Anna Hicks-Jaco: Hello, and welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. Today’s episode is part two of a two-part series on reapplying, and this one is focused on the process of reapplying—the strategy of it, what you need to change from your previous application and what you don’t, how to address why you’re reapplying, and much more. Part one was on the decision whether or not to reapply, so if you’re still on the fence, still deciding, we recommend listening to that episode first.
I’m Anna, Spivey Consulting’s president, and I’ve been in the world of law school admissions for over twelve years now, primarily with Spivey Consulting, doing things like working with law school leadership to improve their admissions processes, working in career services, being in law school dean’s leadership councils, and serving as an interim assistant dean for admissions. Talking to law school applicants, advising prospective law students at this exciting and pivotal point in their careers, that’s my passion.
I am so fortunate to be joined today also by two of our awesome Spivey consultants, Sir Williams and Julia Truemper. Sir, Julia, would you like to introduce yourselves?
Julia Truemper: I’m Julia Truemper. I am one of the consultants at Spivey Consulting. I am just wrapping up my first cycle at Spivey. Before I joined, I was at Vanderbilt Law School, where I was an associate director of admissions, and before that, I was a practicing attorney for six years.
Sir Williams: And hi, everybody. I’m Sir Williams. I’m also a Spivey consultant. I’m wrapping up my sixth cycle with the firm. Prior to that, I served as Director of Admissions at University of Wisconsin Law School from 2012 to 2019, and before that, I was a prosecutor in Dane County, Wisconsin. So I’m really happy to be here as well. This is a really awesome way to sort of use our experiences just as attorneys and as administrators and as consultants, so really happy to be here with you and sharing the wisdom.
[2:09] Anna: Thank you both. I know you both bring perspective from being in law school admissions offices and reading reapplicants’ applications, and then also working with reapplicants and helping them to improve their prior year’s application—looking at that, assessing, “Okay, where can we improve this, and how can we change your applications this year to make them stronger?” So I think both sides of those are really helpful perspectives here.
Let’s jump right in. First, looking at that from the admissions office side, I’d like to talk through, how law schools look at reapplicants generally? Do they read the previous year’s application? Do they not read the previous year’s applications? Do they go in holding a previous denial against you? How does the process of reading a reapplication differ from the process of reading a brand-new application?
Julia: I can obviously speak to my experience at Vanderbilt. At Vanderbilt, we did not typically reread an applicant’s prior application, at least not as a matter of policy or a matter of course. That’s not to say you shouldn’t assume that a school is not going to reread your application. Certainly, if you were a reapplicant and we had questions that came up when we were reviewing your new application, we did have access to the prior application, so we might go back and look at something, but we did not automatically reread your application. We didn’t compare applications side by side, or that sort of thing.
Sir: Yeah, very similarly at Wisconsin, like, we weren’t required to review the former application as a rule or as part of our procedure. However, we did always reactivate the old application in the current term, so that way reviewers could easily, like with one click, get to the old application. And me, being a Curious George, I always went and looked at that other application, because I wanted to see what, if anything, changed.
And the former prosecutor in me was always really focused on the character and fitness section. I wanted to know if there were differences. And if the differences didn’t line up, I was the one that would ask more questions. Like, “Hey, so you disclosed this thing that happened before your previous application, but you didn’t talk about it in the first application. What’s going on?” And I never assumed that people had nefarious intent, but I was always curious, and I would follow up. So if you are the reapplicant—and we’re going to get into it more in a little bit—you really should be thoughtful about that sort of obvious symmetry. Like, your character and fitness responses, unless you’ve done something new, should probably be the same, or you should at least be prepared to explain the difference if you forgot to disclose something the first time around and then remembered it before the second time around.
Anna: That is a very good point. Any discrepancies there have the potential to be flagged. This is the type of situation where, if a law school admissions office sees that type of discrepancy, where it looks like you should have disclosed something last year and you didn’t, they are probably going to reach out to you. You’re probably going to be asked about this. So do explain it proactively.
As Sir and Julia sort of illustrated, this is something where different schools and different individuals vary. So they very well might read your previous application, and they very well may not. Some schools say, as a policy, do not read the previous application. Some schools say, as a policy, do at least glance over the previous application. Other schools leave it more open-ended.
[5:25] Okay. And then what about the question of whether admissions is going in with sort of a bias against an applicant already, if they had been denied a previous year? Are they then going in and saying, “Okay, well, this person was denied last year, so they’re probably going to be denied this year”? Or how does that factor in?
Julia: Yeah, so I would say that, as a general matter, no, it’s not going to be held against you. Where I think it comes into play is, there might be a slightly higher level of scrutiny of your application. So if you applied last year and you were denied, and then you reapplied this year, we’re probably going to be looking a little more closely at what has changed about your application. Why were you a denial last year, but this year you might be someone that we’re interested in? We might just be looking a little bit more closely, because there was obviously something about your application last year that didn’t work for us. So yeah, I would say it really is just a higher level of scrutiny.
