SMU Dedman applicants c/o 2019 (2015-2016) Forum

[PatriotP74]

Meant to post this the other day, this post may be talked about for years to come, SMU DOES negotiate, and 30k is NOT the max without a full.

Feel free to PM for details.

[sneijder]

Meant to post this the other day, this post may be talked about for years to come, SMU DOES negotiate, and 30k is NOT the max without a full.

Feel free to PM for details.

[PatriotP74]

Meant to post this the other day, this post may be talked about for years to come, SMU DOES negotiate, and 30k is NOT the max without a full.

Feel free to PM for details.

I feel like every SMU applicant from here on out will read this post lol my jaw dropped when I read the email!

[michelekfla]

I just withdrew as well, so hopefully a deserving waitlist candidate gets my spot! Best of luck to you all going forward. SMU is a great school and I enjoyed my time in graduate school there very much. If anyone still has any general questions about the school or Dallas, I'm happy to answer them if I can.

I am looking to withdrawal but don't see anything on their site. How did you do it for SMU and other schools? Some seem to have a form and others don't?

[michelekfla]

Just withdrew, so hopefully that clears up some money for you fine folks!

How did you withdrawal? I'm trying to do a bunch today and don't know if there's an easy way to do it.

[OtterLaw]

I just withdrew as well, so hopefully a deserving waitlist candidate gets my spot! Best of luck to you all going forward. SMU is a great school and I enjoyed my time in graduate school there very much. If anyone still has any general questions about the school or Dallas, I'm happy to answer them if I can.

I am looking to withdrawal but don't see anything on their site. How did you do it for SMU and other schools? Some seem to have a form and others don't?

I just emailed Gina Skipworth because I had a lot of communication with her during the admissions process. She sent back an email acknowledging the withdrawal.

[michelekfla]

I just withdrew as well, so hopefully a deserving waitlist candidate gets my spot! Best of luck to you all going forward. SMU is a great school and I enjoyed my time in graduate school there very much. If anyone still has any general questions about the school or Dallas, I'm happy to answer them if I can.

I am looking to withdrawal but don't see anything on their site. How did you do it for SMU and other schools? Some seem to have a form and others don't?

I just emailed Gina Skipworth because I had a lot of communication with her during the admissions process. She sent back an email acknowledging the withdrawal.

OK, the name does seem familiar, I'll email her. Thanks!

[TexasHays]

Exactly that ^. I just emailed the person who had been emailing me from Admissions.

[twokings]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

[PatriotP74]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

It was pretty good! Met up with a fellow TLSer, hope to meet more of y'all! Room was pretty full and had some pretty big time alumni there(Michael Boone and Robert Hart)!

After the scholarship bump they offered me and today I can say that SMU is where I will be going!

[nonamer]

After the scholarship bump they offered me and today I can say that SMU is where I will be going!

Did you ask for a scholarship reconsideration or did they just bump up their offer without your request?

[PatriotP74]

After the scholarship bump they offered me and today I can say that SMU is where I will be going!

Did you ask for a scholarship reconsideration or did they just bump up their offer without your request?

Requested with the form they provided!

[nonamer]

Nice! Sending mine soon. Hoping they bump me.

SMU is in my top 3.

[BeatriceButler]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

Decent sized group, but nothing overwhelming. Everyone I talked to was pretty friendly. Had the chance to talk to a couple of professors, one being Professor Crespi, who was super laid back and genuine. He also gave some really good advice about how to prepare for law school exams. Really hope I get placed in his class this fall. (Not 100% sure, but I think he teaches 1L contracts)

I was pretty dead set on SMU before the ASD, and the visit further validated that feeling.

[kalvano]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

Decent sized group, but nothing overwhelming. Everyone I talked to was pretty friendly. Had the chance to talk to a couple of professors, one being Professor Crespi, who was super laid back and genuine. He also gave some really good advice about how to prepare for law school exams. Really hope I get placed in his class this fall. (Not 100% sure, but I think he teaches 1L contracts)

I was pretty dead set on SMU before the ASD, and the visit further validated that feeling.

