Ep 80: Should I Transfer Law Schools?
The right fit is so important in choosing your law school. Join Alice today to talk about when a transfer may be a good idea, why it's a big decision, and how the process works! Let's talk about it.
Want more help? Check out our comprehensive transfer package for one-on-one throughout the application process until your first day of 2L here.
Episode Highlights
The Process
Most of what you’ve done in your first year through the LSAC portal should be familiar. Check with the specifics of your school on what specific pieces of the application need to be sent to them directly or just through the portal such as transcripts.
Other pieces that you will need to submit that slightly differ as a transfer student are:
Class Rank
GPA
Transfer Personal Statement: For your personal statement, do not send the exact same personal statement from your first year application. A lot of the time transfer applications are a little bit more specific in their prompt. The verbiage needs to change from a first year personal statement to a transfer personal statement.
Sometimes transfer personal statements are smaller. You have even less space, so you need to be able to tell it to me very succinctly. You should learn in your first year of law school how to write very succinctly. Use those skills.
Law School Professor Letter of Recommendation: Ideally pick a professor whose course is pretty standard across the curriculum. If they are teaching in an unconventional way, they may not be your best bet. Pick someone from your contracts class, from your torts class, from your criminal law class, those are the professors that are gonna be able to help you the most. Choose a professor that has taught you something in a classroom, in a typical law school fashion.
Letter of Good Standing
Resume: Update if needed.
Addendums (if applicable)
Should I Transfer? What To Consider
Reasons
This is your life and your future. There are some reasons that are better than others when it comes time to determine whether or not you actually want to transfer law schools. Here are just some examples and listen in on the podcast for more.
If you are miserable, every day is terrible. You hate the city that you live in, you are unhappy. Everything is miserable. If it's not something that is ephemeral and you're doing the things you need to do to try and get yourself out of it and it's not working. Okay. Totally fine.
If you had a bad class, you didn't do well, and you didn't like the professor, if that's the only thing, not always a great idea.
If your support system is somewhere else and you are finding that you want to be closer to them so they can be more readily accessible to you. That's a great reason to transfer as well.
Acceptance Rate
Being accepted as a transfer student is typically more difficult than being accepted as a first year student.
Your class rank has to be very high. You want your grade point average to be at minimum, for averagely statistic law schools, above a 3.0 in your first year law school. And even then, it's not a guarantee that you're going to be accepted even at a school that sits right on those national averages for LSAT and GPA medians
Now it is not unheard of that many students will start at a mid-tier school and move up to a more prestigious, more selective school. That happens. I'm not saying it is impossible, but the students that transfer like that typically are in the top five or 10 students of their class, they're in the top 5%. If you are not that person, maybe think very hard about whether or not you do in fact want to transfer. Whether it is worth the time and the effort that you will put in to put that application together on the off chance that you may not be admitted or make some list adjustments. Be realistic when you are talking about this with yourself.
Finances
It is not new, law school is expensive. Most merit-based scholarship opportunities are going to be as big as they're gonna get as a first year student. If you have a good scholarship at the school that you currently attend, it does not come with you. Some schools will offer transfer student scholarships, but they are very rarely as generous as first year opportunities are.
You'll still do the FAFSA, all of the rest of those things still comes with you. You can still do all of that. You'll do a recalculation to adjust to wherever it is that you're living. If you're using grad plus loans, all of that stuff is going to stay the same. You will go through the process again. You just will not have the benefit of the money you don't have to pay back.
You've Been Accepted! What Happens Now
Most law schools, if not all of them, are going to wipe out the numeric value of your GPA. You will be starting from scratch as a 2L. So now you only have two years of grades. You'll still have access to your transcript from your first school, but for the purposes of the law school from which you will graduate your first year, your GPA does not exist.
You are starting over with your network. As you move through your legal career as a transfer student, you are waving goodbye to the network that you started with to create a brand new one with your new school.
Most first year curriculums are very similar, but they don't always teach them in the same way. You may need to take whatever classes are needed to make up for the fact that you did not take them as a first year student at the school you now attend.
You may lose a little bit of credits to spend flexibly to take classes in the area of interest for you to take advantage of. You may not have quite as much flexibility as a student that started at that school as a 1L because you are having to catch up with part of the first year curriculum.
It will affect your eligibility to be on law review, to be on a competition, trial team, appellate team, any of those co-curricular activities. So law review, you typically get some course credits. Competition teams, you typically get some course credits as long as you do all the things because there is a selection process for those types of things.
Tweetable Quotes
“Don’t sell your yourself short first. You may be able to be admitted to the school that you are planning to transfer to as a first year applicant. Do not sell yourself short just to settle in...If there is a school that you are really excited to attend, put in the work to make sure that you are an attractive first year applicant too.”