Ep 05: Creating a Timeline for Your Law School Application
In this episode of Break Into Law School, we are going to be talking about how to make a plan for your law school applications. We're going to touch on three different things.
We're going to talk about how to make a plan for your LSAT and for studying. We're going to talk about how to make a plan for your letters of recommendation. And we're going to be talking about how to make a plan for your law school personal statement and optional essays.
Mindfulness for Academic Achievement Course: https://granitetestprep.com/mindfulness-for-academic-achievement/
Information on Four Section LSAT: https://lsatblog.blogspot.com/p/4-section-online-lsat-faq.html
Logic Games Pro: https://www.logicgamespro.com/
Today, we are going to be talking about how to make a plan for your applications. We're going to touch on three different things.
We're going to talk about how to make a plan for your LSAT and for studying. We're going to talk about how to make a plan for your letters of recommendation and we're going to be talking about how to make a plan for your essays.
Welcome to another episode of Break into Law School. My name is Sydney Montgomery and I'm a law school admissions consultant specializing in working with first-generation and minority applicants.
So let's dive in.
How to make a plan for your law school application process this cycle. And I think this is really important and really crucial because everything takes time and the different parts of your application take a different amount of time, but you want to be preparing and planning ahead.
If you wake up in July and say, okay, I want to start the law school application process. Now you aren't really going to have enough time to submit your applications in September or October, which is when I recommend submitting your applications so that you can best maximize your law school application process, your acceptances and your scholarships.
You want to be submitting your applications in the fall so that you have your best chance of getting the offers that you want. And if you don't prepare beforehand, your likelihood of being able to submit your applications on the ball drastically decreases. Now of course, and you've heard me talk about this, there are three different stages of the law school application process.
You can apply early in the cycle, which is in September, October, even like November. You can apply kind of on time which is that late November to January timeframe. Then you can apply kind of late in the cycle, which is anything after February. And I've discussed the benefits of applying early and also why you're not really giving yourself your best shot at law school admissions even if you're applying to hybrid programs or part-time programs. Applying late in the cycle really does not help you. It doesn't help you with acceptances and it doesn't help you in terms of getting the scholarship money that you want to go to those schools so that you're not paying full freight. So let's talk about what it would look like to try to apply early in the cycle, to try to apply in September or October.
If you want to try to apply in September and October, then you really do need to give yourself at least three to nine months, first off, to study for the LSAT. So we're going to talk about that first point. What is the plan that you need to make for your LSAT studying?
You need at least three to nine months to study for the LSAT. I don't really care who you are. At a minimum, three months. And that would be three months studying, three hours a day. And then some people do need nine months, even a year of studying. So realistically, if you say, I want to get my applications in, in September, when do you need to get your LSAT studying and your preparations ready? I would say in January is when I would take an LSAT diagnostic test. You've heard me talk about LSAT diagnostic tests before. What they are is, it's a practice test. It's a free practice test. You can take a free one on Khan academy.
A few other test prep companies have free diagnostic exams. And that is to give you a baseline score so that you know how long you need to study. I do recommend taking that really early. If you took it in January and your baseline score was a 156 then, and your goal score was a 165, then you know that you've got about nine to 10 points there that you want to try to target and you can make an appropriate LSAT plan based off of that.
If your diagnostic score is a 145 and you want to get to a one 65? Well, then you know that you've got about 20 points to jump and you are going to want to do a lot more studying, right? You're not going to be able to do that realistically, in those three months, you're going to need at least six or nine months. You're probably going to need to sign up for a course. You're probably going to need to get a tutor. So we're talking about maybe budgeting for a course and budgeting for a tutor. We're talking about making sure that you have enough time to take the course, enough time to troubleshoot in case anything goes wrong. So you really do want to take a diagnostic as early as possible.
You want to figure out where you are so that you can figure out where you're going. There's actually a video on my YouTube page, "top five mistakes students make when studying for the LSAT." I did it with me, Anna Perona, who is the owner of logic games pro, we're really good friends. She's a fantastic LSAT logic games tutor, we did a video on those top five mistakes that students make. And one of those is not taking a diagnostic test at the beginning of their studies.