Crespi is awesome. He does teach 1L Contracts, and is great at it (I didn't realize how great until I started using it in daily practice).

I had / have several issues with SMU's law school, but one thing I can absolutely commend them on is quality of faculty. Both full-time professors and adjuncts are almost with exception excellent.

[tigerteacher23]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

Decent sized group, but nothing overwhelming. Everyone I talked to was pretty friendly. Had the chance to talk to a couple of professors, one being Professor Crespi, who was super laid back and genuine. He also gave some really good advice about how to prepare for law school exams. Really hope I get placed in his class this fall. (Not 100% sure, but I think he teaches 1L contracts)

I was pretty dead set on SMU before the ASD, and the visit further validated that feeling.

Crespi is awesome. He does teach 1L Contracts, and is great at it (I didn't realize how great until I started using it in daily practice).

I had / have several issues with SMU's law school, but one thing I can absolutely commend them on is quality of faculty. Both full-time professors and adjuncts are almost with exception excellent.

Can you elaborate on those issues?

[kalvano]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

Decent sized group, but nothing overwhelming. Everyone I talked to was pretty friendly. Had the chance to talk to a couple of professors, one being Professor Crespi, who was super laid back and genuine. He also gave some really good advice about how to prepare for law school exams. Really hope I get placed in his class this fall. (Not 100% sure, but I think he teaches 1L contracts)

I was pretty dead set on SMU before the ASD, and the visit further validated that feeling.

Crespi is awesome. He does teach 1L Contracts, and is great at it (I didn't realize how great until I started using it in daily practice).

I had / have several issues with SMU's law school, but one thing I can absolutely commend them on is quality of faculty. Both full-time professors and adjuncts are almost with exception excellent.

Can you elaborate on those issues?

This is copied and pasted from the same basic question a while ago. I'm sure some of the information is outdated (and references to the Dean were references to Attanasio), but a quick glance shows me a good chunk of it is still applicable.

Hopefully, some of the more recent attendees can elaborate further on what is out of date, or what may have changed. I hope this is helpful.




Career Services

They seem to make no effort to take advantage of the massive Dallas area legal market. It's almost like they pretend the surrounding cities don't exist. I don't know how familiar you are with Dallas, but their are cities that immediately border it that make up the Dallas-area metroplex. Plano, Denton, Addison, etc. Also Southlake, Grapevine, Las Colinas....there are tons of middle-sized law firms in these areas that I know have at least one summer law associate because I've contacted them. But if you were to look at what SMU offers, it downtown Dallas Biglaw or almost nothing else. It's a huge waste of resources.

We had less than 70 total firms for OCI, which is pathetic given how many firms there are around here. But I get tons of emails with opportunities to go work in places like New York City, Chicago, the Santa Barbara DA's office, which all sounds great until you get to the "unpaid" part. If you've got enough money to afford to go to NYC and work for free over the summer, something tells me a job after school isn't high on the priority list.

The explicitly advise against mass mailing firms, which is just mind-boggling to me.

I do not expect Career Services to hold my hand and find me a job. I do expect them to go out and seek out firms and get them make jobs available to SMU students, and after that, it's up to me to impress the firm. But to not even reach out and get them run a Symplicity posting, but to have 15 unpaid internships around the country in some of the most expensive places to live...it seems like their priorities are screwed up to me.

Further, if you want anything other than Biglaw, they are of little use. They almost freeze up completely if you ask about government work or anything other than Jones Day. And, during 1L especially, they will have a lot of "mandatory" meetings which do nothing but tell you to "network." I suppose that some of the stuff might be nice for someone who is 22 and straight from undergrad, but they need to have an exception for people like me who have worked before school and understand how to write a thank-you email, a resume, etc. I felt like a lot of the time they required of me was fairly worthless, and time is a pretty valuable commodity in law school.

As for job prospects, well...I know a few T10%, LR people who have nothing for next summer. The firms are more selective, and there are a lot of UT and T14 candidates applying to the market. I think I have something for next summer, but it's due to my own diligence and not anything from SMU. SMU's name still carries pretty good weight in D/FW, and if you can do well, you'll probably find something, it just may not be what you want.


