Assistant Dean for Academic Services and Registrar Jason Dugas ’01 joins Admissions Dean Natalie Blazer ’08 to discuss how UVA Law students can earn a second graduate degree along with their J.D., study abroad while in law school, enroll in elective courses and more.
Transcript
JASON DUGAS: One of my favorite times of year is the first couple of days of class, where I like to say, you're not seeing the trains running into each other. Everybody's going to their rooms. No one's going to a room and saying, why is this class still here?
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: It's all kind of running. It's one of my favorite things. It's geeky registrar type stuff.
NATALIE BLAZER: No, but I totally get it.
This is Admissible. I'm Natalie Blazer, Dean of Admissions at UVA Law. As listeners probably know, I try to choose topics for this podcast based on what questions we get when we're out there recruiting on the road, when we're doing Q&As here at the law school.
Basically, what we're hearing out there from applicants is what I try to address on the show because at the end of the day, I want to share information that I think is valuable to you all who are working on law school applications and/or selecting which law schools you might want to attend.
So I'm relying on what you all out in the world are telling me is important to you. Having said that, I think today's show is going to be music to listeners' ears because we have been getting so many questions about this topic lately. And in fact, in my nine years in law school admissions, I will say this has been a perennial quote unquote, "hot topic" for prospective law students.
And that is, how do I, or can I, pursue a dual degree? In other words, how can I get a law degree plus another graduate degree in a different discipline? And also, on a somewhat related note, but not quite, can I study abroad in law school? So these are overachievers who they want to either go abroad or do a dual degree.
And so we're going to talk all about that today. My guest is Assistant Dean for Academic Services and Registrar, Jason Dugas. Dean Dugas earned his undergraduate degree with distinction and a master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994 and 1995 respectively, and his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2001.
While at UVA, he served as a Dillard fellow and as managing editor for The Virginia Sports and Entertainment Law Journal. He also participated in The Legal Education Project. After graduation, Dean Dugas clerked for a judge and then practiced labor and employment law in both the private sector for the law firm of Littler Mendelson, and in the public sector for the US Department of Commerce, during which time he actively participated in the bar and contributed labor and employment law survey articles to the Southern Methodist University Law School Law Review.
Dean Dugas is a member of the bars of North Carolina, Texas, and the District of Columbia. Dean Dugas joined the law school in 2007 as Director of Admissions, a position he held until September 2014, before moving over to the registrar's office. I always love chatting with people who know what it's like to be in admissions because it's quite a unique role. So that's an extra bonus for today.
Welcome to the show, Dean Dugas. But since we're friends, I'll call you Jason, if that's OK.
JASON DUGAS: Absolutely. Great. Absolutely.
NATALIE BLAZER: I'm going to start off by asking, since I mentioned you used to work in admissions here at the law school, is there anything you miss about working in admissions?
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I love what I'm doing. But sometimes it can be very transactional with students. We're happy to help them get into classes, figure out if they want to do a dual degree, or study abroad, and make those things happen. But the relationship building, they can come in and kind of like, thank you for helping me with that. And then they're on their way.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: We don't really get to connect.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: And so I do miss that. Admissions, you really get to know the students. They get to know you. And you're the welcome wagon. They come back when they're students to ask you questions and just visit.
And so I have to work a little harder to connect.
NATALIE BLAZER: I get that. Yeah. You're doing this sort of, I would say, unsung hero work of the law school. You're making things move along. And you're making everything work for them. But it's less sort of probably obvious.
JASON DUGAS: Yes. I analogize it to turning the lights on. When you flick the lights on, you don't really think, thank goodness for that electrician that made it happen, and the guy at the generator that keeps things going. And it's when they don't work that you go, what the heck? I got to call somebody. They got to figure this out.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah, so true. Well, thank you for everything you do.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, absolutely.
NATALIE BLAZER: So I always like to start with a little icebreaker, fun fact. So I would love for you to share with listeners how you met your wife, Elizabeth.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, we met as law students in the first year. She was in one of my classes. I didn't know who she was. And we were at a mixer for MBA, law, architecture, and medicine, or something like that, a bunch of grad programs, professional programs. And her roommate was there. And she wanted to meet-- she wanted to introduce me to her roommate. And her roommate was Elizabeth, my wife, now wife.
And so we hit it off and we became friends for a long time. And we started dating. And we just kept going. And--
NATALIE BLAZER: Got married.
JASON DUGAS: --now we're married for 21 years.
NATALIE BLAZER: Oh, my gosh. And now, my husband and I see you guys all around town.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, we see you all the time.
NATALIE BLAZER: We go to the same restaurants.
JASON DUGAS: We love the restaurant scene in Charlottesville. It's great, as you know.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah, it's always fun to see you guys. OK, so we have a sort of wide-ranging topic for today's show. Like I said, we get asked about it all the time. And I always give my answers, which I think are, for the most part, accurate.
JASON DUGAS: Yes.
NATALIE BLAZER: But I really want to get deeper into it today. Even the term, dual degree, which we used forever to mean a law degree and another degree, has recently changed.
JASON DUGAS: That's right, SACS. Our accreditors-- I wrote it down. I just call it SACS. It's the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: Changed it. They changed it to combination degree. And I still call it dual degree. I will probably always call it dual degree. But we have tried hard to scrub that from our website and get our materials to say combination degree.
A combination degree is with an internal program within your university. Whereas, an external collaborative used to be just that. It was external. But now those are called dual degrees. So we have three of those, one with Tufts, one with Princeton, and one with Johns Hopkins.
NATALIE BLAZER: And it's funny to me because I would think it would be the opposite. Dual degree would mean both within the same university. And combination would be a combination of your university and another university.
JASON DUGAS: But whatever.
NATALIE BLAZER: We don't make the rules.
JASON DUGAS: We don't. We just have to live by them.
NATALIE BLAZER: So for those who, we're going to call it combination degree, for people who might not really know what that is, can you give some examples?
