For prospective law school students, having summer internships can be an application boost, but only if they know how to describe them to an admissions committee.
Experts say that simply listing internships in an application is not enough.
Prospective students must know where to include internship experience in an application and how to describe these short-term work experiences in a way that gives admissions officers a fuller perspective of who applicants are beyond their GPA and LSAT scores.
“The resume is a good starting point,” says Jenny Branson, the assistant dean of admissions and financial aid at Baylor Law School in Texas. “You should definitely highlight any internship you’ve had there. And then, kind of in the bullet points or in the discussion underneath the internship, in the resume, you can talk about what skills you gained.”
[Take this quiz to see if you’re ready to apply for law school.]
Applicants can also discuss internship experiences in more depth in other areas of the application, depending on the importance of the internship, experts say.
“If the internship is a central focus of student’s application or reasons to pursue a career in law, then I’d recommend that the experience should be woven into the personal statement,” says Ethan Rosenzweig, dean for admission, financial aid and student life at the School of Law at Emory University in Atlanta. “If the internship was one step in a longer journey, then a succinct description on a resume or statement of activities would be most appropriate.”
Admissions staff are looking for candidates to describe certain attributes about themselves and what they learned, and applicants shouldn’t worry if their internships are not law related. There is still plenty to learn from working in other fields, says Rosenzweig.
“Leadership, time management, learning from one’s mistakes or challenges, advising customers or clients or solving problems — all of those skills are critical for success in the legal profession,” he says.
If the internship ties into why an applicant is interested in law, it’s important to point that out as well, says Branson.
[Avoid these mistakes when requesting a letter of recommendation.]
“If you say in your personal statement or in a interview that you are interested in a particular area of law and that’s why you want to go to law school, if you don’t have any experience on your resume to back that up, it makes us question you,” she says.
An applicant interested in becoming an attorney who focuses on business transactions, for example, might be expected to have accounting-related work experience on a resume, she says. And elaborating on what that experience entailed is critical. So if the hopeful business attorney learned about financial statements, that’s worth mentioning.
“Details are key,” she says.
If a summer internship involved research, it’s best for applicants to say what topics they researched, how many memos they compiled based on the research and share similar details about their day-to-day activities.
Some experts say that applicants don’t need to list each and every work experience if they don’t feel like it will help them in admissions, but there can be a benefit in discussing less-desirable jobs and work experiences.
“When I would see resumes that had waitressing jobs or driving a taxi or working road crew, that gave more depth in some ways to the individual,” says Anne Richard, who has worked in the admissions office at the School of Law at University of Virginia and George Washington University Law School. She’s now principal consultant of AMRichard Consulting, which helps aspiring law applicants get into school.
[Get law school application advice from recent law grads.]
Candidates sometimes hesitate to mention babysitting or helping an elderly relative as their summer activity, but they should, she says. “It presents a much more robust and accurate picture of each candidate to disclose what they actually did for work and internships and community service.”
Internship experiences that are bad can also be used to highlight a candidate’s journey to law.
“Sometimes the strongest applications describe what the student or the applicant didn’t enjoy about it, and how that helped the student refocus their goals,” says Rosenzweig from Emory University.
Internship experiences that are positive, however, can help candidates get letters of recommendation for law school.
“If the internship experience ends up being a central part of one’s application, it would make really good sense to have an internship supervisor write up a letter of recommendation, so it all pulls together,” says Richard. She encourages applicants to discuss with their letter writers their goals and aspirations and why they want a legal career.
While internships can be important for law school applicants, they shouldn’t be viewed as the only critical component of an application.
“There’s no magic internship that’s going to get somebody admitted into law school or rejected from the law school,” Richard says. “It’s one piece of the whole package that applicants have to work on and craft and present to the law schools to which they apply.”
Searching for a law school? Get our complete rankings of Best Law Schools.
More from U.S. News
Weigh 3 Factors When Making a Law School Budget
10 Law Schools With the Most Part-Time Applicants
10 Law Schools Where Alumni Have the Least Debt
Leverage Summer Internships for Law School Applications originally appeared on usnews.com