School Administration

SMU runs at a glacial pace. For instance, we didn't get a schedule of Spring 2012 classes until the Friday before registration started on Monday. For some reason, they seem to think it's OK to just meander along and take their time with everything. It's not. The top schools give students an answer pretty quickly for the most part. If you apply in October, you'll usually hear back within a couple months. God help you if you miss SMU's November EA deadline, because you may not hear anything until May. And when we were waiting on our exam grades from Fall of 1L, it took almost 6 weeks to get them, and meanwhile, some summer stuff was being hired on a rolling basis and you needed grades to apply. For Spring of 1L, they set a deadline for professors to turn in grades, which several missed. If a student missed a deadline, they would fail a course. Professors got an extension. They teach 1-2 classes a year and only have to grade twice a year. It's not much to ask that they do so in a timely manner and respect deadlines. And I say this as certified English teacher who has to read through a couple hundred essays and grade them. It sucks, but suck it up...you're getting paid 6 figures to be a law professor.

The Dean is a complete tool. Every time he talks, he spends the first 10-15 minutes talking about his published law review articles, how great he is at Con law, etc. I know this sounds like a weird personal attack, but PM any SMU student and they will probably tell you the same thing. He seems so full of himself that it's a wonder he doesn't burst. And he always cites the same "media guide" facts about SMU...we have 3 or 4 grads that are CEO's in Fortune 50 companies (more than Harvard), the Thai or Bangladeshi (one of them, I can't recall which) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court went to SMU, we have a lot of international students...that's all well and good, but the Chief Justice or the Thai Prime Minister could have gone to Cooley and had guaranteed jobs. SMU has been falling in the rankings and he has articulated no plan at all to correct that. Moreover, he always likes to say that SMU is one of the most selective schools in the country and (I kid you not) compare it to Harvard. I understand it's his job to sell the school, but I want a clear and articulated plan as to how he intends to 1) raise SMU's ranking, and 2) secure jobs for the students there. I am paying for a professional degree, and I expect at least an idea of how the school intends to help me. it's much easier to sell a school ranked in the 30's than one teetering on the edge of the top 50.

Further, they love to talk about how bad UT's legal writing program is and how it doesn't prepare students for the real world. Fine and dandy, but UT is rising in the rankings and has at least double the potential employers SMU has. SMU's legal writing program sucks, it's graded, and it's ridiculously hard. I don't mind putting in hard work, but it's almost specifically designed to give you as much work as possible with as little feedback or actual teaching as possible.

There just seems to be some institutional blockage about joining in the modern era. Everything is still run like SMU runs the Dallas legal market, and it doesn't. I want SMU to do things like have an online exam bank for students to study from, not have a secret book in the library that they won't let anyone see until November, and professors are not required to submit sample exams. It's absurd. If I want to study recent exams before November, for $40K a year, I damn well ought to be able to. And I want Career Services to keep track of what class rank gets interviewed by whom. I asked them about the listed cutoffs for firms from OCI and all they could tell me was that firms hire outside their cutoffs. That's very helpful, thanks....to what extent? It seems to me that part of being an effective Career Services office would be the ability to track what class rank got which interview, so when a firm says that they only want the top 25%, Career Services can tell students that they may say that, but that 90% of their interviews come from the top 10%, or that about half the students they interviewed were below top 25% but above top 50%.

It just seems like there are a lot of "best practices" out there that they willfully ignore, yet tout themselves as the equal of Harvard, etc. If everything were humming along like it was 2005, that would be fine. But when you aren't actually Harvard, stop telling people you are just as selective and get off your ass and start implementing practices that will maximize your student's chances of finding employment

I know this is a ton of writing, and I probably sound super bitchy. I'm really not, I just have very little patience for posturing and sticking your head in the sand. If there is a problem, fix it. Don't pretend it doesn't exist. Make a plan and clearly articulate it to students as to how and why their degree will not lose value because "Here are the steps we are going to take to not only keep SMU in the top 50 schools, but raise its ranking..." Maybe I am being too sensitive and bitchy, I don't know. But these are some of the problems I see in dealing with the school on a daily basis. What bothers me most is not that there are problems, but there seems to be no clear plan or direction to fix them.