Sir: Yeah, I’m a big analogies person, as you’ll probably come to learn over the next hour or so. But I agree with Julia, like we’re not going in with, like, a bias against you. At the same time, very curious about what’s changed. And so the analogy here is, I always tell clients who are in this sort of reapplication spot, I say, “Look, turning in the exact same application that you did last year with no changes is kinda like saying, ‘Hey, idiot, you got this wrong. I’m going to give you another shot at it.’ And that’s probably not the best approach.”
Obviously, it’s the same you. Your resume is probably not changing dramatically between cycles unless you change jobs. Your GPA probably isn’t changing dramatically. But you can talk about what you’ve been doing in the last year. You can tell me why you decided not to go. So there are little, small changes, or bigger changes that you can make that’ll help make the reapplication make sense.
I guess the only teeny, tiny caveat would be, if I had someone, and it seemed like the only problem with their previous application was the timing—like they were submitting applications in March—if you’re going to turn right back around and submit in September, October, I still want that personal statement to look a little different, but I’ll give you a lot of sort of grace in terms of the other things, because a few months in law school admissions time is really like a few minutes. So there just isn’t a lot of time for you to have meaningful changes from the end of the previous cycle to the beginning of the next cycle. But for most people, yeah, you need to be looking at, “How can I update this so that it’s—like it’s a remix, same song, a little bit of different flavor.”
[7:56] Anna: Yeah, that’s some good nuance, Sir. And that’s something where any law school admissions officer will recognize if they see, “Okay, this person applied in March this previous cycle, and now they’re applying in September, October,” that’s something where they understand that that is a substantive change that you are making.
Okay. So, before we launch into sort of the meat of the strategy and advice, what are some common mistakes and misconceptions that applicants have about reapplying?
Julia: Well, one Sir just mentioned—not making any changes to your application at all. I remember when I started at Vanderbilt, and my boss there, Todd Morton, said, “If someone comes to you and asks, ‘What can I do to improve my application as a reapplicant?’ the advice to give them is, ‘You’ve got to change something. If you don’t change anything and expect a different outcome, you’re going to be disappointed.’”
So I think, you know, not changing anything at all is the biggest misstep someone can make, and it’s something that I saw constantly. I—you know, as I said—didn’t always go back and look at an old application, but a lot of times I would remember people’s applications that I had seen before, and I would be reading an application and say, “I feel like I’ve done this before with this same application.” And you know, I recognized that not much had changed. So I think just putting in the time and putting in the effort to at least change a few things—you know, obviously, that will result in substantive improvements to your application, but I think it also shows the law school that you’re putting in the effort and you care enough to improve your application and hopefully get a different result from them this time.
Sir: Yeah, building off of that, as an admissions officer, we would have occasion to talk to people who had applied and who were unsuccessful in a current cycle. And different schools have different approaches to this. Some schools will not talk to you about your application. It’s just, “Hey, your feedback is you didn’t get in. Figure it out. Come back later.” Our approach was like, “Yeah, I’m not going to probably engage you about your application in the fall, but if you wait until late spring or summer when stuff is kind of chilling out a little bit, I’m happy to sort of meet with you and have a talk.” Often it was, “I didn’t specifically read your file, so I cannot tell you specifically why you didn’t get in, but let’s point to some things.”
And we can put all of your application components into two categories. There is stuff that is malleable between cycles, so stuff that you can easily change, and then there’s stuff that’s fixed. So let’s look at the things that are malleable between cycles and say, “All right, are there opportunities here for me to improve any of these things?”
And so the big malleable factors between cycles would be timing, would be LSAT score, and would be writing. Those three things are things that can be changed from cycle to cycle that can have a really big impact on your outcomes.
So I think another mistake that people often made in reapplying is, they would almost put too much weight on one thing. They would think, “Oh, it must have been my letters,” or, “Oh, it must have just been the timing,” or, “Oh, it must have been just my score.” Honestly, for most people, it’s some combination of these things. And so, you really should break your application down and say, “What can I possibly change?” And then, “Do I have the sort of bandwidth to change it?”
Connected to that is, some people would rush the reapplication. So they’re so anxious, they have to go to law school now, like, “My world is going to collapse if I’m not in law school next year.” And then again, they’re missing an opportunity to make some changes that would really meaningfully improve their candidacy. So you’re a senior when you’re applying to law school the first time, and you want to rush and apply right back, like, six months after you graduated. Okay. But one big opportunity you’ve missed is to get some, like, actual substantive work experience, have a year under your belt when you submit the application, so then you’ll be at about two years when you start law school. That can make a big difference for some people.
So the short answer is just not being thoughtful enough about, “What can I really meaningfully change from one cycle to a next?” and being intentional about focusing on those things.
[12:08] Anna: Yeah, I’m glad you said that, Sir. That’s something that we talked about in the last episode, about whether or not to reapply, was the possibility of—if what you think you can meaningfully change about your application is your work experience, maybe two years makes more sense to wait. And that’s a very personal decision that lots of things go into, but strategically, that can make a real impact versus what can be just a matter of a few months of difference, depending on your situation.
