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I am really interested in doing a COA clerkship. Basically I am interested in appellate law and while I have a summer clerkship at a firm in their appellate section, I know that a COA clerkship is pretty essential to doing appellate law long term.

I am currently a 2L at a top 15 school and on Law Review. However, our clerkship office has refused to talk to me seriously about COA clerkships since I am at the lower end of the top-10% cut-off.

So my question is this: what can I do to make myself more competitive? My GPA is right on the line of a "competitive" candidate so I am just wondering how I can make my application stand out for a better shot at a clerkship.

Get a professor or someone else who knows the judge to call COA judges to put in a good word for you.

Maybe do a district court clerkship first?

To echo A. Nony Mouse, for sure a phone call (or many phone calls) is the most realistic helpful thing you can do.

A non-exclusive list of additional suggestions:

• Apply as widely as possible
  Have the dean call on your behalf
  Have former clerks from your school contact their judge on your behalf
  Win writing awards and publish

As a point of reference, I had a nearly identical statistical profile. I got four calls from judges in circuits across the country, none of which were from large coastal cities and landed a COA clerkship. It might be a long-short, but it's worth the work.