The Good Stuff

Before you think I hate everything and am just being bitchy for the sake of being bitchy, there are a lot of things I really love about SMU. The students, on the whole, are very friendly and willing to help each other. I know a lot of the top people in my class, and they are very willing to help out anyone and not snide at all. Everyone seems to want to do well, but not at the expense of others. There is much more willingness to help a fellow student out than to try and screw them. No one will deliberately send you bad notes if you missed class, or tear pages out of books in the library. People are genuinely nice to each other.

As much as I dislike the Dean, I will give him credit for bringing in some excellent young professors. People not only at the top of their field in the practice of law, but they also are actually good teachers, which is refreshing. They seem to really enjoy teaching and are a pleasure to learn from. And they, by and large, extremely smart and fairly young. They could probably be at most any law school, but here they are. I can think of at least half a dozen that I want to take every class they offer just to be able to learn more from them. A lot of times professors are chosen based on their skill as lawyers, not teachers. It's nice to have both. I really can't say enough about the quality of professors they've brought in.

The Partner to Practice program is really great, and I can't give them enough credit for that. They find small / medium firms / business around the city that would like legal help for the summer, but can't afford to pay $1500 a week or something like that. The employer pays you, somewhere between $450 and $750 a week, and the school matches that in tuition reduction for the following year. Is it ideal? Nope. But it beats the hell out of working for free, and it's a genuinely creative solution to a problem. It's not supposed to lead to full time employment, but it does for several people.

I'm not really sure how to sum this up. There are aspects of SMU that drive me absolutely crazy, and aspects I really love. On the whole, I am happy at SMU. Would I recommend it over UT? Not unless there was a very, very, very compelling reason. Is it a good law school? I think so. But it could be much, much better. It seems like they waste a lot of opportunity, since they are the only law school in Dallas, and it seems like they should be a much higher-ranked school. They are making missteps along the way somewhere.

[p1921]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

Decent sized group, but nothing overwhelming. Everyone I talked to was pretty friendly. Had the chance to talk to a couple of professors, one being Professor Crespi, who was super laid back and genuine. He also gave some really good advice about how to prepare for law school exams. Really hope I get placed in his class this fall. (Not 100% sure, but I think he teaches 1L contracts)

I was pretty dead set on SMU before the ASD, and the visit further validated that feeling.

Crespi is awesome. He does teach 1L Contracts, and is great at it (I didn't realize how great until I started using it in daily practice).

I had / have several issues with SMU's law school, but one thing I can absolutely commend them on is quality of faculty. Both full-time professors and adjuncts are almost with exception excellent.

Can you elaborate on those issues?

This is copied and pasted from the same basic question a while ago. I'm sure some of the information is outdated (and references to the Dean were references to Attanasio), but a quick glance shows me a good chunk of it is still applicable.

Hopefully, some of the more recent attendees can elaborate further on what is out of date, or what may have changed. I hope this is helpful.




Career Services

They seem to make no effort to take advantage of the massive Dallas area legal market. It's almost like they pretend the surrounding cities don't exist. I don't know how familiar you are with Dallas, but their are cities that immediately border it that make up the Dallas-area metroplex. Plano, Denton, Addison, etc. Also Southlake, Grapevine, Las Colinas....there are tons of middle-sized law firms in these areas that I know have at least one summer law associate because I've contacted them. But if you were to look at what SMU offers, it downtown Dallas Biglaw or almost nothing else. It's a huge waste of resources.

We had less than 70 total firms for OCI, which is pathetic given how many firms there are around here. But I get tons of emails with opportunities to go work in places like New York City, Chicago, the Santa Barbara DA's office, which all sounds great until you get to the "unpaid" part. If you've got enough money to afford to go to NYC and work for free over the summer, something tells me a job after school isn't high on the priority list.

