Emory Law Admission Staffer Taking Questions Forum

[ari45]

Hi, I am interested in knowing about your scholarship policies. I know of an Emory student who was granted a merit scholarship and for health reasons ended up with a low GPA in his first year, he was then granted probation and in his 2nd year raised his grades and regained his good standing. Can he have his merit scholarship reinstated or is it lost forever? If it can be reinstated what procedure must he follow?

Thank you for your prompt reply.

Ariel.

[Emory_Rob]

Question:

How well are Hispanics (in particular Mexican Americans) represented at the law school? The Hispanic population is booming, especially in the South, but very few qualified Hispanics matriculate into law school. Your website was not very specific about this.

Answer:

The Fall issue of Emory Lawyer magazine (available here: --LinkRemoved--) has a lot of data about the current student body and alumni that answer a lot of questions that I am frequently asked. (See pages 4, 5, 31 and 34 in particular.) Here, you will find that the Class of 2012 includes 12% Hispanic/Latino. I do not have the number of Mexican-Americans broken-out. Diversity is something that is very important to us, and you will see that is reflected in the makeup of our student body.

Question:

First, thank you for taking questions. I live in Los Angeles and plan on practicing in California after graduation. I have always been really interested in Emory but am afraid that it will be hard to find a job in California after graduation. Do you have any idea what percentage of students move to California after graduation and the overall job prospects for students that do plan on moving to Los Angeles? Thanks

Answer:

Approximately 5% of the Class of 2008 reports working in the Pacific region, which we count as Alaska, Hawaii and California. You would probably be safe in assuming that most of those people were working in California. Los Angeles has a large alumni population, and our presence there is strong.

Just anecdotally, I know one member of the Class of 2009 who is working in California despite the fact that he had no connections to the area at all before going out there. The Emory degree travels pretty well no matter where you want to go, though of course it’s easier to go anywhere that you have a previous connection, no matter which school you attend.

Question:

Thanks a lot for answering questions, I was actually about to call Emory when I came across this thread. I am a engineer from the University of Florida with a undergrad GPA of 3.01, and I am currently in a very competitive medical masters program through USF's medical school. My graduate GPA is a 3.9 and its about to go up(3.93ish). I know my graduate GPA isn't calculated in but does it help at all? I was president of a club and a member of others with a good amount of volunteering. I am interested in applying for 2011 and I was wondering if there is a certain LSAT score that will make me competitive? I understand that my undergrad GPA is pretty low compared to the average and it is not the traditional pre-law background, but is there a good chance of being admitted with a certain LSAT?

I want to go into IP, and if there is anything else that I should be doing please let me know. Thank you ion advance for the help

Answer:

It’s true that your graduate GPA isn’t considered when LSAC calculates your GPA, but the fact that you are doing well in a graduate program is something that we will consider. As I have said before, the first question we ask with every application is whether the applicant has the ability to do the work successfully here. Good grades in a previous graduate level program can help alleviate some of that concern with a student with a lower undergraduate GPA. Furthermore, we also take into account that certain class loads have lower grade tendencies (engineering being one of those, along with hard science majors and some others) so that could be a mitigating factor as well depending on what your transcripts look like.

As far as what LSAT score you should be shooting for, I can’t really say, but obviously it will help in applying to any school if your LSAT score is above their median. In applying to Emory, I would recommend a really good personal statement that shows that you are a strong writer and gives us a good picture of why you are interested in law school (and why you are interested in Emory in particular). I would also recommend finding professors who will take the time to write a really strong recommendation and tell us why we should take you over the other applicants with similar profiles. Applications with all those qualities tend to result in acceptances more often than those who don’t have them.

Question:

Hi, I am interested in knowing about your scholarship policies. I know of an Emory student who was granted a merit scholarship and for health reasons ended up with a low GPA in his first year, he was then granted probation and in his 2nd year raised his grades and regained his good standing. Can he have his merit scholarship reinstated or is it lost forever? If it can be reinstated what procedure must he follow?

Answer:

That's a highly unusual situation, and of course I can't address the specifics directly. Generally, the Dean of Admission and the Dean of Students would work together to make a determination.

Thanks for all the questions. Feel free to post more if you have them, and I will try to answer them when I get a chance. Sorry that it’s been taking me a while to get back to these, but as you can imagine we are busy working our way through all these applications and also working on our scholarship decisions. We are also working on putting things together for Admitted Students Weekend on April 9-10. I hope to see a lot of you there, it really is the best chance to see the school and learn about what it’s really like to attend Emory and why you should come. We’ll be taking reservations for that starting in the next week or so, so keep your eyes out for it.

