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Is Chicago really 2nd best for clerkships?
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Date: April 20th, 2005 9:55 AM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 9:58 AM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 10:13 AM
http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=165730&mc=14&forum_id=2 |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 10:18 AM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 10:21 AM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 1:19 PM
It doesn't make much sense adjusting those numbers for "quality of student" given these particular schools. Personally, I also don't think it makes much sense to discount the numbers for political orientation, and even if that was reasonable, the effect would likely be very small. Similarly, at least with respect to Columbia, the discount factor for something like effort to get to know professors, or any other motivational factor, should be very small.
So, I'd say a conservative estimate is that Chicago beats Columbia by a 2:1 ratio on an adjusted per capita basis for the type of student you describe when it comes to Supreme Court clerkships, more for NYU. As I suggested above, I also think that is a useful proxy for at least the more competitive COA clerkships, and maybe all federal clerkships. |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 1:12 PM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 4:14 PM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 5:04 PM |
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Date: April 21st, 2005 2:24 PM |
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Date: April 21st, 2005 2:52 PM
In other words, I think at Chicago one might have a little more margin for error in terms of things like grades and journal stuff before your fellow students start taking away your preferred opportunities. |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 9:58 AM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 10:00 AM
How did it happen that making the tired claim that this ghetto shithole is UNDERrated became the signature conversation piece for people who desperately want to be thought smart; really, really smart. smart people love "rigor" and Chicago is full of it; it must be, what with its hair-splitting number grades, punishingly low enforced mean, and oppressive course load. Chicago boosterism usually comes in the form of a comparison with the appallingly UNrigorous Stanford or Yale -- gradeless, abundantly pass-fail, unserious; students who do nothing and know nothing. Chicago: graded, competitive, serious... That it's really just a ruptured ego rehab clinic for Harvard rejects is a fact not emphasized. I have seen a homely Chicago girl, deep into her second year, still spontaneously weeping upon Proustian recollections of the stiff NO Harvard sent her, in brisk three-week turnaround time from the point her doomed application was deemed complete. Happy December, chickiepoo. Then the Yale axe fell, as it does. Welcome to the New Year, dipshit. January passed; February crawled by with those joyless acceptances that only accentuated the horror of Plan B: Georgetown, which is a "Law Center," a failed euphemism if ever there was one. Next: woeful Cornell. Oh, what a very bad school. And -- what do we have here?!? -- a Boston University full-ride. Ummmm, no. On second thought in stead of BU I'd prefer the f free roasted dogshit mignon with a pus reduction sauce and a heaping blob of earwax garnish. Thank you no. I am woe. Add to that the fact that the imbecile whoalways posts about how Sean Hannity is a "serious thinker" just got into Harvard. Time for you to start some damage-control posting here, on the PR board, pretending to seriously consider this BU affront. You wave the flag of thrift and test out a quaintly anachronistic abhorrence of debt. Substantively, you add in some tommyrot about how BU's "really strong in ...'international law,' whatever the fuck that is. BU? Yeah, right. But you need something that gives the illusion that Georgetown, if it comes to that, isn't the three years incarcerated in a smegma chamber that it is. So good, so fine you'll drop the cash dollars despite that lovely gift from BU. You're forming a cover story; something to puff the very real and very nauseating prospect of joining 600 other defeated mediocrities at ... fuck, no ... Georgetown. And you thought going to college at Penn was bad. . Still, there are two more to hear from. Two more law schools ...There's that late April Stanford rejection (inconsiderate bastards) which at least affords you ample time to manufacture the next layer in the cover story: e.g., a strict policy against California, a suburban aversion, a preference for bigness, all of which eliminate Stanford from the sweepstakes. Be sure, too, to ridicule their tepid 25-75 LSAT %ile, too. Kill it dead, if you must. Maybe you thrust out of your frozen horror by sending off one of those strategic "withdrawal" letters, the way all those clowns do when Harvard puts them on hold ... ".you cant't fire me ... i quit! " Adios, Stanford. Suck my cunt, you no-SCOTUS-clerking/dike-dean-TTT. ... die, die, you gravy-sucking pig. .... and now, then, there is just one. Chicago. The Law School. Chicago does do that pathetic yield-maximizing stall, so February passes, March crawls. They haven't the nuts to try the ricockulous