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Truth is - I've been reading a lot about how "unique" a certain soft while TLS claims that everyone has such and such soft. I didn't want to make 5 different posts, so I consolidated it into one. There are 5 choices to make (total of 10 options), you're going to be given 5 votes - please try not to vote twice on a single choice because that would just ruin everything. Thanks! If you don't want to participate, that's cool too

P.S. If we are doing this right, each choice should add up to 20% so we can see how unique it will be to have it.




Okay - i think people are messing up loll

I was wondering... how common are honors theses and undergraduate research experience?

These are my main softs and I was wondering if they would do my application a lot of help.

Thanks.

well so far it looks like around 50% of the people have them

None of the listed softs are unique.

glitched wrote:P.S. If we are doing this right, each choice should add up to 20% so we can see how unique it will be to have it.




Okay - i think people are messing up loll

You should've consulted these guys when you constructed the poll:

http://www.gallup.com/home.aspx

Because right now it's kind of... not going to give you any useful results. But I'd certainly be interested to know which one was supposed to be unique:

1) TFA or Peace Corps are pretty cool, don't know about unique, but they're helping your application.
2) 1+ years WE - I certainly hope this isn't terribly unique, I don't want to go to school entirely with people excited by the prospect of filing their first expense report.
3) Honors and honors thesis. Come on, this stuff gets handed out like candy I thought. Writing a thesis should be a requirement for going to law school tbh.
4) Study abroad. This could be unique if you did your study abroad in Turkmenistan, the Congo or Myanmar.
5) President/Vice President. You'd have to have some work product to make this meaningful.

But I agree with the premise here, even though it's been frequently covered. There are websites where you can create your own polls, I'd try using one of those. Hook us up with a more rigorously constructed poll, these things are great for generating commentary.

Bildungsroman wrote:None of the listed softs are unique.

haha yeah but that's exactly it - were trying to actually see among TLS members (and not the general population) how unique these softs actually are. If the poll comes out that every single choice goes 50/50, then we will know (at least among the TLS people that responded), that okay - 50% of us have done this and 50% of us havn't i guess you can say that's somewhat unique. If it goes 90-10, then we can say okay, 90% people have done this - this is obviously not unique at all. haha it's just to get some numbers to all of our claims - I'm not saying our claims are wrong but it would at least be nice to see some evidence (although this may not be the strongest or most reliable, it just might end up being something)

haha as far as usefulness of the end result - yeah, uniqueness probably won't mean much. You can be the only one in the world who can burp the entire declaration of independence while using a pogo stick, but it probably won't mean much in the admissions process. I just want to see some stats among TLS members of how unique these "average" softs really are.

This poll will yield no useful data.

That said, it's commonly known these are the kinds of softs that don't matter that much (unless you have none of them).

Not to discount the value of softs. Everyone on TLS tends to shout from rooftops that softs don't matter and that it's all LSAT, but I'd disagree. In a 100m sprint, the difference between winner and loser is usually a mere fraction of a second. Softs are small in the sense that a fraction of a second is small, but every fraction is important when they sum to their totality (especially in top schools, anything under T14 and I would tend to agree that softs lose significance).

How about military service - lump that in with TFA/Peace Corps?

ScottRiqui wrote:How about military service - lump that in with TFA/Peace Corps?

I think the purpose of this poll was to confirm that the aforementioned softs are not actually unique, therefore, lumping it in would cloud the data, as your soft is out of the scope of the poll. Though the poll is somewhat vague and open to interpretation, which is why it won't yield any useful information.

robotclubmember wrote:

ScottRiqui wrote:How about military service - lump that in with TFA/Peace Corps?

I think the purpose of this poll was to confirm that the aforementioned softs are not actually unique, therefore, lumping it in would cloud the data, as your soft is out of the scope of the poll. Though the poll is somewhat vague and open to interpretation, which is why it won't yield any useful information.

I see your point - it would need to be a separate poll item so as not to confuse the issue.

I was surprised that postgraduate education wasn't in the poll either - I'm sure it's not that uncommon, although I'd be curious to see just how common it really is among TLS members.

Among TLS members? Pretty rare. Not sure about rest of applicant pool though. Doubt it's special to adcomms though, unless you can spin a great PS out of it and have the numbers to back it up.

robotclubmember wrote:Among TLS members? Pretty rare. Not sure about rest of applicant pool though. Doubt it's special to adcomms though, unless you can spin a great PS out of it and have the numbers to back it up.

It looks that way to me, too. That was the single biggest shock when I started investigating applying to LS (that my 20+ year old UG GPA is going to count almost infinitely more than my 5-year old master's degree.)

Yeah, you can sugarcoat the undergrad GPA a little bit, but it's always going to be there in a big way. On the bright side, a low GPA hurts you less than a low LSAT does (especially if the GPA is 20+ years old and the LSAT is fresh out of the oven). If I could pick one to bone up, it'd be the GPA.

This poll is funny. How can you judge the "uniqueness" of something. It's unique or it isn't. There aren't varying levels of unique.

D-ROCCA wrote:This poll is funny. How can you judge the "uniqueness" of something. It's unique or it isn't. There aren't varying levels of unique.

Was wondering how long it would take somebody to point out the grammar fail. What should be on there, if you're really looking for rare things, are Fullbrights, Rhodes Scholars, etc. I think these do have a significant impact on an app, whereas none of the above do (unless you have some kind of fantastic record backing it up--say, an undergrad honors thesis that was published in Science).