Member-only story
An account of my 8-month-long journey
I still don’t know what got into me, but I decided I wanted to pursue law as a career on a random weekday in March of 2022. I was on track to become a teacher through my university program and throwing that away to pursue something completely unrelated was daunting and risky. Becoming a teacher was something I thought I wanted and something my parents pushed for me, seeing that I wasn’t particularly ambitious in any other field. Teachers do an incredible and crucial job fostering the next generation, but I knew I wasn’t cut out for it. A part of me has always known that I wanted to pursue law but I spent years undercutting myself and dismissing what I was capable of. As my senior year of university was drawing closer to its end, I made the decision to pursue law as a career.
One of the biggest obstacles I had to immediately come to terms with when I began preparing to apply was that my GPA was not good at all. I had many excuses: my part-time job, ADHD, and the long commute to school; but at the end of the day, I knew that I could have done better had I put in more work. Fortunately, my mantra is to always look past things I cannot change and focus on things I am capable of shaping. I knew law schools considered applicants’ LSAT scores in conjunction with their undergraduate GPAs. So I decided to direct my focus on getting the best LSAT I could possibly get.
LSAT is a test administered by the Law School Admissions Council and the score generated can be used by law schools to determine applicants' aptitude. The scoring ranges from 120 to 180, and only 1 percent of test takers score 174 and above. I knew that to compensate for my low GPA, I needed to be in or close to the top 1%.
The LSAT has three main components: analytical reasoning, logical reasoning, and reading comprehension. Every LSAT taker is tested on each of the three sections and one unscored section which could be any one of the three sections. Each section takes 35 minutes to complete and is usually comprised of 22–23 questions for analytical reasoning, 24–26 questions for logical reasoning, and 26–28 questions for reading comprehension.
Analytical reasoning tests one’s ability to analyze a given hypothetical situation and come up with a…
