An imperfect process

When I first started thinking about law school I thought of the admissions committee in a somewhat idealized way. In many ways I saw them as the "keepers of the gate" into their respective schools and viewed the decisions they made as being logical and uniformed (in other words, I largely believed that the admissions committee agreed on their decisions and that if somebody was admitted, everybody on the committee agreed that they deserved to become a student at the university.

I do not know where this image came from. The more I read, the more I become convinced that admissions is a scatershot process where luck and timming play a far larger roll than I would like to admit. With this in mind, it is comforting to know that the men and women making the decisions take great care in making certain that they make informed decisions about each candidate.

What sparked all of this thought? A trip to the blog of Toby Stock, the Director of Admissions for Harvard University. If you want a good read, feel free to drop in:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/

While the process is not perfect, and a unanimous decision is not always the case, it is good to know that at the very least each memeber of the admission committee is making every possible effort to learn as much as they can about the candidates who's fate they are deciding before making a decision.