JASON DUGAS: Sure. Well, we have 12 at the law school. Essentially, it's taking a program, the law program, and you're doing another program, getting a degree in a shorter amount of time than you normally would have to do both because each school is kind of borrowing credits, sharing credits, saying, some of these classes you're taking will count towards our degree.
And so if we require 86 credits towards our JD, which we do, you can get 72 law credits. And we'll use 12 from, say, a master's of history or the ones we have. We have master's of public health. You can do an MBA in four instead of five years. We have six MA degrees, history, English, philosophy, government, foreign affairs, and environmental science.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: So those would normally be done in eight semesters. You can do it in seven. So it's borrowing credits and shortening the time.
NATALIE BLAZER: Got it. I think that's a great way to put it, borrowing credits, shortening the time. So basically, in other words, you could be taking class at the law school that count towards that other degree and vice versa.
JASON DUGAS: Right.
NATALIE BLAZER: That make sense?
JASON DUGAS: Yes. The other school will say, oh, you took environmental law and environmental science master's degree. We'll use that class towards some of our credits.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right. Got it. So is there one of our combination degrees that's the most popular?
JASON DUGAS: I would say the MBA has been traditionally the most popular. And none of them are-- anytime we have anywhere between, I would say, 20 to 30 students doing a dual degree or a combination degree-- see, I'm going to do that.
NATALIE BLAZER: I know. I know.
JASON DUGAS: But so it's not like a ton of our student body does them. I think there's a lot of interest in the admissions side.
NATALIE BLAZER: There is, yeah.
JASON DUGAS: We see that. I remember as an admissions person, you get the questions a lot. But I think along the way, students kind of either conclude, they realize I can get some of those classes, I can take a few classes at the business school. I don't need to commit myself to a whole master's degree, and the tuition, and the time that comes with it.
Whereas some other students do. They want to do it.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: So the MBA is traditionally our most popular with anywhere between 5 and 8 to 10 students, somewhere in there.
NATALIE BLAZER: Got it. Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: And the next one, the one that's coming up, I would say, as more and more popular is our history.
NATALIE BLAZER: I was going to say that. I'm getting that question all the time.
JASON DUGAS: We get a lot of legal history, obviously. We've got a very deep bench of legal historians in the law school and the history department.
NATALIE BLAZER: So before we get into the nitty gritty of how they work, because I do want to talk about that, just talk about, like we said, there's a lot of interest coming in. And then it doesn't necessarily translate to a ton of people doing them. So who do combination degrees make sense for? Do the people who actually end up executing on them, what are their goals? Who does this make sense for?
JASON DUGAS: Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't say no one at the law school is telling anybody you should do it. The JD will get you where you want to be if you want to be a lawyer.
NATALIE BLAZER: Totally. Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: I know that sounds odd. We have them. We're here to support a student that wants to do them. But we're not here to say, you should take that extra time and money. We're here to support a student if they want to do it.
I think some schools don't say that. They promote them. And I don't really feel like we-- it feels weird to promote a student to take more time to get a JD.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: But again, we're not against it. So if you've concluded, to answer your question about who, it's a student that might maybe want to do academia. A school or university that can have a person be dual appointed in more than one department is attractive. A person that maybe wants to do specialized industry work, like they want to be in investment banking, or they want to be in the executive suite as an executive, not the general counsel.
They might find an MBA attractive. Or a person that wants to be in the hospital general counsel's office might benefit from an MPH. Those kinds of things.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: I think those are the types of students that you find, where they are giving it that good, hard thought about what their career objectives are and saying, yeah, that's what I want to do.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah. Well, and I remember being that age and thinking, God, well there's so much I am interested in, which is great.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's great. And this is, I think, a great segue. You're saying two credentials not necessarily better than one. You also have to think how much work law school is even just on its own. And so with the timing, I want to talk about timing a little bit, because I usually tell people, if you're considering a dual, a combination degree, you don't have to apply until you're even here as a 1L.
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: So don't feel like-- we do ask on our application, are you considering or have you already applied for another program? Great. We would love to that. But by no means is that necessary. I tell people, come start 1L year, and then see if the workload is-- you're managing it OK and you still think that adding something makes sense.
JASON DUGAS: That's right. And we've seen that-- most of our agreements are, the time frame is that you can do that in the first year. With the MBA, we even changed our agreement with Darden, that you can do it in your second year. You can go through four semesters of law, then go to the first year of the business school, and then come back for the mix of the fourth year.
And that's been popular. That's really grown in popularity.
NATALIE BLAZER: Because then people feel like, OK, I have two years of law school under my belt. I feel more equipped and more sort of-- that totally makes sense to me, actually.
JASON DUGAS: Now, some students might come. They want to know. You're in admissions. They know they want to get a dual degree. And that makes sense. Apply to both. You're going to choose among the schools where you're in both.
NATALIE BLAZER: Totally.
JASON DUGAS: I can see wanting to do that. So we're flexible with either. And when they do put on the application, we like that you ask, because then we can counsel them through, hey, what are you doing? We need to talk to you about credits, what can count before you even show up for law school, what can't.
NATALIE BLAZER: So this is what I want to talk about because this part always kind of confuses me. So let's say somebody is at Darden, our business school. They're in their first year. And they want to apply to the law school. Is it a given that everything they've done at Darden is going to count towards that combination degree?
JASON DUGAS: No, not right now. The ABA is looking at changing some of its rules about credits that can be counted. But currently, the way we administer it, you can only get credits towards the JD that you earn once you become a JD student.
So anything earned prior is not going to be able to be credited. That's not to say it was a waste. You can obviously credit it towards the MBA. And you still have a whole other year of MBA work to do that we're going to be able to get you enough credits that you can count towards your JD.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: The same thing with the MPP. If you did Batten, our public policy school, first, which happens a lot. A lot of students will do that, and then come here. And then they've still got another semester where they'll be at Batten doing a lot of work, where we still can borrow those 12 credits.
NATALIE BLAZER: Sure. I see. OK, so it's an ABA thing. OK, this makes sense.
