Cornell 1L taking questions Forum

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Lincoln

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Lincoln » Fri Jan 27, 2017 3:06 pm

Lavitz wrote:You don't necessarily have to be top 25%. A few people, including several TLSers, have gotten good clerkships below top 1/3rd. Of course, grades help, but they're not the entire story.

Since OP PM'd me, I'll just post some general info here for future reference.

The percentage of the class in federal clerkships right after graduation is usually between 5-10%, which is in line with the rest of the T-14 besides HYS, Chicago, and UVA, which usually have over 10%. However, since clerkship hiring has accelerated, a lot of students end up clerking after 1-2 years of working, and so the employment numbers no longer account for them. Hence a rather dismal year last year.

In addition, clerkship resources have definitely improved since I was a 1L. Back then, the public service office was in charge of clerkships, and mostly all they did was maintain symplicity and host one panel to explain to 1Ls how OSCAR works. When Dean P took over, clerkships went way up on the administration's priority list, so we have a separate clerkship office which hosts many more events, sends out weekly e-mails highlighting opportunities and providing advice, etc. So I think the opportunities here are similar to any other lower T-14 now. I can go into more detail in PM though.
Current SDNY clerk here. District Court clerkships are, as Lavitz says, exceedingly rare right out of school. Almost every judge in the SDNY and EDNY now hires clerks for one or more years out. That makes the clerkship statistics almost useless.

Cornell is reasonably competitive when it comes to clerkships, and the school has gotten better at getting students into them. But I still wouldn't rely on the clerkship office. Clerkships typically require a lot of legwork. You should keep a spreadsheet of all the judges in courts in which you would consider clerking and fill it in with any information you get from OSCAR or calling the judges' chambers.

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dietcoke1

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by dietcoke1 » Sat Jan 28, 2017 7:13 pm

Has anyone had any success negotiating with a Texas offer?

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Lavitz

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Lavitz » Sun Jan 29, 2017 12:00 am

dietcoke1 wrote:Has anyone had any success negotiating with a Texas offer?
Not sure if anyone has personal experience with this, but if you have no better offers by March, then just go for it and see what happens. Your best chance is if the UT offer is significantly larger than Cornell's offer and you make a convincing case for why you'd attend if they bump up your award.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by ZVBXRPL » Mon Jan 30, 2017 9:16 pm

Lavitz wrote:
dietcoke1 wrote:Has anyone had any success negotiating with a Texas offer?
Not sure if anyone has personal experience with this, but if you have no better offers by March, then just go for it and see what happens. Your best chance is if the UT offer is significantly larger than Cornell's offer and you make a convincing case for why you'd attend if they bump up your award.
Can you post or direct me to a sample 1L schedule - monday through friday or whatever? tysm!

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Lavitz

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Lavitz » Mon Jan 30, 2017 9:40 pm

ZVBXRPL wrote:Can you post or direct me to a sample 1L schedule - monday through friday or whatever? tysm!
A class schedule? You can see the whole Fall term schedule here: https://support.law.cornell.edu/student ... hedule.pdf

And here's a sample 1L schedule that looks cleaner:

Image

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by ZVBXRPL » Tue Jan 31, 2017 1:17 am

Lavitz wrote:
ZVBXRPL wrote:Can you post or direct me to a sample 1L schedule - monday through friday or whatever? tysm!
A class schedule? You can see the whole Fall term schedule here: https://support.law.cornell.edu/student ... hedule.pdf

And here's a sample 1L schedule that looks cleaner:

Image
Thanks dude! Were you happy with Cornell? What did you like most and what did you dislike?

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Litt1tUp

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Litt1tUp » Tue Jan 31, 2017 2:17 pm

Anyone have any reviews/experiences on living at 13 South or living on campus in graduate housing?

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Lavitz

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Lavitz » Tue Jan 31, 2017 10:52 pm

ZVBXRPL wrote:Were you happy with Cornell?
Yes. Quite.
ZVBXRPL wrote:What did you like most
Free alcohol The vibrant student life and great sense of community.
ZVBXRPL wrote:what did you dislike?
The weather. I wasn't one to complain about it, but it's the most obvious negative.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by ZVBXRPL » Wed Feb 01, 2017 12:28 pm

Lavitz wrote:
ZVBXRPL wrote:Were you happy with Cornell?
Yes. Quite.
ZVBXRPL wrote:What did you like most
Free alcohol The vibrant student life and great sense of community.
ZVBXRPL wrote:what did you dislike?
The weather. I wasn't one to complain about it, but it's the most obvious negative.
ELI5: Law review and journals: whats the point? Helps job prospects? And whats the process to join? Thanks for your excellent contribution here, Lavitz!

