Imagine a small, committed group of BYU-Hawaii students who meet weekly on their own initiative to take rigorous practice exams and discuss ways to prepare for graduate school, and you have begun to form a mental picture of the campus pre-law group.
Group founder Ryan Alexander from Niagara Falls, Canada, who will be graduating next month with an international business management degree, explained that he decided he wanted to go to law school about a year-and-a-half ago.
“One of the first things I did was get an LSAT [Law School Admission Test] book from a friend, tried one of the tests, and got them all wrong,” Alexander said. Over the ensuing months, he kept studying and “started looking at law schools, and setting myself up so I was doing LSATs every other week.”
“While I was studying and talking to people about law school, I met up with at least a dozen BYU-Hawaii students who were also thinking about law school,” he said. “I found there were people scattered throughout the different majors, but I also found there was no central information center that could combine us, except for Dr. Dale Robertson, who is the school’s official pre-law advisor.
Alexander added, “I met with him a few times, and came up with the idea of starting a pre-law group as an information center to guide people through the process.”
The group, which currently meets Tuesday evenings at eight p.m. in McKay 134, organized a year ago to practice for the LSAT.
“We’ve also had speakers come in, worked on planning letters of recommendation, and gone over law schools. The people who get involved are the ones who do well on the LSAT, and get into law school,” Alexander said, noting that dozens of other students have said they’re also interested in law school.
“They’re very self-motivated,” Dr. Dale Robertson said. “We’ve had BYU-Hawaii students over the past few years get in over 60 different law schools.”
He added that the group also hosted the international Jessup Moot Court Competition on campus in February on behalf of BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School.
He explained for anyone else interested in law school, “the first obstacle is the LSAT, which is unfortunately geared toward quick thinkers. You have to answer a paragraph’s worth of logical thinking in about a minute-and-a-half.” “Then your GPA is second in importance; and most schools require two or three recommendations, along with the application paper work,” Robertson said.
“It can also be costly, because taking the LSAT costs $100, and the LSDAS — the application service that processes transcripts, charges $12 per transcript. The average student applies to between six-to-nine schools. Each of them has about a $70 application fee as well, so it’s a costly process.”
Alexander explained that once a student is accepted, law school tuition averages about $25,000-$30,000 a year. “Even though it’s ludicrously expensive, there are a lot of ways to pay for it,” he said.
Alexander interrupted his studies at BYU-Hawaii to serve a Spanish-speaking mission in Seattle. Five weeks after returning, he met and eventually married Emily Carver, a BYU-Hawaii student from Gig Harbor, Washington.
He said he believes the group will continue after he graduates because it helps like-minded students “keep our goals in order” while quickly showing others that law school is not for them.
“For the people that stay, it helps reinforce our goals,” Alexander said. “It also, hopefully, helps us get into law school.”
Was the extra study worth it? Alexander, who sent applications to some of the top law schools in the nation, said waiting for the results was “nerve wracking”; but he’s been wearing a huge smile ever since he was recently accepted at Harvard Law School.