LSAT/Application Disapointment

[owl12]

With the January LSAT results coming out, I've seen an uptick in posts about people's individual disappointment with their LSAT results. Often, these lower LSAT scores either disqualify or hurt you from gaining acceptance into some of the schools you were targeting. Been there, felt that way. However, try to think constructively about you paths forward from this point. 

In my mind, there's two paths you can take. Either are perfectly acceptable: 

1. Accept an offer to a law school that may not have been your first choice - Not all career paths require you to go to Toronto/Oz/McGill/UBC. In fact, very few do. Take some time to reflect on why you want to attend law school. Do you really need to attend the top ranked schools? How much of a benefit will attending your top choice versus a backup really provide? You can be a GREAT lawyer despite not graduating from the above mentioned schools. In the school comparison portion of this forum, there are many valid arguments being made about why it wouldn't actually hurt to attend a lower ranked school. At the end of the day, Canadian law schools are much closer in terms of their quality of education compared to our American counterparts. 

2. Take a year and reapply - If not getting into your target school is going to hurt your career aspirations (academia, big law, international human rights, whatever), then maybe its not a bad idea to reapply. Improving your LSAT is usually the easiest way to improve your application; if you have a subpar score, take a year to study off, study, get a better score, and reapply next cycle.  The LSAT is an incredibly learnable exam; if you put in the work and devote 4-6 months to the LSAT, you 'll see some pretty sweet results. Future you will thank you. I personally took 3 summers to study for the LSATs before getting a score I was happy with, and had to re-apply this cycle after not getting the results I wanted last cycle. Present day me truly appreciates past me's patience, as I got into my top choice this cycle (I'm not advising you to take 3 summers to study. Please do well in only 1 summer to avoid my suffering). If your response is something along the lines of "Ya but the LSAT sucks and I don't want to do it again," then have fun being a lawyer and a law school student. You'll be doing a lot of crappy tasks/assignments during and after law school. 

With all that being said, I hope the rest of the cycle goes well for those who have already applied and are currently waiting on results. Good luck to all those future applicants out there and congrats to all those who have already fulfilled their dream of getting into law school.