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As the title suggests I'm currently attending community college with a GPA of 3.9. I chose to attend community college solely due to financial reasons, I had a 3.3 hs GPA and 1440 SAT. I've applied to transfer next spring (undergrad) to University of Maryland, Boston University, NYU, and Emory. Ultimately my goal is to attend a T6 law school and I'm hoping to apply next fall.

How much does attending community college (and not getting a 4.0) hurt my chances if I want to apply to a T6 law school next fall? Keep in mind, even if I get a 4.0 at the institution I transfer to during the spring semester and summer classes, the majority of my credits will consist of community college credits during the time of my law school applications. Something like 60 community college credits and hopefully close to 30 credits at my new school.

Someone suggested I overload on credits and difficult courses at the new school to show law schools that I'm capable of doing well at a reputable school.

Will not hurt you, keep your gpa up at 3.9+ when you get to your 4-year college, study for 170+ on the lsat, and profit. I would suggest you study something useful in college in case you decide not to go the law school route and would like to be employed straight out of college (or even if you are interested in law school, meaning ful work experience is a great thing to do before it anyway).

paglababa wrote:Will not hurt you, keep your gpa up at 3.9+ when you get to your 4-year college, study for 170+ on the lsat, and profit. I would suggest you study something useful in college in case you decide not to go the law school route and would like to be employed straight out of college (or even if you are interested in law school, meaning ful work experience is a great thing to do before it anyway).

Lots of lawyers went to CC for two years. Won't hurt you one bit.

It won't hurt you at all... Your community college only helps you to enhance your chances more

raoulduke89 wrote:
Someone suggested I overload on credits and difficult courses at the new school to show law schools that I'm capable of doing well at a reputable school.

Whoever this someone is don't listen to them about anything law school related ever again

As long as you graduate from a known 4-yr university and you can get LoRs there, attending cc for 2 yrs won't make any difference whatsoever for your law school admissions.

Prepare hard for the LSAT though. A 1440/2400 (im assuming not /1600) with no other data points doesn't bode well for your diagnostic lsat performance, but with sufficient practice you can overcome this - in your case, I would recommend a class or private tutoring and hard study on RC when you start thinking about the test yrs down the road - read as much as you can between now and graduation from your 4yr university, real literature or print news (NY or lA reviews of books for example), canonical works and scholarly texts on a variety of subjects. It might sound silly now but RC passages are dense and the requisite skills are substantially comparable to those on the SAT, whereas LG and LR are arguably more learnable outside of the context of that skill set.

I went to CC and it did not negatively affect my application to law schools. The only instance where CC is bad for you is if you do really poorly, transfer to a 4 year university, kick butt on your GPA there, and then see your LSAC GPA get dragged down by your CC grades. With a 3.9 CC GPA, you are doing great. Keep up the hard work and good luck!