Good morning, fellow prelaw students! Welcome back to a new post!
Unfortunately, you read that right. There are costs BEFORE you even consider paying for tuition, textbooks, or a townhouse if you’re fortunate.
- LSAT-specific Resources – This is the first thing everyone spends money on when they start their LSAT studying. Or any standardized test to get into a specialized program/field. As usual, there are books or programs you need to study with to create a study schedule, for explanations, for what to focus on, etc. Some people choose to do classes, which could be valuable depending on your learning style or what you’re comfortable with. I have a blog post here of LSAT resources I’ve used or am planning to use, both free and paid for.
- LSAC – This is where you need to take the LSAT, so it’s non-negotiable. The LSAT costs about $200, provided you don’t want to see your grades in advance or cancel your test if you don’t feel prepared or any other benefit I haven’t explored on the website. If you want access to extra practice tests (your sign-up gives you 4 in a simulated testing environment, as well as a sample essay question), you need a subscription of about $100.
- Applications – Hello and welcome to ‘I have to pay the province to get into the school.’ If you live in Ontario, there’s a standard $200+ fee on the OSLAS website, plus some schools require specific applications that they may have to pay for.
- Study supplements – My biggest surprise was how much food I’ve been eating. If you watch the YouTube chronicles of my time studying, you’ll see me get frustrated with eating almost every three hours. Intense concentration requires more brain work, apparently. The more your brain works, the more calories you use and the more you need to eat to supplement and ensure you build the stamina to keep going. And, you want to nourish yourself with good food, which costs more.
- Time – I saved enough money to apply for law school, finish my last semester of University and support my basic needs, including bills, for about a year. However, what I didn’t budget for was how long each application would take, how long it would take to write a good essay, to apply for multiple scholarships, to actually study, or even to ask professors for recommendations! All these things I never budgeted my time and energy for. And my mind was overloaded once I realized this.
As you can see, there’s a lot more that goes into law school than just grades and LSAT scores. There’s a lot of pre-planning and sacrifice before you even get to step 3, so it really makes sense to make sure that’s what you want before you decide to start the journey.
Hopefully, this post helped put things into perspective for you and helped you decide your law school journey.
– HL