The explicitly advise against mass mailing firms, which is just mind-boggling to me.

I do not expect Career Services to hold my hand and find me a job. I do expect them to go out and seek out firms and get them make jobs available to SMU students, and after that, it's up to me to impress the firm. But to not even reach out and get them run a Symplicity posting, but to have 15 unpaid internships around the country in some of the most expensive places to live...it seems like their priorities are screwed up to me.

Further, if you want anything other than Biglaw, they are of little use. They almost freeze up completely if you ask about government work or anything other than Jones Day. And, during 1L especially, they will have a lot of "mandatory" meetings which do nothing but tell you to "network." I suppose that some of the stuff might be nice for someone who is 22 and straight from undergrad, but they need to have an exception for people like me who have worked before school and understand how to write a thank-you email, a resume, etc. I felt like a lot of the time they required of me was fairly worthless, and time is a pretty valuable commodity in law school.

As for job prospects, well...I know a few T10%, LR people who have nothing for next summer. The firms are more selective, and there are a lot of UT and T14 candidates applying to the market. I think I have something for next summer, but it's due to my own diligence and not anything from SMU. SMU's name still carries pretty good weight in D/FW, and if you can do well, you'll probably find something, it just may not be what you want.


School Administration

SMU runs at a glacial pace. For instance, we didn't get a schedule of Spring 2012 classes until the Friday before registration started on Monday. For some reason, they seem to think it's OK to just meander along and take their time with everything. It's not. The top schools give students an answer pretty quickly for the most part. If you apply in October, you'll usually hear back within a couple months. God help you if you miss SMU's November EA deadline, because you may not hear anything until May. And when we were waiting on our exam grades from Fall of 1L, it took almost 6 weeks to get them, and meanwhile, some summer stuff was being hired on a rolling basis and you needed grades to apply. For Spring of 1L, they set a deadline for professors to turn in grades, which several missed. If a student missed a deadline, they would fail a course. Professors got an extension. They teach 1-2 classes a year and only have to grade twice a year. It's not much to ask that they do so in a timely manner and respect deadlines. And I say this as certified English teacher who has to read through a couple hundred essays and grade them. It sucks, but suck it up...you're getting paid 6 figures to be a law professor.

The Dean is a complete tool. Every time he talks, he spends the first 10-15 minutes talking about his published law review articles, how great he is at Con law, etc. I know this sounds like a weird personal attack, but PM any SMU student and they will probably tell you the same thing. He seems so full of himself that it's a wonder he doesn't burst. And he always cites the same "media guide" facts about SMU...we have 3 or 4 grads that are CEO's in Fortune 50 companies (more than Harvard), the Thai or Bangladeshi (one of them, I can't recall which) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court went to SMU, we have a lot of international students...that's all well and good, but the Chief Justice or the Thai Prime Minister could have gone to Cooley and had guaranteed jobs. SMU has been falling in the rankings and he has articulated no plan at all to correct that. Moreover, he always likes to say that SMU is one of the most selective schools in the country and (I kid you not) compare it to Harvard. I understand it's his job to sell the school, but I want a clear and articulated plan as to how he intends to 1) raise SMU's ranking, and 2) secure jobs for the students there. I am paying for a professional degree, and I expect at least an idea of how the school intends to help me. it's much easier to sell a school ranked in the 30's than one teetering on the edge of the top 50.

Further, they love to talk about how bad UT's legal writing program is and how it doesn't prepare students for the real world. Fine and dandy, but UT is rising in the rankings and has at least double the potential employers SMU has. SMU's legal writing program sucks, it's graded, and it's ridiculously hard. I don't mind putting in hard work, but it's almost specifically designed to give you as much work as possible with as little feedback or actual teaching as possible.