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Cow » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:55 pm

ZVBXRPL wrote:
Lavitz wrote:
ZVBXRPL wrote:Were you happy with Cornell?
Yes. Quite.
ZVBXRPL wrote:What did you like most
Free alcohol The vibrant student life and great sense of community.
ZVBXRPL wrote:what did you dislike?
The weather. I wasn't one to complain about it, but it's the most obvious negative.
ELI5: Law review and journals: whats the point? Helps job prospects? And whats the process to join? Thanks for your excellent contribution here, Lavitz!
Most folks I know are just doing it for the resume line (though a few actually enjoy it). LR, in particular, is considered a strong resume booster and supposedly helps with job prospects. You’ll get a lot of practice editing and verifying legal citations too, but that really has nothing to do with why people join LR/Journals.

If you’re interested in a journal, you have to compete in a writing competition at the end of your 1L year. The current setup for it is a 10-day competition that has two components: editing citations and grammar according to Blue Book requirements, and a legal writing component. Placements onto Law Review are a combination of 1L grades and competition scores, with a few diversity positions available as well I believe. There are three journals: Law Review, the Journal on Law and Public Policy, and the International Law Journal. If you don’t get LR, you’ll almost certainly get one of the other two.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by hopefuljumbo23 » Wed Feb 01, 2017 7:16 pm

Cow wrote: If you’re interested in a journal, you have to compete in a writing competition at the end of your 1L year. The current setup for it is a 10-day competition that has two components: editing citations and grammar according to Blue Book requirements, and a legal writing component. Placements onto Law Review are a combination of 1L grades and competition scores, with a few diversity positions available as well I believe. There are three journals: Law Review, the Journal on Law and Public Policy, and the International Law Journal. If you don’t get LR, you’ll almost certainly get one of the other two.
How competitive is it to get onto LR? I know this is a hard Q to answer, but I figured I'd ask it in case anyone somehow knew. Happy to hear anecdotal evidence as well.

Also, how do you know there are "diversity positions"? I've never heard of this.

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Lavitz

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Lavitz » Wed Feb 01, 2017 10:50 pm

hopefuljumbo23 wrote:
Cow wrote:
ZVBXRPL wrote:ELI5: Law review and journals: whats the point? Helps job prospects? And whats the process to join? Thanks for your excellent contribution here, Lavitz!
Most folks I know are just doing it for the resume line (though a few actually enjoy it). LR, in particular, is considered a strong resume booster and supposedly helps with job prospects. You’ll get a lot of practice editing and verifying legal citations too, but that really has nothing to do with why people join LR/Journals.

If you’re interested in a journal, you have to compete in a writing competition at the end of your 1L year. The current setup for it is a 10-day competition that has two components: editing citations and grammar according to Blue Book requirements, and a legal writing component. Placements onto Law Review are a combination of 1L grades and competition scores, with a few diversity positions available as well I believe. There are three journals: Law Review, the Journal on Law and Public Policy, and the International Law Journal. If you don’t get LR, you’ll almost certainly get one of the other two.
How competitive is it to get onto LR? I know this is a hard Q to answer, but I figured I'd ask it in case anyone somehow knew. Happy to hear anecdotal evidence as well.

Also, how do you know there are "diversity positions"? I've never heard of this.
As stated above, the point is mostly for the resume line. Not being on a journal can be seen as a red flag, especially when combined with low grades. So everyone tries to get on a journal just to be safe.

There are 45 spots on Law Review for approximately 200 students. To clarify the selection process, the top 15 people in the class GPA-wise will "grade on," meaning that they will make it so long as their writing comp score was not in the bottom third of the class. Yet some people in the top 15 still manage to not get on. After the top 15 in terms of GPA, another 15 spots go to the people with the highest scores in the writing competition. After that, another 15 spots (or more if some ppl in the top 15 didn't grade on) will be decided by "composite scores." This is a combination of your GPA, writing comp score, and score on a "personal statement" which is sort of a diversity statement, as you'll have to explain what unique traits you'll bring to the journal. This is what I believe Cow is referring to as a diversity position, but it is definitely not actually a diversity position. You can composite-on without being "diverse" in an ethnic sense. Anyway, this works out to be almost 25% of the class on Law Review, and not limited to the top 25% gpa-wise. So although it's difficult to quantify exactly how "hard" it is to get on LR, this should give you an idea of what it takes. Anecdotally, you can be median and still get on if you kill it in the writing comp and/or have a great personal statement.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Cow » Wed Feb 01, 2017 11:14 pm

