Tranferring to HYS Forum

[kurama20]

You can make connections with people at whatever school you transfer into as well. The idea that you shouldn't go into LS thinking you're going to transfer makes sense if it means going to a bad school with dreams of transferring. But if you're going to a lower T14 with goals of transferring to HYS, and that's what it takes to stay motivated day in and day out, I don't see what the problem is.

OMG I can't believe you said that! That's supposed to be one of the biggest faux pas' on TLS. FWIW it's the same thing I've been thinking for ages about UVA. Once you are in the top 14 there is absolutely nothing wrong with thinking that, it's basically a win win situation. Yeah if you think that way while you are at Cooley it's an issue, but going in trying to transfer isn't always the ridiculous idea that people on here make it out to be.

[studylaw7]

You are honestly already gunning to transfer before even attending? I really hope you're not going to Cornell....

whatever it takes to stay motivated right? LS is an investment not a love affair.

I think that it is a career move, not just an investment. Careers involve REAL connections with actual people. If you treat everything in life as a stepping stone, you miss out big-time.

I'm aiming to get the most out of law school to protect myself in case the transfer doesn't pan out. Even if I didn't want to transfer, my desires would still be the same. But the additional goal of transferring does help.

I don't call it gunning. Everyone wants to get good grades in law school.

[los blancos]

OMG I can't believe you said that! That's supposed to be one of the biggest faux pas' on TLS. FWIW it's the same thing I've been thinking for ages about UVA. Once you are in the top 14 there is absolutely nothing wrong with thinking that, it's basically a win win situation.

Eh, I'd be wary of that type of mentality. You could end up unwittingly alienating yourself from your fellow students and putting yourself in a difficult place mentally - perhaps this is just me, but I wouldn't want to go to Cornell and have my dreams of transferring to HYS be the only thing keeping me going. There's already enough pressure without bearing that weight on your shoulders.

That said, I see nothing wrong with keeping it in the back of your head. Unless I end up at Berkeley, I probably will, whether I want to or not.

[studylaw7]

OMG I can't believe you said that! That's supposed to be one of the biggest faux pas' on TLS. FWIW it's the same thing I've been thinking for ages about UVA. Once you are in the top 14 there is absolutely nothing wrong with thinking that, it's basically a win win situation.

Eh, I'd be wary of that type of mentality. You could end up unwittingly alienating yourself from your fellow students and putting yourself in a difficult place mentally - perhaps this is just me, but I wouldn't want to go to Cornell and have my dreams of transferring to HYS be the only thing keeping me going. There's already enough pressure without bearing that weight on your shoulders.

That said, I see nothing wrong with keeping it in the back of your head. Unless I end up at Berkeley, I probably will, whether I want to or not.

I don't think anyone is suggesting transferring is the "only thing keeping" them going. I certainly am not. Like I said, I want to go to law school and get good grades, be involved and establish relationships with professors. I would do this even if I didn't want to transfer. The opportunity of transferring is just an additional goal.

[studylaw7]

I'm going to a T7-14 school in the fall, and I am hoping that I will have the grades to transfer to one of HYS. If I am successful in the transfer, I'm wondering if people at HYS look down on the transfer students. Does anyone have any first hand experience with this? On one hand, these transfer students likely come from a T14 school and dominated in 1L. On the other hand, there is likely something wrong with their background (likely either a low gpa or low lsat score, but probably not both) so they didn't get in the first time around.

please share your viewpoints about this matter even if you are not at HYS and definitely please share if you are a transfer student at any school.

You definitely can't "hide" as a transfer at Yale (nor, I assume, at Stanford). This year, there are 12-14 here. I don't think any of us "look down" on them in any way; they clearly worked their butts off at their previous school to be admitted here (and had to have built good faculty relationships to get the all-important-for-transferring LORs). If anything, we admire their work ethic - they're generally the best-prepared for class.

I think if I were a HYS student already, I'd be a little scared of the transfer students from T14 schools since they must have done extremely well in 1L to get in and they probably had a high gpa or a high lsat score.

Maybe if there was a distinction between the types of jobs that transfer and non-transfers got during 2L OCI or clerkship applications, people would be upset. But I don't think any of those distinctions exist, so transfers become relatively well-integrated (though, in this year and last year's transfer group, many people are older/married or otherwise in committed relationships...and so to some extent, their social experience might be different). My totally uneducated guess would be that transfers *might* do a bit better grade-wise in traditional black-letter courses (because they know how to learn that material, whereas we were trained in a habitat completely foreign to traditional briefing/memorizing/etc.)...but those marginal grade differences, if they exist at all (just Hs vs. Ps, anyway), don't cause animosity between the populations.

this is a nice post. thanks for your input.

anyone else?