Getting the Most from Your Undergraduate Legal Education

Do-it-yourself majors can be very valuable. You should be able to make good grades because you are working largely in what you are strong at and interested in. Simply by creating the major, you signal that you have unique personal intellectual interests. And if the pro-gram is a rigorous one, you will probably have to do an unusual amount of writing, which is impressive in itself (for reasons I will discuss later).

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These are the best strategies in that they maximize the likelihood that you will be able to accomplish your main academic goal, which is to get good grades in a program that the law schools will perceive to be good preparation for legal study. But students with unusual majors regularly go to law school also. Bradley University has an engineering school, and each year at least one engineering student comes into my office and says, "Professor Lermack, you're going to think I'm crazy, but I want to go to law school." Though I've never been trained in psychiatry, I feel confident in diagnosing these students as sane. The Columbia Law School study I quoted above found that about 5 percent of its students had backgrounds in engineering or pure sciences. My engineering majors go to law school if their grades are good enough.

If you're a nontraditional and your college major was unrelated to law, you shouldn't conclude that law school is closed to you. Through the years I've counseled a chemistry professor, a laid-off librarian, several fine arts majors (one of them a painter), and numerous others whose backgrounds were best described as unconventional. All went to law school.

If you're starting from scratch, the best rule to follow is that you should choose an unusual major only if you have some specific career-oriented goal for which that major is appropriate. Some of my engineers, for example, go on to specialize in patent law. Their engineering background is useful. One, who was trained in highway construction, now writes and reviews contracts for a major highway construction company. Similarly, if you want to imitate the present administrator of the Food and Drug Administration, David Kessler, who is both a lawyer and a physician, then you are best advised to begin your college career in a challenging premed program. Majors in foreign languages or sophisticated technological subjects are appropriate for students contemplating careers for which these subjects are useful.

If this is so, does choice of major matter? Is there such a thing as a bad major? You can't avoid taking some easy courses, but law schools recommend that you avoid majoring in fields that are perceived as too easy. Michigan Law School says that "... students who have devoted their undergraduate careers to the avoidance of challenges, or who have sought rewards for rote learning, are poorly prepared for law school..." Since law school admissions decisions are known to rely heavily on grades, the integrity of the process is threatened by students who systematically take only easy courses. Law schools are extremely sensitive to this danger and are quick to reject applicants whose GPAs appear padded in this way. Ask around. If everyone on your campus seems to know that all the lazy boneheads are majoring in, say, elliptics, then you should assume that the law schools also know it.

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Also, you should think carefully before choosing a major that is heavily specialized in career-oriented subjects far removed from legal relevance. You will need to find room in your college program for the BGEs. If you major in one of them, you're making your scheduling that much easier. But if you major in some highly specialized field, your four years of college will be so taken up with career-oriented courses that you won't have room for all the BGE electives you'll need for law school. In my experience, most fine and performing arts programs fall into this category, as do physical education programs. Music majors, for example, typically emphasize vocal or instrumental performance. Students have to spend long hours practicing and rehearsing; musical skills must come first, and there's a temptation to let academic subjects slide. These programs are intense and demanding, and certainly can't be described as easy. But they are designed to introduce you to a specialized profession and shouldn't be faulted because they leave time for nothing else.

Some of these programs have a second disadvantage: they grade on a pass/fail basis. You should avoid taking too many pass/fail courses. Because law schools don't know how to evaluate these courses, they tend to ignore them. They must then place more emphasis on your other grades and on your LSAT scores.

Though it's unlikely, you may still come across something called a prelaw major that involves studying a lot of business and real estate law. Years ago, many colleges had such courses of study. Most, if not all, have discontinued them because law schools now frown on an immersion in law on the undergraduate level. Undergraduate law courses can't be taught with the same rigor and sophistication as law school courses precisely because undergraduates do not yet have the background in the BGEs that they need to understand law on that level. You can take a few undergraduate law courses for familiarization, to see if you like the subject. But avoid any course of study that is built around them.

Finally, you should avoid choosing a subject just because it is hard. True, law schools want applicants to show intellectual ability, and they are impressed when an applicant has done well in, say, nuclear physics. But you shouldn't spend four years on a subject that you have no interest in and that has little direct application to your law school work. The rule that applies to engineering majors should apply here: unless you anticipate a career need for an unconventional major or have an unusual personal interest in the subject, you should avoid it. Whatever you decide to major in, be sure that your academic adviser knows that you intend to go to law school. Work the information into your first conversation with him or her and ask your adviser to write it down in your file. Each semester when you review your study program, make a point of reminding your adviser that one of your goals is to go to law school. It is your adviser's responsibility to make sure that you are making progress toward your goals.

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