Indiana

My visit to Indiana was an interesting time and left me with mixed feelings. Before I go into details, let me start with a statement to the IU admissions office: students coming to visit your law school are primarily intersted in, get this, your LAW SCHOOL. The material that you give to your prospective law students should reflect this. To give out a folder that does not include 1 single piece of information about the law school, not even so much as a viewbook, is ridiculous!

So I walk into IU, go to the office where my meeting is, and am given a folder. The folder contains a large collection of "tourist sites in Bloomington," IU sports schedules, theatre schedules, and resort advertisements. What it lacks is any information about the law school. After flipping through the folder and figuring this out, I went to the rack and pulled off a viewbook and a few handouts that I felt would matter in terms of areas that I might be interested in.

This was a fairly accurate example of how my visit went: I saw things I liked, but the school was not choosing to sell them. I was especially impressed by their library. The view out the huge windows in the "reading room" is fantastic (a nice forest setting makes it seem somewhat more relaxing, if I am going to spend a large part of my life in this room, at least it will look nice), the desks are large and nice looking, the building seems very technology friendly, and the collection is fairly large. I am not keen on the fact that it is open to the public, but the trade-off (being a federal records repository) seems to make it worth it. This is where the first disappointing part of my law school tour experience occured. We spent a grand total of 15 seconds in the library and another 10 looking at the computer lab. He mentioned that they had the top ranked library in the nation, and apparently I was supposed to hear that and come to the conclusion that "oh, well its the top library in the nation, it much be nice, I don't need to see anymore." I haven't taken a marketing class, but something tells me that if you have the best something in the nation, mabye you should focus on it, sell it, and convince me why it is important. At any rade, the library was a big plus.

The next aspect of my tour was the classroom that I looked at. The annoying thing is that I want to see the classroom. I want to know what the classroom looks like, how much technology is present, if the seats are confortable, etc. Again, a grand total of 15 seconds in the classroom, and when I wanted to look around at the desks, my guide seemed fairly annoyed. The odd thing: the classrooms seem ok. They have wireless in the classrooms and plenty of power strips to hook computers up to. Technology wise, the classrooms seem pretty generic.

So what did my tour focus on? Not much, it was 15 minutes and that is only because I asked about 5 minutes of questions when the tour was over. We did spend five minutes talking about lockers, which is the one place we could have spent 15 seconds.

Though my review of my tour is negative, I enjoyed the school. The town has the typical "big ten town" feel to it, which I like. More importantly, the school has some really interested aspects. Students have the option of selling books back to the bookstore or through the student office on consignment at 100% of the sale price. This is a neat feature that I have never heard of before. Additionally, my guide had nice things to say about career services, and odd occurance on my tours and definately different than what I have been reading online. Hopefully he wasn't just feeding me a line. I will have to contact some students at IU and see if this holds true.

Additionally, I like the idea of write on and grade on to law review, with different methods for gaining admission to the other two journals. I also enjoy the fact that they have multiple journals that each have an aspect that makes them attractive (similar to American). Instead of having law review and some others, they have three journals with unique advantages. Law Journal is their version of law review and is clearly the most prestigous. Their communications journal is interesting for two reasons. First, it is a communications journal and I have developed a recent interesting in communications law (specificaly regulation of telephone communication hardware). More importantly, the communciation journal has the widest circulation of the journals and is the official journal on the topic, meaning that it will generate good exposure.

Finally, their global studies journal (which interests me the least) is in a developing topic and it seems to me that as the topic grows so will the importance of the journal.

The student lounge was one of the nicest I have seen on my visits, leather couches, nice TV, lots of tables and room. I found my visit to IU to be a mixed bag, but after visiting I know that I have a higher opinion of the school than I did before I visited. Overall I would call the visit a positive experience.

Frat boy note: I visited the Pi Kappa Phi house at IU today. We hear a lot of talk about it and it is for good reason: it is an awsome house. Unfortunately, lots of the chapter houses at IU are nice and it doesn't stand out all that much, but it is still an awsome house with lots of neat features (including a full court basketball court on the side of the chapter house). I'm glad I visited and I definately wish that I could live in a chapter house that nice!