So let's say you've taken a diagnostic test and you're like, now what. Now you want to figure out when you're going to take the LSAT exam. There's a June test. There is an August test, and there's an October test, right?
There's usually a November test as well and then it jumps to January.
Now at the beginning of this, I said I'm going to try to give you a timeline for applying. Early in the cycle, for applying in that September through October, November timeframe means that you need to be taking the June, or the August LSAT exam. Maybe the October LSAT exam to get in that September through November window. Those are the three tests dates that are going to get you a test score that still allows you to apply relatively early in the cycle. I will say that an important note is that the August LSAT changes format. The August LSAT is a different format than the June LSAT.
For those of you who have been on this LSAT journey and following it for some time, you know that the June LSAT and the past year of LSAT have been under this LSAT Flex. And what that means is that the LSAT used to have five sections: two sections of logical reasoning, one section of logic games, one section of reading comp and a fifth experimental section that didn't count towards your score, but it could have been any one of those three sections.
The June LSAT exam and like I said, the last 12 months have been on LSAT Flex, which means that they've only had three sections. One of each. They've had a logical reasoning, logic games and our reading comp section. That's it. Three 35 minute sections, no experimental sections, no breaks. And it's been at home right digitally on your computer.
In August, they are switching to a four section tests. So they'll still be one logic games, one reading comp and one logical reasoning. However, there will be a fourth experimental section and there will be a break, and I'm not exactly sure yet how that break is factoring in, but there will be a break.
So you want to be practicing at some point, if you're going to take the August LSAT, you want to be practicing with a fourth section with the break where it's going to be. Because I'm a big proponent of practice like you're going to take it, right? Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. If you practice poorly or you practice in a completely different way than the test is, it's not going to help you because come test day, you're going to be like, oh, there's an extra section.
I'm now more tired or I'm flustered because I had two logic games in a row because one of them was experimental. You want to get in a habit of practicing exactly like you're going to take the test.
I even tell people, if you know when you're going to take the test, back in the day the test was always at 8:00 AM.
Take your practice tests at 8:00 AM, right? It doesn't make sense to take your practice tests at 10:00 PM if you're never going to take the LSAT at 10:00 PM. I want you to practice what kind of breakfast you're going to have in the morning. I want you to practice where you're going to sit.
Are you gonna have the fuzzy slippers on or not? Are you gonna have the fan on or not? I know that this seems really granular, but these kinds of things will get your body into a muscle memory so that when it comes time to take the test, even if you're feeling a little nervous, you're going to be like, oh, this is exactly like last weekend and the weekend before and the weekend before.
This is where I sit. This is what I wear. This is what I've eaten today. This is the time that I take my LSAT tests and that will internally calm your body down. I'm also going to plug mindfulness. All of this is about controlling the anxiety that comes up when we start to take the LSAT and that poor performance sometimes that happens, which is different from how we've been practicing.
I did a video with my friend Grantly Neely at GRANITE test prep and he has a fantastic course that is like $17. It's mindfulness for academic achievement, and it's an eight week course that will really walk you through how to use mindfulness and incorporate it into your test prep situations. It will help you be able to get control over things like anxiety and over all of those mental blocks that we have when it comes to studying or a lot of pressure.
So I really recommend that as well. I just wanted to let you know that if you're taking the August LSAT or the October LSAT, you want to be practicing with those four sections. You want to be practicing exactly like you're going to take the test.
Like I said, take that diagnostic, figure out what kind of test prep course you're going to use. A lot of them are a hundred day courses for good reason, and then also see if you're going to use the tutor or not. Now that's the timeline for the LSAT exam. If you end up taking the November LSAT exam, you are going to be applying more on time, which is fine. That's fine.
For most schools, for the highly selective schools, you want to be applying early, but if you apply in November or December, it's fine. January, we start getting a little dicey. I start getting a little nervous. But the November test is absolutely fine for getting your applications in, in November or December.
