I don’t care how high your SAT scores are: if you’re planning to attend any institution of higher education that isn’t blatantly obvious in its accreditation (Stanford, Yale, etc.), and you don’t take the so-easy-a-monkey-could-do-it step of checking your intended school’s official accreditation status, then you’re an idiot.

Go here or here and get it done. You’ll spend hours more time texting today than you will ascertaining that your institution will hand you a valid degree after you’ve given said school your blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. Avoid this woman’s mistake.

Accreditation Resources:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA)
U.S. Dept. of Edu. Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(graduation joy)

Want to be a lawyer but you have a conscience? Do you find yourself sympathizing more with the planet than with your fellow humans? Angry with mankind for hosing the planet utterly? Do I have the career for you! Environmental law is the perfect way for smarty-pants lawyer types who want to use their fighting powers for good to stick it to the man while saving the world.

The law firm Shems Dunkiel Raubvogel & Saunders PLLC has two environmental law blogs to peruse: The Renewable Energy Law Blog and the Vermont Environmental and Land Use Law Blog.

I would also recommend looking into the law schools below as they all offer environmental law in one form or another. Some schools offer only graduate degrees in environmental law, while others offer environmental law coursework as part of another law degree. Georgetown University, for example, includes environmental law as part of its Masters of Studies in Law (MSL) Degree for Journalists.

Environmental Law Programs:

Lewis and Clark Law School
Vermont Law School
Pace Law School
The University of Maryland School of Law
NYU Law
Berkeley Law
Stanford Law School
Georgetown Law
GW Law
Yale Law School
Columbia Law School
Colorado Law
Tulane Law School
UT Austin School of Law
University of Oregon School of Law
University of Washington School of Law
Harvard Law School
Duke Univ. Environmental Law and Policy Clinic
Boston College Law
University of Utah College of Law
Florida State Univ. College of Law

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

Studying for the California Bar exam? Have an extra $1000 burning a hole in your freshly-law-degreed butt-pocket? Then by all means check out BarMax: California Edition. One of the only iPhone apps to cost that much money, its creator, Mike Ghaffary, a JD/MBA ‘06 Harvard grad, says it has everything one might require to study up for the bar.

Ghaffary has an MBA and as of December 2009, is a member of the California Bar; so he’s got that whole I’m business savvy and I studied for and conquered the bar exam thing going for him.

As with all things iPhone, it’s portable and weighs a lot less than the fifty pounds of books you’d be buying and dragging around town if you were to go the dead-tree route. So handy! Also, if you contact BarMax, they’ll send you a free trial version so you can evaluate the materials before forking over a decade’s worth of ramen money.

BarMax: California Edition, available now in the iPhone’s App Store for $999.99, is a study guide for the California Bar Exam. Harvard lawyers oversaw development of the app, which weighs in at 1 GB and includes outlines, lectures, a study calendar, and real questions and essays from previous exams. The only comparable app available now is from BarBri, but you must be enrolled in the company’s $3000 to $4000 classes to use most of the features.

TechCrunch reports that Mike Ghaffary, a former law student and current director of business development at TrialPay, envisioned BarMax as an alternative to BarBri’s pricey classes and digital offerings. Ghaffary partnered with successful app developers in Los Angeles, and enlisted some fellow Harvard Law alumni to guide development. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Big dreams and no money. Such is the situation colleges, universities, and the students who attend them are struggling with. The schools want to teach students to think outside the box, to be able to look ahead and improve the future of humanity. The students want to learn how to think wider and deeper and bigger and more. The President wants the schools to kick some researching butt and find ways to get us out of this mess (pick one).

Too bad there’s a global economic crisis, and the recession our country is experiencing is sucking the life and the funding out of everyone’s Big Dreams balloons. Now the schools and the students are walking around carrying sad little limp and deflated aspirations, jettisoning the deeper-thinking, big-picture courses and degrees for the more utilitarian/practical ones.

I won’t bore you with numbers, but there are an astonishing number of folks doing pre-professional undergrad work, and a ridiculous number of business degree holders in this country. I think we’re good on the ‘future of money’ front; someone learn something that’s helpful in a different way. Think outside the box, people. Don’t give up on the idea that knowing how to think in non-linear directions is conducive to the survival of mankind.

Read this piece in the NY Times:

The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education. Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery.

American universities have long struggled to meet almost irreconcilable demands: to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values. And in the past decade and a half, such conflicting and unbounded expectations have yielded a wave of criticism on issues ranging from the cost of college to universities’ intellectual quality to their supposed decline into unthinking political correctness. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

I wrote previously about Steve Bogucki (Educated Soldier) and his Law School vs. Special Forces quandary. He recently wrote a powerful post about his decision to quit (his term) Special Forces training and to continue with his higher education goals. He explains his thoughts on the topic and his reasoning, all of which are interesting and make sense.

It’s no small thing to decide to just drop such a major chunk of your life. I quit school three years into my second degree because I finally saw what my intense academic focus was doing to my family, my daughter especially. Like Steve, the actual realization and the subsequent decision-making moment went fairly quickly. But even though I could see how necessary it was for me to quit, it still sucked. It’s hard to just stop.

It’s dangerously easy to stay on a path, whether you’re happy to be there or not, simply because you’ve wanted it for so long and have invested so much time, effort and emotional energy into that goal. Walking away from something tremendous is usually more difficult than staying the course. I’m very impressed with Mr. Bogucki’s decision and the ballsiness it took for him to quit. And he sounds happy. Effing busy with school, but happy.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

photo: Jeff Sullivan

There are several points in every person’s life in which a major, life-changing decision must be made. I myself have never had to decide whether to work toward my Special Forces qualification or to go to law school, but I’ve always wondered how that thought process would go…My major life decisions were more along the lines of which order to do grad school, career and motherhood.

Steve Bogucki at Educated Soldier has a post up in which he works through his Special Forces vs. law school quandary. It’s very interesting, as is his blog. I think he and I are probably at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but that doesn’t mean I can’t respect him as a dedicated soldier and as an intelligent student. Also, his Mom pointed me in the direction of his blog, and he refers to her as his ‘confidante’, so he can’t be all bad.

Posted by Alexa Harrington