Deciding where to go to law school was not easy for me. After four years of being over a thousand miles away from my family I was ready to go home. I applied to all the great law schools in Chicago hoping that I would get to go home after graduation. Obviously, it didn’t work out that way. Money was a huge factor in my decision. Ironically enough, staying home and living with my mother still would have cost more than living in Cambridge or in California because the University of Chicago Law School doesn’t give need based financial aid. Even after I tried to leverage some of my other offers, they just didn’t cut it. So I was left to decide between the east and west coasts.
When I went to Stanford’s admit weekend, I fell in love with the school. I boarded the plane back to New Haven thinking that I would be headed back there in the fall. I didn’t get to attend Harvard’s admit weekend so I took the train up early in the morning for a visit. A current student gave me a tour, we had lunch and I sat in on her afternoon class. The trip wasn’t as jam packed as an admit weekend would be but I did get a chance to ask questions of a current student and that was really helpful for me.
I had a really hard time deciding between the two schools. My friends and family got tired of hearing me go over the pros and cons. I didn’t actually make a final decision until the afternoon of May 1st. and in the end it came down to location. I couldn’t really compare my visits to make a decision because they were completely different experiences. Visiting both schools did help me decide based on what the campus and surrounding areas were like.
One of my only complaints about my experience in college at Yale is that I felt like I was confined to the same ten-block radius in part because I didn’t have a car and mostly because there was nowhere to go that was worth while. It was clear to me that if I went to Stanford I would have the same experience all over again. The campus was beautiful but I couldn’t walk to a grocery store and everything was so spread out that most of the current students needed cars to get around. My host told me that every 1L without a car came back with one after 1L summer.
Getting around Cambridge is much easier. Everything that I need is within walking distance, which is really nice. I don’t have to plan trips to the grocery store in advance. If I need milk I can walk across the street and get it. The convenience of public transportation saves me a lot of stress and provides many opportunities to explore the greater Boston area. The fact that HLS’s campus is in the middle of a city also helps me feel like I have a life outside of school. I live 15 minutes from the law school. When I go home, I don’t necessarily see any classmates and I don’t have to think about the law if I don’t want to.
When I think about these things now, they don’t seem like the best way to decide on a law school but both schools had a lot of things that I wanted so my decision was bound to come down to personal preferences. I decided to go for comfort and convenience and it’s worked out well for me.
– Elizabeth
