How useful has my Ivy-League degree been to me? How cold is the sun? How shallow is the sea?
I'm a bit biased at this point.
Fact 1: Law schools are ranked according to certain criteria. Namely, the GPA and LSAT of their incoming students. Therefore, they care deeply about your GPA and not at all about where that GPA came from. I regularly hear about people who graduated from community college with a 4.0 made possible by 60 credits in interpretive dance and basket weaving. Those people blow me out of the water when in comes to applications because, for the purposes of law school apps, nobody cares where you went to school.
Fact 2: Once you actually land a job, nobody will ever care where you went to school again. Your prospects for advancement will be decided in equal parts by your work ethic, the caprice of your overlords, and good or bad luck that you have no influence over.
Fact 3: In an economic downturn, when you're looking for work, your Ivy degree is a scarlet letter. Nobody believes that you will really stay at an admin job once the economy picks up, because "you could do anything".
Fact 4: Most of the first 2 facts are bullshit in my particular scenario. I would never have gotten my first job if I didn't have that Ivy name on my resume. I put the school on, took my GPA off, and landed a kick-ass job largely on name recognition. In addition, law is probably the single-most prestige driven field in the world so the Ivy undergrad I have probably does give me some tangible advantage over a Borough of Manhattan Community College grad. So, while my degree didn't help me at the job, it put my foot in the door, and while it didn't help me get into law school, it'll help me get into a firm.
Friday, March 20, 2009
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hahaha...yea...i've put the college name and taken off my GPA as well...
ReplyDeletei support the practice...LOL
GPA's still on my resume ...tempted to remove.
ReplyDeletePoint 3 is soooo true! I got turned down from so many jobs and even had someone say to me "we don't think we can pay you what you would be asking for" before I even told them that I would basically work for free because I was desperate. I didnt say that after the fact because they then offered me $17,000.00/year which I almost died of a heart attack. How can you offer that with a straight face? Managers at McDonald's make more! Consequently... I had almost made that much in the first 6 or 7 months at my job. I wasnt THAT desperate lol.