Let's accumulate knowledge a bit.

[TinCow]

I also heard that law schools like people who worked through undergrad, now it's no internship but mainting a gpa north of 3 while putting in a full week of work counts for something right?

Definitely, though I cannot overestimate the importance of your GPA and LSAT score.

[Strike For The South]

Definitely, though I cannot overestimate the importance of your GPA and LSAT score.

I heard that it's mostly LSAT though, any truth to this?

[TinCow]

I heard that it's mostly LSAT though, any truth to this?

My understanding was that the highest level schools value GPA over LSAT, while LSAT gains more weight as you go down further in the rankings. Regardless, the two scores are by far the most important considerations for law school admission... far more important than GPA and SAT are for undergrad. For law schools, things other than GPA and LSAT constitute a minor aspect that can be determinative, but usually only if you're borderline. Great 'extracurriculars' (or whatever you want to call them) won't help you get in if your scores aren't good enough for that school, and a total lack of 'extracurriculars' won't matter at all if you've got scores well above average for that school.

For reference, my wife and I both went to William and Mary School of Law, which is generally ranked somewhere between 25th and 35th, depending on the year. So, good, but not spectacular. I was admitted with a 2.9 GPA and a 172 LSAT on out-of-state basis. My GPA was way below average for that school (I was a slacker and a pothead), but my LSAT was well above average. I also counted as an international student for their statistical purposes, which likely had a very significant impact on my admission (a rare exeption to my 'extracurriculars don't do much' statement). I'm not 100% on this, but I think my wife was admitted with something like a 3.7 GPA and had an LSAT score somewhere in the high 150s, she was in-state and had attended the same school for undergraduate. So, as you can see those are two very different scores. I had poor GPA but very high LSAT. My wife had a very high GPA and an LSAT that was below average for the school. Personally, I doubt I would have been admitted if I hadn't counted as an international student.

[Strike For The South]

Yea when it's all said and done My GPA will probably be around 3.3

There allot of other things I have to take into consideration (most of which being financial) I'll be out of undergrad at 21 so I was toying with the idea of working for a few years and then going to law school with some financial cushion OR going back home to St.Marys (which is highly regarded in SA but nowhere else teir 4 :shock:) to live with my folks to cut down on that cost. I couldn't come out with the amount of debt I would incur and not find a job. It would be suicide.

I know I love the law and I love pouring over old cases but alas economic downtunrs have no time table

Thanks Tincow

[TinCow]

There allot of other things I have to take into consideration (most of which being financial) I'll be out of undergrad at 21 so I was toying with the idea of working for a few years and then going to law school with some financial cushion OR going back home to St.Marys (which is highly regarded in SA but nowhere else teir 4 :shock:) to live with my folks to cut down on that cost. I couldn't come out with the amount of debt I would incur and not find a job. It would be suicide.

Regarding taking a few years off between school, that's very normal and will not disadvantage you at all. The average age of my 1L class was 27, so clearly a very large number of people were getting the degree long after graduation. In professional life, I have never seen any preference for attorneys based on age. If anything, being younger probably hurts you more than being older.

Regarding less-prominent law schools, like St. Mary's, location is a very big factor to consider. State and local law firms and corporations tend to be biased towards hiring 'local' graduates. So, even if a school isn't a top tier school, it can still give you good employment opportunities within the local job market. The key is to make sure that is a job market that is both healthy and one in which you want to work on graduation. If a school is not well-known outside of its state or local community, it will be hard to get a job with a degree from that school elsewhere in the country. So, if you want to increase your odds of being able to be hired anywhere in the country immediately after graduation, you should try to go to a school that is well-known on a national level. However, if you're perfectly happy working in San Antonio, a place like St. Mary's is perfectly fine even if it's lower ranked. Keep in mind as well that where you graduate from law school becomes far less important after you've gotten some legal experience under your belt. Once you've been employed for a while, future employers only care about your work experience. Your old law school is pretty much irrelevant to getting a job at that point, unless you happened to go to someplace like Harvard or Stanford.