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mallard

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:19 pm

englawyer wrote:how is recruiting for non-law careers? ex banking/consulting. sorry for the odd question
I hear it happens. I have a few friends who I think may be considering it. Not sure it's the best time to be going into those specific industries, but you can definitely do it from HLS. Now, biglaw pays more, has actually better hours, has a more systematic recruiting program at HLS, and has better lateral opportunities into the other industries down the road. So I'm not sure I'd completely recommend it, especially given the economic situation right now.

As for the quote above, I'm a little hungover and I just finished finals, so I might be a little harsher on the school and the industry than I normally would be.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by Mr. Matlock » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:21 pm

mallard wrote:As for the quote above, I'm a little hungover and I just finished finals, so I might be a little harsher on the school and the industry than I normally would be.
What was the drink of choice last night? How many?

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by 06072010 » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:22 pm

The real rationale for taking the higher-ranked school is simple. Kids here are simply not that much smarter than kids at BU or BC. Your extra point or two on the LSAT or the fact that you spent that one semester studying and the other kid spent that semester drinking does not mean you will perform better in law school. You have a comparative advantage now; you got into Harvard. You give it up by going to another school because the legal profession overvalues law school prestige.

There are, of course, other great reasons. My professors have been friends with Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, Antonin Scalia, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. My friends will be running for Senator and Governor; they'll be on the federal bench; they'll be coming back here to teach. Even Yale and Stanford do not have the feeling Harvard has. That's one reason why the arbitrariness and the randomness and the strange sense of hierarchy and misplaced priorities is so unsettling and occasionally nauseating while you're here: you're at the heart of a vast system, you know you're a little cell being pumped back and forth, carrying oxygen to one finger or toe of this system, and yet you can hear that the heartbeat is just a little irregular, the heart is just a little diseased.
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mallard

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:22 pm

Mr. Matlock wrote:
mallard wrote:As for the quote above, I'm a little hungover and I just finished finals, so I might be a little harsher on the school and the industry than I normally would be.
What was the drink of choice last night? How many?
I forget. Let's say seven or eight. My tolerance is pretty abysmally low.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by ali & ali » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:38 pm

Thanks for fielding questions, mallard. How do you find the overall stress of Harvard Law? I'm coming out of UG a little burned out, and I'm really interested in law intellectually and practically. Are you and your classmates constantly stressed out/competitive with one another, or is there an overriding sense that y'all will all do fine because of your relative position at the heart of a broken heirarchical legal machine?

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by tinman » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:43 pm

:?
Last edited by tinman on Sat Dec 19, 2009 3:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

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mallard

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:45 pm

ali & ali wrote:Thanks for fielding questions, mallard. How do you find the overall stress of Harvard Law? I'm coming out of UG a little burned out, and I'm really interested in law intellectually and practically. Are you and your classmates constantly stressed out/competitive with one another, or is there an overriding sense that y'all will all do fine because of your relative position at the heart of a broken heirarchical legal machine?
Haha. I guess I'm being a little melodramatic. Anyhow, I find Harvard pretty stressful in general. Everybody has a sense that they'll do well with jobs and that sort of stuff, but especially during finals, everybody's working very, very hard, either because they want the grades or because of their natural propensities.

I took a year off and mostly posted on TLS during that year. (Honestly.) I think it was very good. I came into law school very energized, wanting to study, wanting to work hard, and I think that's how I was able to jump into a very solid study schedule a couple weeks in. There's not always a great support structure here and everything moves pretty fast and to a certain extent cumulatively, so you want to make sure you're not so burned out that you might get left behind.

I can't say much about the "intellectual and practical" interest in the law since all I've done so far is 1L required courses. I will say that the issues are rarely unimportant or uninteresting and legal reasoning is a good skill to have.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:47 pm

tinman wrote:
mallard wrote: ......
The real rationale for taking the higher-ranked school is simple. Kids here are simply not that much smarter than kids at BU or BC. Your extra point or two on the LSAT or the fact that you spent that one semester studying and the other kid spent that semester drinking does not mean you will perform better in law school. You have a comparative advantage now; you got into Harvard. You give it up by going to another school because the legal profession overvalues law school prestige.

