Hillbilly Elegy

to talk myself into it. I even printed the
form and drove it to campus. But when
the time came, I crumpled it up and
tossed it in the garbage. There would be
no Stanford Law for J.D.
I decided that I wanted to go to Yale
more than any other school. It had a
certain aura—with its small class sizes
and unique grading system, Yale billed
itself as a low-stress way to jump-start a
legal career. But most of its students
came from elite private colleges, not
large state schools like mine, so I
imagined that I had no chance of
admission. Nonetheless, I submitted an
application online, because that was
relatively easy. It was late afternoon on