| Topic Name: |
Choosing School: School rep or Program |
| Message Name: |
Reputation matters; program can matter |
| Date Posted: |
12/27/2000 |
| In Reply To: |
Would you choose a school based more on its overall reputation or its strength in a particular program? Do law firms really look at your school's strength in certain practice area?
THanks |
| Message: |
This question is too general to permit of a one size fits all answer. Some schools have programs that are ranked a good bit higher with some practitioners than the school rank overall. NYU's tax program and the IP programs at GW and Franklin Pierce come to mind as programs in which the particular program is considered a real benefit to your resume.
If you know you want to go to a specialized field, and a school has a national reputation in that field, you can drop down a good few notches in school rank to pick up that program. In general, though, one might not wish to give up a high ranked school to go to a much lesser school with an interesting program.
But here's where the generalities don't hold up--if you talk to the folks at a school who have a specialty program in an offbeat area of the law, and you've always died to go into that offbeat area, then you might want to look into whether recruiting by firms that specialize in that offbeat area is really a part of the recruting picture, or if the program is instead just getting "off the ground". A world of schools pick a special emphasis area for various academic and marketing reasons, that in general matter very little outside the cloister. The real research topic is whether they get better jobs for grads in those fields. My guess is that you'll find some schools of modest rank which can get a recruiting boost from an interesting subject area, but also find some programs which look cool in the brochure but are non-sequiturs from a recruiting standpoint.
Law firms do notice if your school has a major reputation in a practice area, but the number of schools that have such national reputations in one specific field (as opposed to "overall") is not all that extensive a list.
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