Feb 18-22

This week at DGS and Pre-Law I worked on gathering information for the new DGS newsfeed and calendar. I am working in webtools to create more resources for DGS students online. Thus, I have been collecting relevant news and relevant dates for these resources. I also have been maintaining the Facebook and Twitter for DGS and I researched relevant articles to be used on the Pre-Law Facebook page. I spent a majority of my time attempting to figure out the TV Lobby computer software. The software is not user friendly and when the slides are on my computer, they look different once they get to the TV, so I have done lots of editing of the TV Lobby slides. I also attended the Pre-Law and DGS staff meetings. At the Pre-Law meeting and over email I asked several times how I could help with programming. Thus far, I have not been given much to do. I plan to attend an upcoming pre-law program to see how they run. Because they have a graduate student in their office already, she does a lot of the blogging and she is working on a collaborative workshop with the law school at Illinois.

This week I spent about 1 hour reading and blogging, 2 hours in staff meetings, 5 hours working on the TV in the lobby, 1 hour research for the Pre-Law Facebook page, and 2 hours working on the news feed and calendar on webtools.

This week, I read about law school rankings that are given out by the U.S. News and World Report. The author, Sam Kamin, makes the point that administrators do not like the ranking system, which is based mostly on LSAT scores, and they would rather have faculty produce better and more useful scholarly work. However, administrators cannot deny that there is a structure in place that makes rankings important to people. Kamin states that since the rankings are mostly based off of LSAT, there is a lot of competition to be ranked the highest and that brings out questionable practices by law schools. Kamin also make the point that students see the rankings and try to get into the top schools, yet because the schools are ranked on LSAT alone, the student does not thoroughly explore what school is the best fit for them. The current system of rankings, according to Kamin, does not privilege other characteristics of someone, such as race, ethnicity, work experience, etc. What I find interesting about this is that education is using a standardized test to basically categorize students. Example: If you do very well on the LSAT, then you go to the "best" schools, and thus your are the smartest of all law students. What about the students who are brilliant but do not do well on standardized tests? What about students who do not use the same semantics and lexicon as that used on the LSAT? I do not know much about the LSAT, I am only assuming that it was written for an Anglo-American. Throughout graduate school, we have had numerous conversations about the problems with rankings. I see the case of law school as very extreme and frankly, alarming. After sitting in on appointments with the pre-law advisors, I could tell that they do not push students to go to law school nor push them to go to certain law schools, but rather give them the skills and information to make the most informed decision. I think this is one way that pre-lad advisors can move away from the power of rankings, and more towards student agency in deciding what is best for them.

Kamin, S. (2006). How the blogs saved law school: Why a diversity of voices will undermine the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Indiana Law Journal, 81(1), 375-381.

My first few weeks at Pre-Law

I started my internship in the Pre-Law Advising Office a few weeks ago. Since then, I have been working on a few things while also giving a portion of my time to DGS. So far, I have shadowed two of the pre-law advisors in a few appointments which gave me a glimpse into how their advising compares to DGS advising. From my brief experiences with Career Services, it appears as if pre-law advising is similar to career advising. I also have been to staff meetings for both Pre-Law and DGS, which has been a great introduction to hearing about what different resources pre-law brings to students. Since I know nothing about law school, I feel like I am behind in the learning curve, so I have done some reading on law school and admissions information. I have done a considerable amount of research to determine how best so market pre-law services on social media. I tried polling students on the pre-law facebook page and I have read a lot about blogging, tweeting, and facebooking, but unfortunately, I found little relevant, scholarly literature on best practices for social media within education and more specifically student affairs.

I also have been given reigns of social media for DGS. I created a twitter page and have taken over Facebook. I also have created a webtools calendar and newsfeed so I will begin to post to those soon. I have attended a few meetings regarding a strategy for DGS marketing. Since these strategies are new, we know it could be a slow moving process. I also learned how to use the software that updates the DGS lobby TV (which also has a learning curve).

I also looked into the literature regarding pre-law advising. I was a little upset to find that there is not much about best practices in the field. The literature I did find will be used for my academic plan.

So far, I have interned for 38 hours the past 3 weeks. I start my full time job on May 1st, so I need to average more than 10 hours per week.