Jennifer Mishory
Applying to law school, and I’d imagine any graduate school, is a grueling process. I’m sure my experience is no different from others, and I have spent months cramming to take a monster of a standardized test, finding recommendation letters, and researching schools.
Then came the hours spent trying to explain who I am in a two-page personal statement.
Most students heading to graduate school next year are in the midst of the process. As I sent off the last of my applications, I realized I probably could have looked for help in the one place I never thought to go: UCLA.
To find out more about what the university offers students considering graduate school, I talked to the UCLA Career Center’s associate director, Al Aubin.
“We have two types of counseling,” Aubin said. “If (students) have fast questions or are looking for assistance on applications, they come in for drop-in counseling.”
Aubin said about 300 students a quarter use the drop-in counseling. Given the number of seniors who are realizing that life after college is quickly becoming a reality, that number is low, but not surprising.
More in-depth, one-hour appointments are also available.
There is no pre-law counselor, only general counselors trained to give pre-law advising, Aubin said. Those counselors can help in a variety of ways, from providing information about professions to helping with personal statements.
In addition, the career center works with the pre-law fraternity and a variety of law schools to bring admissions events onto campus.
I was frustrated to find such services only after I had already gone through the process, and wondered whether others had faced similar frustrations due to lack of information.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized my assumptions were not necessarily unwarranted. In my three years at UCLA, I have seen little support from the school itself – student organizations and clubs aside – for students interested in law and politics as a career.
Donna Schuele, a professor of political science and lawyer in the Los Angeles area, said she has seen many students struggling as they apply to law schools.
UCLA offers inadequate pre-law advising, and more specifically does not give a clear picture of what being a lawyer entails, Schuele said.
“It would be very valuable to undergraduates to have a better sense to what lawyers did,” she said.
The number of political science professors with law degrees is very small, as is the amount of interdisciplinary work done between the law school and university, she said.
She said having a law degree gives her a different viewpoint while teaching.
“I come to the subjects that I teach differently because I also went to law school,” she said. Schuele has both a Juris Doctor and a Ph.D in political science. The UCLA political science department has eliminated the public law part of the curriculum, she said.
Perhaps the physical seclusion of the career center from the rest of campus mirrors the disconnect between what we learn in many of the majors in the northern half of campus and how we are expected to apply it.
The university must create a balance. It can be an academic institution for research with a strong liberal arts tradition, but also act as a springboard to launch students into careers where these theories and concepts can be applied.
E-mail Mishory at jmishory@media.ucla.edu.