Okay. So we covered the LSAT. The second thing is you want to make a timeline for securing your letters of recommendation and really for all things ALSAC. ALSAC is the law school admission council. That is the hub of your applications. That is where you're going to do everything from apply, to submit your transcripts, to get your letters of recommendation. So.
Sometimes getting your transcripts sent two ALSAC takes a little bit of time. You have to get all of your transcripts. You have to get your transcripts from study abroad, from if you have a degree from another country, if you took some classes at a community college, but then didn't transfer somewhere else, all of your transcripts need to be collected and submitted to ALSAC. So I think that's really important for you to know that that can take time. And if you're already done with school, there is no time like the present.
So I would do that. Generally speaking, it probably won't take more than a few weeks to get your transcripts in. But once the summer kicks in and everyone is sending their transcripts and everyone is requesting things to ALSAC, they are going to start to get a little backed up.
If you need to call ALSAC over the summer, times to get in touch with someone else, that can be ridiculous. So you want to be making sure that you're doing that. And also, if you are seeking accommodations, whether that's for testing anxiety, ADHD, discalcula, any kind of accommodations you want, to also start that process because it can take some time. The deadline to apply for accommodations is the last day to register for the LSAT exam. So that means that you need to be talking to your doctors, getting your medical documentation, you need to get all of that together in time to submit when you submit your LSAT registration, so that you can have the accommodations that you need.
Now for letters of recommendation. I usually say you should give your professors at least, at least a month, but probably two months to write your letter of recommendation.
And you want to make sure that you give yourself a month buffer in case something happens with ALSAC and they have issues uploading it. So if I want to submit my application September 15th, that means I need to tell my recommenders that they need to try to have their letters uploaded to ALSAC by August 15th.
Which means that I need to be asking my recommenders by June 15th. Right? You see how we kind of work backwards from when you want to apply. But some of you have not fostered the relationship that you need to with your professors. Some of you don't know who you're going to ask and this is a good time to build that relationship, set up a coffee or go to virtual office hours, connect with your professor and then connect with them again. Then maybe on your third time you make the ask or your fourth time connecting you make the ask. You have enough time to build stronger relationships with professors, and that goes for employers as well. Maybe you can take on a little bit more at work or you can really be a leader in certain projects.
Next, you can try to make the ask as easy as possible when you ask. Not all of us have had wonderful relationships with employers or professors up to this point, but you have time to change that. You will need to be doing some groundwork right now, so that you can make the ask, you can ask competently and you know that it's going to be the best person to write your letter of recommendation.
Now, I talk a lot about, on my blog, on my YouTube and the essential guide, how you go about getting a letter of recommendation, you can check it out in the guide. I talked through all the things that I would prepare for your recommender, the anecdotes and the information that they will need to write you a strong letter. What it looks like, a strong letter, and also a template for how to write your own letter if an employer asks you to draft it first. So all of those things you can check out in my guide, I walk you through the whole process because you don't want to just ask and then just hope that they write the right thing because nine out of ten, they're probably not going to. You want to help them a little bit and give them as much information as possible to make sure that they are going to write a recommendation letter that is going to really be impactful to admissions committees. And recommendation letters do mean a lot to admissions. Different schools it means a different amount, but there are some schools that really value the letters of recommendation.
And you want to make sure that you're submitting your best ones. Also poor letter recommendations can really hurt your application package. Now. Speaking of your application package, that third point that I really want to talk to you about is your essays. And quite frankly, this is where I see a lot of students falter.
They are so focused on the LSAT, and that makes sense. I understand the LSAT of course is such a large part of your law school application. But you're going to do yourself a disservice if you only focus on the LSAT. I was on a webinar a couple of weeks ago with a law school admission Dean,
and he was saying that yes, LSAT scores were up. They were way up this year. However, he also said that the quality of writing that he saw in people's personal statements and diversity statements was down. Honestly, he was really disappointed in the quality of work that he was seeing. And so he told pre-law advisors and the consultants that were on the call, don't be surprised if you have a student with a really high LSAT score who didn't get in. They might be confused, but you should have them look at the quality of the work. He said that they were really rewarding students that had strong application essays, strong application packages.
