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How to Spend the Time Waiting for Your December 2010 LSAT Score

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How to Spend the Time Waiting for Your December 2010 LSAT Score
By now, you’ve probably already made your decision whether or not to cancel the December 2010 LSAT. If you haven’t, the deadline is tomorrow, so if you can’t figure it out in the next 24 hours, old Mr. LSAC is going to figure it out for you.

But for those of you who have already made your decision, and have decided to keep your score, then it’s time to turn your attention to actually applying to law school. While we generally always recommend that people work on their applications between the LSAT and scores being released, this advice is especially important for December LSAT takers because you want to be able to apply as soon as you get your score back. Right now, LSAC has listed January 10th as the release date for LSAT scores. They almost never come that late, but even if the release date January 6th or 7th, that’s still a much later date than usual for the December LSAT. So, even more than other years, it’s imperative that you work on your applications in the next three weeks.

So what does that mean?

First, it means that your Christmas and New Years are really going to suck. Really bad. If you haven’t already cranked out the majority of your application, then you’re going to be doing a ton of work over the next 20 some odd days. And that means easy on the egg nog and New Years’ power hours.

The first big thing you have to take care of, immediately, is procuring letters of recommendation. At this point, you don’t really have time to write your personal statement first. You need to quickly get letter writers, and then impress upon them how time sensitive the situation is. Hopefully, you have good relationships with a couple of professors who won’t mind you nagging them a little. If you want to apply when scores are released, you’re going to need them to submit their letters right around Christmas, which doesn’t give you a ton of time. So that needs to be done yesterday.

The next big thing is to request and send in your transcripts. This is another thing that needs to happen today, because the turnaround time on this can literally take a month. First, your school admin office is probably populated by some extremely slow moving bureaucrats. Second, for some reason, it takes LSAC almost two weeks to process transcripts once they are submitted. Again, get on this immediately.

The last big thing: everything else to do with the application. This includes your personal statement, your explanation of the time you were the lead orchestrator of a cock-fighting ring, and any other secondary essays you have to write. These will take the bulk of your time between now and early January, but they are hugely important. While your LSAT score and GPA are the two most important factors in law school admissions, the next most important factor is your personal statement. So work long and hard kids, and get everything ready and submitted before January 10th so that the LSAT score is the last thing to throw on top of the pile.