When Should You Reach Out to an Admissions Offi...

In this short episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike discusses a question that tends to come up frequently this time of year—“Should I contact x law school's admissions office to ask for an update since I haven't heard back yet?”—then talks generally about when it can be advantageous to reach out to admissions, why, and how you should do it.

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Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. Today is going to be law school admissions. I had promised a podcast on U.S. News rankings—we're waiting for a bit more information on these lines. I think the rankings are going to come out late March just FYI. And I think that there's going to be waves of merit aid offers and admits after the rankings come out, because right now no one knows the weights of the metrics, so no one knows if the LSAT’s going to double or half in weight, if the GPA is going to double or half, selectivity probably won't move much. So next week we'll have the rankings one up.

I saw a post on Reddit this morning, “Should I call an admissions office and ask them about the status of my application?” So I thought this would be a good time to do a podcast, a quick podcast on how to reach out to admissions offices. There's multiple ways, but the only two ways to initially reach out that you should consider are phone calls or emails, right? So don't message them on LinkedIn or find their Twitter account, etc. Don't do that.

It is all the more appropriate—I mean it's their job—to call or email them. But I want to click on why you should call, why you should email. I've talked about this before. To the post I saw, “Should I call the admissions office and ask them for the status of my application?” there's a heuristic I use: Are you doing it to placate your nervousness, anxiety—understandable, waiting—or are you doing it to enhance your chance of admission? So calling and saying, “What's the status of my application?” is not enhancing your chance of admission. If they had a status, they would tell you. The second a decision is rendered whether it's waitlist, denial, admit, or if they're putting a group in a holding pattern, they're going to let you know. So calling and saying, “Hey, what's the status?” is not beneficial at all. Emailing saying “what's the status” is not beneficial at all.

On the flip side, let me just give you the best ones: emailing and saying, “I’m deeply interested in…”—we’ll say Princeton Law School. Until there's a Princeton Law School, and a Dean of Princeton Law School to get mad at me for using their school name, it's going to be Princeton Law School. So emailing Princeton Law School and saying, “Hey, I know it's a long cycle, and I completely understand, but is there anything I can do to enhance my application? I'd love to visit. I would love to speak to an admissions officer on the phone. I can update my resume.” There's the value-add. If you have new things to offer, a visit, a phone call. But again, not a phone call saying, “Hey, what's the status?” A phone call saying, “You're my top school. I would attend and matriculate if offered”—incredibly value added.

So, an email with a new resume, if you got a new job, saying, “Please find my updated resume, I have a new job,” a letter of continued interest. I'm a big fan of letters of continued interest about five, six days after school seat deposits are due if you're on the waitlist, because that's when they get a sense for how many people they're going to take off the waitlist. So, an email saying, “Attached is my letter of continued interest, please know that blah, blah, blah,” you can say your number one choice, if it is your number one choice. Or you can say, “You're my top choice,” which a student can have three or four top choices. So, that verbiage is not startling or alarming to me. The thing I would hesitate for you to say is “You're my number one choice” if it's not. Because what could happen is they admit you, and then all of a sudden you blow them off—this doesn't happen often, but it does happen—they say, “Well, you said, ‘you're my number one choice,’ and we admitted you, we didn't hear from you.” So, there is a process that goes through LSAC's committee of infractions where they could give your name to other law schools. And if it's found out that you're telling every law school [they’re your] number one choice, that might not go away. That's why I'm a fan of “top choice.” Obviously, you can have a dream school, you can have a number one school, and you should be telling that school you would matriculate if admitted.

So, reaching out to law schools, theme of this podcast—and I promise it's going to be short, mostly because I have to run somewhere, and I felt like I owed Reddit message boards something—I’m a big fan of reaching out, it shows interest. I'm a big fan of measuring your pace. So, please don't reach out every other week. Once every month and a half, and then you can increase the pace because the risk-reward factor changes over time. And also, late in the cycle when schools' medians are locked in. Remember it’s medians not means. This is greatly to your favor. When medians become locked in, if you just happen to email someone on the right day, and all of a sudden their medians are locked in, and they had three people drop off… this is why also I’m always a fan of a signature block; if you're going to email someone or, look, if a Dean of Admissions gave you their cellphone number at a forum or a fair and you text them—I get these texts all the time, “Hey Spivey, blah blah blah,” and then there's no who this is. So, if you're going to text them, say who it is. If you're going to email them, have a signature block with your phone number in the signature block. Why? This is going to amaze you, but this happens every year. They can just mash the button on their phone and call you and say, “Hey, we do need to make a few admits. We want to know, would you attend if we admitted you?” And if you say yes, you can get an admit on the spot, just because you’ve made their lives easier to call them. That kind of admit happens late cycle, not right now—it's a slow cycle.