JASON DUGAS: That's changing, just be candid. I mean, it is changing. I don't know if the law school is going to change with it. The law school might adopt the same, we're only counting JD credits that you earn once you're a JD.
NATALIE BLAZER: But I still think, and tell me if I'm wrong, I still think it makes sense. I mean, if it were me, I would want to get 1L year--
JASON DUGAS: Yeah.
NATALIE BLAZER: --under my belt--
JASON DUGAS: Right.
NATALIE BLAZER: --before I start anything else.
JASON DUGAS: That might be why you see a lot of people ask the questions, but don't go through it. I think that's huge number of people that realize, this JD is going to get me where I want to go. And then the other thing, which I don't know if we've mentioned already, but you can take classes at these other schools, at Darden, at Batten.
You can get history department, English department and have them count. You can take up to 12 credits towards your JD from these other schools without doing the degree.
NATALIE BLAZER: In the graduate program.
JASON DUGAS: In the graduate program.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: You can take an English class that's at the graduate level. Show me the syllabus. Persuade me that it's going to contribute to your legal education, which is not a hard argument to make.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: And we'll count it towards your JD.
NATALIE BLAZER: So 12 credits, so that's roughly, what, four classes?
JASON DUGAS: It's about one a semester, one course a semester after your first year.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK. What about language classes? I get that asked a lot.
JASON DUGAS: That's the one-- in our academic policies, language classes cannot count towards the JD. I think the reasoning is it's not helping you think like a lawyer. It's obviously helping you practice, if you're able to be multilingual. But it's not training your legal brain.
We do have a new class. Well, not new anymore, it's several years old. Professor Sanchez teaches Spanish for lawyers at the law school.
NATALIE BLAZER: And that is what I've been pushing people who ask about Spanish specifically. And I do tell people, if you have language skills and you want to develop them, please, by all means--
JASON DUGAS: You can definitely take the class.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: You just can't get credit.
NATALIE BLAZER: You could take the class. It's just not going to count towards the law degree.
JASON DUGAS: And a handful every year take-- I want to continue my French, or Chinese, or something, and I'm going to take a class. Can I do that? Absolutely.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right. But that's interesting because I never really thought of that. Law students can take classes at the main university that they're not necessarily getting credit for.
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: As long as it works for their schedule--
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: --they're free to just take those.
JASON DUGAS: That's right. As long as it doesn't conflict with something. You can't be two places at once.
NATALIE BLAZER: And do they have to pay?
JASON DUGAS: No.
NATALIE BLAZER: No. OK, so that's all within their tuition.
JASON DUGAS: We've never encountered a limit.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right, right, right.
JASON DUGAS: But they also don't count towards your 17-credit ceiling. We have a limit on the number of credits you can take any given semester towards your JD at 17. But those credits aren't being counted towards your JD. So you could take a 3-credit class and not have it count towards that ceiling.
NATALIE BLAZER: This is the episode for overachievers because, like I said, most people, myself included, when they get to law school, they're like, OK, I have my hands full. But there are people out there who want to do it. And look, you're at a place like UVA. I totally, like I said, get the impulse to want to take advantage of things.
JASON DUGAS: That's right. I was the same. There's enough on the buffet here for me to enjoy.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's right. That's right. OK, so that's combination degrees. And we will probably come back to those. But I also want to point out what we've touched on, now we call them dual degrees, our sort of external three programs with Tufts, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins. So can you talk about what those are?
JASON DUGAS: Sure. Essentially, they're similar. We will borrow up to 14 credits from those programs. You would normally take four semesters in those. You'll do them in three. And you'll normally do a law degree in six semesters. And you can do it in five. So it's the same eight semesters.
It's four years of study, you'll have to figure out your three semesters there. Some people do your 1L year, then take a year and go to the other, or three semesters straight, just do three semesters straight. We had a student that just did that.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: And then come back and finish. Or you could do two semesters before coming to law school, start law school, and then just go back for one more semester at some point before you graduate. So there's lots of ways. You just have to get those three semesters in over at the other school and five here.
NATALIE BLAZER: So this is very interesting. So with a combination degree, the ones within the University of Virginia-- OK, let's say someone does their 1L year. They say, I want to do my JD MBA. They do 1L year. Then they have options though. They could then go to Darden, the business school, and do a whole year there.
JASON DUGAS: Each school wants you to marinate in their first-year program, just totally in their program.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: Just like us. So we kind of have the person for the first-year program. So they do, in your example, 1L us. Then they go away for first year at Darden.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: And then they come back and for the next two years they're doing a mixture.
NATALIE BLAZER: So with the dual degrees with Princeton, Tufts, and Johns Hopkins-- and those, by the way, we should say, those are all in the public affairs.
JASON DUGAS: Public affairs, international diplomacy.
NATALIE BLAZER: Diplomacy kind of, all law adjacent, I would say, things. The difference with those is that there's no real sharing time.
JASON DUGAS: That's right. Yeah, you're there.
NATALIE BLAZER: You're physically there. You're doing it.
JASON DUGAS: And this is really in the weeds, but we technically have you go on leave of absence because in order to get federal aid at the other school, you have to be severed from us. And so we put you on leave of absence. And then they can go to the other school, get loans, all that stuff.
NATALIE BLAZER: I'm getting so educated in the first few minutes of this. I mean, I think I've been giving vaguely the right answers to people. But this is going to help people a lot.
JASON DUGAS: And I don't know if we've talked about what our programs are in the dual, or sorry, the combination. We have an MBA. We have programs with the Darden business school, the MBA, the med school, the MD, the Batten School of Public Policy, the MPP. We have an agreement with McIntire, our School of Commerce for the masters of accounting.
We have six master's degrees with our graduate arts and sciences, history, foreign affairs, environmental science, philosophy, English, and government. We have the master's of public health and a master's of urban and environmental planning with the architecture school.
NATALIE BLAZER: See, I'm already-- I get why people are excited and want to do one of these.
JASON DUGAS: Absolutely.