[Gatorbull84]

Thank you very much, that cleared a few things up for me. I appreciate your help

[doinmybest]

Rob:

In an e-mail I recieved from Emory, it stated that applicaion/resume updates should not be sent in unless they are particularly groundbreaking. If I was unemployed when I submitted my application, and I now I have something like a new interesting and potentially revelevant job, and an interesting recent study abroad oppurtunity to mention, is it worth bothering the committee with a short concise e-mail update?

[chicoalto0649]

Rob,

You have alluded to this before but I would still like some clarification; am I completely screwed if I do not mention in my application why I am interested in Emory Law? In my personal statement I decided to talk about an event that had a profound effect on my life, however I refrained from sticking in the generic " and because of these events, this is why I want to attend xxx law school and study xyz." I still feel the piece was a solid example of my writing skills and more importantly, could reveal something about me that can not be gleaned from my resume/recs. I am very interested in Emory Law, I just feel like if I stuck that bit in, it would come off as contrived and insincere.

Thanks!

[jrstephens1991]

How does Emory old up with BigLaw in NYC or D.C.?

[pinkzeppelin]

How does Emory view the GPA of an Engineering student? Is it given any sort of boost?

[Emory_Rob]

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to answer questions – obviously you know that we’ve been admitting lots of people lately and sending out a lot of scholarship offers, which has been keeping all of us in the office very very busy. Congratulations to those who have already been accepted, and to those who are still waiting, we’re working to get to your application as quickly as possible. I hope to see many of you at our Accepted Students’ Weekend on April 9-10.

Question:

In an e-mail I received from Emory, it stated that application/resume updates should not be sent in unless they are particularly groundbreaking. If I was unemployed when I submitted my application, and I now I have something like a new interesting and potentially relevant job, and an interesting recent study abroad opportunity to mention, is it worth bothering the committee with a short concise e-mail update?

Answer:

That’s hard to say without knowing exactly what the specifics are, but from what you’ve described it probably wouldn’t hurt. Generally we don’t need to know everything that you’re up to since you submitted your application, but if it’s something you feel is important then go ahead. An email will suffice.

Question:

You have alluded to this before but I would still like some clarification; am I completely screwed if I do not mention in my application why I am interested in Emory Law? In my personal statement I decided to talk about an event that had a profound effect on my life, however I refrained from sticking in the generic " and because of these events, this is why I want to attend xxx law school and study xyz." I still feel the piece was a solid example of my writing skills and more importantly, could reveal something about me that can not be gleaned from my resume/recs. I am very interested in Emory Law, I just feel like if I stuck that bit in, it would come off as contrived and insincere.

Answer:

Absolutely not. Good personal statements come in a variety of forms. The things I mentioned before are simply things that we like to see answered, but it’s not as if we have a checklist and if you don’t hit everything on it, then you’re out of luck. If you’ve written the best personal statement that you can, then don’t worry about what we’re looking for in it. If it’s a good statement, then we will probably like it.

And yes, it’s pretty obvious when a personal statement ends with “…and that’s why I want to attend [fill in the blank] Law School.” It’s not that we don’t appreciate the effort, but so many personal statements have something similar that when we see one that incorporates something specific to Emory in the body of the essay, we take notice.

Question:

How does Emory old up with BigLaw in NYC or D.C.?

Answer:

Very well. I’ve talked several times about how many alumni we place into both markets. Those are some of our top destinations for graduates.

Question:

How does Emory view the GPA of a GaTech student? Is it given any sort of boost?

Answer:

I wouldn’t say that it gets a specific numeric boost, but obviously we’re very familiar with Tech, and we know the caliber of student that graduates from there. If you went there and majored in Engineering or something in a hard science, we take that into account. We know very well that certain majors – not just at Tech – require different types of class loads, and that’s something that is part of our evaluation as well.

That’s all the questions I’ve received in this thread so far, but I understand from questions that we get through other channels that there are some other things that people are wondering about.

