Public Interest - $$ at GW or $$$ at American? Forum

[latetothis]

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[Socratease]

Didn't you ask the exact same question yesterday

[latetothis]

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[Socratease]

Yeah so I think the responses you got yesterday made a lot of sense. If by "focusing on women's rights," you mean handling small-scale DV cases or something of the sort, either choice is probably okay. But if you only want to be doing impact lit in DC for some prestigious PI org, don't go to these schools.

Also I'm not sure about your claim that there's less pressure to be at the top of the class at GW than at American. Is this really true?

It would probably be helpful to know your stats. I would think that if you got WL'd at CLS & N you'd have better--or at least more--options.

[latetothis]

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[latetothis]

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[UVA2B]

I did get a full scholarship at UNC and Northeastern, but I knew I wanted to practice in DC so I figured the networking would be better at American, not to mention the internship opportunities in DC during the school year. I applied to most of the T14, except Michigan and Cornell.

I mean, I'd still have to do well at GW to maximize job opportunities, but I figure I'd have to be at the very top of American's class to get the same kind of opportunities that someone with a lower GPA at GW would have. I'm just basing this on the rankings of each school (#30 vs. #82).

This is not exactly how you should be viewing these two schools. You definitely want to be in DC, and you're looking exclusively at two regional schools in DC. The rankings are meaningless outside of claiming you go to a T30, T40, or whatever other arbitrary distinction you want to use. From everything you've posted, you want to get into low-paid PI work and you recognize you won't be going into national impact lit PI out of either of these schools, at least not initially. So that means you need to tailor your entire approach in law school to getting a job in a local women's rights/DV organization, which generally speaking don't care about prestige so much as they do about commitment to their cause. So that'll mean interning, externing, pro bono volunteering, and whatever else you can make happen. Your grades won't be completely unimportant, but being a committed American graduate with a 3.1 will do much more for you than a lesser committed GW graduate with a 3.3 (these GPAs are meant to be purely illustrative, not indicative of any level of performance at the two schools).

GW opens up the possibility of other opportunities to a degree, but those seem to be opportunities you don't really want, so why would you base any law school decision on having them available to you. The only type of hiring that is going to be extremely different between these two schools will be Biglaw and maybe Fedgov. Local level PI more than likely will not be. So you should really be focused on saving money for your local PI career you want and figuring out how to maximize your opportunities to get connected into the sector of PI that you're trying to enter. You'll still want to focus on getting good grades at either, because it absolutely can't hurt to also have a high GPA, but GWU is not going to place you into local PI based on the weight of its relative prestige to American.

[latetothis]

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