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I have a question about the name scholarships that you have to submit a separate essay to be considered for at NYU (http://www.law.nyu.edu/jdadmissions/scholarships). Scholarships like the ASPIRE Cybersecurity Scholarship, Jacobson Law and Business Scholarship, Bickel & Brewer Latino Institute Scholarship and most of the other name scholarships definitely are targeting people who have demonstrated interest in certain fields or areas. My question is, is getting these scholarships mostly still a numbers game (LSAT/GPA) or is it less about that once you've been admitted and your scholarship essay and demonstrated interest from resume/activities matter more at that point? Or do all of these scholarships still typically go to people with really high numbers?

To illustrate, let's say we have two candidates for the ASPIRE Cybersecurity Scholarship who have been admitted to NYU:

Candidate A: 3.4 GPA, 168 LSAT, B.S. in Information Security and 3 years of work experience working for the federal government in some sort of cybersecurity capacity who is able to write a killer essay on how he wants to combine his experience and JD to achieve the purpose of the scholarship and it is apparent that he's a very good fit for the scholarship and his goals line up well.
Candidate B: 3.9 GPA, 174 LSAT, B.S. in Computer Science, K-JD. Just applied on a whim because he figures not many people with Comp Sci degrees are applying to law school and comes up with an okay essay about how he would be interested even though he hadn't thought of doing that until he saw the scholarship.

Assuming both do okay on the interview, I would say that it's clear that Candidate A is a better fit for the scholarship given his interest and work experience and the committee can sense this but his stats are not actually going to help out the school's stats at all. Who gets the scholarship?

Your numbers should be good enough to get you into NYU after that its all about your story.

/thread

If you want to improve your chances of getting a named scholarship, you should retake your 168.

EDIT: Unless you're Person B. In which case, don't go to law school on a whim.

EricHosmer wrote:If you want to improve your chances of getting a named scholarship, you should retake your 168.

EDIT: Unless you're Person B. In which case, don't go to law school on a whim.

I don't have anything in common with either person and am not interested in the ASPIRE scholarship specifically. I was just creating two hypothetical candidates to clearly illustrate my question.

sesto elemento wrote:Your numbers should be good enough to get you into NYU after that its all about your story.

/thread

What he said.

I'm interested too. As for Aspire, at least 1 of the first 2 recipients had 4 years of relevant WE before LS