There are, of course, other great reasons. My professors have been friends with Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, Antonin Scalia, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. My friends will be running for Senator and Governor; they'll be on the federal bench; they'll be coming back here to teach. Even Yale and Stanford do not have the feeling Harvard has. That's one reason why the arbitrariness and the randomness and the strange sense of hierarchy and misplaced priorities is so unsettling and occasionally nauseating while you're here: you're at the heart of a vast system, you know you're a little cell being pumped back and forth, carrying oxygen to one finger or toe of this system, and yet you can hear that the heartbeat is just a little irregular, the heart is just a little diseased.
Sorry to crash the Harvard 1L taking classes here, but I wanted to give the Yale 1L response to some of Mallard's obloquy.

First, the people here at Yale Law are ridiculously smart and intimidating. I spent many years at Harvard and took classes there with law students. I have never been intimidated like I am here. In my small group of 15 people, for example, we have 2 Ph.D.s, someone from Harvard's Kennedy School, a Truman fellow, 2 Rhode Scholars, a former speech writer, someone who worked many years at the ACLU (I am sure I'm forgetting some other awesome experiences). The person who was trying to help me chill out the other day (not in my small group) has a summer firm job and had a 180 LSAT and a 4.0 GPA coming in. It seems like all the students that got in straight from undergraduate here had 180s on their LSAT. I agree that the LSAT probably doesn't mean much, and I don't think the difference between a 165 and 175 is profound.

But I would argue that the difference is profound between someone with a 3.95 GPA and a 175 LSAT straight from undergraduate and a 3.95/175 who is also a former Rhodes Scholar or who has a few years of amazing work experience. The former class dominates Harvard. The latter class dominates Yale.

Judging by history, Harvard will send about the same number of (perhaps marginally more) people into academia, supreme court, and clerkships. But Harvard is more than twice as large. There are superstars at every school. But here at Yale they are in nauseating abundance. I guess what I mean to say is that we have so many people that were already superstars in their post-college careers before starting law school.
lol wut

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by OperaSoprano » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:51 pm

mallard wrote:
Mr. Matlock wrote:
mallard wrote:As for the quote above, I'm a little hungover and I just finished finals, so I might be a little harsher on the school and the industry than I normally would be.
What was the drink of choice last night? How many?
I forget. Let's say seven or eight. My tolerance is pretty abysmally low.
You had seven or eight, and you're awake and typing coherent sentences right now? I had three, and everything is still a blur. No more vodka and chambord for me.

Welcome back. If you do anything but return to HLS as a professor (after a SCOTUS clerkship), I'll be quite disappointed.

Also, general giggling at the HLS/YLS rivalry ITT. I am profoundly glad my classmates are not all Rhodes scholars. The funny thing is that Tinman might be right about the LSAT disparity and actual performance-- one of the best prepared kids in my class came in here with an LSAT score that makes mine look like an achievement, and he'll probably wind up setting our curve.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by Haribo » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:52 pm

tinman wrote:
mallard wrote: ......
The real rationale for taking the higher-ranked school is simple. Kids here are simply not that much smarter than kids at BU or BC. Your extra point or two on the LSAT or the fact that you spent that one semester studying and the other kid spent that semester drinking does not mean you will perform better in law school. You have a comparative advantage now; you got into Harvard. You give it up by going to another school because the legal profession overvalues law school prestige.

There are, of course, other great reasons. My professors have been friends with Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, Antonin Scalia, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. My friends will be running for Senator and Governor; they'll be on the federal bench; they'll be coming back here to teach. Even Yale and Stanford do not have the feeling Harvard has. That's one reason why the arbitrariness and the randomness and the strange sense of hierarchy and misplaced priorities is so unsettling and occasionally nauseating while you're here: you're at the heart of a vast system, you know you're a little cell being pumped back and forth, carrying oxygen to one finger or toe of this system, and yet you can hear that the heartbeat is just a little irregular, the heart is just a little diseased.
Sorry to crash the Harvard 1L taking classes here, but I wanted to give the Yale 1L response to some of Mallard's obloquy.

First, the people here at Yale Law are ridiculously smart and intimidating. I spent many years at Harvard and took classes there with law students. I have never been intimidated like I am here. In my small group of 15 people, for example, we have 2 Ph.D.s, someone from Harvard's Kennedy School, a Truman fellow, 2 Rhode Scholars, a former speech writer, someone who worked many years at the ACLU (I am sure I'm forgetting some other awesome experiences). The person who was trying to help me chill out the other day (not in my small group) has a summer firm job and had a 180 LSAT and a 4.0 GPA coming in. It seems like all the students that got in straight from undergraduate here had 180s on their LSAT. I agree that the LSAT probably doesn't mean much, and I don't think the difference between a 165 and 175 is profound.