Woodruffs: To be clear, if you applied for a Woodruff scholarship, you should not have received a scholarship notification in the mail yet. That does NOT mean that you are in any way at a disadvantage for a scholarship award. If you were going to get a scholarship, we have that money set aside for you already. As we evaluate the candidates, it’s possible that we might give you more than we originally set aside for you based on your application if the committee likes you a lot. If you go all the way and actually win the Fellowship, the award you would have received goes back into the pool and someone else will wind up with it. You should be hearing about your Woodruff status next week.

I’ve also seen inquiries about whether or not the date on which you go complete has anything to do with your decision date. It does not. The two processes are entirely separate.

Even if you never received an email telling you that you were complete, you probably are. At this point, there are only a very few people who are still incomplete. We think there has been an intermittent problem with the process by which the “application complete” emails are sent out. It’s something that will be fixed before next year, which doesn’t do you folks much good I’m afraid. If you’re really concerned about it and haven’t heard anything, you can drop us a line, and we’re happy to check for you. Email is best for that type of inquiry.

Cost of Living: Don’t take whatever number the school publishes as the cost of living as gospel. That number determines how much you can borrow, and the actual cost to live here varies from the published cost of attendance depending on things like where you decide to live and so on. There are dozens of different places where you can compare how much it will cost to live in various cities – what you will see from those is that Atlanta is very affordable, particularly compared to the locations of many of our peer schools.

Scholarship notification: Unfortunately there’s no hard and fast rule about whether we are notifying people at the same time as we send them an acceptance or not. If we are able to do so, we’ve been sending it at the same time. For a variety of reasons, sometimes the scholarship offer will come a bit later. Again, we’re trying to get those out as quickly as possible.

We know that most of you are choosing between several schools. We do ask that if you have decided to go elsewhere, let us know as soon as possible. An email is fine. We’re also interested in knowing where and why you decided to go elsewhere, so we can do the best job possible with our scholarship allocation next year. We anticipate there will be a substantial wait list this year – our applicant pool this year was even more competitive than we expected – so we’d like to get information to the people on the wait list as quickly as possible so they can make their plans.

[hankstamper]

Hi Rob,

I didn't intend to play gotcha here, but I noticed this comment:

Just anecdotally, I know one member of the Class of 2009 who is working in California despite the fact that he had no connections to the area at all before going out there.

Considering some of your other comments in this thread...

Our graduates also migrate to larger cities with significant alumni bases such as New York, Washington, Chicago, California, Dallas, and Houston.

I talked about national reach earlier, and mentioned that we have a lot of alumni in California.

As you’d expect, the state with the highest concentration of our alumni is Georgia, second is New York, third is Florida, and fourth is California.

I'm wondering why this particular student was without connections in CA. Did he set up shop in some obscure part of CA that has no alumni? Hang out a shingle? Not bother to request alumni contacts (yet somehow admissions is aware of his situation)? Or did you just mean he didn't have connections outside of alumni, and I totally missed your point? What gives?

And thanks for taking the time to post comments here, it's been very helpful.

[sebastian0622]

hank,

I'm sure he means that the student did not have personal contacts there or previously live there. A lot of people who move 3000 miles from their law school for a first job do so because daddy or uncle Joe have a firm there. A list of alums from the career office doesn't really count as a list of personal contacts.

[hankstamper]

I see. Looks like I need to recalibrate my definition of "connections," as I was left with the impression that it was a comment about Emory's reputation traveling well. Point taken.

[hankstamper]

Oh yeah, and about tuition... here are some recent rates I just Googled up:

00-01: 25,064
/////
05-06: 32,592
06-07: 36,746
07-08: 38,176

09-10: 40,900
10-11: 42,900

Any comments on where it's headed? Is there a particular target in mind?

[ppjd]

Hi Rob,

I didn't intend to play gotcha here, but I noticed this comment:

Just anecdotally, I know one member of the Class of 2009 who is working in California despite the fact that he had no connections to the area at all before going out there.

He said the person had no connections to the AREA, I am assuming he means this person is not from California, has no friends or family in California and possibly, this person has never been to California. It sounds like he is letting us know that despite that fact that this person had no connections to California BECAUSE of the alumni base in CA, they were able to move out there and get a job.

[autao]

First off this has been a great resource thus far, and reflects well upon Emory. I have two questions and one is more trivial than the other.
Does Emory offer travel stipends to the admitted student's day in April?
Could you potentially talk about the externship opportunities of both previous years and any options forthcoming? Perhaps companies that Emory has a well established relationship.
I thank you for your time.