I would say another mistake goes sort of hand in hand with what we were just talking about, which is either assuming that the admissions office won’t read your prior application and then submitting discrepant information, or assuming that they will read the prior application and just assuming that they’ll have that context, therefore you can write your new application with that basis, which is not an assumption that you can make either.
Sir: So I think what I would add on to what you just said, Anna, is that there’s—some of our colleagues have brought it up in our broader conversations, but because of the changes to the sort of law around admissions, some schools have changed their applications in ways that make it more difficult or problematic for them to go back and look at the application, because those old applications will include redacted fields like race or gender or sexual orientation or other protected classes that schools are really trying to back away from now. So I think it is more fraught than ever to assume that they’re going to read your old application, because they might not, because they don’t want to be exposed to the sort of prohibited content. But it’s still a good practice to assume that they can read your application and might, so that way you can’t just like, “I overshared last time about my character and fitness, so now I’m going to walk that back three steps.” Now you’ve created an opportunity for them to flag your file.
I know it’s terrible because we’re telling you, like, things that conflict. They won’t read it; they will. But they’re both kind of true.
Julia: They are. That’s what I noticed when I was making notes for this podcast, and, you know, first I was thinking about, “Okay, assuming that they are going to read your application,” and I was like, “Don’t make that assumption.” And I was like, “Also, don’t assume they’re not going to.” It’s just basically don’t make assumptions, I think, is kind of the takeaway.
Sir: Right.
Julia: Another common mistake that I have seen both from an admissions office perspective and then as a consultant is underestimating the amount of time that you will need to prepare your new application. And I’ve seen this play out in a number of different ways. So I’ll kind of go through some of those pitfalls that I’ve seen, so that hopefully you can avoid them as you are reapplying.
Number one, I’ve seen people who have realized very late in the process that they are going to need more time than they thought they did to get their new application materials together. So they say, “I’m just going to wait, and I’m going to apply in November. I don’t need to change anything,” and then they get to November and realize they need to redo everything, and then all of a sudden it’s February.
You also see people who have kind of a set timeline in mind as far as when they want to submit their new application, so they say, “Last year I applied in March. This year, I want to get my application in in October,” and they have this self-imposed deadline. So October comes, they haven’t changed anything, and they say, “Okay, I guess I’m just going to submit everything I already have done, because getting my application in earlier is more important than making sure that my materials are as strong as possible.”
And then I also see people just assuming that because they’ve done this before, they can get through the process faster. You know, “I’ve already written a personal statement in the past. I know what goes into it. It’s going to be much faster this time.” And I think that it’s important to go into your reapplication process assuming you’re going to need as much time as you needed the first time around. Worst case, you budget too much time for yourself and, you know, you have some extra time to look everything over. But I do think that people tend to underestimate that you really are going to need time to go back through everything with a fine-tooth comb, redo some things, and hopefully get your application in in a timely manner
Anna: Thank you for that, Julia. I do think that’s a big one.
[16:06] Okay, here’s a question that I’m going to ask with very little nuance, and then you both can inject the nuance into it. When you are reapplying, what should you update, and what can you keep the same?
Sir: You can definitely update your resume, but different people end current entries differently. So some will say “to present,” and some will say “to specific month/year.” So if you’re a month/year person, you need to make sure that you change that, because it’ll make it look like you stopped the job that you didn’t, and now there’s a gap.
You can definitely update that personal statement. To me, that is the lowest-hanging fruit. If nothing else in your application changes, the personal statement can.
Perspectives/experiences statements, those are trickier, but they can change from cycle to cycle. Often, I find people have maybe had different ideas about things they could write about. So sometimes if you’re in a reapplication mode, it may help to go back to your previous notes and see, were there ideas that you could have written about but you, for whatever reason, decided that “this one’s a little bit better”? Those can be really good alternatives that’ll let you, again, freshen up your materials without having to completely rebuild the application from scratch.
Those are the big ones that come to mind for me.
Julia: Yeah, the only other one I would add that came to mind was addenda. Perhaps the first time you applied, maybe you didn’t include an addendum that you should have that would be helpful to your application. So maybe you could have included, let’s say, a GPA addendum to explain some low grades or something like that, and so this time you decide, “I want to add that additional context to my application.”
You know, we talked earlier a little bit about character and fitness. Obviously, you want to be careful there as far as what you change, but maybe there’s a way to explain your character and fitness issue in a more clear way or a way that law schools are going to be more receptive to.
Sir: I think that’s a really good one, too, that character and fitness one.
And it kind of goes back to the previous topic. One mistake I think people can make is that they’re reviewing their application—look, you don’t know what you don’t know. If you’re in a situation where you did not like your results from a previous cycle and you’re going to reapply, I think it’s really important that you try to figure out some way of getting some objective information about what could be improved from the previous application, and you aren’t necessarily going to be the best judge of that.
