Door Closes, Door Opens

I suppose it's time to "allow myself to introduce ... myself." I've been spending some time tinkering with the back-end of the blog and it's Egon's big first day so I've been happy to let him have the floor which he so ably occupies (and in ways that I would never imagine). My own law school is on the quarter system, meaning I've got more than a month to go for orientation (much less classes) and so I'm in a very different place right now: still working, not even in the right city or time zone yet, and still without a firm lease.

As if further proof of this difference were needed: I actually received a rejection e-mail from a law school today. One generally thinks of the admissions cycle as ending in April or May, but with waitlists this excruciating cycle continues on well into summer.

I was waitlisted at an almost absurd number of schools actually -- from some (e.g.) that seemed to be blatantly playing the yield-protection game,* and from one in particular from whom the waitlisting (as opposed to an outright rejection) felt like no small accomplishment. This was from the latter (they placed me on their waitlist way back in April/May and kept me on ever since), and given the passage of time and what I felt was a remote likelihood, I had in fact rather forgotten about it.

In any case, the rejection e-mail included the following, which I'm certain is boilerplate language:

If your interest in ... Law School continues into your first year at another law school, we would welcome your application as a transfer student in 2010.

The truth is, I was already thinking about it, and I know that it's something that Egon has in the back of his mind, too: the transfer calculus. To be clear: I'm very happy to be going where I'm going, and the "worst case scenario" of "having" to stay there all three years is something I'm utterly content with.

But facts are facts: certain schools produce appellate clerks, law professors, and prominent attorneys at higher rates than others. With the absurd competitiveness of the law school rankings/numbers game these days, it's well-known that transfers are on the rise. Given the particular weaknesses in mine and Egon's applications, we both might be good candidates for transfering, assuming we do well in our 1L years.

That's no small assumption -- I get the sense that 1L grades are a bit of a crap shoot -- but it's certainly something that's in the back of my mind, particularly because a good friend of mind did so successfully and has been very happy.

So, stay tuned to see how things play out over the course of the year.

*yield-protection ("YP") (noun) - the practice of not admitting students whose LSAT and GPA indicate a likelihood to attend a more prestigious/higher-ranked institution, for the purpose of improving one's "yield" (that is, the percentage of students who are admitted to a law school who matriculate), which is a large component of the U.S. News and World Report's law school ranking. to give the schools the benefit of the doubt, it's one way for them to to gauge interest of applicants (the assumption being that a sufficiently interested applicant will ride out the waitlist.)

[disclaimer to the preceding: I don't doubt that many schools may have had perfectly reasonable reasons to reject my particular candidacy, but the practice of yield-protection is well-known and did seem at least likely in at least a few cases.]