After that, another 15 spots (or more if some ppl in the top 15 didn't grade on) will be decided by "composite scores." This is a combination of your GPA, writing comp score, and score on a "personal statement" which is sort of a diversity statement, as you'll have to explain what unique traits you'll bring to the journal. This is what I believe Cow is referring to as a diversity position, but it is definitely not actually a diversity position.
Correct. I perhaps misspoke by calling it a “diversity” position. The take-away here is that you definitely want to write a personal statement.
How competitive is it to get onto LR? I know this is a hard Q to answer, but I figured I'd ask it in case anyone somehow knew. Happy to hear anecdotal evidence as well.
Also purely anecdotally, I was somewhat surprised by some of the people who did and did not make it on to Law Review last year, so it’s definitely competitive but not always easy to predict one way or another.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by lawschool2017712 » Sun Feb 05, 2017 4:55 pm

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Last edited by lawschool2017712 on Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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hopefuljumbo23

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by hopefuljumbo23 » Sun Feb 05, 2017 5:04 pm

lawschool2017712 wrote:Thoughts on Collegetown Terrace?
I can help you out here. Feel free to PM, but in short: it's awesome, but pretty expensive.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by capnobvious123 » Sun Feb 05, 2017 7:06 pm

Hi everyone, great thread, lots of helpful info.

I sent my apps in 1/9/17, and just got invited to interview w/ Cornell. 3.85/167. Anyone have thoughts/pro tips on the online interviews? I did it last cycle for Northwestern and kind of hated it (was waitlisted basically everywhere with a 165, reapplying this year with my 167).

I'm looking to craft a coherent "why cornell" for when that inevitably happens. I'm interested in NYC biglaw, like the idea of a small college town setting for law school, and love the idea of small class sizes, but I don't have much of an idea of what field of law I'm interested in yet (IP? PI?).

Also unrelated, how difficult is it to organize a fresh student organization as a 1L at Cornell? I'd basically just need to reserve a space and drum up interest from students, but I wanted to see if people had a sense for how doable that is in addition to the nightmare that the workload will be, and whether 1Ls ever bother/succeed.

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Lavitz

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Lavitz » Sun Feb 05, 2017 9:26 pm

capnobvious123 wrote:Hi everyone, great thread, lots of helpful info.

I sent my apps in 1/9/17, and just got invited to interview w/ Cornell. 3.85/167. Anyone have thoughts/pro tips on the online interviews? I did it last cycle for Northwestern and kind of hated it (was waitlisted basically everywhere with a 165, reapplying this year with my 167).

I'm looking to craft a coherent "why cornell" for when that inevitably happens. I'm interested in NYC biglaw, like the idea of a small college town setting for law school, and love the idea of small class sizes, but I don't have much of an idea of what field of law I'm interested in yet (IP? PI?).
I have no interview tips, but your "why Cornell" sounds fine as it is. You don't need to know what area of law you want to specialize in now, and I probably wouldn't float IP unless you have a hard science background.
capnobvious123 wrote:Also unrelated, how difficult is it to organize a fresh student organization as a 1L at Cornell? I'd basically just need to reserve a space and drum up interest from students, but I wanted to see if people had a sense for how doable that is in addition to the nightmare that the workload will be, and whether 1Ls ever bother/succeed.
I helped revive an old club during 1L, and it wasn't that hard. I'm assuming that you've already reviewed the list of student orgs to make sure there isn't already an org for what you're thinking of. To start with, you'd want to talk to the law school event coordinator, and maybe also the dean of students. Then I believe you just need to get at least 2 other students to agree to be on the e-board with you, get a faculty advisor on board, draft a constitution, and maybe submit some forms. I think we just hosted one speaker event in the Spring with money from CLSA, submitted a budget to the graduate funding committee to get funds for 2L year, and didn't have actual elections until 2L Fall.

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capnobvious123

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by capnobvious123 » Sun Feb 05, 2017 11:55 pm

Lavitz wrote: I have no interview tips, but your "why Cornell" sounds fine as it is. You don't need to know what area of law you want to specialize in now, and I probably wouldn't float IP unless you have a hard science background.
Awesome. I didn't really realize that I had a solid answer until I started writing that oddly enough. Oh well. Thanks!
Lavitz wrote:I helped revive an old club during 1L, and it wasn't that hard. I'm assuming that you've already reviewed the list of student orgs to make sure there isn't already an org for what you're thinking of. To start with, you'd want to talk to the law school event coordinator, and maybe also the dean of students. Then I believe you just need to get at least 2 other students to agree to be on the e-board with you, get a faculty advisor on board, draft a constitution, and maybe submit some forms. I think we just hosted one speaker event in the Spring with money from CLSA, submitted a budget to the graduate funding committee to get funds for 2L year, and didn't have actual elections until 2L Fall.
Yeah, I'm pretty confident without needing to look that there isn't, haha. I'm looking to start teaching a pretty unknown martial art on whatever campus I end up on for whoever's interested in dropping by. That sounds like pretty standard stuff though, thanks for the insight. Hoping it works out easily enough.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Yea All Right » Thu Feb 09, 2017 9:11 pm