The gold standard would be talking to the school that you wanted to get into and didn’t, and if they’ll talk to you and give you some feedback, well then fantastic. But again, a lot of schools, especially like the more popular schools, don’t have the bandwidth for that.
A nice sort of alternative would be, maybe if you’ve got access to an experienced pre-law advisor on your campus, they could give you some insight. Or maybe, you know, you can reach out to us. Like, we have people who were all in admissions who could review an application and give you a sort of analysis of maybe why you got some of the decisions that you got.
But the most important thing is just, don’t go it on your own, because I think that’s a really easy way to miss some opportunities to improve your application. And don’t go to Reddit, because they’ll tell you all sorts of things that were, like, “wrong” with your application. “You didn’t apply by October 1st.” I promise that normally that’s not going to be the thing that kept you out.
[19:16] Anna: Yeah, all good advice. I think that assessing your application is so important, and I think there are people in very different situations for reapplying, in terms of how much you need to invest into reapplying. If you’re in a situation where you applied last cycle and your LSAT score was below median for all of your target schools, and then you retook the LSAT, and now you’re above median by several points for all of your target schools, do you need to revamp every single component of your application and make it way stronger? Probably not. I mean, maybe. Maybe your applications were just really weak also, in addition to your LSAT score, but that is probably not going to be the crux of what makes the difference for you.
If you’re going in especially with a similar numbers profile in relation to the medians of the schools that you’re applying to, that’s when I think you need to be extra, extra, extra careful about how you’re doing that assessment of your previous application and how you’re updating your materials, if that’s really what you are relying on to make the difference from the previous year.
Sir, the first one you called out was the personal statement. That’s the one where I think pretty much any admissions officer, if you talk to them about, “Hey, what should I change for my application from one year to the next?” they’ll almost always say, “Update your personal statement.” I say almost just in order to not say the absolute. I’ve never heard someone say, “Don’t update the personal statement.”
Other things, as you were talking about, maybe you have another angle of coming at your perspective statement, or maybe you really did talk about the most important element of your background that you wanted to communicate to law schools, and maybe there’s only a small adjustment that you need to make there in terms of how you talk about it or how you think about it, the takeaways that you have.
And then your resume, of course, you know, that’s just objective statements of what you’ve been doing. That’s probably going to look pretty similar. Certainly, if you submitted a really messy resume last cycle, you should clean it up. You should make sure that it’s as strong as it can be, as with all of this.
The one other application component that I will flag is letters of recommendation. So that is one area where you can also assess, “Are the letters that I submitted last cycle strategically the right letters that I should be submitting? Are they the strongest letters that I should be submitting?” And that is tricky, because most of the time you’re not able to read those letters, but you can look at things like, “Okay, did I maybe ask somebody who doesn’t know me all that well, but my strategy, my thinking was, okay, this person is really high up in my university, so that’s going to be impressive.” That’s something where, if you just go out and do research into admissions—and I think that to some extent, reapplication strategy is application strategy, and listen to a lot of our different podcast episodes and other people’s podcast episodes. A number of law school admissions offices have podcasts that are fantastic.
But really taking a good, hard look and making an honest assessment of those letters of recommendation and whether you can get stronger ones, I think, is also something to think about.
And then, even if you think your recommenders that you selected were the strongest choices, it may make sense, and it can be helpful to ask them to just update the letter. It could be, frankly, just updating the date and re-uploading it if you haven’t had a lot of interaction. But it’s great also if they can add a little something extra at the end, you know, about how you’ve stayed in touch or whatever it might be. But just getting those updated is another thing that you can do. Is that going to make all of the difference from your previous year? No. A lot of what we talk about is on the margins, and optimizing everything that you can so that the full picture of your application is as strong as it can be.
Julia: I just wanted to add one thing about letters of recommendation, which I learned this year, actually, in my first year at Spivey. And this may be true at other schools, but I know there are some schools, Notre Dame is one that comes to mind, that requires that letters of recommendation be from within one year. So if you’re applying to a school where that’s the case and your letter is from outside of that year window, you’re definitely going to want to either get new letters or, as you said, Anna, at least get the date updated. So, just something to flag so that you don’t discover that when you’re submitting your applications, and all of a sudden you’re scrambling to make sure that you have current letters of recommendation.
Anna: Very good point.
[23:07] Sir: One other thing I thought of while we were talking is, it’s maybe not super intuitive, but you might need to reevaluate your school list. Because your application strategy from the previous cycle included a list of schools, and if you’re not changing much numerically, you might want to include more “safety” schools where you are strong numerically, because that can also have a really big impact on your cycle.
I meet lots of people who are reapplying who, their approach to their first cycle was, “I have a very set list of schools that I’m interested in, and I want to shoot my shot and see what happens. And if it doesn’t work out for any of those schools, then the universe is giving me useful feedback, and I will take it and adjust my list.”