move Stanford does. So they write. Ever rigorous, The Law School requests the pleasure of your company. Not so fast . No decision has been made. They want to inspect you in person. The "evaluative interview. Looking for people skills. And evident thirst for knowledge. The life of the law is the law itself. It seems you've fucked up; quite possible3 when the went "behind the numbers." Maybe those two essay paragraphs about why the 171, exactly where you topped out in Kaplan, is a truer measure than the 164. maybe it was two paragraphs too many. You weren't an auto-admit. So off to the "evaluative interview," and you give them not much to evaluate. You stay on message, though: owing to its RIGOR, Chicage is now, and ever was, your FIRST CHOICE. Tell your audience what it wants to hear. Then they decide, engaging the only evaluation that matters in this gig. Looks like they can break even with your sorry ass. Median-wise, your 171 nullifies the 159 URM from Howard they took yesterday. They'll swallow your 3.46; sometimes that's the price of a yield-lock, and you're that. (No one's swallowing the Howard guy, if you catch my racy double entendre.) These admissions guys talk, as you suspected, and you wisely decide against telling them it had come down to Chicago or Harvard for you; first versus second choice; no choice at all. Never get caught lying. Bad idea, even worse than telling that stupid girl from Emory you were "a Kennedy." These things get found out. Like they say, no sense lying about your cock size. Turns out you didn't need to fake a bidding war. The usual stampede of all Chicago's best admitees are going to Y and H and S without so much as the courtesy of telling C to go pound sand. Why tell them what they already know? They need to fill place #143 of their famously teeny-weenie class. The assumed occupant got unheld at Harvard this morning; never so relieved, he had the audacity to ask Chicago for his deposit back. They don't need these headaches. You're in. They write, very pleased to offer admission; then a recital of just how "keen" the competition was for the few precious "seats" in the class of 2006; and, finally, a paragraph celebrating the legal profession with a toploftiness and richly felt purpose so precisely at variance with reality that you are unsettled by the suspicion that you might be the target of a satire so subtly corrosive that you will never connect it with the despair that will progress, exponentially; beginning as a persistent annoyance progressing into a pervasive physical and mental crapulence and ending in the crippling burden as lumber and writhe and tumble toward the epiphany. What epiphany is that? That this "career" of yours --BIGLAW! -- has somewhat less to recommend it than residence in the "shoe" at Pelican Bay. For now, though, the seed of tragic hopelessness finds expression in the "Law Discussion Area." You post -- IN AT CHICAGO -- and, without overtly lying, you manufacture the entirely erroneous impression that you "chose" Chicago, being also the originator of the CHICAGO v. HARVARD and YALE v. CHICAGO threads, under various of your insipid monikers, all selected from either Pulp Fiction or Friends. Be careful not to ass fuck your credibility, though. The purported Yale turn-down is a tough one to pull off. The "New Haven's-an-armpit" trope just doesn't pass the ha-ha test. It's too puny a reason to toss away a lifetime of being supposed a genius ... fuck it: always good to give your fabrications a little populist tint, not to mention a dollop of truth. Join the commiseration thread of Yale rejects; pretend to be sad for that Nuisance turd; be one of the masses for once. Getting rejected isn't the same thing as not getting in, You merely did not get in. You claim to have been wait-listed; and, with admirable maturity, you hold out no hope. Remember, too, this lie must be built on several fronts. Lard up the Harvard thread with grave concern about big classes, low morale, faculty acrimony, and speculation about a precipitous US News ranking drop. Throughout April, you go political, fulminating about Tribe and Dershowitz and how Duncan Kennedy drives a far-too-expensive car. to be a genuine socialist. Chicago's "conservative climate" is just a better fit for you; marginal cost curves figure in your every analytical moment; you read Posner opinions on the crapper; Coase is as important as Socrates. There is that little stinging glitch, though. Somehow Stanford neglected to process that request to quash your application, which is not favorably acted upon and this is memoriaized in a letter that suggests the Stanford Admissions Office ignores their LaserWriter Pro's TONER LOW warning. On May 7th they regret to inform and wish you well at any of the scores of other law schools that, they assure you "offer excellent programs of legal instruction." (Which, you have no doubt, they do. What they don't offer, is really the only important thing Stanford does offer: the opportunity to sit for three years with your thumb up your ass, comatose, and still get the job you'll have to bust nuts to get coming from whichever craphole you end up at.) It's sealed. An ugly, styleless maroon CHICAGO LAW, Champion sweatshirt has arrived, per your online order. You wear it, eliciting congratulations from the babe you want to rail. She's so happy for you, and you're so wrapped up in the fantasy of creaming on her tits you nearly miss perky aside that