If you have been dreaming about becoming a lawyer since a young age, you likely will want to do everything you can to maximize your chances of gaining acceptance to law school.
When entering college, selecting your major is an important consideration. After all, your college major can have a significant impact on what you can do after graduation. For example, if you want to be an engineer, you should major in engineering. Following the same logic, you need to choose a law-related major in order to attend law school, right? Well, no. You do not need to major in a specific subject to go to law school. Does that mean your major does not matter? Absolutely not! However, you should still choose your major carefully.
In this blog post, we at Stratus explain how to best choose your major to set you on the path to law school.
The Impact of Majors on GPA
Your major primarily matters because it can impact your GPA. When applying to law school, your GPA and LSAT score are the two most important factors. Although you can take the LSAT up to seven times in your lifetime (with certain limits for different time frames), each grade contributing to your GPA is permanent, so you want to start strong.
How Your Interests and Abilities Affect Your Success in a Major
You might be thinking, “If my GPA is so important, then I guess I should choose the easiest major!” However, that is not the best move for a few reasons. College is four years long and requires a lot of effort. If your major bores you, even if it is easy, you might not be motivated to put in the effort required to do well. Additionally, some people adapt better to different majors, as each area of study employs varying skills and types of professors. Also, you might later decide not to attend law school. So, if you chose a major solely for the purpose of going to law school, you would have nothing to fall back on.
That being said, while your interest in a major should not be your sole determinant, your ability to succeed in the major does matter. There are likely multiple skills that you want to gain, and you might be interested in several majors with varying levels of difficulty. For example, if you are interested in both history and biology, and you think you are more likely to succeed in history, then you might want to choose that major. Fair or not, law schools generally look at majors equally and only offer a little slack for a lower GPA in a tougher major.
How to Research a School’s Majors and Determine Your Chances for Success
It might feel like you need to predict the future to learn what majors would be easier for you, but there are plenty of contextual clues. Your high school experience will likely indicate where you would excel. For example, if you got higher grades in history and language arts than math and science, you are likely better off selecting a liberal arts major.
You could also research your university specifically, such as by reading posts on a school-specific subreddit where students share insight on the level of difficulty of courses. Additionally, some universities post student evaluations of courses that enrolled students can review. This feedback can be particularly helpful because these evaluations typically provide details on the types of assignments, the student feedback gathered, and the professor’s availability, in addition to the grades and ease of the course. This information can be helpful beyond choosing your individual courses. For example, at some schools, a small group of professors teach most of the courses for a given major. Therefore, if you choose a particular major, you might be stuck with professors whose teaching style does not work for you. To see if a particular group of professors teach most of the courses, you should check the course catalog.
Changing Majors or Taking Multiple Majors
Alternatively, you could simply enroll without a major and change it later. After taking a few courses from different majors, you might be more interested in a particular one. You will likely need to take some general education classes anyway, so you can use this process to gauge where you might be more successful.
Remember that you can always change your major. A student might select a major like biology because they are interested in it and want to be a doctor but then later discover it’s too difficult and/or decide to go to law school.
If you have a weak GPA freshman year, nothing will erase those grades, but you can still boost your GPA by performing better in the remaining years. If your major is not working out during freshman year and you are intent on becoming a lawyer, there is no reason to double down if it will not help your law school application. Of course, changing majors might require you to spend more time in school, which might cost you more, so you will have to determine if it is worth the investment and if you can afford it.
You have probably met someone who brags about triple majoring and double minoring. Although these are nice accomplishments, law schools generally will not care about them. Again, they are focused on your overall GPA. Some people take extra majors for credentials in areas such as languages. Doing so could certainly help you get a job in international affairs right out of college, but for a career in international law, there are other avenues. For example, you could take private courses in a language later. As long as you can gain professional fluency in a language, legal professions will not care whether you majored in it, and they will be more focused on your writing and grades in law school. This is important to note because some of the most high-profile languages these days (such as Arabic, Russian, and Chinese) are particularly difficult to learn. So, it could be better to learn those languages outside the university setting. Many law schools will let you register a certain number of credits at a university, and those courses will often be pass/fail, so that could be a better time to gain language experience.
It is also worth noting that focusing on one major, rather than adding extra majors, will enable you to have more control over what classes you take (including easier ones), which will help you get a better GPA.
Law School Interest in STEM Majors
There have been some reports that law schools are more interested in STEM majors, but does that mean you should choose a STEM major? You should not do so for the sole purpose of getting into law school. But sometimes people know early on they want to be a patent attorney or a law professor who utilizes empirical data. In these cases, it might pay off to be a science or math major. For the patent bar, you will need to meet certain prerequisites, but you could always take those courses later at a community college. So, it is best to fully research your options.
Although it might seem like overkill to be so rigid in terms of choosing your major, it’s important to make choices based on what will help you professionally. When choosing a major, you should always weigh the pros and cons—and recognize there is not one right answer.
If you want further advice on applying to law school, our Stratus advisors are available for a free consultation!