That list adjustment can be huge, because it can be the difference between going 0 for 14 and getting into half of the schools that you apply to or better. Even if you’re only adding one or two schools, it’s just nice to get a little more data about your marketability in the pool.
And sometimes, there’s a lot going on with the schools in terms of their numerical profiles, and so you could have been numerically strong last year at a school or right on the bubble, and now you’re -1 or -2 on the median, which puts you in a dramatically different position. So again, recalibrating that school list based on your current numbers and the school’s current numbers can be a really important thing to adjust between cycles.
Anna: Yeah, that’s a really, really good point. People can be in all sorts of different situations as far as their school list for the previous year. If you were in a situation where you were maybe just shooting your shot and just seeing, “Okay, can I get into these schools that were my dream schools, and if not, then I’ll reapply,” if most of your school list was schools where you are significantly under the LSAT median or maybe you’re under both medians, and especially if you’re applying right now—you know, we’re talking during the 2025-2026 cycle when applications are up versus the previous year—it’s at least theoretically possible that a bunch of schools will go up in their medians again next year or that some schools will.
So if you were applying below medians, I don’t think that it’s a wise idea to go into a second cycle and say, “Okay, I’m going to keep the same school list where I’m still below the medians, and I’m just going to improve, you know, my personal statement, and I’m going to make sure that my essays are stronger.” That’s a situation where I would definitely be reassessing that school list and making sure that you really do have a strong set of schools across the board if your goal is to go to law school over going to a specific type of law school.
We have a podcast episode about making your school list, so I think all of that still applies if you’re a reapplicant, and we can link that in the show notes.
Okay, so this is getting a little bit more specific, but it’s something that I’ve heard from lots of reapplicants. The prospect of, “rewrite your personal statement” or “update your personal statement” is super easy to say and sometimes really difficult to do. I think it’s particularly hard for people if you really do have one specific formative experience that pointed you toward law and wanting to pursue law school and becoming an attorney. If you are someone who is in that situation where, like, “I wrote about the thing that makes sense for me to write about in my law school personal statement,” what do you do? Everybody’s telling you you have to update your personal statement, you think you already wrote your strongest personal statement. What now?
Julia: Yeah. So I am not of the mindset that you have to completely rip everything apart. You know, if you did have that one experience that is why you want to go to law school, that’s okay, and the fact that that is the story that you told in your personal statement is probably not why you didn’t get in. It might be about how you told it, what the takeaways were from that story. So I think you can still start with the same baseline, and then retool how you’re telling the story, making it a little bit more compelling, a little more personal, that kind of thing.
I think that another thing you can do is, obviously, since you last applied, it’s at least been a few months, maybe longer. Incorporate more recent updates. So, if you’re talking about, the reason you want to go to law school is because you’re really passionate about this one area of law, tell me what you’ve done in the last year or the last six months or the last few years to continue to pursue that and solidify that reason for going to law school. I think that it is possible to keep kind of the framework of your personal statement intact, but just kind of change how you’re telling the story.
Your reason for wanting to go to law school probably won’t change from one year to the next. And that is something that, as an admissions officer, I often saw people would completely from one year to the next change their personal statement and what they were talking about in it as their reason for wanting to go to law school, which is fine if that is true. But that’s not what we’re saying. We’re not saying tear everything down and find a completely new narrative for wanting to go to law school. It’s really just about how you’re telling the story and telling it in a way that will capture a law school’s attention.
[27:55] Sir: Yeah, I really agree with what Julia’s saying. I’m not a big fan of reinventing the wheel. Now, sometimes it’s necessary, and again, that’s part of that whole benefit of getting someone that’s not you to, like, look at your materials and give you their thoughts and feedback. Because maybe something that you thought it was funny, and it’s just like, “This was not funny.” It’d be good to have that feedback so that you don’t land flat again.
But oftentimes, I find that you can keep the same framework, like Julia was saying, and just incorporate some new material. If it’s been even six months since you applied before, if it’s clear that you applied before, most people who reapply really could have gone to law school the previous year. Now, me as a reader, I don’t know what your sort of issue was at any other school in the previous cycle. I can intuit what your decision was at my school, but I know I never went to go look to see what your previous decision was. And we’re going to get into this later, too, about, “Am I disadvantaged if I got accepted to the school and I didn’t take it, and then I reapplied?” And that’s definitely something that you should be thoughtful about.
But I think that adding some new material—again, like, you’ve had more time. Have you learned anything? Have you picked up any new skills? Have you gained any more insight? Have you gained additional clarity on why law? Maybe you didn’t get new clarity, but maybe your experiences in the intervening months just sort of reconfirmed or doubled it down.
So at the end of the day, I like the low-hanging fruit analogy, but one of the easiest things to sort of go after in terms of changing a statement from one cycle to the next is to talk about the intervening time. Like, what happened over the months since you previously applied, and how have those happenings influenced your decision about reapplying, either to this place or in this cycle? Because that’s going to be different, and I think that that can be enough difference. That might make, like, a 20% difference in your personal statement. So it’s not even a big, huge change, but it’s enough to show that you cared enough to make some updates and not again just give me the same thing and expect me to magically make a different decision.