Someone asked what my admissions friends are saying. What my admissions friends are saying right now is, and this is—I don't mean this to sound judgmental; it's just the view from the admissions offices—“We are getting bombarded with incredibly anxious people. And we get it, we're going slowly, but it’s doing them no good to be incredibly anxious.” So, a very calm professional email—even better by my estimation, a very calm professional phone call—to the admissions office, “Hey, this is Mike Spivey”—by the way don't say that, but—“Hey, this is Mike Spivey, I'm an applicant. And I just wanted, if anyone had time, I know you all are super busy, two to three minutes, just to let an admissions officer know you're my top school.” That kind of phone call differentiates because so few people do it. The kind of phone call where it's, “Hey, this is Mike Spivey and it's been four months. When am I going to get in the decision?” That also differentiates, but differentiates in a poor way.

So, let me end on the heuristic. If there's an update, if you're going to do something value-add, if you're going to do something upbeat and calm, if you're going to do something professional, fire out that email. But on the flip side, if you're really just reaching out to calm your own nerves, which are incredibly understandable. I'm nervous for people. It’s an incredibly slow cycle. But admits are coming, and they're going to let you know when you're admitted or waitlisted or denied. They're going to let you know. So, if you're doing it for those reasons, just to get an update, no, it's not a good idea to reach out. I hope this was helpful. This was Mike Spivey of the Spivey Consulting Group.

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r/LawSchoolAdmissions AMA: Waitlists, Predictions, Loan Caps, Scholarship Reconsideration, & More

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, we take questions from Reddit! Mike Spivey, Mike Burns, and Anna Hicks-Jaco discuss just how slow this cycle is (10:19) and how that might impact late-cycle applicants (6:47), why law schools place applicants on “holds” (1:23), decision timelines and how/why they vary (4:23), advice for scholarship reconsideration (11:20), whether schools rescind admits or scholarships if you ask for more money (13:31), how the new student loan caps might impact your request for scholarship reconsideration (14:00), whether you should email a school if you haven’t heard from them since you applied early in the cycle (23:44) and whether they might have forgotten about your application (24:44), predictions for next cycle (19:31) and waitlist season this cycle (15:00), the cannonball strategy of law school waitlists (25:50), how important softs are and whether “soft tiers” are admissions pseudoscience (27:48), essays about institutional injustice and how to avoid coming off overly negative in a way that could harm your chances (34:36), advice for becoming an admissions officer (37:40), and more.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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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They discuss a wide range of AI-related topics, including how significantly Dr. Farahany expects AI to change our lives (10:43, 23:09), how Dr. Farahany checks for AI-generated content in her classes and her thoughts on AI detector tools (1:26, 5:46), the reason that she bans her students from using AI to help generate papers (plus, the reasons she doesn’t ascribe to) (3:41), predictions for how AI will impact legal employment in both the short term and the long term (7:26), which law students are likely to be successful vs. unsuccessful in an AI future (12:24), whether our technology is spying on us (17:04), cognitive offloading and the idea of “cognitive extinction” (18:59), how AI and technology can take away our free will (24:45) and ways to take it back (27:58), how our cognitive liberties are at stake and what we can do to reclaim them both on an individual level (30:06) and a societal level (35:53), neural implants and sensors and our screenless future (39:27), how to use AI in a way that promotes rather than diminishes critical thinking (44:43), and how much, for what purposes, and with which tools Dr. Farahany uses generative AI herself (47:27).

Among Dr. Farahany’s numerous credentials and accomplishments, she is the author of the 2023 book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology; she has given two TED Talks and spoken at numerous high-profile conferences and forums; she served on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues from 2010 to 2017; she was President of the International Neuroethics Society from 2019 to 2021; and her scholarship includes work on artificial intelligence, cognitive biometric data privacy issues, and other topics in law and technology, ethics, and neuroscience. She is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, where she also earned a JD, MA, and PhD in philosophy after completing a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth and a master’s from Harvard, both in biology.

Dr. Farahany’s Substack—featuring her interactive online AI Law & Policy and Advanced Topics in AI Law & Policy courses—is available here. The app she recommends is BePresent. The Status Check episode Mike mentions, with Dr. Judson Brewer, is here.

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Dr. Winch is a prominent psychologist, speaker, and author whose TED Talks on emotional well-being have over 35 million combined views. He has a podcast with co-host Lori Gottlieb, Dear Therapists. Dr. Winch’s new book, Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life, is out today!

Our last episode with Dr. Winch, “Dr. Guy Winch on Handling Rejection (& Waiting) in Admissions,” is here.

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When Should You Reach Out to an Admissions Office, and How Should You Do It?

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When Should You Reach Out to an Admissions Office, and How Should You Do It?

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