In terms of preparation, if you’re even remotely law school material you’ve come a long way academically from your high school days. College is grownup learning, more self-directed and self-motivated than most people experience in high school. And by the end of college, you should, by virtue of your bachelor’s degree, have developed not an expertise but a close acquaintance with at least one subject area. This process can be more or less useful in your law school preparation, and even if it’s already senior year you may be able to improve your first-year experiences in law school through your course selection next spring.
When it comes to getting into the law school of your choice, neither board scores, activities, lifelong ambitions, even money comes close in importance to your years in college. This is less true for older students, as will be discussed in the next chapter. But when a law school is trying to determine how you handle academic work, it has nothing more to go on than your undergraduate experience.
Some prelaw students make the mistake of thinking of college as an anteroom or lobby for their expected entry through the portals of law school. There’s no question that you can take this approach, and perhaps even succeed with it, at least if you define success by getting into a "good" law school.
But this approach is an unfortunate one, because college is not an anteroom to law school but a foundation, ideally for your entire life. This doesn’t mean you can’t make good use of your college years in terms of preparing for law school. It does mean that having law-school tunnel vision in selecting your courses and your major will deprive you of what is almost certain to be your last chance to get the benefits that college is meant to impart.
You should think of college as something you build upon. If you build a legal career on it, that’s great. But if the legal career doesn’t work out, your undergraduate foundation can be used for any kind of edifice. Whereas if you merely build an anteroom to a legal career, you risk constructing nothing but an expensive, time-wasting, and unsightly hallway to nowhere--a dead end.
If you’re just positive you’re "a prelaw," you can accomplish the same thing as you would with a so-called "prelaw" major even with the traditional "prelaw" majors. Take politics, government, history, and economics, but avoid attaching such a loserly label like "prelaw" to your transcript.This advice doesn’t only apply to the so-called prelaw major. Regardless of your major, be a college student who wants to get the most out of her undergraduate experience, and who is considering law school as a step in the future. By doing so you’ll be the best "prelaw" you can be.