NATALIE BLAZER: And we mentioned that short of doing something that's going to take extra time, and money, and all that, you can do the 12 credits--
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: --at any of the other graduate programs. How often do people do that?
JASON DUGAS: Take classes at the university?
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: It's not as popular as I would think.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: We probably-- less than 10 every semester.
NATALIE BLAZER: And I think that speaks to-- I tell people this too. Our electives at the law school are so vast. I mean, yes, of course they're all legal related. They have to do with the law. But they're really, I would call them interdisciplinary. So I can imagine why people don't necessarily feel like, well, this one topic I'm so interested in, I can't even touch on it in the law school just because there are so many things to choose from.
JASON DUGAS: We have a ton of classes. I help design the curriculum every year with our Associate Dean of Curricular Programs, Quinn Curtis.
NATALIE BLAZER: Nicest man ever.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, exactly. It's so much fun to put it together and see what our faculty are offering. And it's new things every year.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah. Well, I was catching up with a faculty member today in the hall. And he was telling me the class he's teaching this semester. And I'm like, can I audit that? That sounds fascinating.
JASON DUGAS: Right.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK, so I kind of want to pivot for a moment from the combination dual degrees to study abroad.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah.
NATALIE BLAZER: This is also something we get a lot of questions about. And my impression is because of the COVID era, some college students who were in college during COVID maybe were planning to study abroad or wanted to study abroad and just literally couldn't. And so my impression is that this question has become much more popular because suddenly they're like, well, I still want to study abroad. Maybe I can do it in law school. Did you guys see an uptick?
JASON DUGAS: Somewhat in applications. We are still limited in the number of what we call nominations. We have 12 partner schools and basically two per school. We have to stay in balance.
NATALIE BLAZER: I see.
JASON DUGAS: --in our sending and taking of exchange students. But yes, we did see a bit of an increase, but not a huge one after the pandemic in applications.
NATALIE BLAZER: In applications.
JASON DUGAS: And then they just got a little bit more competitive.
NATALIE BLAZER: And is this just for 3Ls?
JASON DUGAS: It is. It's for first semester 3L, fall of your 3L year.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK. Can you go for a full year?
JASON DUGAS: We have one program that is full year. It's Sciences Po in Paris. That's a dual degree program, which we should have added to our list of dual degrees.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yes.
JASON DUGAS: I think of it in the study abroad category.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right. Me too.
JASON DUGAS: But it is definitely a dual degree. You can go there and sit for the French bar after you graduate. You get a master's in economic law. And you're eligible for the French bar exam. And we usually send two. If there's extraordinary circumstances, we may get the law school to approve one more. And we did that this year. We have three.
NATALIE BLAZER: I was going to say I know we have three there because there was just a nice article about it.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah.
NATALIE BLAZER: Now I'm like, if I could go back, maybe I would do that one. I was a French minor. And what I personally did, and the advice that I sometimes give people, is if going abroad doesn't necessarily make sense for you during the school year, I found ways to go abroad both summers and after graduation, for work-related reasons.
So I have FOMO. And so I didn't want to be gone during the school year. And I think a lot of people, they get to UVA Law. They get their community. They see all the things we offer right here on North grounds. And they're like, how am I going to be gone a semester?
JASON DUGAS: And I think it's similar to the combination degree calculus. It doesn't make sense for my professional career goals. And that's what it should be driven by. And talk to career services, talk to career development.
NATALIE BLAZER: So we have Paris.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah.
NATALIE BLAZER: Seoul. I know we have one in Australia.
JASON DUGAS: That's right. We have Australia. We have Sydney and Melbourne.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: We have Bocconi in Milan.
NATALIE BLAZER: Nice.
JASON DUGAS: Bucerius in Hamburg, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Jindal University in India. That's our newest exchange program. Melbourne. We already talked about Seoul. Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: Auckland University. University of Auckland I should say.
NATALIE BLAZER: In New Zealand.
JASON DUGAS: In New Zealand. And Paris Panthéon-Assas in Paris. And then Sydney. And the last one is Waseda in Tokyo.
NATALIE BLAZER: Amazing. That is just awesome. So is there a study abroad that is the most, I would say, quote unquote "competitive"?
JASON DUGAS: You would think. Sometimes it's very like-- Bocconi, The Instituto de Empresa in Madrid. Paris has been very popular. We've only had that one for three or four years, Bocconi for three or four years. Those have been consistently two students.
And so we have to try to always be in balance. The students pay our tuition. Our students pay our tuition and then go abroad.
NATALIE BLAZER: Sure.
JASON DUGAS: And the same thing inbound. So the Virginia legislature has a law. Basically, we can't give away free.
NATALIE BLAZER: We're not just going to give-- right.
JASON DUGAS: So we have to stay in balance as strictly as possible. But we recognize that--
NATALIE BLAZER: It's not always going to work out perfectly.
JASON DUGAS: Exactly.
NATALIE BLAZER: So what about language requirements?
JASON DUGAS: So all of our programs are English speaking. But I think the committee that decides our nominees looks favorably on someone who's going to immerse themselves in the culture because like I said, it's a nomination. Some of them are competitive. And they want students that are going to really take full advantage.
NATALIE BLAZER: And when does that application process start?
JASON DUGAS: It's going on right now. The application-- we had a Q&A about it in early October. Usually it's early October. The application is due by the 31st of October. The committee takes November to look through and decide. And then we're notifying by exam season.
NATALIE BLAZER: Got it.
JASON DUGAS: And then the spring is spent with the other school. They are going to that other school. They have to do whatever that other school tells them. And that's also part of the learning process is navigating another program, another school--
NATALIE BLAZER: Sure.
JASON DUGAS: --because not all schools are--
NATALIE BLAZER: All that administrative stuff. So if our committee approves them, that's it. They're approved.
JASON DUGAS: They're approved.
NATALIE BLAZER: And then they just have to do all the--
JASON DUGAS: They have to apply to the other school. The school always reserves the right to say, you nominated someone that--
NATALIE BLAZER: That we're not going to take.
