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I am a noob to all this graduate school mess. My question is, Would it be helpful to attain a master's degree before I apply for law school or take the lsat? I am currently attending a school in Arkansas and initially I was thinking about going to law school, but in order for me to be accepted at a top tier law school I thought I should build some credential. Please help me!!! I will be a senior in the fall and I need some advice whether I should study for the LSAT or the GRE?

awoken_soul wrote:I am a noob to all this graduate school mess. My question is, Would it be helpful to attain a master's degree before I apply for law school or take the lsat? I am currently attending a school in Arkansas and initially I was thinking about going to law school, but in order for me to be accepted at a top tier law school I thought I should build some credential. Please help me!!! I will be a senior in the fall and I need some advice whether I should study for the LSAT or the GRE?

A Masters will not help you get into law school.

From what people say, a graduate degree won't help you much as far as law school admissions. It will give you some time out of UG (although, still in school) to build some more interests and experiences to talk about, but it's not like you'll be able to get into schools you otherwise wouldn't have gotten into (as far as I understand it).

If you are a hard-science major, you could get a masters in engineering or something, and then go to law school (again, probably won't help you get into a better school), but then you could do intellectual property or patent litigation (maybe).

So, unless you want to do IP or have some legitimate reason, otherwise, to get a graduate degree, just study for the LSAT.

thanks for the quick replies. Well in truth, I was hoping to study sanskrit/asian languages at university of washington and gain some experience. From masters I was thinking about applying to Univ. of washington law school along with other schools. I guess I need to give it some more thinking. P.S. I am a history and pilosophy major.

That really sounds like a question only you can answer. If you can pick up a masters degree in something you're truly interested in, without accruing debt, I say do it.

From what I understand, a graduate degree is considered more of a soft factor. Probably won't get you into any schools that your numbers don't justify, but if admincons are looking at two very similar characters, don't doubt that they would give the edge to somebody who has shown they can study at a higher level and brings that aspect of diversity to their program. Also sounds like it could be leveraged into a cool personal statement.

I guess my recommendation is - if you're looking to do it as a means of getting into law school, don't waste your time, energy, and money.

If you're looking to do it because you think it's fascinating and would be fun to pursue, you only live once. Do it.