Transfer Logistics Forum

[Mauve Velociraptor]

Hello to the best law school forum in the world:

A little background:
I'm currently a part-time evening student at a T2 (bottom 90's as a result of a drop in the 2011 rankings). My Fall '10 GPA is a 3.78 (5/63) (Top 8%)

Other than focusing on Spring '11 classes and soliciting LORs from my professors, I'm not doing much else. When I do get to thinking of what will ensue in the coming months, however, a wave of anxiety overcomes me.

Reasons for the anxiety:
Well for starters, I'm a PTE student. To transfer into the FT program at my school I need to take Crim Law over the summer and register for it relatively early. If I stay at my current school, I have every intention of transferring into FT. It is my understanding that summer course credits don't transfer over. What should I do?

I also know that my writing competition will be sometime around the middle of May and I predict other schools' will also be around the same time. If it just so happens that my school's writing competition runs concurrent to a school of interest's writing competition; which one should I write for?

If I decide not to register for Crim Law for the summer because I'm banking on good grades in the Spring, but end up messing up one of my classes and subsequently my transfer odds; I'm stuck in PT for another year.

There's so much uncertainty, and I don't know how to go about the process in a mechanical way.

I wish there were a "personal jurisdiction checklist" for transferring. I read Arrow's advice but it doesn't answer some of my nuances described above.

Please help!!

[Wholigan]

What schools are you hoping to transfer to? Some schools have a separate write-on competition just for transfers after you are accepted. Others invite people who have applied to try to write on, but that's crazy. I would never do a write-on if you don't even know if you're accepted yet. I think they just do that so they can say transfers have a chance to be on LR. You should do your own school's write-on in case you end up staying. I mean when that time comes, you won't even have spring grades so you have to protect yourself for the worst case.

Also whether summer courses can be transferred depends on the target school. For example, Columbia will accept summer credits if you were PT and need the credits to catch up. Unless you are casting a very wide net, you have to see what your target schools' policies are. If you want to transfer to FT no matter what, you have to just bite the bullet and take the summer class with the risk you might lose the credits. If you are stuck doing another year of PT, you might as well just stay PT for the whole four years since you probably won't be able to get enough credits to graduate in three anyway.

[Mauve Velociraptor]

Thanks. Your advice makes a lot of sense. I'm going to start calling some of these schools.