JASON DUGAS: But I've never seen that.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK. OK, good.
JASON DUGAS: It's never happened. I think there was a time when Sciences Po did have more of a language requirement. They now do not. And so we would have our students interview in French with one of our faculty members who's fluent in French.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: And there was one time that a student kind of had less French fluency than they would have liked. But they still got to go.
NATALIE BLAZER: They still got to go. Well, part of me is like, if you're getting the dual degree with Sciences Po and you're going to sit for the French bar, you got to speak French.
JASON DUGAS: Right. And that one is competitive. I would say lately in the last several years, that one has grown. Now that they don't have the language as much, it's gotten more competitive. So now the committee is, I think, looking more towards, who is fluent or close to, or taken several years, or something?
NATALIE BLAZER: That makes sense. So we talked about tuition and how when you study abroad, you're still paying the law school's tuition. For the other programs, the combination degrees and the dual degrees, how does that work? I mean, obviously, you're going to be overall paying more money.
JASON DUGAS: Yes. Yeah, if you're doing seven semesters for a master's of English and a law degree, you're going to do five semesters of law tuition and two semesters of GSAS, Graduate Arts and Sciences.
NATALIE BLAZER: Got it.
JASON DUGAS: Same thing for Darden. You're going to do three semesters of Darden. And that all tracks with the school of enrollment. Whatever school of enrollment kind of holds you that semester is the tuition you pay. So yeah.
NATALIE BLAZER: Well, and I'll point out here that if you get a scholarship from the admissions office from the law school, that only can be applied towards JD tuition.
JASON DUGAS: That's right. That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: And we say very explicitly in our scholarship letter, this is subject to if you do a joint degree, da, da, da.
JASON DUGAS: It's only for our--
NATALIE BLAZER: For our classes, and so on.
JASON DUGAS: I would say-- one other thing while we're on study abroad, there's a couple other categories of ways to get out of Charlottesville and into international programs. We have what's called a student-initiated study abroad. It's rigorous. But it's essentially, I want to go to a place that's not on your list.
And I've worked out the program. I have a sponsor there. I have a reason to go there. There's something that they do that I'm not seeing anywhere in our curriculum, something like that, where you convince the committee to say, you can go for a semester there. And you also do an independent research with a faculty member here to do 15 credits of student-initiated study abroad.
So we've had-- the last ones we did were probably three or four years ago. We had one student go into Copenhagen.
NATALIE BLAZER: Oh, cool.
JASON DUGAS: We had a student go to Geneva. We had a student go to China. And so that's not common. It's a lift administratively.
NATALIE BLAZER: Totally.
JASON DUGAS: And you do have to pay your tuition here, as well as the other school. But law schools abroad are not nearly as costly. And we also contribute some.
NATALIE BLAZER: But you have to be a real true self-starter--
JASON DUGAS: Exactly. You have to do it--
NATALIE BLAZER: --and come up with this.
JASON DUGAS: --and propose it to the committee.
NATALIE BLAZER: And then you said there was another?
JASON DUGAS: Well, you can an externship. You can do a full-time externship anywhere in the world, including abroad.
NATALIE BLAZER: And so how does that work?
JASON DUGAS: So we have a Director of Externships, Professor Ryan, Sprightley Ryan. And you apply before you have the externship, you can say, this is my plan. And it gets approved by the curriculum committee to say, yes, you've got a sponsor here. You've got a supervisor here that's going to supervise your program and help you with the directed study. And you're going to try to get this externship, which sounds amazing.
And it's usually public focus, public, non-for-profit. You can't go to a firm or company, for example. And then you go get the extras. You got to get the job.
NATALIE BLAZER: You have to go apply--
JASON DUGAS: You have to get the job.
NATALIE BLAZER: --and get that. It's not like we have a relationship with that organization and say--
JASON DUGAS: We may have. I mean, Professor Ryan-- we have lots of deep relationships.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: But yeah, we're not here to say, oh, here's your externship.
NATALIE BLAZER: Correct. Right. You have to go and you have to get it. And then we have approved you to. So is there someone in recent or a place in recent memory?
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, we have people go-- I think right now we have one in London. We have people go, yeah, all over.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's amazing. So I did not really that. I know we had the externship in DC. I know we have various externships in Charlottesville with different nonprofits. But that is really cool.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, It is.
NATALIE BLAZER: And is that for a year or a semester?
JASON DUGAS: It's just a semester.
NATALIE BLAZER: Semester, OK.
JASON DUGAS: It can be. We just approved now full-time externships can be in your sixth semester. It used to be that you could only do them in your fifth or your fourth. Now you can do it in the last semester. Whether or not want to do that, you'd be out of Charlottesville in the spring of your last year--
NATALIE BLAZER: Sure, sure.
JASON DUGAS: --working instead of enjoying Charlottesville and maybe taking a lighter course load.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right. All the second semester 3L things.
JASON DUGAS: Right.
NATALIE BLAZER: So there's also, I should point out, a couple obviously, shorter frames. But we have J terms that go abroad. We have winter break. Talk about those kind of week-long type things students can do.
JASON DUGAS: We have two J-term abroad programs, one in Paris, one in Tel Aviv. We paused the Tel Aviv one. It's taught by a resident faculty member, Michal Brzuza. And she's not doing it this year for obvious reasons. But we have one in Paris.
We take the applications from students in September. And then my office starts enrolling them. If we get more applications than there are seats, we prioritize LMs and 3Ls and then 2Ls and then 1Ls.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: So right now it is full with 20. But there's a bit of a waitlist.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: It's usually during our January term. It's usually like January 7th to the 15th, around there. So it's about a week. And it's usually classes in the morning, 9:00 to 11:30. And then they do fun stuff in the afternoon. They meet with Supreme Court Justices and go to different agencies and meet people.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: It's really amazing. People that have done it really love it. I've been advocating that we have more of those kind of to do because I think students really do-- they may not want to do a full semester abroad, as we've talked about. But they would love a one or two-week intensive study of an issue abroad.
