Getting everything together was a bit chaotic, I had a place to meet my 1L ambassador contact but it seemed like many did not. Also, the weather was uncharacteristically bad the day before the event which caused many people's transportation to be delayed, cancelled or otherwise messed up.
There was a registration where we were given a name tag along with a swag bag containing a t-shirt, frisbee, note pad, pen, and squishy mascot, all of which were emblazoned with the GULC name.
We started the events on time with an announcement from Dean Cornblatt to head down to the auditorium area. Everyone got into the seats and I would say it was 90% full, so the turnout must not have been too bad. I did see a lot of non-admits there (parents, friends, SOs, etc...).
There was an introductory spiel from Cornblatt about the school, followed by Dean Treanor, the Dean of Students, and the head of the of PI office. After the pep talks about how great GULC is, Cornblatt said that Ken Feinberg was running late so we were encouraged to introduce ourselves to new people seated around us.
Ken Feinberg came and gave a talk about his experiences in Washington, DC in a number of politically appointed positions. He also talked about teaching at GULC, how great the students were, and what sort of opportunities the school's location provided. Afterwards he took questions for 10-15 minutes.
After a short break we came back to an alumni panel. There was a pretty diverse cross section of alums, 3 biglaw lawyers (1 year, 3 years and 10 years out IIRC), 1 PI lawyer, and a non-traditional that does political coverage at CNN. The panel gave brief introductions and then took questions. The questions either focused on opportunities at GULC or on career prospects out of GULC. The panel generally painted a rosier picture of GULC employment than you would get on TLS (big surprise!
). I have to say that the non-traditional grad was extremely annoying and took over a lot of responses to questions with blathering that was irrelevant to 90% of the people there (talk about the PT program, working in a non-traditional field, etc.....)After the panel, we got up and had student led tours of the buildings. The campus is pretty small and very new. There is a giant fitness center, basically 2 classroom/admin buildings, the library, and one student residence hall. The tour was really short and we didn't cover any classroom space or specifics, really just looked at the buildings (other tours seemed to follow a different route).
Post tour, we were served dinner on a buffet line staffed by the various deans running the event. Everyone had an opportunity to mingle over dinner and there were random professors roaming around talking with admitted students.
I had to go home before the after-hours event at Kelly's Irish times, so if someone went you can fill in on what that was like.
Overall, I had kind of made up mind not to go to GULC before attending the event but now would consider if given a substantial scholarship. They did a pretty decent job of pointing out some of the positive attributes of the school.
Side note - I don't know if all ASW events have this or not, but there was a lot of awkward conversations going on about what other schools people were considering or had been admitted to. There were clearly two groups who were there, one with GULC on the low end of their list and another with it on the high end. Seemed to create some uneasiness.
Anyone have anything to add?
