Imposter Syndrome and How to Combat It: The Law School Application Process

I’m excited to introduce my FIRST guest post of the blog. I love to discuss the many faces of law school imposter syndrome and today we are diving into its presence in the application process! Kassidy did a great job articulating what many of us feel/felt in applying to law school, especially folks who are first-generation and may not have access to the resources others do.

Feel free to message me on my blog instagram if you want to write a guest post for EarthToJul yourself!

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Kassidy Tirelli is a graduate of Rowan University and will start school at the Rutgers University School of Law in August. She hopes to practice family law after graduating from law school and is incredibly excited that Rutgers has a Child and Family Advocacy Clinic and a family law certificate program.

If there’s one thing I wish I could go back and tell myself a year ago, it’s that every person’s journey to law school is different.  During middle and high school, I had dreams of being a lawyer, but once I began college, I fell in love with my school’s writing department and declared a Writing Arts major. Throughout college, I operated with the expectation that I would apply to Creative Writing MFA programs after graduation, publish my first novel, and eventually become a tenured Writing professor.

However, during my junior year of college I began to contemplate going to law school again. As much as I loved the world of creative writing, I was becoming more and more convinced it wasn’t for me. For one thing, I was almost positive I didn’t want to teach, and that was the only real, tangible career path I anticipated having with an MFA. I also knew deep down that I while I did have a passion for writing, a large part of the reason I had pursued it in college was because I didn’t think I would make a good lawyer. Being a first-generation college student, I didn’t know any lawyers and thought that to be a well-respected lawyer a person needed to be brash, cutthroat, and fearless—three things which I am not.

All things considered; I had some big decisions to make during the spring of 2020. I knew that loving writing wasn’t enough for me to make a career out of it and came to the understanding that while it would always be my passion, I needed to pursue a career that I felt would both challenge and fulfill me. With that realization, I ordered an LSAT prep book from Barnes and Noble, spent the next three months studying, and took the LSAT-Flex in July. That’s when the real fun began.

I am a planner through and through, so the fact I felt I hadn’t spent adequate time researching and learning about the application process scared me. I felt like a huge imposter as I chose schools, wrote my personal statement, and sent out my applications. On top of that, as a first-generation student I didn’t have anyone in my family who had gone to law school before, so I felt like I was constantly figuring things out as I went. I also discovered the double-edged sword that is the subreddit r/lawschooladmissions during this time. While I did learn a ton of useful information about the application process from (obsessively) browsing the site, at times it made me feel incredibly inadequate. I felt like I didn’t measure up to other applicants because I hadn’t scored a 170+ on the LSAT and didn’t have years of legal internships under my belt.

From the time I submitted my applications at the beginning of October to when I heard back from my first school the day before Thanksgiving, I was in a state of panic. Despite the fact that my LSAT and GPA matched up with the medians of the schools I had applied to and I had written what I thought was a compelling personal statement, I felt like there must be something that I was missing. I harbored this insane fear that I was unaware of some piece of key information that I needed to be successful in the application process. I think that feeling partially stemmed from the fact that in six months I’d gone from deciding to apply to law school to submitting my applications, but the other half of it was that I desperately felt like I needed someone who had gone through this process before to look up to.

Thankfully, I discovered so many amazing first-generation Instagram bloggers while I was waiting to hear back from the schools I applied to. The more I interacted with these accounts, I started to understand that almost everyone who was in the midst of the application process felt the same way that I did. Unfortunately, so many applicants, and those who are first-generation students in particular, experience anxiety and nervousness as they wait to receive decisions. While there’s no way to get around the fact that it usually takes about two months to hear back from a law school, there are ways to mitigate your stress during that period of waiting. First and foremost, it’s important to find a community. If you weren’t on a pre-law track in college or don’t know any lawyers, it’s very easy to feel like you’re embarking on this journey alone. My advice would be to seek out others who are or were in the same situation as you, whether it be through Instagram, a friend of a friend of a friend, or networking.

It’s also incredibly important to recognize that your acceptances or rejections do not define your worth. No one who truly wants what’s best for you is going to think less of you if you don’t get into your top school, and you shouldn’t think any less of yourself either. Unless you have specific career goals that require you to be T-14 or bust, don’t force yourself to chase prestige at the expense of your emotional wellbeing. I spent the first half of my application cycle hoping to get into a school because of its reputation and the name recognition it offered. However, as I did more research and interacted with the faculty and admissions office, I began to realize the school was not a good fit for me. It seemed like they wanted a very specific type of student and I did not fit their mold. At first, this made me feel like something was wrong with me, but I came to understand that every school will not be the right fit for every person.

The school I ended up choosing was much more in line with who I am and what I value as a person. I ended up picking a state school that places emphasis on public interest work, community involvement, and diversity within the student body. Selecting a school that wanted me for the student and person I am did wonders to combat my feelings of imposter syndrome. I ended up getting a better scholarship than I would have predicted based off of my LSAT score alone, which led me to believe that the admissions office truly evaluated my application holistically and felt that my experiences and passions would be an asset to their law school’s community. This made my choice incredibly easy, since I knew the values and goals the school emphasized aligned with my own.

Last but not least, although this process is long and daunting, try to remind yourself that you deserve a spot at the table just as much as the next person. If you’ve made it this far, chances are you’ve worked incredibly hard and deserve to be here. You earned a GPA high enough to get you to this point, you performed well enough on the LSAT to apply, you stood out enough in your professors’ classes that they were willing to write you letters of recommendation, and you have enough passion and determination to tackle this process. Keep your chin up: this period of waiting will end, you’ll find a school you love, and you will become the amazing lawyer you’ve always dreamt of becoming. Everyone’s journey to law school looks different, and in my opinion, that is a good thing because it means that every person will have a slightly different skill set and background, which will allow them to better serve the unique needs of their future clients.