NATALIE BLAZER: Well, then there's spring break service trips and so on. I know some of our students went to South Africa last year. I feel like there's a lot of--
JASON DUGAS: Those aren't for credit, though.
NATALIE BLAZER: Those are like a pro bono trip. OK. OK. So you're right. Those aren't for credit.
JASON DUGAS: We do have another. It's called the Human Rights Study Project. It's a year-long class taught by Professor Sanchez, where they will pick a country and study it and decide to go and make all sorts of arrangements to meet with, interview people, and talk, and document it, and come back, and present to the community what they've found and what they want to do.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah, I feel like they went to Kenya a couple of years ago. I mean, that's just amazing.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, Kenya to Columbia to-- yeah, I'm blanking on lots of places.
NATALIE BLAZER: Lots of ways to just for credit alone to go for a short amount of time, for a longer amount of time. I mentioned there's service trips. I mentioned I personally made my summer job. This all depends. I'm just somebody who likes to be abroad. Half my family's abroad.
So if it's something that's important to you, I think we've established there are multiple ways to do that--
JASON DUGAS: Yes, there are.
NATALIE BLAZER: --without necessarily feeling like you're sacrificing a semester in Charlottesville. So graduation, that's another thing. If you do a combination degree, you might not graduate--
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: --at the same time as the people you started with.
JASON DUGAS: That's right. Some people, they start at, like I said, Batten or Darden, Batten MPP or the Darden MBA or one of our external collaborators. They do a year. And then they start as a 1L. You're on track with your 1L class and you're going to graduate. But if you decide to do a master's, you might take a seventh semester.
What you'll do is you'll participate in graduation. If you've finished your JD requirements, we will let you participate in the ceremony. But you will not get your degree conferred until you finish both.
NATALIE BLAZER: That makes sense.
JASON DUGAS: That's a university rule. We're not going to confer one and then another. You get both. It may impact your State Bar some states will let you take if you finish your JD requirements. Some states want you to have that degree in hand. And so that's a consideration. But most people, I think they either are fine with lining themselves up with their graduation class.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right. Right. I think it all comes back to if the combination degree, or the study abroad, or the dual degree makes sense for your goals, these are just all things you have to think about. And people do it. And they do it with success and all of that. But you just have to work out, oh--
JASON DUGAS: What matters to me professionally.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right. Right. And when am I going to sit for the bar? When am I going to graduate? These are things that you need to be aware of.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, 98% of our students follow a very, very tight path. Six semesters, take the bar in July, on their way. But for a handful, they're slightly different. We're here to support.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we've fully covered sort of those degrees and the study abroad. I want to talk a little bit about what else your office does because that's just one small part. I would argue a pretty small part of what your office actually does.
JASON DUGAS: Throughout this whole thing, it's a big lift administratively for a very few number of students. But it's a lot of work to manage someone through these dual degrees or through a study abroad, matching up their credits, making sure they're taking classes that are going to count towards the JD, not just taking a class that doesn't count, making sure they keep up with their other graduation requirements towards the degree, upper level writing, professional skills, racism, bias, and cross cultural competency, all those things.
So those are things we're monitoring for all of our student body. But we pay really close attention, we give a lot of counseling to our dual degree and study abroad students so that they remain on track.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah, yeah.
JASON DUGAS: The dual degree, I like to say, it should be hard to do in the classroom, but it shouldn't be hard outside of it. And that's what we do. So I appreciate you asking. But other things we do, we administer the exams. As you know, we have a flexible exam system, meaning you can-- not for our 1Ls. Our 1Ls are fixed.
They take it on a certain day. We hand it to them. They take it. We collect it. Other students have a flexible period, two-week period of I'm not ready to take my exam yet. I'm going to show up three days from now and take it. They show up. And we have to be ready to go. So that's a fun system to do. I enjoy that time of year counseling students through that.
They're at their most stressed. But we try to make it as-- they're stressed about the schoolwork, about their classwork, not about how does the system work? It's a really easy system.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah, you guys make it really, really easy and straightforward. I will say I love-- you ask for volunteers every year to help proctor the 1L exams because, like you said, those are fixed. Your contracts exam, your criminal law exam, your torts exam, they're at the same day and time as every single other 1L. So I love to proctor these exams because not only am I like, wait, I just admitted you seemingly a minute ago. And here you are sitting for your first exam.
And the first exam, they're just like, no one's talking. Everyone's reviewing their outlines. I'm handing them out. I'm saying good luck. Don't forget your blind grading number, all this stuff. And then I swear, by the last exam, they're like walking in two minutes before it's going to start. They are chatting with each other up until the last second.
It's amazing because you get through that first one and--
JASON DUGAS: It kind of comes into perspective. It's like, this is important, but I'm going to do fine.
NATALIE BLAZER: But I'm so proud. I'm like that. I love doing that because it's like, you know that after this they're going to feel so much more confident going forward because it's such a big kind of milestone to cross.
JASON DUGAS: So that's a fun thing we like to do that takes up a lot of our energy. And then during the semester, we have short course exams, midterms, things like that to administer. There's a lot more short courses now than there ever were.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: And that takes a lot of attention administratively. We do the grading process, collecting grades, administering the grading norms, all that kind of stuff.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: And then my biggest other thing is designing the curriculum with the faculty and scheduling it and putting it out there, putting the details out there on the website so the students can see what is offered? What are the requirements? What am I going to be asked to do? Am I going to be asked to do an exam? Am I going to do a paper? What kind of paper?
I like to collect as much as I can from the faculty and put it out there on the website.
NATALIE BLAZER: So people know.
JASON DUGAS: So people what they're getting into. That's not to say it's a syllabus. But it's at least it's supposed to be a good information for the student to make a decision. And our lottery just opened today. Our enrollment process, we call it a lottery, for spring classes just opened today for 3Ls and LMs. So they're on their way.
NATALIE BLAZER: So can you explain a little how that works?