Anna: All really good advice. Thank you both. Yeah, you do not need to reinvent the wheel, and certainly, trying to do that can result in weirdly conflicting things if someone does read your previous application. Of course, your motivations can change, and that is something that people recognize. But in your first personal statement, if you talk about how you have this huge interest in corporate law and M&A, and then the next cycle you talk about how you’ve always had a big passion for public service, that is a conflict, right?
So there are ways to update that make sense. There are ways to update that don’t make sense. If your “why law” hasn’t changed, don’t make up a change for it; don’t make up a difference. But do make some sort of update. Find ways to add a new element.
So, Sir, you were just alluding to this. Let’s talk about it. How do law schools look at a reapplicant who was admitted to their school the former time they applied but chose not to attend?
[30:52] Sir: I was always curious, and sometimes they would sort of address it, but sometimes the applicant wouldn’t address it. But I think it’s almost like an elephant in the room. It’s like, you could have come here last year. You decided not to; that was a choice. And so one side of the coin is, if you were a strong enough applicant to get in last year, there’s a very good chance that we as an institution are still going to like you and want to admit you again, and we’re not going to be petty and say, “Well, you snubbed us last year, so now we’re going to, like, turn you down or waitlist you.” That’s antithetical to our goals of a school of building a great class.
Now, one piece of advice I have is, if you’re somebody who’s applied in a cycle and you’ve gotten a positive result, even if it’s not necessarily the one that you were going for, you should really think hard about whether you want to request a deferral. That’s an option, too, that a lot of applicants don’t think about. They don’t think that they can ask the school to hold their seat while they get another year of work experience or do something else that puts them in a better position to start law school on the right foot. But there are correct and incorrect ways of framing that request that will dramatically impact whether or not a school says yes. “Here, hold my beer while I go talk to this other person at the bar”? That’s not going to work.
But from my perspective, we weren’t super judgy about it, but definitely curious. And so, if you’ve got at least a partially non-jerky reason for not having accepted the previous year’s offer, then I think it makes sense to bring it up, just so that that question that’s going to pop up in that reviewer’s mind is addressed, and you’re not leaving it to them to just sort of imagine what it was. Because that imagination may not necessarily work in your favor.
Julia: Yeah, I totally agree. It’s funny that you mentioned the elephant in the room, because I literally had that in my notes. I say address it, because they will have questions, and they might draw, as you said, the wrong assumptions.
I think the best way to address it is to turn it into a positive, the fact that you turned them down the previous year for whatever reason. So when you’re talking about it, talk about what you’ve done in the past year that makes you as strong if not a stronger applicant than you were last year. So maybe it’s getting more work experience, maybe it is saving up more money for school, that sort of thing, but turn it into a positive instead of focusing on the negative reasons why you chose not to attend last year.
[33:17] Anna: Yeah. All good advice. This is kind of a nitty-gritty question, but where are you doing this addressing? Is this something you stick into your personal statement? Is this, like, in a Why X essay? Is this an addendum? What’s the ideal sort of method for injecting this information?
Julia: My recommendation would probably be an addendum. I think just get it out there in a succinct way. You don’t need to take up space in your personal statement for it. You don’t need to put it in your Why X. I think an addendum is perfect. And you can be brief about it, but just so that it’s not hanging out there, so that it’s clear to them that you know that you were admitted before, you know you turned them down. You know it may not be the best look. That would be my approach.
Sir: I agree. I think the addendum, for most people, is going to be the best place. I think if you’re someone that’s struggling to figure out “How do I update my materials?” and you need to update that personal statement, to the extent that you can tie in why you didn’t matriculate any law school last year, if you can connect it to why you’re applying again this year, then maybe it can sort naturally fit in the personal statement without seeming awkward. But you shouldn’t force it at all.
So if you can’t seamlessly insert in some other narrative, then just make it its own addendum, and like Julia said, make it short. I think that’s another mistake that a lot of applicants make. They make things a way bigger deal than they should be. So they’ll spend, like, two pages talking about a speeding ticket. And it’s just like, I’m already thinking it’s worse just when I see how long it is. Like, before I’ve even read it, I think “this is going to be terrible,” because you took two pages to tell me.
So similarly, brevity is a virtue, so if you can communicate your specific reasons for why you didn’t accept that offer the previous year—and Julia gave you a lot of good ones. Like, maybe you got into your dream school, but tuition’s $95,000 a year, and it’s just, you can’t imagine servicing $300,000 in debt. That’s not weird. And so, “Hey, I decided to get one more year of work experience and save some more money so that I can start law school without all of that hanging over my head.” So there are lots of good reasons, and it’s just about, like Julia said, how you frame it can make a big difference in how people receive it.
