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This might sound a little bit on the ridiculous/useless side on the spectrum of questions, but I drove myself crazy with college admissions and unrealistic expectations and I'm hoping to get a feel for law school and what I should expect going in. I just finished my first freshman semester at Wash U, class of 2014. I'm a mechanical engineer and I don't plan on double majoring or minoring in anything. My goal was to play the numbers game and play it hard, which is what I did in high school (unfortunately, college admissions was less kind to numbers than I would have liked =/). This semester I came out with a 3.92 UGPA and a 4.08 LSAC GPA. I don't really see myself with a whole lot of soft factors helping my application, if anything I might join one or two clubs, but nothing substantial at all. What should I expect over the next few years? Does law school really only care about numbers? Does coming from Wash U with an engineering degree help? If I can keep an LSAC GPA of 3.9+, maybe 4.0+, and get an LSAT into the mid 170s, what should I be looking at? I know those are huge assumptions, but I'd like to know what my targets are. In a perfect world, I could make it into Stanford with those stats, but then again, in my perfect world I'd be at Stanford for undergrad right now.

So bottom line, if we fast forwarded 2 years and these are my stats:
Wash U mechanical engineer
LSAC GPA of mid to high 3.9x
LSAT of mid 17x
little to no extracurriculars

What should I expect / What would I need to do to make Stanford-level schools happy?

yoft wrote:This might sound a little bit on the ridiculous/useless side on the spectrum of questions, but I drove myself crazy with college admissions and unrealistic expectations and I'm hoping to get a feel for law school and what I should expect going in. I just finished my first freshman semester at Wash U, class of 2014. I'm a mechanical engineer and I don't plan on double majoring or minoring in anything. My goal was to play the numbers game and play it hard, which is what I did in high school (unfortunately, college admissions was less kind to numbers than I would have liked =/). This semester I came out with a 3.92 UGPA and a 4.08 LSAC GPA. I don't really see myself with a whole lot of soft factors helping my application, if anything I might join one or two clubs, but nothing substantial at all. What should I expect over the next few years? Does law school really only care about numbers? Does coming from Wash U with an engineering degree help? If I can keep an LSAC GPA of 3.9+, maybe 4.0+, and get an LSAT into the mid 170s, what should I be looking at? I know those are huge assumptions, but I'd like to know what my targets are. In a perfect world, I could make it into Stanford with those stats, but then again, in my perfect world I'd be at Stanford for undergrad right now.

So bottom line, if we fast forwarded 2 years and these are my stats:
Wash U mechanical engineer
LSAC GPA of mid to high 3.9x
LSAT of mid 17x
little to no extracurriculars

What should I expect / What would I need to do to make Stanford-level schools happy?

For now, don't worry about anything but keeping your GPA as high as humanely possible. SLS does like engineers, especially if you can keep a high GPA. LSAT scores are hard to predict, but if you have a 3.9x engineering and a mid 17x, you have excellent chances at H, and good chances at S. However, S is known for being a "black box" in admissions, and there is no such thing as lock there. If you really want S, you should probably get some extracurriculars -- they like well-rounded applicants.

Prepare to take your LSAT in the June after/during your Junior year. Good luck, and feel free to shoot me a pm or ask any more questions.

Knock is the go to guy on this forum for everything Stanford. Listen to what he says; he knows his shit.

Thank you so much for your response and interest, I really appreciate it! It's great to know that Stanford places more weight on extracurriculars than some of its competitors, I'll definitely keep that in mind!

yoft wrote:Thank you so much for your response and interest, I really appreciate it! It's great to know that Stanford places more weight on extracurriculars than some of its competitors, I'll definitely keep that in mind!

Its not as great as it might appear, as a lot of the best softs are work experience related (the majority of the class has at least one year post grad work experience), so you will be at a disadvantage coming straight out if undergrad.

Lot of unknowns at this point. Just keep your GPA high and start familiarizing yourself with the LSAT but wait until about 6 months prior to the administration you would like to write before you fully begin preparing.