I was keeping my fiance company today in his classes, and started drafting my selection criteria for law school. In choosing a college, my mom and I finally resorted to using a priority grid (ala Six Sigma) with colleges as my collumns and characteristics (excellence in music, access to CS classes, liveability of location) as the rows. I may do this to determine which law schools I apply to because application fees for law schools are rather high. But for now, I am working to solidify what I want/need in a law school (I’m doing this while considering if law school is my best path–don’t worry, I haven’t decided for sure yet).
Top priority cluster, in no order:
Alums placed in the human rights field; Located in a place I want to live in; Has a solid clerk placement record; Has an active human rights clinic on campus; Has an excellent reputation in the human rights field.
Second tier cluster, in no order:
Small classes; Small community; International enrollment (you can see Doha is effecting me).
Third tier, in no order:
Has recreational singing groups; has arabic classes.
Inspirational Quote:
“This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.”–Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr,
What is a Six Sigma? priority grid? I never did this using this system.
Since the primarily result will be (hopefully) a thorough training, retraining, stretching etc, of your mind, isn’t that capability of the utmost importance? Often grad. students hate the place their college is located in (Mark called New Haven the “armpit of the world) but you would spend very little time in town. It’s a very intense, brief period of concentration on one subject: exhilarating, stimulating, frightening, and even fun!
Hey,
Six Sigma is Mom’s thing–you should ask her about it :-D. As I understand, it is a grouping of statistical methods for improving product development. In this case, it was a grid where I gave each college a certain number of points on criteria (1 pt if it wasn’t good, 3 if it was ok, 5 if it was great).
And I’m not so sure about New Haven–my friend who’s a 2L at Yale Law right now doesn’t seem to mind it all that much. I’m mostly concerned about the region the law school is in. If I want to practice in the Bay Area, going to University of Pittsburgh will not give me a good network there. And so on.