JASON DUGAS: Sure. Absolutely. So the start of our enrollment system of our process starts with students deciding. They come up with a list of classes. And that's really all the lottery is. It's a system where they put together a list in the order in which they think is best. We ask them to put 20 to 30 courses on the list.
They can all conflict in time. And there can be a bunch of conflicts in there of duplicate courses. I want to take evidence. And there's three sections of it. I can put all three on there. I want to take antitrust. And there's two of that. And I'm going to put both on there. I want to take corporations, but only with this one professor.
NATALIE BLAZER: Does that help their chances of getting it if they put all three sections?
JASON DUGAS: No. Chances are they'll get one of them.
NATALIE BLAZER: OK.
JASON DUGAS: But the system, the beautiful thing about the system, so you put the list together. And then we collect all of those. And then we have this system, this algorithm that runs. What it does is it gives-- let's say there's 300 participants. I'll just make up a number. 300 participants in that lottery. It gives each one of them a number 1 through 300.
And then it's going to go to number one and say, OK, let's look at your list. I'm going to find one class on your list to put you in. And I'm going to go from top to bottom. So number one is going to get there if they did things right. If they didn't put a class with the prereq they don't have or something like that. They're going to get it.
Then it goes to number two. It doesn't go through their whole list. It gives them one class. And then it goes to the second person and it gives them one class, and the third, and the fourth, all the way through the 300th. So depending on what each student wants-- students have different interests, different desires. all that.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: So it's going to put their classes. And maybe along the way things are starting to get full. So it's going to say, OK, your number one class, it's full. Let's go to number two. Oh, number two, it's full too. Go to number three. OK, we gave you number three. Now it goes to the next person. Once it gets to all 300, it gives everybody a new number.
And it goes through it again and again, until they have a full--
NATALIE BLAZER: How long does that take?
JASON DUGAS: It takes about a minute.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's amazing.
JASON DUGAS: And then we audit it. We go through it and make sure. And it spits out a message for each course. It's like, OK, you didn't get this course. It finds one reason why you didn't get the course. There may be multiple.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JASON DUGAS: This course was full. This course you didn't have a prerequisite. You have a time conflict with this one. So you already got this course. You got antitrust with this professor. Now we're not going to give you another one.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: So it's doing all of that. And it gives the student a schedule to start with. It gives them up to 15 credits. If they do what we tell them, it's going to give them 15 credits.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: And then what we do is we upload that to SIS, our Student Information System. And then it's add/drop. They can make adjustments on their own.
NATALIE BLAZER: Right.
JASON DUGAS: And that's a first come, first serve system. So the beautiful thing about our lottery, it wasn't first come, first serve. They could put that list together anytime.
NATALIE BLAZER: Do they know if they were number one the first round?
JASON DUGAS: Uh-uh.
NATALIE BLAZER: They're never going to that, right?
JASON DUGAS: No.
NATALIE BLAZER: I just think that's--
JASON DUGAS: They don't.
NATALIE BLAZER: --just kind of funny. So then they can do add/drop.
JASON DUGAS: And they can say, oh, my God. Most people I think like what they get generally. That's the beautiful thing about it. It's giving you basically-- it may not give you everything you want. But I got three out of my top six. I got four out of my top five. But I still want to be on the waitlist for this other class. So I'm going to go into add/drop when it opens.
It's usually a week or two later. And I'm going to put myself on the waitlist for that class. And that's just add/drop. That lasts a while, especially between the fall and the spring. It starts in mid November. And it ends late January. So it's a long period of long time.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's a long time. So you can be trying to work add/drop for weeks.
JASON DUGAS: Exactly.
NATALIE BLAZER: Wow. OK. I mean, this is one of those things. Talk about when things go right. Nobody is noticing. I'm in my class. Great.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah, I got my class.
NATALIE BLAZER: Here I am. And the lights are on. So you obviously were a student here.
JASON DUGAS: I was.
NATALIE BLAZER: Graduated in '01. Do you have a favorite memory from your time as a student?
JASON DUGAS: Oh, my goodness. So many.
NATALIE BLAZER: Or just like a favorite overall thing?
JASON DUGAS: Gosh, that's really hard. I mean, so many. 1L year was exciting. You're sectioning and meeting your classmates. And kind of coming to law school so excited for this endeavor you're about to do. And I think 1L is just that.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah.
JASON DUGAS: Another experience just popped in my head. The PILA auction every year. For the audience, it's a chance to give money to the Public Interest Law Association, raise funds for students that are maybe going to unpaid internships in the public sector. So every year they organize this wonderful event, this auction, where the community members, businesses, faculty members will donate various things.
Students will donate. They'll donate their time as babysitters or as I'll teach you how to make pasta or how to bake pies or whatever. And faculty members will, you can have a beach house for a week or whatever. John Grisham, a local resident, donated dinner with him with 10 students to chat and to watch a movie, one of his books made into a movie and just have dinner.
And so me and nine of my friends, we bid on that and won.
NATALIE BLAZER: Oh, my God, so fun.
JASON DUGAS: And it was fantastic. He was so generous with his time.
NATALIE BLAZER: Did you watch The Firm?
JASON DUGAS: We watched the Pelican Brief. No, The Rainmaker. Sorry, The Rainmaker, the one with Matt Damon.
NATALIE BLAZER: There's so many to choose from.
JASON DUGAS: It was The Rainmaker with Matt Damon, and Danny DeVito. And Jon Voight I think was in it.
NATALIE BLAZER: Amazing.
JASON DUGAS: Yeah.
NATALIE BLAZER: Wow. That must have been awesome.
JASON DUGAS: It was incredible.
NATALIE BLAZER: I don't even want to what that went for.
JASON DUGAS: It was not bad. But it was a chunk of money.
NATALIE BLAZER: Because I now the last two years have auctioned off a guest spot on this show.
JASON DUGAS: Oh really?
NATALIE BLAZER: And had guests on who bid on it. So PILA supported me during my time in law school. So I'm happy to give back. But it's no dinner with John Grisham.
JASON DUGAS: It was incredible.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's amazing.