[Madcow1369]

I really appreciate you taking the time to answer questions. I am an admitted student with Emory as my top choice. I look forward to seeing the school at admitted students day in April. I have a quick question. An unexpected opportunity has recently come up for me to spend a year working abroad. This opportunity only arose about a month ago, and it is something I am quite interested in. Two questions: What is Emory's policy on an admitted student deferring admission for a year, and if a student defers admission for a year, will merit scholarship money awarded for this year carry over if the admitted student is granted a deferral?

Thanks again for answering questions!

[chicoalto0649]

Hi Emory Rob,

I am representing the TLS Emory waitlist contingent.

Here are a few questions I can think of right off the bat about the Emory waitlist (although I am sure others can think of plenty).

1.) Can you give us an idea about how many kids have been extended offers of admission from the waitlist in years past? How big do you expect the waitlist to be this year?

2.) What do you consider when you go about making offers of admissions from the waitlist? Is it numerically driven or do you take other factors into consideration? Will everyone on the list get reviewed again?

3.) Was this really the most competitive year in terms of strength of applicants?

4.) Is there ANY (no matter how slim) chance of getting merit based scholarships if one is to be accepted off of the waitlist?

Thanks in advance!

PS: Please, don't use my avatar against me. Its Dr. Rockzo, the rock and roll clown.

[blsingindisguise]

So Emory Rob, would it be accurate to say that you're on the Emory Board?

[mavsman88]

What is the nicest and most convenient student housing for law students, and when is it necessary to sign up to ensure getting a place to live?

[Emory_Rob]

Hi folks –

As you can imagine, things have been extremely busy in the admission office lately, which is why I haven’t been able to answer questions in a while.

To clarify a little about my anecdote about the graduate I know who went out to California, what I meant by “he had no connections” is that he didn’t go out there to work for Uncle Phil or something.

One other possible relevant thing is that I recall two years ago, there were enough graduates going out to California that they successfully lobbied BarBri to offer California bar prep classes here over the summer, so they could prepare to take the bar exam out there without having to actually move out there just to take classes first. I don’t know if they did that again this past year or not.

Anyway, on to the questions:

Question (regarding tuition):

Any comments on where it's headed? Is there a particular target in mind?

Answer:

Does tuition ever go down?

Seriously, though, I know one of the Dean’s goals has been to limit tuition increases as much as possible over the last several years. So I have no idea where it’s going, but there is a commitment on the part of the administration to keep increases in check as much as possible. That’s one of the advantages of a private school over a state school, where tuition increases are largely out of their hands, particularly when state governments everywhere are looking at substantial budget shortfalls.

Question:

Does Emory offer travel stipends to the admitted student's day in April?

Answer:

I’m afraid we don’t offer travel stipends. We have negotiated some really good rates at the closest hotels, and one nice thing about Atlanta is that it’s usually pretty inexpensive to travel here with Air Tran and Delta both headquartered here.

Question:

Could you potentially talk about the externship opportunities of both previous years and any options forthcoming? Perhaps companies that Emory has a well established relationship.

Answer:

Regarding externships, we call them “field placements.” There is a ton of information on the web site at http://www.law.emory.edu/academics/acad ... ement.html - poke around and you’ll see lists of placements both in the corporate world and in the public sector. This semester there are 132 students who are doing a field placement, and generally 60-65% of students will graduate having done a field placement. Some do more than one.

Question:

What is Emory's policy on an admitted student deferring admission for a year, and if a student defers admission for a year, will merit scholarship money awarded for this year carry over if the admitted student is granted a deferral?

Answer:

We usually will honor a deferment for one year (with some exceptions, such as Teach for America). Your scholarship award does not carry over, so next year you will go into the scholarship pool again, and based on the Scholarship Committee’s review, priorities and budget, you will be reevaluated as if you were a newly-admitted applicant. We feel that policy is the best balance between the interests of our deferrals and the rest of our applicants.

Question:

Here are a few questions I can think of right off the bat about the Emory waitlist (although I am sure others can think of plenty).

1.) Can you give us an idea about how many kids have been extended offers of admission from the waitlist in years past? How big do you expect the waitlist to be this year?

2.) What do you consider when you go about making offers of admissions from the waitlist? Is it numerically driven or do you take other factors into consideration? Will everyone on the list get reviewed again?

3.) Was this really the most competitive year in terms of strength of applicants?

