Inside the Black Box

Happy almost-August! I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a new podcast, in collaboration with the Yale Law School admissions team. YLS admissions dean Miriam Ingber and I have teamed up to co-host Navigating Law School Admissions with Miriam & Kristi.

It’s December and here in the J.D. Admissions Office that means it’s Application Reading Season. Thanks to the rolling admissions timeline, we will be receiving your applications on a daily basis until the application closes, and our team is already hard at work carefully reviewing the files we’ve received thus far. We read files whenever […]

Admissions Assistant Alessandra Luedeking takes you behind the scenes of the interview assignment process. 

So you received an invitation to interview with a member of our Harvard Law School Admissions Committee! Read on to hear how that very Committee suggests you prepare for our meeting.

Considering whether to write an optional statement? If you complete your personal statement and still feel that you have more to share, an optional statement provides you with an opportunity to do so. Here is our advice to determine whether submitting an optional statement is the right choice for your application.

Letters of recommendation are an important part of your application. We’ve compiled some tips and advice on how best to approach these letters to help you better prepare for this part of the process.

We know that applying to law school is a big investment of your time and resources, and we do not want the HLS application fee to be a barrier for anyone. We encourage any prospective applicant for whom the application fee would be a hardship to  consider applying for a fee waiver via the process […]

Each interview is bespoke to the candidate – your interviewer will have read your entire application and will have prepared questions specific to you. That said, we each have a go-to question or two.

The personal statement is “an opportunity to give the Admissions Committee a better sense of who you are as a person and as a potential student and graduate of Harvard Law School.” But what does that mean to us?

This fall, we will discuss each major component of your application in a series of blog posts. Our next topic is transcripts. Like your test scores, your grades are a component of your application that we look at when we are trying to get a sense of your academic abilities. We know that you are […]

This fall, we will discuss each major component of your application in a series of blog posts.  First up: test score(s).

Speaking to prospective students this summer on the road, a number asked whether there is any advantage to submitting an application “early” in the cycle. The short answer: yes.  The lawyerly answer: it depends.

It’s summertime in Austin Hall, but we know many of you are thinking ahead to the 2018 – 2019 cycle. One question we’ve heard a lot this summer: How did the GRE pilot shake out in 2017 – 2018?

This post is part of a series that will help to demystify the black box of HLS Admissions. In this post, you will learn more about the application review process.