There just seems to be some institutional blockage about joining in the modern era. Everything is still run like SMU runs the Dallas legal market, and it doesn't. I want SMU to do things like have an online exam bank for students to study from, not have a secret book in the library that they won't let anyone see until November, and professors are not required to submit sample exams. It's absurd. If I want to study recent exams before November, for $40K a year, I damn well ought to be able to. And I want Career Services to keep track of what class rank gets interviewed by whom. I asked them about the listed cutoffs for firms from OCI and all they could tell me was that firms hire outside their cutoffs. That's very helpful, thanks....to what extent? It seems to me that part of being an effective Career Services office would be the ability to track what class rank got which interview, so when a firm says that they only want the top 25%, Career Services can tell students that they may say that, but that 90% of their interviews come from the top 10%, or that about half the students they interviewed were below top 25% but above top 50%.

It just seems like there are a lot of "best practices" out there that they willfully ignore, yet tout themselves as the equal of Harvard, etc. If everything were humming along like it was 2005, that would be fine. But when you aren't actually Harvard, stop telling people you are just as selective and get off your ass and start implementing practices that will maximize your student's chances of finding employment

I know this is a ton of writing, and I probably sound super bitchy. I'm really not, I just have very little patience for posturing and sticking your head in the sand. If there is a problem, fix it. Don't pretend it doesn't exist. Make a plan and clearly articulate it to students as to how and why their degree will not lose value because "Here are the steps we are going to take to not only keep SMU in the top 50 schools, but raise its ranking..." Maybe I am being too sensitive and bitchy, I don't know. But these are some of the problems I see in dealing with the school on a daily basis. What bothers me most is not that there are problems, but there seems to be no clear plan or direction to fix them.

The Good Stuff

Before you think I hate everything and am just being bitchy for the sake of being bitchy, there are a lot of things I really love about SMU. The students, on the whole, are very friendly and willing to help each other. I know a lot of the top people in my class, and they are very willing to help out anyone and not snide at all. Everyone seems to want to do well, but not at the expense of others. There is much more willingness to help a fellow student out than to try and screw them. No one will deliberately send you bad notes if you missed class, or tear pages out of books in the library. People are genuinely nice to each other.

As much as I dislike the Dean, I will give him credit for bringing in some excellent young professors. People not only at the top of their field in the practice of law, but they also are actually good teachers, which is refreshing. They seem to really enjoy teaching and are a pleasure to learn from. And they, by and large, extremely smart and fairly young. They could probably be at most any law school, but here they are. I can think of at least half a dozen that I want to take every class they offer just to be able to learn more from them. A lot of times professors are chosen based on their skill as lawyers, not teachers. It's nice to have both. I really can't say enough about the quality of professors they've brought in.

The Partner to Practice program is really great, and I can't give them enough credit for that. They find small / medium firms / business around the city that would like legal help for the summer, but can't afford to pay $1500 a week or something like that. The employer pays you, somewhere between $450 and $750 a week, and the school matches that in tuition reduction for the following year. Is it ideal? Nope. But it beats the hell out of working for free, and it's a genuinely creative solution to a problem. It's not supposed to lead to full time employment, but it does for several people.

I'm not really sure how to sum this up. There are aspects of SMU that drive me absolutely crazy, and aspects I really love. On the whole, I am happy at SMU. Would I recommend it over UT? Not unless there was a very, very, very compelling reason. Is it a good law school? I think so. But it could be much, much better. It seems like they waste a lot of opportunity, since they are the only law school in Dallas, and it seems like they should be a much higher-ranked school. They are making missteps along the way somewhere.

A lot of this is absolutely correct. Disregarding the dean stuff, like you said. They're making more of an effort to branch into government, but mid-size and smaller firms are still basically non-existent on Symplicity. Also on mass-mailing, I told them I had sent out a bunch of stuff like that and my advisor almost exploded about how shitty of an idea that was. Sorry, but if you aren't going to help much then I'm not going to rely on you. I also share in the positive aspects, and the professors and fellow students really are good.

Side note, we did receive an email today that they're cutting out the part-time program because of the reduced applicant pool. Apparently the class this year is 26, and they're going to move to 3 medium sized full time sections in the fall. Pretty bizarre move, especially since A&M is suspending their program as well. Seems if SMU left their's alone, a lot of potential A&M students who work during the day would like to venture over to Dallas rather than quit their jobs to go full time or not go at all.