4.) Is there ANY (no matter how slim) chance of getting merit based scholarships if one is to be accepted off of the waitlist?

Answers:
First of all, I assume everyone on the wait list has taken a look at our Wait List FAQ.

1.) I do not have specific numbers, but I do know the number has varied quite a lot over the years. This year we are quite confident we will make offers from the wait list. We won’t know until our first deposit deadline how many of our offers are going to be accepted, at which time we will have some idea of how many people we are going to take off the wait list. I would be extremely surprised if we didn’t take people off the wait list this year. Whether it will be 10 people or 100 people, I have no idea. Either is possible.

2.) We consider a variety of factors when we take people off the wait list. We do not rank our waitlist, which means we re-evaluate files as spaces open-up. Remember, we have already thoroughly reviewed everyone’s file, so we will take the review notes and any additional information that you submitted – per the wait list instructions – to make offers.

What we are looking for in the wait list really depends. One way to look at it is that we will be filling any holes in our class. If it so happened – totally hypothetically! – that everyone who accepted is predominately from one undergraduate institution, we would want to diversify the class and would look for other colleges. It really is completely unpredictable what type of people we will select.

3) Without question. Somewhat surprisingly, we had almost the same number of applicants as last year, but their numeric qualifications were significantly higher by every measure. I have on my wall right above my desk a color graph of every applicant from this year and last year (what you would see on LSN if every single applicant put in their numbers, and actually told the truth about them!), and just with the naked eye you can see that the big blob of 2010 applicants have higher LSATs and GPAs than the big blob of 2009 applicants. It’s a nice problem for us to have, but we feel badly for people who applied and would have probably gotten in last year, because a lot of them are on the wait list this year.

That being said, everyone who *is* on the wait list is perfectly capable of coming here and being a successful student. Truth be told, we would love to have every single one of you. Unfortunately, our facilities won’t allow for that!! If you’re on the wait list, we are looking for people who will help us fill out the class, and of those people, we want the ones who really want to come here. Emory is a really special place, and we want to fill our class with people who will love it as much as we do.

4) I don’t want to give any false expectations, because right now we have allocated all our scholarship funds. If our modeling is right then we will enroll the right number of people with scholarship offers to completely use up our scholarship budget. However, if – and this is a very big if – it turns out that the people who enroll don’t use up all the money we have allocated for scholarships, then there may be some additional funds available. It might be offered to people off the wait list, or it might get offered to people with outstanding offers, I really couldn’t say. But it’s not impossible.

Question:

What is the nicest and most convenient student housing for law students, and when is it necessary to sign up to ensure getting a place to live?

Answer:

I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, opinion varies widely on that. Current students would probably have better insight on the pros and cons of the various options (of which there are many). One of the new things we are doing this year is we have invited ten of the most popular housing complexes to come to Visiting Day so that you can get information from them if you manage to make it down for that. Hopefully that will help you find a good place to live. There also is information on the main university web site about available off-campus housing options: http://www.emory.edu/HOUSING/GRAD/gradhouse.html

Question:

So Emory Rob, would it be accurate to say that you're on the Emory Board?

Answer:

I’m not sure what you mean by that, but I have peeked through the various Emory threads from time to time. That is one reason that I would really encourage people to come to Visiting Day in a few weeks. The amount of information that seems to be common wisdom on the message boards that is just completely and totally wrong is really amazing. I’d be happy to talk to any of you in person to answer any questions or concerns you might have (as would any of the admission people, or any of the current students for that matter).

Also, I know there are some of you still out there who are still waiting on a decision, and I’m sorry that it’s taken this long to get to you. Counting the letters we sent out this morning, we have sent decisions to more than 93% of our applicants at this point. If you happen to be in that last 6+%, I’m sorry, but someone has to be last.

If you have any more questions, please just ask, I’ll try to check in as soon as I can.

[lawschoolgiant]

TAG

[mavsman88]

Where can we find pictures of the facilities? The Emory website doesn't have any type of virtual tour or snapshots of the campus.

[ron1321]

Now that the deposit deadline has passed, do you have any idea how many ppl you will be accepting off the WL?

[mavsman88]

Is there a minimum GPA students need to get their last semester of UG? (specifically would Emory withdraw your admission if you got a 2.0 your last semester but still graduated with above a 3.0)

[waitingfor1L]

Not sure if you are still taking q's Emory Rob, but have offers been made off the waitlist?

[TTT-LS]

.