And I think that “I needed to take time to like work another year, get some more experience, save money,” that may not be the direct reason, but it’s often the indirect reason if you think about it properly. So I don’t want people to be dishonest, but I also don’t want you to shoot yourself in the foot. There are people, a lot of people who reapply because they just were not happy with their results, and what that unhappiness looked like is, “I didn’t get into the schools I wanted to get into,” or, “I did get into them, but I didn’t get enough money.” And you can’t really come with either of those as your official party line reason.
Julia: No, you definitely don’t want to come to a school and say, “You didn’t give me a big enough scholarship last year.” That’s a really easy way for them to say, “Well, we’re not going to give you more money this year, so we’ll just deny you.”
Sir: So, not making it specific to, “You didn’t give me enough money,” but “As I sort of considered my options, I was just really uncomfortable with my projected debt, so I decided, instead of starting school right away, take one more year, work really hard, save aggressively, so that way I could be in a position to help myself more.” And it’s the same thing. Like, you didn’t get enough money. But instead of framing it as a “you didn’t do this to me,” you’re framing it as, “I saw an opportunity to help myself more, and even though that meant pressing pause and deferring my dream, I think long term, I’ll be better served by this 50 grand I was able to save this year, versus starting law school right away and essentially paying, like, a really high premium just to start law school right away.
Some applicants feel like, “Oh, if I don’t apply right now, if I wait even one year or two years”—it’s like talking to newlyweds whose families have been pressuring them to, like, have kids—and it’s just like, “Wait, we kind of have a big window for this. It doesn’t have to be next year.” But sometimes it’s hard to have that perspective, and so then they’re working themselves up into a tizzy over something that’s like, “No, you can just not have kids this year. It’s okay.”
Anna: You have an even wider window for law school. We admitted people who were in their 60s when I was at Syracuse.
Sir: Totally. But certainly, they just feel like there’s this meaningful difference between starting law school at 21 and 23, and it’s just like—that is fake news.
Julia: Yeah, I know. I love the people who are like, “I’m 26. Is that too old to start law school? Am I going to be the old person in my class?” No.
Sir: “I’m a geriatric applicant.” How old are you? Oh, you’re 27? Oh, okay. Not exactly.
[37:49] Julia: So, a couple other reasons that I see a lot for why people have decided to maybe turn down an acceptance they had and reapply the next year, a really common one is family obligations. If you have a family member you need to go take care of and it’s just not feasible for you to start law school this year—and that’s a reason that law schools are going to be sympathetic to. They’re not going to fault you for needing to go take care of a sick family member or take care of your kids or whatever the situation is.
And another one kind of goes to something we already mentioned, which is getting more work experience, but maybe there’s a really cool job opportunity that has come up, a promotion, or something like that, that you just really can’t turn down or feel like you would be missing out on an opportunity you might not ever have again.
So those are just a few that come to mind. Obviously, there are any number of reasons that you may decide to turn down an acceptance and reapply the following year. And as we said, it’s all about how you frame it and just putting a positive spin on it so that law schools see that you got something positive out of the year you decided to turn down an acceptance and reapply again.
Anna: All really good advice. And I think your point, especially, about framing it positively is so important. Because, yeah, people listening to this might have all sorts of reasons that they decided to reapply instead of taking this admit. I think the framing is really, really important. So definitely avoiding anything that could be construed as disparaging to the school, could be seen as you feeling entitled to a better outcome or a better scholarship, or sort of calling into account their judgment or anything of that nature, I think keeping it, with that more positive focus, as you’re saying, Julia, is a really, really good idea and guideline, regardless of what your reasons are.
Some schools ask, if you’re reapplying, why you didn’t enroll the previous time you applied. This is somewhat similar to the last question in some situations, but I’m curious specifically about how you might frame your answer to this question if you’re being asked it specifically, whether that’s in an application or in an interview, how you would answer that if you’re in a situation where you didn’t receive any admits the previous cycle, you didn’t have any options.
[40:01] Sir: So I think, for the applicant that didn’t have any options, there are a couple different ways you could approach it. Like, you could try radical honesty. There’s actually nothing wrong with saying that you didn’t get accepted anywhere last year, if you’re able to talk about it in a way that basically, “I tried, I got some really specific feedback that, for whatever reason, it wasn’t my time, and so I was able to reflect, and I’ve made some adjustments. This is still my goal, and here are the things that I’ve done in the interim to sort of present myself as a better applicant.” It has the opportunity to demonstrate patience and maturity and thoughtfulness, and all of these sort of good, high-quality skills that you want to see in a law school applicant.
It also shows resilience—like, it’s really hard to not get accepted to any law schools and you really wanted to go. I was talking to an applicant this week who’s having that kind of cycle, and they’re, like, super bitter about it. And I feel for them. I know it that’s a really tough go.