But I would argue that the difference is profound between someone with a 3.95 GPA and a 175 LSAT straight from undergraduate and a 3.95/175 who is also a former Rhodes Scholar or who has a few years of amazing work experience. The former class dominates Harvard. The latter class dominates Yale.

Judging by history, Harvard will send about the same number of (perhaps marginally more) people into academia, supreme court, and clerkships. But Harvard is more than twice as large. There are superstars at every school. But here at Yale they are in nauseating abundance. I guess what I mean to say is that we have so many people that were already superstars in their post-college careers before starting law school.
:roll:

Warning to all 0Ls - attitudes like this will be nauseatingly common in all YLS vs HLS/SLS comparisons over the next 8 months, peaking during the writeups of the three ASWs. The self-congratulatory circle-jerking by YLS students/acceptees can get a little barfy.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:56 pm

Yeah, there's no necessary connection between LSAT and law school performance. Although there's also no necessary connection between class preparation and exam performance, either.

There's no HLS/YLS rivalry, there's just some guy who parachuted in, calling an empirically valid statement of fact (Langdell? Frankfurter? Brandeis? Hell, Scalia? There's clearly no law school in the country with the sort of history and impact of Harvard) an "obloquy" and offering the normal Yale story about how intimidating and impressive everyone around him is and how dumb he feels in comparison. If we aggregate the story every Yale student posts in those threads, the picture we have to get is a bunch of insecure people throwing their weight around. It sounds awful. I don't mind that Harvard students are a little younger or don't have impressive scholarships, and I think I've been quite critical and realistic enough about the school in this thread.

And Haribo hits the nail on the head, with concision I did not manage.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by excelsiorcaelo » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:04 pm

mallard wrote:Yeah, there's no necessary connection between LSAT and law school performance. Although there's also no necessary connection between class preparation and exam performance, either.
I just hope that there's no necessary connection between overall effort and exam performance! I'll let you know when I find out.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:05 pm

excelsiorcaelo wrote:
mallard wrote:Yeah, there's no necessary connection between LSAT and law school performance. Although there's also no necessary connection between class preparation and exam performance, either.
I just hope that there's no necessary connection between overall effort and exam performance! I'll let you know when I find out.
Probably this semester there wasn't that much of a connection. None of us really knew what to study or how exams worked yet.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by buckley » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:07 pm

Do you happen to know anyone that did not have the numbers to get into to Harvard but got in?

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by excelsiorcaelo » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:09 pm

mallard wrote:
excelsiorcaelo wrote:
mallard wrote:Yeah, there's no necessary connection between LSAT and law school performance. Although there's also no necessary connection between class preparation and exam performance, either.
I just hope that there's no necessary connection between overall effort and exam performance! I'll let you know when I find out.
Probably this semester there wasn't that much of a connection. None of us really knew what to study or how exams worked yet.
If there's a necessary connection between TV watched and exam performance, I'm sure I'll get straight dean's prizes.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:09 pm

buckley wrote:Do you happen to know anyone that did not have the numbers to get into to Harvard but got in?
People don't really go around talking about their numbers, but from last year's LSN, sure. I see from your history you have a 3.3, so your chances are going to be quite slim.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by 02082010 » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:12 pm

mallard wrote:
buckley wrote:Do you happen to know anyone that did not have the numbers to get into to Harvard but got in?
People don't really go around talking about their numbers, but from last year's LSN, sure. I see from your history you have a 3.3, so your chances are going to be quite slim.
Are you William Buckley's grandson? If not, probably not.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by buckley » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:13 pm

Yeah I figured, I am wondering if it is worth it to apply. Although maybe a strong lsat would help

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by mallard » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:15 pm

buckley wrote:Yeah I figured, I am wondering if it is worth it to apply. Although maybe a strong lsat would help
It depends how much money you have. Marginal costs and all that. Are you an incredibly interesting person? What's your resume look like? There was a 3.4/174/179 (and not URM) who got HYS last year, but he was a really unique applicant by all accounts.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by doyleoil » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:15 pm

OperaSoprano wrote:If you do anything but return to HLS as a professor (after a SCOTUS clerkship), I'll be quite disappointed.
people who make comments like this ought to be placed in burlap sacks and beaten with Reeds

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by Mr. Matlock » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:17 pm

Edit: I have no idea what happened here. Obviously not Harvard material. :(
Last edited by Mr. Matlock on Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by Mr. Matlock » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:17 pm

mallard wrote:
tinman wrote:
mallard wrote: ......
The real rationale for taking the higher-ranked school is simple. Kids here are simply not that much smarter than kids at BU or BC. Your extra point or two on the LSAT or the fact that you spent that one semester studying and the other kid spent that semester drinking does not mean you will perform better in law school. You have a comparative advantage now; you got into Harvard. You give it up by going to another school because the legal profession overvalues law school prestige.