And even if you had a high LSAT score, if your essays were not good, you are not getting accepted this year. So I think that was really important for us to hear as pre-law advisors and consultants, but also really important for me to share with you. Because I see this time and time again. Students
so focused on their LSAT and then when it comes to their essays, they just rush and they kind of throw it together or they will invest in LSAT prep, but they won't invest in getting help with their essays. And you're really hurting yourself and shooting yourself in the foot because sometimes what ends up happening is even if you invest in the LSAT, we all know that
things sometimes don't go as planned. And so if you spend all of your time prepping for the LSAT and all of your money prepping for the LSAT and you still don't get the score that you want. What you would ideally have in that situation is still really strong essays, really strong letters of recommendation and you would have been applying in September.
However, oftentimes students still don't get the score that they want, but then they also haven't given themselves any time and any investment in their essays. And so they have not so great essays and they're kind of applying late and now they have a poor score. And it just really compounds into a really bad situation. So I really try to stress to my students that you absolutely need to be prioritizing the written application portions of your application just as much as you're prioritizing your LSAT exam.
Because they do look at your application holistically and LSAT is a median and how they're able to look at it holistically depends on when you apply. Whether you're applying in September or you're applying in January, completely different. Remember you can be the same exact applicants, same test scores, same essays, apply in September- get in with scholarship money. Apply in February, get denied.
It's really important that you understand the power of timing in your application process. But when it comes to your essays, I tell students it takes at least three to four months to create really strong essays all around. That's your personal statement, your diversity statement, any addenda, your resume and any supplemental essays, scholarship essays, all that good stuff, right. It takes at least three to four months. Sometimes people will come to me and they will want to like wham bam the process and get it done in like two weeks. And I'm like, well, that is not how this works.
You might have something in two weeks, but you're not really gonna have what you need. Even in my personal statement online course, I say that it takes four to 12 weeks. To do that you want to make sure that you're giving yourself enough time. And even at the end of the four weeks, you're going to have a really strong first draft, but it's still going to need a second pair of eyes and all those things that take it from good to great.
So when we're talking about your application materials as a whole, getting all of your essays from good to great or from nothing to great. Getting everything that you need, you're gonna need three to four months. All right. So let's do that backwards, right? We're trying to apply in September. When do we need to start? Okay. So that's August that's July, that's, June. That's May.
Now I work with students as early as even January for the September cycle. And I will tell you, it makes a huge difference in where they get into school. It makes a huge difference in their acceptances and their scholarships, and also just the peace of mind and the lack of stress that they have. So what does that whole plan look like for your essay? So let's say you gave yourself four months to do all of the written components of your essays. You want to start with you brainstorming. When I do brainstorming, I help students brainstorm an entire universe of stories that can then be used for both the personal statement, a diversity statement.
I help you create a story bank, if you will, on the story matrix. That way, when it comes to writing and outlining, we can be pulling from the same brainstorming process and that makes it go a little bit faster. But whatever brainstorming method you use, you want to make sure that you are thoroughly brainstorming, that you have crystallized your why law and a clear why law statement needs to talk to me about what area of law you want to practice and who you want to help.
That you are outlining, that you are writing drafts. It takes I don't at least three to four drafts, probably three to five drafts I would say of every essay to get it truly great.
And I'm very picky. So I'm going to tell you what it takes to have a phenomenal essay. I'm not going to tell you what it takes to have a mediocre essay or an essay that's just good enough. I'm going to tell you what it takes to have a phenomenal essay, because you shouldn't be expecting nothing less of yourself in this process.
