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I'd really like to get into HYS. I just took the June LSAT, and if I score within my PrepTest range I can expect a 174-177, hopefully closer to 177. I have a 3.67 LSAC GPA from USF.

Since I have a GPA well below the 25th percentile for HYS, I'm concerned about my prospects. I took 8 years to graduate. I have very few softs besides Honors College and my major's org, but the experience of the past 8 years of my life has been unique in both good and bad ways.

My transcript is particularly unique. I withdrew from most of my first semester courses in Fall 07 to move back home, got some B's in the other courses. Spring 08 was ugly—withdrew from everything except an online intro geography class, in which I received a D since I stopped doing the work. I managed to get some order in my life long enough to take two 18-21 credit semesters. I maintained a 3.75 average for those. Things fell apart after that and I basically withdrew from two entire years (3 semesters of WCs and a skipped semester). Came back in Spring 2013, got overwhelmed, withdrew again. More WCs.

Following spring 13, I moved back home to reassess. Long story short, I developed a lot of good habits that summer, and I have been very healthy and adept at managing stress ever since. From Summer 13 to graduation, I've maintained a 3.97 LSAC calculated GPA.

I have many reasons that I could mention in personal statements or addenda for why this is the case. My socioeconomic circumstances were never great. My mom has been on welfare and unemployed for 20 years, and my dad is below the poverty line. I had to go back to my hometown for months/semesters at a time to take care of my grandmother and cut lawns with my dad. My grandfather's dementia got much worse after I left for college and he died in my sophomore year. All of these circumstances, along with my academic failures, led to a tough case of depression for the first several years of school (hence the WCs). If it wasn't for my admittedly poor decision to stay in that intro geography class during the semester that my grandfather died, I would have a 3.8 LSAC GPA.

I am hoping someone could give me some insight as to how an ad comm might view this kind of record. Assuming that I do a good job of explaining these circumstances, have good recs, etc., can I have hope that HYS would give my application significantly more weight than a 3.67 with no apparent improvement over 4 years?

First, get your actual LSAT score, because this is all hypothetical without it.

You can't retake a GPA, so I would spend less time worrying about it. Write an addendum, but if they're playing a numbers game (and HYS absolutely does when it comes to GPA/LSAT), it won't really raise your GPA. The best thing you can do to offset that is have a stellar LSAT and some well-above-average softs. I think with a really strong LSAT, you have a shot at Harvard, but probably not Yale or Stanford.

As to your addendum: your story is extremely compelling (and makes for great PS material), and good for you for overcoming those obstacles. But I think you're overestimating how unique your circumstances are and how much that will affect your admissions decisions. The improvement in your GPA would be (I think) more important to highlight than your difficulties, since you don't want to give the ad comm the impression that another traumatic life event could cause you to do the exact same thing in law school.

All that said, HYS is great, but so are pretty much all the other schools in the T14. With a high LSAT, I think CCN with money would easily be in reach, and you'd likely achieve the same kind of job results from those schools for almost any field that isn't extremely unicorn-y (SCOTUS clerk, etc.).

Wbh8814 wrote:I'd really like to get into HYS. I just took the June LSAT, and if I score within my PrepTest range I can expect a 174-177, hopefully closer to 177. I have a 3.67 LSAC GPA from USF.

Since I have a GPA well below the 25th percentile for HYS, I'm concerned about my prospects. I took 8 years to graduate. I have very few softs besides Honors College and my major's org, but the experience of the past 8 years of my life has been unique in both good and bad ways.

My transcript is particularly unique. I withdrew from most of my first semester courses in Fall 07 to move back home, got some B's in the other courses. Spring 08 was ugly—withdrew from everything except an online intro geography class, in which I received a D since I stopped doing the work. I managed to get some order in my life long enough to take two 18-21 credit semesters. I maintained a 3.75 average for those. Things fell apart after that and I basically withdrew from two entire years (3 semesters of WCs and a skipped semester). Came back in Spring 2013, got overwhelmed, withdrew again. More WCs.

Following spring 13, I moved back home to reassess. Long story short, I developed a lot of good habits that summer, and I have been very healthy and adept at managing stress ever since. From Summer 13 to graduation, I've maintained a 3.97 LSAC calculated GPA.

I have many reasons that I could mention in personal statements or addenda for why this is the case. My socioeconomic circumstances were never great. My mom has been on welfare and unemployed for 20 years, and my dad is below the poverty line. I had to go back to my hometown for months/semesters at a time to take care of my grandmother and cut lawns with my dad. My grandfather's dementia got much worse after I left for college and he died in my sophomore year. All of these circumstances, along with my academic failures, led to a tough case of depression for the first several years of school (hence the WCs). If it wasn't for my admittedly poor decision to stay in that intro geography class during the semester that my grandfather died, I would have a 3.8 LSAC GPA.

I am hoping someone could give me some insight as to how an ad comm might view this kind of record. Assuming that I do a good job of explaining these circumstances, have good recs, etc., can I have hope that HYS would give my application significantly more weight than a 3.67 with no apparent improvement over 4 years?

It is going to be a hard sell to HYS, I think less because of your circumstances than because of your numbers. Those schools are definitely invested in keeping their extremely high medians extremely high, and they have plenty of top scorers to choose from. That being said, you should definitely give it a shot.

It sounds like your unique experience over the past several years could make for a compelling personal statement. If you choose to go that route, be honest and transparent about the difficulties you faced, but focus on how you dealt with/overcame them in particular.

I don't know that your application would be weighed more than someone else with the same numbers/less of a dramatic rise. In any case, worrying about it is pointless. Focus on pulling that LSAT score for real, writing a strong personal statement, and getting your apps in early in the cycle. You definitely have a strong shot at T14 + money with a high LSAT score. I'm not sure what your priorities are, but a lack of debt and good employment prospects sound pretty good to me.