There are, of course, other great reasons. My professors have been friends with Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, Antonin Scalia, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. My friends will be running for Senator and Governor; they'll be on the federal bench; they'll be coming back here to teach. Even Yale and Stanford do not have the feeling Harvard has. That's one reason why the arbitrariness and the randomness and the strange sense of hierarchy and misplaced priorities is so unsettling and occasionally nauseating while you're here: you're at the heart of a vast system, you know you're a little cell being pumped back and forth, carrying oxygen to one finger or toe of this system, and yet you can hear that the heartbeat is just a little irregular, the heart is just a little diseased.
Sorry to crash the Harvard 1L taking classes here, but I wanted to give the Yale 1L response to some of Mallard's obloquy.

First, the people here at Yale Law are ridiculously smart and intimidating. I spent many years at Harvard and took classes there with law students. I have never been intimidated like I am here. In my small group of 15 people, for example, we have 2 Ph.D.s, someone from Harvard's Kennedy School, a Truman fellow, 2 Rhode Scholars, a former speech writer, someone who worked many years at the ACLU (I am sure I'm forgetting some other awesome experiences). The person who was trying to help me chill out the other day (not in my small group) has a summer firm job and had a 180 LSAT and a 4.0 GPA coming in. It seems like all the students that got in straight from undergraduate here had 180s on their LSAT. I agree that the LSAT probably doesn't mean much, and I don't think the difference between a 165 and 175 is profound.

But I would argue that the difference is profound between someone with a 3.95 GPA and a 175 LSAT straight from undergraduate and a 3.95/175 who is also a former Rhodes Scholar or who has a few years of amazing work experience. The former class dominates Harvard. The latter class dominates Yale.

Judging by history, Harvard will send about the same number of (perhaps marginally more) people into academia, supreme court, and clerkships. But Harvard is more than twice as large. There are superstars at every school. But here at Yale they are in nauseating abundance. I guess what I mean to say is that we have so many people that were already superstars in their post-college careers before starting law school.
lol wut
Interesting. Didn't see this as a possible development.

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by OperaSoprano » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:18 pm

mallard wrote:Yeah, there's no necessary connection between LSAT and law school performance. Although there's also no necessary connection between class preparation and exam performance, either.

There's no HLS/YLS rivalry, there's just some guy who parachuted in, calling an empirically valid statement of fact (Langdell? Frankfurter? Brandeis? Hell, Scalia? There's clearly no law school in the country with the sort of history and impact of Harvard) an "obloquy" and offering the normal Yale story about how intimidating and impressive everyone around him is and how dumb he feels in comparison. If we aggregate the story every Yale student posts in those threads, the picture we have to get is a bunch of insecure people throwing their weight around. It sounds awful. I don't mind that Harvard students are a little younger or don't have impressive scholarships, and I think I've been quite critical and realistic enough about the school in this thread.

And Haribo hits the nail on the head, with concision I did not manage.
I agree that you have. Just from the people I know in your class, HLS seems to attract a decent number of geniuses who remain surprisingly humble about their achievements. I don't think Harvard needs an inferiority complex on TLS, or anywhere else. It's just amusing to me to observe that people who get into Yale can still be insecure about their place in the pecking order. A little bit sad, though, if the above was done purposefully or knowingly.

I think there is more correlation between preparedness and performance than LSAT score and performance, though I look forward to seeing whether excelsior is right. I also cannot imagine why HLS makes you guys take four finals per semester. What's up with that? Isn't three the norm for 1Ls at most schools?

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by buckley » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:18 pm

I have a lot of extracurricular and lived in venezuela a while and it was pretty crazy. i don't know if harvard would really care about that

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Re: Harvard 1L will take some questions about Harvard.

Post by IHaveDietMoxie » Fri Dec 18, 2009 1:19 pm

Is Elizabeth Warren as cool as she seems on TV or is it like when you meet a professional wrestler in person?

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