miskellyjohnson wrote:OP, fwiw, I dont really understand the problem with someone wanting to go to HLS as a first choice. I think you just tapped into a collective anger that people on this forum have towards HLS/prestige whores, and they are now taking it out on you with 500 word diatribes scolding you for having the perfectly reasonable goal of wanting to go to HLS.
I don't think folks on this forum have anything against HLS. Quite the opposite, TLS is one of the most prestige-obsessed places I've ever had the "pleasure" of finding. Nowhere IRL have I ever met folks so totally obsessed with parsing the differences in prestige between the V5 and V10, or the V3 and V5, or whether the V3 should even be a thing, or whether Chicago is better than Columbia and NYU, or... you get the point.
I also think that it's perfectly reasonable to want to go to a top law school, but I think that it's regrettable for anyone to fixate on a single law school to what comes across as the point of obsession. I think it's that apparent fixation (which I recognize OP now denies) that folks ITT are responding to. I think folks would have responded exactly the same way if, instead of honing in on Harvard, OP had honed in in the same manner on Chicago, or NYU, or Berkeley, or heck, even ASU.
miskellyjohnson wrote:The answer to how you get into HLS without work experience is (in addition to getting good grades and LSAT): find something meaningful to you, dedicate a substantial amount of time towards it such that you become a significant figure and make a substantial impact. That "something meaningful" may be political (LGBT policy on campus), or it may be personal (volunteering with/supporting cancer patients at local hospital) , or it may be completely academic (scientific research into a new material for solar cells), or it maybe starting your own company, etc. etc..
What you describe is what a K-JD needs to do to get into Yale or Stanford. Sure, inventing a revolutionary solar cell or starting the next Facebook would
also get someone into Harvard, but it's hardly necessary. Harvard's admissions process exemplifies the numbers-driven approach used by all law schools from Harvard on down.
miskellyjohnson wrote:(And, yes, here's a bunch of advice unrelated to what you asked but that people really want to give you: Have fun during the process, make relationships with people, call your parents weekly and tell them you love them, use protection during sexual encounters, dont drink the water in mexico, the orange LSD is bad. Why people feel the need to bring up this type of advice in a thread asking about HLS, I dont know, other than that us old people love to give unsolicited advice to youngs as a way to relive our regrets).
I don't think any of the other posters ITT had any interest in advising OP w.r.t. their relationship with their parents, let alone their dating life.
We have been solely focused on trying to advise OP to not fixate on a single law school as a college freshman.
miskellyjohnson wrote:Also, I'd just say that *right now*-- with a strong economy and legal market-- there is not a meaningful difference in career outcomes between HLS and other T13s. You can get big law from both. However, I do think (without any evidence to support this view) that HLS is recession-proof (or at least recession-resistant) in ways that other T13s may not be. If the legal market shrinks substantially, I'd rather be holding onto a H degree than a NW degree, but that may just be me.
The idea that H is "recession-proof" in some unique way is categorically untrue. I have plenty of HLS friends who attended about a decade ago and can directly attest to that.
It's also not instructive, IMO, to compare H to NW. No one disputes that there are meaningful differences between the top and the bottom of the T13. No one ITT is telling OP H = NW. Rather, it's that H isn't materially different from, say, Chicago in outcomes, and in many cases it will make more sense, objectively, to attend CCN over H. In some cases, such as for someone whose goal is simply to be a lawyer and live a regular life, attending NW or even a non-T13 school for $$$ may make far more sense than attending H. The point, which I absolutely stand by, is that there's no reason for OP (or any other 0L) to fixate on H (or any other single law school) in particular.