Jul 22, 2026 · 21 min · 6 segments
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Sarah ZearfossHost
Hey everybody, it is Dean Z here in my office today, which I will not be in too much longer because when we hire my replacement, that person will be sitting in this office and I will be moved to a corner of Dustin's cubicle.
I keep getting people asking for application reads, and I'm going to kind of do that, but in a slightly different way than I have done in the past.
I have picked a whole pile of people who applied very early, so timing could not be an issue.
and they got denied, not waitlisted, but denied, which means, now first of all, I should say, lots of good people get denied when there is an application volume of more than 9,000, but the signal is, I don't think I can ever admit you.
Whereas waitlist says, I may not be able to admit you right now, but I'd be very interested in admitting you later.
So getting denied when you're at or above both meetings is a pretty strong signal.
I picked ones that I thought had mistakes in them that were not just one offs and that might illustrate something a little larger.
And I want to say, I'm going to try to remember to say this at the end too, but what I want to say at the beginning is these are all mistakes that could be avoided.
One of the things, doing this exercise, I read about 50 different applications trying to pick out the best ones.
And one of the things I came away really feeling strongly is Most of your application is sort of written in stone.
You have the grades that you have, you have the LSAT score that you have, the people who are your recommenders.
You can have a little bit of leeway there who you're gonna pick, but what they write is outside your control.
Everything that went wrong with these applicants is the things that are within an applicant's control.
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Hey everybody, it is Dean Z here in my office today, which I will not be in too much longer because when we hire my replacement, that person will be sitting in this office and I will be moved to a corner of Dustin's cubicle.
I keep getting people asking for application reads, and I'm going to kind of do that, but in a slightly different way than I have done in the past.
I have picked a whole pile of people who applied very early, so timing could not be an issue.
and they got denied, not waitlisted, but denied, which means, now first of all, I should say, lots of good people get denied when there is an application volume of more than 9,000, but the signal is, I don't think I can ever admit you.
Whereas waitlist says, I may not be able to admit you right now, but I'd be very interested in admitting you later.
So getting denied when you're at or above both meetings is a pretty strong signal.
I picked ones that I thought had mistakes in them that were not just one offs and that might illustrate something a little larger.
And I want to say, I'm going to try to remember to say this at the end too, but what I want to say at the beginning is these are all mistakes that could be avoided.
One of the things, doing this exercise, I read about 50 different applications trying to pick out the best ones.
And one of the things I came away really feeling strongly is Most of your application is sort of written in stone.
You have the grades that you have, you have the LSAT score that you have, the people who are your recommenders.
You can have a little bit of leeway there who you're gonna pick, but what they write is outside your control.
Everything that went wrong with these applicants is the things that are within an applicant's control.
