Mid-Cycle Pep Talk & 2024-2025 Update from Mike...

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike gives a brief update and pep talk for current law school applicants during the 2024-2025 admissions cycle.

Mike mentions our podcast with world-renowned psychologist Dr. Guy Winch in this episode—you can listen to the full interview here: Dr. Guy Winch on Handling Rejection (& Waiting) in the Admissions and Job Search Process

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. A full transcript of this episode is below.

Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, and a little bit of everything. I want to talk about the remaining portion of this 2024-2025 cycle from a practical and strategic—but also almost a psychological—standpoint.

So, first, it's going to be tough. We'll likely end up a little bit below 20%, but there is going to be a substantial increase. I thought early on it would be around 12%. It'll be higher than that. It'll be 15 to 19 percent up. The grade point inflation is real, of course, and the LSAT inflation, for whatever reason, is real. There's a bigger increase at 165 and above, percentage-wise, than any other bandwidth.

So, you applied in a tough cycle. What does that mean? To begin with, it means nothing about you—of course. You're still the same person you were before the cycle, nor could you have predicted—nor did experts predict this would be as tough a cycle as it is. Certainly, we and others predicted this would be a tough cycle, but we didn't realize it would be right now up at 23.9%. No one thought it would have spiked as high as a 35% increase in applications.

Here's what it also doesn't mean. It also doesn't mean waves aren't coming. There are many, many, many admits that have to be made, because you only are seeing things from your perspective. You've never been a dean of admission. They have stresses, too. They have to fill classes. They've been admitting at a slow pace, too. So they have to make admits, and for a number of people listening, that means you're going to get admitted to a number of schools. For some people listening, that means you're going to get admitted to your dream school—maybe not on your timeline, maybe off the waitlist, maybe tomorrow.

And then for some people listening, this is my suggestion. It is not too late to apply to a few more schools. I want to give you all a compliment. Over the years, and particularly this year, I've noticed, and other people have noticed, that people are less rankings-focused. Someone corrected me the other day, I think rightfully so, on Reddit, and I, for the sake of ease, mentioned something about T14, and they were like, "That's outdated nomenclature." I would agree. I would say any ordinal number—"I got into the seventh-ranked school, and that's two better than the ninth-ranked school"—is ridiculously ill-worded nomenclature, because 7 to you may be 50 to me. So I would encourage you—it's free. I don't make any money off this; it's free—to go to our myrankbyspivey.com and maybe broaden your list of schools and apply to a few more.

It is not too late. Schools will still be doing a lot of admitting. And just so you know the timelines of these things, schools are going to be admitting people until literally August and the beginning of September.

I had a client of mine years ago, dream school was Stanford. They had matriculated to Michigan. Got the phone call from Stanford that they were admitted. They were in orientation at Michigan. And I said, you know, "What do you want? What do you want with your life and career?" and they said, "I want to see myself practicing in California, in this area," and I was like, "Then get in the car and drive. You will never remember those two days of driving. You will always remember your ultimate career goal."

So don't be afraid of late admits, because they're coming. Don't be afraid of having to make a couple of difficult decisions late. You get into two schools late, and you have to make a difficult decision. That's just going to be a tiny speck in your sort of lifelong story.

But I also want to end on this note. Don't be afraid of being wrong. And what I mean by that is, being wrong about a school. I applied to Princeton coming out of high school and didn't get in. I ended up going to Vanderbilt. I could never see myself having gone anywhere but Vanderbilt. People in my life who I love off the planet—I'm in Nashville right now. People who I love off the planet, some of my closest friends in the world, I never would have met had I gotten into my dream school. I never would have had the job I have and the career I have had I gotten into my dream school. I was a horrible Vanderbilt student. Maybe not so much my later years, but the first couple of years I cared about sports and friends and my girlfriend. So my grades suffered. I did not get into my top choice business school or my second choice business school. I got into my last choice business school.

If you want a better story, listen to Dr. Guy Winch. We'll link it. He's given three TED Talks with over 30 million views. He didn't get into a single PhD program in psychology when he applied. Not one. He applied to a safety school he had never heard of and didn't get in. So he went back and applied the next cycle and got in and proved to the world.

If you're going to bet on anyone, don't bet on a school that you don't know. Don't bet on someone saying, "Oh, you need to go to this school because it's ranked 13, and we think that means it's better than 15." Bet on your instincts, and bet on yourself. If you're listening to this, the odds are incredibly high you will get admitted to a school, or schools, or many schools. It might not be what you think is #1, but you're going to have admissions. You're probably going to have some denials, too. Don't use the word rejection. You're not being rejected. They don't know you. And this is my point: you know you.

If you feel like, at the end of the cycle, you have a couple of options, and you feel good about going to law school, I wouldn't play the game of waiting another cycle. I would go. And if you don't like the school you go to and you perform well, you can always transfer. Odds are, you won't even end up wanting to. I mean, I had so many students when I was at Vanderbilt and WashU who came in thinking they were going to "transfer up," who absolutely fell in love with the school they were at,—again, not their initial dream school.

So in a tough cycle, many waves of admits are coming. You'll miss some of those waves, highly likely; you'll be in some of those waves, highly likely, although maybe not when you want to. But you're also going to have a choice, and your choices are going to be more than you realize. "Do I pick a school from these schools? Do I think about applying next cycle? Do I think about going to a school and killing it there and betting on myself and transferring up?" So many schools have actually really good job prospects, more than I think you realize, if you start drilling into the job side data. "Or do I go to a school and kill it for three years, and bet on myself in the market? Someone who's going to polish my skills at law school, network and impress interviewers, and have a stellar career." That was me. I went to a middling business school I never thought I would go to, but I always knew I would have a business career.

And I think if you're listening to this—doing research, listening to podcasts, proactively seeking out expert advice—deep down, you probably know, despite what a school says to you in a tough cycle, odds are you're going to have a killer legal career, or you're going to do something with your law degree that's going to position you to be successful in your life. And let me end with saying: I do not define success as how much do you make or what firm do you work for. I define success as, how passionate are you about something? There's no competitive cycle that can make you less passionate about being a lawyer, an advocate for other people, a litigator, someone who kills it in business law and mergers and acquisitions. Nothing about this cycle can change that.

You will get an admit. Admits are coming. If you covered all your bases and made, or continue to make, smart school lists with a healthy range of options, you're going to get an admit. You will get options. We've gone over the options. At the end of the day, the word that matters in this whole thing is nothing other than you.

Marcus Aurelius said, one of the human superpowers is—you're allowed to not have opinions about things. So I would invite you to not have an opinion about the competitiveness of the cycle. It is competitive, but I would have an opinion that, no matter how competitive, your long-term outlook is what you make it.

I hope this was helpful. This was Mike Spivey at the Spivey Consulting Group.

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You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.

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Mid-Cycle Pep Talk & 2024-2025 Update from Mike Spivey

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