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Boston University has two different early decision options, the distinguished scholar ED that comes with a full scholarship and the BU-Bound ED which automatically precludes you from any merit aid. I know it might seem rather foolish to willingly give up any merit aid, but I think I have a unique situation and wanted to see if the BU-Bound ED might be beneficial in my situation. This is assuming that the BU-Bound ED gives a slight admissions boost, does it?

UGPA: 3.35 with a slight increase after this semester
LSAT: PT'ing 160-163 taking the December LSAT and hoping to be mid to upper 160's by then
URM: Half Mexican half Middle Eastern

Fortunately, I have parents that will pay for most of, if not all, of my tuition and living expenses. My ultimate goal would be BigLaw, but the T14 is unattainable with my stats and it looks like BU places a good amount of their grads in BigLaw jobs. However, I have no connections to Boston or the North East in general, I've lived the vast majority of my life in Florida.

Would it even be worth it for me to submit an application to BU? I'm also considering submitting an app to Emory just to see what happens, but in the likely event that I'm not admitted to either of those schools I'm also sending apps to UF, FSU, and UMiami.

There's nothing unique about your situation.

Well, it's more accurate to say that there is nothing unique about your decision that would merit making the boneheaded choice of applying to an early decision program that explicitly precludes you from getting merit aid.

But you are selling yourself short. An LSAT in the higher 160s will absolutely put you in contention for the T14 based on your URM status. You probably won't get HYS, but you'll have options. And if you want biglaw, those are the schools you should be targeting.

A 165+ would get you some lower T14 acceptances and you could justify blowing 250K of your parents money for law school a little more than you would be able to at BU

cavalier1138 wrote:There's nothing unique about your situation.

Well, it's more accurate to say that there is nothing unique about your decision that would merit making the boneheaded choice of applying to an early decision program that explicitly precludes you from getting merit aid.

But you are selling yourself short. An LSAT in the higher 160s will absolutely put you in contention for the T14 based on your URM status. You probably won't get HYS, but you'll have options. And if you want biglaw, those are the schools you should be targeting.

For some weird reason, hearing someone else say it's a bad idea to apply ED when it will prevent merit aid is what I needed to hear. It's strange how we can try to rationalize things to ourselves haha.

I didn't think any T14 would be an option, but I guess from now until December I'm really going to ramp up my LSAT studying.

Bro, your mommy and daddy are paying. Why care about the merit-based scholarships you won't be able to obtain anyway?