents being harassed in a train station in a Ukrainian border town on their way out of the Soviet Union toward the United States. I framed all my travels in terms of tracking their path through Europe toward the States, since I'd been to all their stops (albeit with no conscious intent of following them): Bratislava, Vienna, and Rome. So now instead of being a spoiled world traveler, I'm a more immigrant child. Bah, whatever.
4. Professors should not be administrators. Here's the thing...if you're going to have things as they are now, where administrators are drawn from the pool of educators, obviously the only fair way to do is a meritocracy (best professors get the promotions). BUT, by doing it fairly that way, you end up depriving the students of their best teachers, and making it so that those best teachers don't have time to teach well, and to do all the things incidental to teaching, like holding office hours, researching, interacting with students, and (in my gripe) letters of recommendation. I wanted Dr. Lamy to write me an LOR for school, which he ultimately did, I guess. I wanted him not as an administrator, but as a respected IR guy who I had as a teacher in more than one class who I felt could speak about me specifically and effectively. It was a happy bonus that he was also Director of the IR department, but I really didn't care about that. The thing is, he's completely impossible to reach by phone, doesn't respond to emails at all, essentially unavailable to students in office hours if they're not currently enrolled in one of his classes, and it makes him utterly impossible to deal with. I needed to (1) make sure he had written his letter, and (2) find out how he submitted it, since that affected what settings I'd have to indicate when I submitted my application, and I tried to reach him FOR WEEKS in vain. The only way to fix that problem while remaining fair is to make administration separate from faculty...don't draw one from the other, or at the least, don't let administrators continue to pretend they're also teachers, cause they can't really be as effective as teachers anymore.
5. Law school applications are basically extortion. I paid $103 for the LSAT, another $103 for the LSDAS (the service that compiles my transcripts and letters of recommendation to send out to law schools...incidentally, I had paid USC $15 to send my transcript to them), and $10 per school for 8 schools for LSDAS to make those reports to the schools I'm applying to. That, of course, doesn't count the $65 per application fee that goes to each school I'm applying to, nor the $60 I had paid just to get access to the online application system. In what world is this considered just? Just cut out the middle man, I can handle the grave responsibility of just sending the damn transcripts and letters of recommendation to each school separately myself, like I did for undergraduate. So many people getting rich for so stupid a service that nobody really actually needs.
6. There's always something else to apply to, so I should never assume I'm done. Man, I can't wait till I'm dead.
1. Toasting an anonymous admissions officer probably has little to no effect on their decision.
2. Affirmative action is everywhere, and I hate it. This is pure politics, but I'm going to present it as fact: I'm tired of people being judged on anything other than a meritocracy. Most of the applications invite a diversity statement to describe how you could enhance the diversity of an institution, and some, including NYU, actually specifically ask within their applications what ethnic groups you belong to that may potentially be underrepresented within the school or within society at large. That sucks. I understand if, given someone's underprivileged background, you may consider their B on the level of someone else's A. But I can't help it if I didn't have to struggle...my parents aren't about to give away their house to charity to put themselves in financial hardship so that my As count. I can't get anything better than As, but evidently, my As count less. So lame.
3. Luckily, in dealing with this affirmative action stuff, I have no sense of ethics, which is highly useful for the process on the whole. I totally milked the Russianness and Jewishness for all it was worth (yeah, cause there are no Jewish lawyers or anything). In my personal statement, my original draft talked about traveling. I was warned that this would make it sound like I had too much disposable time and income, while other people would be submitting deeply personal stories of hardship and struggle. Evidently, the most compelling part of my original draft had been talking about my parents being immigrants, so I should focus on that...and if I didn't have any hard luck stories of my own, I could always use theirs. So whereas draft 1 was bracketed by a narrative of me in a train station in Madrid, the final draft instead had my parents being harassed in a train station in a Ukrainian border town on their way out of the Soviet Union toward the United States. I framed all my travels in terms of tracking their path through Europe toward the States, since I'd been to all their stops (albeit with no conscious intent of following them): Bratislava, Vienna, and Rome. So now instead of being a spoiled world traveler, I'm a more immigrant child. Bah, whatever.
4. Professors should not be administrators. Here's the thing...if you're going to have things as they are now, where administrators are drawn from the pool of educators, obviously the only fair way to do is a meritocracy (best professors get the promotions). BUT, by doing it fairly that way, you end up depriving the students of their best teachers, and making it so that those best teachers don't have time to teach well, and to do all the things incidental to teaching, like holding office hours, researching, interacting with students, and (in my gripe) letters of recommendation. I wanted Dr. Lamy to write me an LOR for school, which he ultimately did, I guess. I wanted him not as an administrator, but as a respected IR guy who I had as a teacher in more than one class who I felt could speak about me specifically and effectively. It was a happy bonus that he was also Director of the IR department, but I really didn't care about that. The thing is, he's completely impossible to reach by phone, doesn't respond to emails at all, essentially unavailable to students in office hours if they're not currently enrolled in one of his classes, and it makes him utterly impossible to deal with. I needed to (1) make sure he had written his letter, and (2) find out how he submitted it, since that affected what settings I'd have to indicate when I submitted my application, and I tried to reach him FOR WEEKS in vain. The only way to fix that problem while remaining fair is to make administration separate from faculty...don't draw one from the other, or at the least, don't let administrators continue to pretend they're also teachers, cause they can't really be as effective as teachers anymore.
5. Law school applications are basically extortion. I paid $103 for the LSAT, another $103 for the LSDAS (the service that compiles my transcripts and letters of recommendation to send out to law schools...incidentally, I had paid USC $15 to send my transcript to them), and $10 per school for 8 schools for LSDAS to make those reports to the schools I'm applying to. That, of course, doesn't count the $65 per application fee that goes to each school I'm applying to, nor the $60 I had paid just to get access to the online application system. In what world is this considered just? Just cut out the middle man, I can handle the grave responsibility of just sending the damn transcripts and letters of recommendation to each school separately myself, like I did for undergraduate. So many people getting rich for so stupid a service that nobody really actually needs.
6. There's always something else to apply to, so I should never assume I'm done. Man, I can't wait till I'm dead.