But at the same time, I’ve also had a client who went 0 for 30 in their first cycle, and then we worked together, and we were able to work together to get some admits, and then they did well at their first school and then transferred to the dream school that they didn’t get into the first time around. So, like, it was really beautiful to see that arc. But remember that person, because the personal statement and the reapplication basically started off, “I got my 30th and final rejection, and then I gave myself ten minutes to cry about it, and then I had to go to work that day. So I did.” And obviously it’s not nice. No one wants to be in that position. But it just sort of framed it well, like, “Look, I’m a person who, I’ve done hard things. And I know that life is going to likely bring other hard things, and here is how I react to hard things. I pause, I reflect, I adjust, I keep going.” So all of that to say, like, I think you can tell people what was going on if you didn’t get any, but it’s not required. You don’t have to. And again, so you don’t have to feel the need to force it. But I don’t think that there’s any shame in trying and not getting.
Julia: Yeah, I think as long as you can say what you have done since your unsuccessful cycle to improve yourself as an applicant and improve your applications, then there’s no shame in having been unsuccessful the first time around. It happens, and as Sir said, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and say, “How can we turn this into a positive now?”
Anna: Yeah. Thank you both. What other tips do we have for reapplying that we haven’t had a we have chance to cover yet?
[42:38] Julia: As far as you are reapplying to a school that you applied to this year, continue to engage with them over the coming months as you prepare to reapply. Let them know that you really want to be there, and you wish your outcome had been different but you get it, and you’re going to try again next year.
As you start to think about reapplying and you are engaging with admissions offices, remember that they’re going to—probably, if it’s in writing—have a record of your communications with them. So keep it professional. I always think back to this anecdote from when I was at Vanderbilt. We had an applicant who was on the waitlist and was ultimately denied from the waitlist, and he sent the admissions office this very strongly worded email telling us that we had made the biggest mistake of our lives in denying him and that it showed really poor judgment on behalf of our admissions office. You know, it circulated around the office. We were all aware of it. Come September, the application reopened again, and he was one of the first applications we received. We all recognized his name, and we were not an office that jumped to say, “Let’s just automatically deny this person,” but it definitely came up. So if you applied this year and you’re thinking about applying next year, if you’re currently on waitlists or even if you’ve already been denied, be very mindful of all of your interactions with the admissions office. It’s not like the new cycle starts and there’s a completely clean slate. They’ll either have a record of ways that you’ve reached out to them, or they’ll remember your name. So I would just be very mindful of that in the coming months.
Because I know that, if you’re not getting the outcomes you wanted this year, it’s emotional, and your gut instinct may be to lash out in some way at the admissions office. But just keep in mind that next year you could get a different outcome, and how you present yourself to the admissions office can have an impact on that.
Sir: Yeah, I think mindfulness is a really great takeaway from this whole process of reapplying. It’s very easy to look at an admissions decision as personal. It’s very easy to take it personally. You put in the work, you applied, and then they said no. But it’s really—from a school’s perspective, it’s a business decision. It’s not really personal to you. There are a lot of factors that can go into you not getting an answer. In fact, I was listening to Dean Z’s podcast, another great one, and she was talking about how, in any given cycle, there are probably 800 more people that she wished she could have admitted, but because of the circumstances, she just was not able to, did not have the room in her class.
And so, if you can get out of that space of, “This is like a personal affront to me,” and “It was just the school sort of telling me not right now, not this cycle.” I’ve seen dozens and dozens of examples of people who reapplied who then did get in the next cycle, which tells me it’s not personal. I’ve also seen people who were unsuccessful in the reapplication, but like I mentioned earlier, then they go to another school, they do well, and then they’re able to get to the second school as a transfer. So there are always other avenues.
But again, it’s hard to see them as long as you’re sort of focused on the intense pain of, “I didn’t get the thing that I want, and this is the worst thing that could have happened to me.” Mike Spivey talks about it a lot, too, but a lot of people who are in those big feelings, it’s just really hard to see past them. So have the feelings, sit with them, but then be really intentional about, “Okay, what now? I’ve done it. I felt it. Now, what can I do to get to where I want to be? If this route is closed, are there other routes?” There almost always are. So just stay encouraged.
And like Julia was saying, stay in touch. Keep showing interest. Because I know I saw a couple of transfer students come through, and I was so happy that they persisted. I’m like, “I’m so glad that you took my advice and didn’t take this personally and just worked hard and came back.” And they were some of my favorite—we’re not allowed to have favorite students, but you totally do. We’re human. But some of my favorite students sometimes were people that had to go through a little bit of a different, more circuitous route to getting to the goal.
But at the end of the day, their degrees are printed on the same paper, and they get all of the sort of things that everybody else got. So don’t give up, but do be smart about how you approach it.
Anna: Sir, I think that is a wonderful place to end, a great piece of advice to finish this podcast on. So thank you very much again for joining us. Thank you, Julia, and certainly thank you to our listeners. As I mentioned earlier, to some extent, reapplicant strategy is just applicant strategy, so definitely take a look at some of our other episodes. We have deep dives on personal statements, resumes, experience and perspective essays, so check those out. And if you are reapplying, best of luck, stay positive, and hang in there. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
Julia: Bye.
Sir: Have fun, everybody!
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