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I'm a 1L at Penn with grades near the top of the class (~top five percent). I think I have a strong chance to make law review, which would obviously be a great credential and an enriching experience. I'm also considering throwing up a transfer application to HLS.

Which would look more prestigious on the resume and give me the best shot at a COA clerkship at graduation and DOJ or AUSA in the medium-term? 1L summer will be major city DA office, if relevant.

Penn law review will put you a better (or at least comparable) position than a typical transfer student at Harvard. The same might not be true at Yale, but certainly at H. You also have networks / connections from doing 1L there. Stay at Penn. If you're not on scholarship, you should try to leverage your transfer prospects to get some.

badaboom61 wrote:Stay at Penn. If you're not on scholarship, you should try to leverage your transfer prospects to get some.

Agreed.

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I agree with the above.

However, Stanford and Yale place better statistically in FedClerk.

http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/c ... clerkships

You can write-on to H's LR, so there's that. Also, does Penn's LR guarantee a number of spots for grade-ons?

Clerkship apps suck for transfers because you don't have that much time to secure LoRs from profs. If you transfer, ideally you should have 1 Penn tenured professor's letter, 2 from H, and probably one from your 1L summer gig. If you can't secure those two H letters, you're going to have a hard time getting interviews.

Stay at Penn. People at the top of the class at Penn regularly get COA clerkships, including feeders.

I don't think there are many jobs you can't get with Top 5% from Penn that Harvard would open up.

If you are set on moving, though, I can say that the transfers this year have really been killing it both in terms of grades, EIP performance, and clerkships for those who applied.

I thought about this a couple years ago from a not-quite-as-good position at CCN. a few things to consider:

if you repeat your grades you'd almost certainly get H and an application to Y wouldn't be a waste of money, especially with strong recommendations. note HLS requires potential transfers to write on at the same time as everyone else, so that's a huge pain (if I recall correctly both S and Y reserve spots for transfer competition).

on the clerking issue, maybe it would affect you, maybe not. I'm not sure why you couldn't get two good recs developed during your fall semester. also my professors at CCN were entirely understanding and I'm sure still would have written for me had I ended up deciding to transfer. at any rate, if you're going the firm route, I'd think most (though I know not all) firms would be ok with you clerking one year out if it didn't work out for 2015-16 for some reason.

if you want DC, that might weigh towards transferring. HLS EIP has far and away more spots for DC firms than did my CCN (I was quite surprised when I saw the numbers) and I gather that DC firm standards are a bit more relaxed for HLS students. but very hard to say whether individual outcomes would be hugely different.

all that said, it's rare to see many T14 students transferring to HLS, because those that can don't have much reason to; I think there's <10 per year. this is especially true if you'd be leaving a big scholly behind and wouldn't get much need-based aid. if that's the case, probably not worth it.