Lavitz wrote:
dietcoke1 wrote:Has anyone had any success negotiating with a Texas offer?
Not sure if anyone has personal experience with this, but if you have no better offers by March, then just go for it and see what happens. Your best chance is if the UT offer is significantly larger than Cornell's offer and you make a convincing case for why you'd attend if they bump up your award.
Interestingly, Dean of Admissions Monica Ingram was at UT before she came to Cornell. So presumably she has an idea of the inner workings of admissions/ scholarship negotiations at both schools and how they might affect each other.

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Yea All Right

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Yea All Right » Thu Feb 09, 2017 9:24 pm

Cow wrote:
After that, another 15 spots (or more if some ppl in the top 15 didn't grade on) will be decided by "composite scores." This is a combination of your GPA, writing comp score, and score on a "personal statement" which is sort of a diversity statement, as you'll have to explain what unique traits you'll bring to the journal. This is what I believe Cow is referring to as a diversity position, but it is definitely not actually a diversity position.
Correct. I perhaps misspoke by calling it a “diversity” position. The take-away here is that you definitely want to write a personal statement.
How competitive is it to get onto LR? I know this is a hard Q to answer, but I figured I'd ask it in case anyone somehow knew. Happy to hear anecdotal evidence as well.
Also purely anecdotally, I was somewhat surprised by some of the people who did and did not make it on to Law Review last year, so it’s definitely competitive but not always easy to predict one way or another.
Another takeaway: Put as much effort and work into the writing competition as you can, even though you'll be hella burned out after finals. Just gotta grind through it.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by cantexplaingottago » Fri Feb 10, 2017 1:04 pm

Yea All Right wrote:Another takeaway: Put as much effort and work into the writing competition as you can, even though you'll be hella burned out after finals. Just gotta grind through it.
If 12 weeks from now is anything like the present, I suspect it's planned like that so we get it done before we have any opportunity to realize that OH GOD, IT'S OVER, IT'S FINALLY OVER... for 3 months. I feel like I've been broken like a wild horse, and now I write memos and read case law without complaint, without any notion of there being other ways of life. It's actually pretty helpful in getting shit done, so I don't mind.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Yea All Right » Fri Feb 10, 2017 7:22 pm

cantexplaingottago wrote:
Yea All Right wrote:Another takeaway: Put as much effort and work into the writing competition as you can, even though you'll be hella burned out after finals. Just gotta grind through it.
If 12 weeks from now is anything like the present, I suspect it's planned like that so we get it done before we have any opportunity to realize that OH GOD, IT'S OVER, IT'S FINALLY OVER... for 3 months. I feel like I've been broken like a wild horse, and now I write memos and read case law without complaint, without any notion of there being other ways of life. It's actually pretty helpful in getting shit done, so I don't mind.
You may feel like a broken horse now, but after 1L you will be a majestic stallion free to roam across the plains.

Kind of.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by cantexplaingottago » Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:50 pm

Yea All Right wrote:
cantexplaingottago wrote:
Yea All Right wrote:Another takeaway: Put as much effort and work into the writing competition as you can, even though you'll be hella burned out after finals. Just gotta grind through it.
If 12 weeks from now is anything like the present, I suspect it's planned like that so we get it done before we have any opportunity to realize that OH GOD, IT'S OVER, IT'S FINALLY OVER... for 3 months. I feel like I've been broken like a wild horse, and now I write memos and read case law without complaint, without any notion of there being other ways of life. It's actually pretty helpful in getting shit done, so I don't mind.
You may feel like a broken horse now, but after 1L you will be a majestic stallion free to roam across the plains.

Kind of.
There have been rumors of a motion to shorten the writing competition period... Can it be? I hope they're true.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by Rubbishdump » Tue Feb 14, 2017 4:58 pm

What should I buy to prepare myself for Ithaca? Emphasis on cold weather gear, I suppose. But whatever else you guys feel is essential, too. I want to create a checklist.

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Re: Cornell 1L taking questions

Post by counttoten » Tue Feb 14, 2017 5:21 pm

Rubbishdump wrote:What should I buy to prepare myself for Ithaca? Emphasis on cold weather gear, I suppose. But whatever else you guys feel is essential, too. I want to create a checklist.
This may not be what you had in mind, but the weather can change quickly here because of the lake. I'd recommend getting an extra umbrella to keep at school, just in case it suddenly starts precipitating ("Ithacating") when you're looking to leave, which it often does.

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