her boyfriend remains in the throes of elation from his admission to Yale, back in January. Throughout the summer, you bookmark links that embody the wisdom US News lacks. Your are heading off, soon, to your own first choice, which also places first in a ranking produced by the rigorous methodology conceived by a statistician from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That Harvard tied for #14 undermines your confidence in the ranking diminishes the likelihood it will supplant US News' preeminence. So you go. Your Hyde Park apartment is actually rather nice. Your housemate went to Harvard College. One night, instead of jacking off before sleep, you register as an active component of your self-conception the notion that, transitively, your housemate's undergraduate credential nullifies the Harvard rejection that left you lusterless and unlaid at your senior prom, -- and has persisted as a gnawing ache, going on five years. You are now on equal footing with a Harvard graduate. Should your law school prowess exceed his -- say a 75 in Torts to his 74 -- you will once and for all flick away the scab of that Harvard wound. First cut is the deepest. As it turns out, your housemate is an engaging, witty fellow. He's porking the big bosomed lady with the Dutch accent. Wow! He offers to you, his new chum, the story of his own execution -- by lethal injection -- as expected, he painlessly relates, by the HLS admission staff. You pretend to explore what might have caused things to go awry, flatulating the usual fatuousness about Harvard being excessively "numbers driven," the "arbitrariness" of it all, dangling the threat of going on at some length, when he offers up the only information you genuinely care to know about him: : 178/3.34 ..Of course some one will inevitably have the 6th percentile college GPA in every HLS class; probably not a white guy from Greenwich, though. Friendship is built through reciprocity. So you tell your own story. You attempt to weave compassion into the telling of your story, being careful not to appear boastful about not just possessing, but discarding something he does not possess. HLS. Dreamy, So, your story: the grueling back-and-forth ... one day it's Chicago, the next Harvard; the hardest decision you've ever made; that feeling of immense responsibility to yourself; discovering and summoning the emotional maturity to pierce the specious veil that is prestige. With the bearing of a battle weary soldier you tell what it is to do something rarely done -- circumnavigate the Earth, dunk a basketball on a regulation hoop, turn down Harvard Law School . You picked Chicago. You chose, you adorable little existentialist. You are not exposed, chiefly because this a shared lie, Community glue. (Postscript: Throughout the 1Lyear you and your housemate discover much commonality, He, too, prefers the Stones to the Beatles. You both smoke pot. neither is circumcised. You've each fucked 5 girls; gotten head from several others. Each of you applies to transfer. He gets into HLS. He turns down Harvard Law School. Of course no two people are exactly alike. Your desire to transfer wanes around the time Stanford and Yale's decisions on your transfer applications reach you by mail. You begin the CHIGAGO 1L TAKING QUESTIONS thread. One of your alter ego monikers asks simply: how do you like Chicago. You love it. You wouldn't go anywhere else and, you note, there were other places you could have gone. Same for your housemate. He transfers to Yale.)
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Date: April 20th, 2005 1:20 PM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 1:28 PM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 5:09 PM |
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Date: April 20th, 2005 5:46 PM How did it happen that making the tired claim that this ghetto shithole is UNDERrated became the signature conversation piece for people who desperately want to be thought smart; really, really smart. smart people love "rigor" and Chicago is full of it; it must be, what with its hair-splitting number grades, punishingly low enforced mean, and oppressive course load. Chicago boosterism usually comes in the form of a comparison with the appallingly UNrigorous Stanford or Yale -- gradeless, abundantly pass-fail, unserious; students who do nothing and know nothing. Chicago: graded, competitive, serious... That it's really just a ruptured ego rehab clinic for Harvard rejects is a fact not emphasized.
I have seen a homely Chicago girl, deep into her second year, still spontaneously weeping upon Proustian recollections of the stiff NO Harvard sent her, in brisk three-week turnaround time from the point her doomed application was deemed complete. Happy December, chickiepoo. Then the Yale axe fell, as it does. Welcome to the New Year, dipshit. January passed; February crawled by with those joyless acceptances that only accentuated the horror of Plan B: Georgetown, which is a "Law Center," a failed euphemism if ever there was one. Next: woeful Cornell. Oh, what a very bad school. And -- what do we have here?!? -- a Boston University full-ride. Ummmm, no. On second thought in stead of BU I'd prefer the f free roasted dogshit mignon with a pus reduction sauce and a heaping blob of earwax garnish. Thank you no. I am woe. Add to that the fact that the imbecile whoalways posts about how Sean Hannity is a "serious thinker" just got into Harvard.