JASON DUGAS: The other one was a dinner with, graduation dinner with Anne Coughlin. She had us over and a couple friends. And it was also incredible.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's really amazing. That's memories of a lifetime.
JASON DUGAS: So I should have said that one. That's definitely a highlight. But I was thinking more of in the classroom or something.
NATALIE BLAZER: Totally. I know. There's a lot to choose from. Going to professor's houses, for me, those are the times that stick out because you're just like, at least I was still so in awe of them. But I'm like, you're also a real person. Here's your house. Here's your dog or whatever.
JASON DUGAS: Did you do a seminar on ethical values, those year-long--
NATALIE BLAZER: I did not. And I would say if I had to do one thing differently, I would do one of those.
JASON DUGAS: Oh, OK
NATALIE BLAZER: Because those, I think, are just--
JASON DUGAS: I did one with Professor Rutherglen and Professor Dudley.
NATALIE BLAZER: For folks who don't know what the seminar on ethical values course is, can you just describe it?
JASON DUGAS: Sure. Most of them are year long. We do offer a few faculty members that want to do just a single semester. They're essentially book club around--
NATALIE BLAZER: Book club for lawyers.
JASON DUGAS: Book club for lawyers, where you're getting together with faculty members, usually in their homes and talking about subjects that range. But they have something to do with the ethical lawyering, thinking, growing your mind as a lawyer about issues. And they're usually centered around a theme. And ours was on government lawyering, but through all these different books and topics.
And one of them was written by Evan Thomas. We read his biography of RFK, our alum. And he came and spoke at our little 10-person seminar on ethical values at the professor's house. It was fantastic.
NATALIE BLAZER: That's really cool.
JASON DUGAS: Another one was written by a lawyer in the southern part of Virginia about a death penalty case. And he came and spoke. It was incredible. It was just really amazing.
NATALIE BLAZER: Just things you're not going to be able to do outside of those precious three years, the things that you can take advantage of while you're here. It's amazing. So I know we're, oh, my gosh, running long. Since the audience is, for the most part, prospective law students, people working on their applications or thinking about law school or whatever, what advice can you offer to people who are applying to law school or thinking about where they want to go?
JASON DUGAS: About applying to law school, I think the advice I tend to give is get as up close to lawyering as you can. And I mean lawyering, not law, not I took a class. Obviously great to take classes in undergrad or wherever about the topics of law. But really get to see as up close as you can, whether that's volunteering or going to work as a paralegal or going to work as a clerk or going to do just making copies at a firm, whatever it is, where you can see what lawyers do on a day-to-day basis is valuable because as you know, it's not necessarily represented on the TV, in the movies about what lawyers.
They're not always making an argument or persuading.
NATALIE BLAZER: It's not all The Firm and Pelican Brief.
JASON DUGAS: But it is a lot of reading. It's a lot of writing. It's a lot of on the phone. It's a lot of talking. It's a lot of talking and a lot of talking. And it's a lot of just negotiating and persuading. And if that's something you see, OK. And it's very creative. It's a very creative profession. A lot of creativity involved in what we do as lawyers.
NATALIE BLAZER: And I will say, though, it's also a lot of details. And it's a lot of organization. And it's, I'll just be honest, it's a lot of sometimes tedium that you just have to know. I personally like that stuff. Give me a task. And if you say it's kind of a menial task, I'm like, give it to me. I love this. I know I can do a good job.
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: If you need like a brainstorming session, I'm like ugh. So I like that. And I know it's very important to know your skill set. But it's also important to be around lawyers and be like, oh, they had to think about this and how it connects to that. And you kind of have to be aware of those details at all times.
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: Anything else before we go that you want to make sure listeners know?
JASON DUGAS: Get up close to lawyering. The other thing I would say is there's kind of two things that students seem to think that lawyers do. There's either, I'm going to be a litigator. I'm going to do transactional. And the law does break down a lot like that. I would say to a student or a prospective lawyer, litigation is a lot of what we see lawyers do, A versus B, adversarial process.
The thing that I would say to ask yourself and to be honest with yourself about is, do you like being in an adversarial posture? That's not to say, do I like being oppositional? You can be a perfectly pleasant person. But are you comfortable being in a position of being adversarial with another person's ideas? I think if I had talked to myself about that more, I might have said, I don't know if I like being in litigation.
Litigation was fun, but it was challenging to take that home every day. If you're not comfortable with that-- I'm not arguing with this person. It's about my client's facts. It's about my client's issues. It's not me personally. But if you're not used to that or comfortable with that, then transactional might be something. Or think about what you're doing in litigation, what you like in that process.
You might not be the one making the case. But you might be behind the scenes. That's probably where I would have been if I'd stuck with doing it. I would have been a support, I think, a support lawyer.
NATALIE BLAZER: Yeah. And I think taking advantage of our obviously, career counseling and having them help you understand, again, your strengths, your interests, where those things align, and also being willing to accept the fact that all lawyering is going to be difficult. And you're not going to love every minute of it.
JASON DUGAS: That's right.
NATALIE BLAZER: And I think as long as you are willing to work hard and, again, you find something that you connect with, I think that's where people can really succeed.
JASON DUGAS: I agree. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a wonderful visit.
NATALIE BLAZER: Oh, thank you, Jason. It was awesome to have you on the show. And I'm really, really excited for listeners to hear this because I have sort of glossed over this and learned a lot today.
JASON DUGAS: I hope they listen to it all. We went on for a while.
NATALIE BLAZER: We did.
This has been Admissible with me, Dean Natalie Blazer, at the University of Virginia School of Law. My guest today was Assistant Dean for Academic Services and Registrar Jason Dugas. For more information about UVA Law, please visit law.virginia.edu. The next episode of Admissible will be out soon.
In the meantime, you can follow the show on Instagram at @admissablepodcast. And as a reminder, Admissible is now on YouTube. You can check out all new episodes there, along with some vintage content we're sharing to help guide you through this application season.
Thanks so much for listening. And please remember to rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
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