So it's going to take at least three to five drafts of each. Three to five drafts of your personal statement. Three to five drafts of your diversity statement. You want to make sure that you are using all of the real estate on the page wisely. You only have two pages for your personal statement, one page for your diversity statement. You want to make sure that you're putting in the right anecdotes and the right stories. You want to be looking at grammar and transition. You want to be thinking about tone. Who are you talking to? What's the audience you'll want to be thinking about.
All the things that go into it. You're showcasing the right things, you're also being specific and not vague in your language. There's a lot that goes into workshopping your essays. So you want to make sure that you have the time to do that, and you need to set aside time to really write and time to get this down. The hardest part of an essay I usually say is the outline, because that's the structure of your essay. And if you don't have a good structure, you're going to have a trash essay.
It just doesn't matter. You have to have a strong outline to have a strong essay, but then we really want to get into the grammar and fine tuning of it. Your resume, you know, probably you want to have it looked over. If you're already coming from corporate world, it could look a little different from law school. Some law schools require different things on their essay, so you may need to tailor it a little bit.
You also might have supplemental essays. So you want to leave time for that. You want to leave time for, let's say you're applying to Stanford. Well, if you're a strong applicant, you also want to be applying to the Knight Hennessy fellowship program, right? Because that's a full ride scholarship.
Well, the Knight Hennessy program has a whole application process in and of itself. If you're applying to NYU and you're incredibly bright and you're interested in public interest, then you want to be applying to the Root-Tildern-Kern scholarship and they have a lot of other scholarship essays. Those are separate applications or separate essays. Rather if you're applying to Georgetown, you might want to write one of those optional essays. If you're applying to Stanford, they have optional essays.
There are a lot of essays depending on where you're applying to. So you really want to make sure that you're giving yourself enough time to do all of these things, to apply to the pipeline programs and access programs and outside scholarships. So, this is not a process that I want you to rush or to think about rushing. And then of course we need to work on your addenda. So yeah.
It's going to take you at least three to four months. If we kind of do a summary of those three different areas, that first plan that I told you to make was an LSAT prep plan. And I said, it's going to take you at least three to nine months, which means if you're trying to apply in September, you want to have taken a diagnostic test maybe in January, but really as soon as possible. Then you need to give yourself a least three months, three hours a day to study, depending on what you want your score increased to be.
When we're talking about letters of recommendation, you want to give yourself a three month timeframe as well. One month in case anything happens with ALSAC, two months for your professor to write your letter of recommendation. And then you might need some more lead time to build that relationship. It might take a couple of months to build the relationship before you even get to the ask, which starts that three month timeline.
And then third, we talked about the essays. It's going to take you at least three to four months to do the essays. We're talking about three to five drafts of each of your essays. There are optional essays that are supplemental essays. There are scholarship essays. There's having a strong personal statement and maybe even tailoring the end of your personal statement to every school. There's a lot that goes into that. Now of course, if you go on until October and November, those are also still in that early timeframe that I talked about. Your timeline shifts a little bit but you want to be thinking ahead and preparing ahead, you don't want to just wake up in June or July and decide you want to start the process then because you are going to be a little stressed, but it's still possible and you can still do it. But then I would strongly suggest if you're going to start the process in June or July or August, that you have expert guidance walking you through to make sure that you're not wasting time to expedite some parts of the process, to expedite the brainstorming, to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together a little bit quicker so that you can still get your applications in November, December.
So that you're not waiting until January to apply, because at that point you really are starting to change what the acceptances and scholarship money might look like. I hope all of that was helpful. Like I said there is a free guide and essential guide to applying to law school, which walks you through a lot of those steps.
I also have a webinar, how to gain control and really maximize your law school applications that talks about the importance of timing and breaks down all of those different application components.
This was another episode of Break into Law School with Sydney Montgomery.
Want to learn more about how you can work with me? Visit my website at www.smontgomeryconsulting.com or follow me on instagram @smontgomeryconsulting.
Make sure that you rate and review this episode, if it was helpful to you. And if you're looking for even more inspiration, check out my podcast, Mindful Prayers for Students, where I provide encouragement, mindfulness, and prayer on your academic journey.