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Hey ya'll,

I feel like I shot myself in the foot with academic probation and a low GPA during my undergrad.
It was due to a death and a family and I found it impossible to focus for the semester. I wrote a strong addendum taking full responsibility for my probation regarding this.


My first question is, do you recommend writing an addenda for a low GPA in addition to the probation one? Or is it kind of an overkill/repetitive? It is for the same term, my freshman year. Also there is improvement in my GPA each semester thereafter.

My second question is, how badly did I screw myself over? Obviously I don't think I can swing an admission into HLS or Yale... but I've been doing some research on the UGPA/LSAT calculator on the lsac website, and I believe I have a better chance of getting into private schools. Luckily my parents offered to foot the bill for law school until I can pay them back so that is good news. Do you think that I still have a chance of getting into Notre Dame, William & Mary, BC, or Vanderbilt if I write a hell of personal statement? Also my LOR's are very strong, I have one from my boss at LexisNexis, my pre-law professor, and the athletics director at my undergrad who is like a mentor to me ( I played DI Volleyball).

Also what do you think the chances are for a lower end of a T14 like Georgetown?


Be brutally honest!

Is there a reason your addendum can't cover both topics? I'm not sure how they're supposed to be written, but one seems to be a direct consequence of the other: family death meant you couldn't focus on school so you got bad grades --> academic probation. You were put on probation because of that particular semester right? I think you could easily cover the probation with a sentence or two with the addendum you already have. It was just another consequence of the low grades stemming from a family death.

How long have you been out of school and working? GPA always matters to schools, but less so if you've been out of college for a while. What do the rest of your grades look like? Basically, if you hadn't had that shitty semester and you got grades similar to what you got every other semester, what do you think your GPA would be? Because that's more or less what you're trying to get these schools to do: overlook that one bad semester. I am not an expert on this subject. The conventional wisdom is that, at the end of the day, law schools only care about the statistics they get to report, and so will be very apprehensive about admitting someone with a 2.5 GPA. Unfortunately there isn't really any data for Georgetown, but they did admit someone with similar GPA/LSAT in the 2013-2014 cycle. Your LSAT score is monstrous, congrats! I think the question you really want to be asking is: do addenda actually make a difference? If they do, and your grades would be significantly higher if not for that one semester freshman year, I think you will get into the schools you want.