When Weinberg senior Marissa Ronk got a call telling her she was admitted into Harvard Law School’s 2011 class, she left the Active Endeavors sale, called her mom while walking down Evanston streets and went home to tell her roommates.
“What? Like it’s hard?” one roommate asked, mocking the tarty co-eds from 2001’s breakout film (and current Broadway hit) Legally Blonde. “There’s been a lot of comments about Elle Woods. That’s the unifying theme,” she says. “I’m not even blonde.”
Unlike the film’s protagonist, Ronk relied on solid recommendations from English and political science professors (her two majors) and talking up her interest in naturalization (the daughter of an Italian immigrant, she teaches citizenship courses and interns for an immigration lawyer) instead of pink, perfumed resumés and a bikini-clad video essay.
But like Woods, Ronk had the numbers Harvard looks for: The school’s average GPA runs from 3.72 to 3.95, its LSATs 169-175. “I did a prep course, then took a practice test every other day for a month,” Ronk says of achieving her test scores, which went up 20 points by the end of summer. “I wasn’t naturally good, but it’s a very learnable test.”
When Sara Schroeder, another Weinberg senior, took the LSAT, she scored a 174 – the 99th percentile starts at 171 – and decided to apply to nine schools (including the first seven on the U.S. News rankings list). She was admitted to Harvard, too.
“At most places, you turn in everything and get a letter,” she says. “But Harvard is more of a process. They e-mail to say they want to talk to you,” referring to the law school’s notorious five-minute interview, which involves Dean of Admissions Toby Stock (who chronicles the admissions process on a Harvard-sponsored blog) calling about 1,100 applicants to speak with them. In the end, about 800 are admitted for an ideal class of about 500. “I really prepared: ‘Why law school?’ ‘Why Harvard?’ ” Ronk says. “But it was more like, ‘What’s keeping you busy these days?’ ” Schroeder remembers discussing her commute to high school and interning at the White House instead of taking classes junior year.
About a week later, Schroeder got a voicemail telling her she was one of the about 12 percent of applicants admitted annually. “I just got into Harvard,” she told the first friend she saw outside Harris. “It’s like, ‘What do you say to that?’ ”
She’s not even blonde.