ETA: current 1L

[BVest]

I suspect the elimination of the evening program as much about raising their scores as it is about resource allocation. The difference between the PT and FT scores has been quite significant in the past. I doubt it's gotten any better as overall applicant scores have fallen across all schools, but there's a few years ago:

Code: Select all

Start Fall  2012   2011  CHANGE
FULL TIME         
N Students   154    158     -4
Med GPA     3.74   3.72   0.02
Med LSAT     164    165     -1
Avg Age       23     23      0

PART TIME      
N Students    64     73     -9
Med GPA     3.49   3.57  -0.08
Med LSAT     160    160      0
Avg Age       27     29     -2

[p1921]

I suspect the elimination of the evening program as much about raising their scores as it is about resource allocation. The difference between the PT and FT scores has been quite significant in the past. I doubt it's gotten any better as overall applicant scores have fallen across all schools, but there's a few years ago:

Code: Select all

Start Fall  2012   2011  CHANGE
FULL TIME         
N Students   154    158     -4
Med GPA     3.74   3.72   0.02
Med LSAT     164    165     -1
Avg Age       23     23      0

PART TIME      
N Students    64     73     -9
Med GPA     3.49   3.57  -0.08
Med LSAT     160    160      0
Avg Age       27     29     -2

That could very well be true. Good point. I just meant that being the only part-time option in the metroplex, with A&M suspending its program, could allow it to be more selective, which could raise those numbers a bit as well. If A&M has a few students each year with good numbers, they may be willing to come to SMU instead and boost those numbers a bit. But like you said, that may not be enough to warrant the extra resources that comes with maintaining an evening program.

[eagle2a]

We don't need more people going to law school, whether it's in the day or in the evening, good move by SMU, hopefully they don't increase the day class by much

[tigerteacher23]

How was admitted students day today? Big crowd?

Decent sized group, but nothing overwhelming. Everyone I talked to was pretty friendly. Had the chance to talk to a couple of professors, one being Professor Crespi, who was super laid back and genuine. He also gave some really good advice about how to prepare for law school exams. Really hope I get placed in his class this fall. (Not 100% sure, but I think he teaches 1L contracts)

I was pretty dead set on SMU before the ASD, and the visit further validated that feeling.

Crespi is awesome. He does teach 1L Contracts, and is great at it (I didn't realize how great until I started using it in daily practice).

I had / have several issues with SMU's law school, but one thing I can absolutely commend them on is quality of faculty. Both full-time professors and adjuncts are almost with exception excellent.

Can you elaborate on those issues?

This was so helpful, thank you! In retrospect, would you still attend SMU? I'm deciding between a couple of places but this is currently at the top of my list.

[GMasters5]

Withdrew today, hopefully one of you gets my scholarship money!

[kalvano]

This was so helpful, thank you! In retrospect, would you still attend SMU? I'm deciding between a couple of places but this is currently at the top of my list.

Yes. It was the right school for me and my family - as much as I may have wanted to, packing up and trying to move across the country wouldn't have been a good choice. Even though I found it to be a frustrating school, it's also the only law school located in the Dallas area (UNT aside, but that doesn't really count at the moment), and really for Fort Worth as well. A&M may get there one day, but it's not there yet.

SMU has a great reputation in the city of Dallas and surrounding areas, and feeds into one of the most economically viable markets around. Dallas has a large variety of small, mid, and large size firms, and SMU allows you a lot of opportunities at those firms. I was able to work at everywhere from a mid-size family law firm to a portion of the summer with in-house counsel at a technology company, with an awesome time at the US Attorneys's office (highly recommend that, by the by). All without ever having to leave the area.

And I really can't stress enough how much I enjoyed interacting with a lot of the professors. SMU really has a top-notch faculty.

[trmckenz]

Just found out that SMU is nixing its part-time evening program. I'll share more once I receive information through the official channels.