Time for you to start some damage-control posting here, on the PR board, pretending to seriously consider this BU affront. You wave the flag of thrift and test out a quaintly anachronistic abhorrence of debt. Substantively, you add in some tommyrot about how BU's "really strong in ...'international law,' whatever the fuck that is. BU? Yeah, right. But you need something that gives the illusion that Georgetown, if it comes to that, isn't the three years incarcerated in a smegma chamber that it is. So good, so fine you'll drop the cash dollars despite that lovely gift from BU. You're forming a cover story; something to puff the very real and very nauseating prospect of joining 600 other defeated mediocrities at ... fuck, no ... Georgetown. And you thought going to college at Penn was bad. . Still, there are two more to hear from.
Two more law schools ...There's that late April Stanford rejection (inconsiderate bastards) which at least affords you ample time to manufacture the next layer in the cover story: e.g., a strict policy against California, a suburban aversion, a preference for bigness, all of which eliminate Stanford from the sweepstakes. Be sure, too, to ridicule their tepid 25-75 LSAT %ile, too. Kill it dead, if you must. Maybe you thrust out of your frozen horror by sending off one of those strategic "withdrawal" letters, the way all those clowns do when Harvard puts them on hold ... ".you cant't fire me ... i quit! " Adios, Stanford. Suck my cunt, you no-SCOTUS-clerking/dike-dean-TTT. ... die, die, you gravy-sucking pig. .... and now, then, there is just one. Chicago. The Law School.
Chicago does do that pathetic yield-maximizing stall, so February passes, March crawls. They haven't the nuts to try the ricockulous move Stanford does. So they write. Ever rigorous, The Law School requests the pleasure of your company. Not so fast . No decision has been made. They want to inspect you in person. The "evaluative interview. Looking for people skills. And evident thirst for knowledge. The life of the law is the law itself. It seems you've fucked up; quite possible3 when the went "behind the numbers." Maybe those two essay paragraphs about why the 171, exactly where you topped out in Kaplan, is a truer measure than the 164. maybe it was two paragraphs too many. You weren't an auto-admit. So off to the "evaluative interview," and you give them not much to evaluate. You stay on message, though: owing to its RIGOR, Chicage is now, and ever was, your FIRST CHOICE. Tell your audience what it wants to hear. Then they decide, engaging the only evaluation that matters in this gig. Looks like they can break even with your sorry ass. Median-wise, your 171 nullifies the 159 URM from Howard they took yesterday. They'll swallow your 3.46; sometimes that's the price of a yield-lock, and you're that. (No one's swallowing the Howard guy, if you catch my racy double entendre.)
These admissions guys talk, as you suspected, and you wisely decide against telling them it had come down to Chicago or Harvard for you; first versus second choice; no choice at all. Never get caught lying. Bad idea, even worse than telling that stupid girl from Emory you were "a Kennedy." These things get found out. Like they say, no sense lying about your cock size. Turns out you didn't need to fake a bidding war. The usual stampede of all Chicago's best admitees are going to Y and H and S without so much as the courtesy of telling C to go pound sand. Why tell them what they already know? They need to fill place #143 of their famously teeny-weenie class. The assumed occupant got unheld at Harvard this morning; never so relieved, he had the audacity to ask Chicago for his deposit back. They don't need these headaches. You're in.
They write, very pleased to offer admission; then a recital of just how "keen" the competition was for the few precious "seats" in the class of 2006; and, finally, a paragraph celebrating the legal profession with a toploftiness and richly felt purpose so precisely at variance with reality that you are unsettled by the suspicion that you might be the target of a satire so subtly corrosive that you will never connect it with the despair that will progress, exponentially; beginning as a persistent annoyance progressing into a pervasive physical and mental crapulence and ending in the crippling burden as lumber and writhe and tumble toward the epiphany. What epiphany is that? That this "career" of yours --BIGLAW! -- has somewhat less to recommend it than residence in the "shoe" at Pelican Bay. For now, though, the seed of tragic hopelessness finds expression in the "Law Discussion Area." You post -- IN AT CHICAGO -- and, without overtly lying, you manufacture the entirely erroneous impression that you "chose" Chicago, being also the originator of the CHICAGO v. HARVARD and YALE v. CHICAGO threads, under various of your insipid monikers, all selected from either Pulp Fiction or Friends.
Be careful not to ass fuck your credibility, though. The purported Yale turn-down is a tough one to pull off. The "New Haven's-an-armpit" trope just doesn't pass the ha-ha test. It's too puny a reason to toss away a lifetime of being supposed a genius ... fuck it: always good to give your fabrications a little populist tint, not to mention a dollop of truth. Join the commiseration thread of Yale rejects; pretend to be sad for that Nuisance turd; be one of the masses for once. Getting rejected isn't the same thing as not getting in, You merely did not get in. You claim to have been wait-listed; and, with admirable maturity, you hold out no hope. Remember, too, this lie must be built on several fronts.
