Dear Friends,
My name is Arisa. I am taking the June LSATs at Temple University in Tokyo and sending away my applications to schools in the fall. I have been making my way back and forth between America and Japan since I was born. In chronological order, I have lived in: Osaka, San Diego, Fort Lee, Sagamihara and Los Angeles. I am temporarily situated in Tokyo until the start of the fall quarter next year at an American law school, wherever that may end up being.
I hope this place can serve as a resource for students looking into, or already in the process of applying to law schools in the U.S. From the moment I had even the smallest inkling that I was interested in law, I have come across interviews, study guides, and discussion forums on the web that have proved indispensable in helping to shape my ideas about law school, re-shape misconceptions, and to develop goals and strategies to best meet them. Thanks Internet! I am especially indebted to the Internet for a couple reasons...
1) I graduated in December 2009 from UCLA and immediately moved back to Japan where I could work and continue to study Japanese. Without access to career counselors, pre-law advisors, or a pre-law society, I have come to rely heavily on the web for information about how best to approach the application process. The internet is a source of dynamic and individualized information for people with specific questions whose answers can't be sought in books and guides that cater to the needs of the majority of readers. For those of us in different countries, the web is the place to go to read up on, say, a discussion on the conditions of various testing centers in Japan.
2) Living out here in Tokyo apart from anything remotely resembling the academic/intellectual environment of school and lacking the companionship of even one person in the locality with whom to share the LSAT blues, I have commiserated and been inspired by people all over the states who are sharing their experiences of studying the LSATs through blogs and forums. For better or for worse, the web has diminished the role that geographical closeness plays in the development of a community, and in this case, I am a grateful beneficiary of this effect.
3) The aforementioned dearth of law school aspirants makes Tokyo a not very lucrative location for test prep centers to exist. In fact, there is just one prep center in Yotsuya and it is Kaplan and I have yet to hear a good review about them. Despite the best efforts of test companies to deter the dissemination of free and effective test-taking strategies, there are a couple great sites devoted to helping students get high scores without paying exorbitant prep course fees.
I imagine that anyone who is as far into the application process as I am has come across most, if not all of the sites that I will be posting on this blog. I also realize that it is not a difficult task to spend a few minutes typing iterations of "law school help" or "lsat free tips" or "importance of law school rankings" and looking through the search matches for an acceptable match.
I think the difficult thing about this process, especially for newcomers to the application game, is filtering the unreliable from the trustworthy sites and making sense of all the different voices speaking to and about law school/the field of law. I cannot claim to provide a comprehensive guide to the best law-related sites on the web. But I can direct you to the ones that I have come across that have been an immense source of help for me and why I think so.
For those of you curious as to what the few months leading up to moment a law school aspirant receives letters of acceptance or rejections--taking the lsats, getting the score, writing a personal statement, collecting letters of rec, sending away the applications and so on--I'll keep you updated! Consider this a super holistic profile of a successful law school applicant in progess...
Please contribute to make this blog interactive and unbound by geographical boundaries. I look forward to hearing from you!
Best of luck,
Arisa Kono
