Would going back for more undergrad be beneficial? Forum

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jimmybuttons

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Would going back for more undergrad be beneficial?

Post by jimmybuttons » Tue Feb 22, 2022 2:16 pm

I have been out of school for 3 years (graduate with a degree in finance) and have been doing soul searching on what I want to do with my life. I have looked into many things. The things I've looked into most seriously are law school and medical school. Two very different things I know but I am just looking for something that I feel is important work, are challenging, and bring meaning to my life. In my looking into medical school I can across post-bacc programs as I would need to take prerequisites for medical school. This was intriguing to me because as I went through my undergrad, although I had a 3.5, I was not a good student. I was not involved in any extra curriculars at all and did not interact with my professors. So, these post-bacc programs were going to allow me to build my resume in ways outside of just the prerequisites, like extra-curriculars and building relationships for letters of recommendations. So, my question is would going back and taking undergraduate work for a year give or take be beneficial in the same way if I were to pursue law? I do not feel I could find professors to write me letters currently and being in a college town would make it a lot easier to find opportunities to build my resume in the extra-curricular department. Or would going back to undergrad be a waste of time and money in pursuing law school?

Thanks in advance for your time and responses.

The Lsat Airbender

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Re: Would going back for more undergrad be beneficial?

Post by The Lsat Airbender » Tue Feb 22, 2022 2:31 pm

Post-bacc is a complete waste of time for a legal career. Certainly less valuable than a master's program, and a two-year M.A. isn't very useful for law school either. Letters of rec are the only material factor here and that's pretty minor—you could instead get letters from employers.

(Med school is very different although I'm not knowledgeable enough to say much there.)

nixy

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Re: Would going back for more undergrad be beneficial?

Post by nixy » Tue Feb 22, 2022 4:01 pm

To my knowledge (mostly anecdotal), med school admissions are way more holistic than law school admissions and take into account all the kind of extracurricular stuff even for candidates with awesome grades. Law schools largely don't care - if you have good numbers, you'll get in somewhere decent. Even if you don't have good numbers, you'll find somewhere willing to take you (although you shouldn't go to a school with poor employment prospects). In contrast, there are plenty of people who just won't be able to get into med school. The medical profession regulates med school admissions much more strictly, so that it's hard to get in, but if you get in, you should be able to get a job. The legal profession lets basically everyone go to law school and then fight it out over the not-enough-jobs available.

So there's no need to do any kind of post-bacc additional undergrad to polish up your application - getting a great LSAT is much more important. Even if you want to look more well-rounded, you can find opportunities to volunteer etc without enrolling in college classes to do so. The pre-med post-bacc thing exists really only because so many people don't get all the required prereqs in undergrad and there's no wiggle room about needing those for med school, whereas there are no coursework prereqs for law school.

jimmybuttons

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Re: Would going back for more undergrad be beneficial?

Post by jimmybuttons » Mon Feb 28, 2022 5:21 pm

What if getting a 4.0 in those year of classes could raise my GPA from a 3.5 to a 3.6? And the institution would be a better school than my original undergrad work. Still a bad idea to go back to school?

nixy

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Re: Would going back for more undergrad be beneficial?

Post by nixy » Mon Feb 28, 2022 5:56 pm

jimmybuttons wrote:
Mon Feb 28, 2022 5:21 pm
What if getting a 4.0 in those year of classes could raise my GPA from a 3.5 to a 3.6? And the institution would be a better school than my original undergrad work. Still a bad idea to go back to school?
For law school admissions purposes, your UGPA is set in stone on the day you graduate with your first bachelor’s degree. So any subsequent undergrad coursework won’t change it, and for law, still a waste of time.

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