Lard up the Harvard thread with grave concern about big classes, low morale, faculty acrimony, and speculation about a precipitous US News ranking drop. Throughout April, you go political, fulminating about Tribe and Dershowitz and how Duncan Kennedy drives a far-too-expensive car. to be a genuine socialist. Chicago's "conservative climate" is just a better fit for you; marginal cost curves figure in your every analytical moment; you read Posner opinions on the crapper; Coase is as important as Socrates. There is that little stinging glitch, though. Somehow Stanford neglected to process that request to quash your application, which is not favorably acted upon and this is memoriaized in a letter that suggests the Stanford Admissions Office ignores their LaserWriter Pro's TONER LOW warning. On May 7th they regret to inform and wish you well at any of the scores of other law schools that, they assure you "offer excellent programs of legal instruction." (Which, you have no doubt, they do. What they don't offer, is really the only important thing Stanford does offer: the opportunity to sit for three years with your thumb up your ass, comatose, and still get the job you'll have to bust nuts to get coming from whichever craphole you end up at.)
It's sealed. An ugly, styleless maroon CHICAGO LAW, Champion sweatshirt has arrived, per your online order. You wear it, eliciting congratulations from the babe you want to rail. She's so happy for you, and you're so wrapped up in the fantasy of creaming on her tits you nearly miss perky aside that her boyfriend remains in the throes of elation from his admission to Yale, back in January. Throughout the summer, you bookmark links that embody the wisdom US News lacks. Your are heading off, soon, to your own first choice, which also places first in a ranking produced by the rigorous methodology conceived by a statistician from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That Harvard tied for #14 undermines your confidence in the ranking diminishes the likelihood it will supplant US News' preeminence. So you go.
Your Hyde Park apartment is actually rather nice. Your housemate went to Harvard College. One night, instead of jacking off before sleep, you register as an active component of your self-conception the notion that, transitively, your housemate's undergraduate credential nullifies the Harvard rejection that left you lusterless and unlaid at your senior prom, -- and has persisted as a gnawing ache, going on five years. You are now on equal footing with a Harvard graduate. Should your law school prowess exceed his -- say a 75 in Torts to his 74 -- you will once and for all flick away the scab of that Harvard wound. First cut is the deepest. As it turns out, your housemate is an engaging, witty fellow. He's porking the big bosomed lady with the Dutch accent. Wow!
He offers to you, his new chum, the story of his own execution -- by lethal injection -- as expected, he painlessly relates, by the HLS admission staff. You pretend to explore what might have caused things to go awry, flatulating the usual fatuousness about Harvard being excessively "numbers driven," the "arbitrariness" of it all, dangling the threat of going on at some length, when he offers up the only information you genuinely care to know about him: : 178/3.34 ..Of course some one will inevitably have the 6th percentile college GPA in every HLS class; probably not a white guy from Greenwich, though. Friendship is built through reciprocity. So you tell your own story. You attempt to weave compassion into the telling of your story, being careful not to appear boastful about not just possessing, but discarding something he does not possess. HLS. Dreamy, So, your story: the grueling back-and-forth ... one day it's Chicago, the next Harvard; the hardest decision you've ever made; that feeling of immense responsibility to yourself; discovering and summoning the emotional maturity to pierce the specious veil that is prestige.
With the bearing of a battle weary soldier you tell what it is to do something rarely done -- circumnavigate the Earth, dunk a basketball on a regulation hoop, turn down Harvard Law School . You picked Chicago. You chose, you adorable little existentialist. You are not exposed, chiefly because this a shared lie, Community glue. (Postscript: Throughout the 1Lyear you and your housemate discover much commonality, He, too, prefers the Stones to the Beatles. You both smoke pot. neither is circumcised. You've each fucked 5 girls; gotten head from several others. Each of you applies to transfer. He gets into HLS. He turns down Harvard Law School. Of course no two people are exactly alike. Your desire to transfer wanes around the time Stanford and Yale's decisions on your transfer applications reach you by mail. You begin the CHIGAGO 1L TAKING QUESTIONS thread. One of your alter ego monikers asks simply: how do you like Chicago. You love it. You wouldn't go anywhere else and, you note, there were other places you could have gone. Same for your housemate. He transfers to Yale.)
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Date: April 20th, 2005 5:13 PM |