It's a Big Coincidence or a Big Conspiracy

You thought you'd be spared from listening to me rant about law school some more?! HAHAHA, you lose!!

First thought I should really keep in mind, the best thing to help me make up my mind about law school is law school itself. As I get closer to that building I want to projectile vomit all the way into Ohio. Sitting in the class rooms, listening to the professors put on their high and mighty 'we rule the world, you lose forever' attitude.. ugh!

And today was an ESPECIALLY crazy day, though!

First, as I walked into my first class this morning, trays of cupcakes were all over the tables. Now you know, there's nothing I love more than cupcakes. Plus, they were funfetti cupcakes! We're talking serious crack for me! Instead of excitement though, fear struck my heart. The last time there were cupcakes in contracts it was because this girl had a nervous breakdown over the weekend and then thanked us all (for ?) and told us how proud she was of us.

Well, today was no different. But I did help myself to a cupcake.

In my next class a girl bitched at the professor. It was really weird. All the laid-back guys suddenly woke up from their daydreaming and started making loud comments about how this was 'just like middle school.' She tried to defend herself, but when you're crazy... you're crazy!

In my last class of the day, the professor told us how worried she is about all of us because we don't realize how much debt we're going to be in 'for the rest of your lives' ... and how little we've learned... and worried she is for our futures. Yes... yes....

I must say, it hurts me that I don't enjoy this more. I always fancied myself a scholar, an academic, a cut above, a thinker, a lover of knowledge. I feel like this should be right up my alley. But I can't fake it; it's NOT!

Law school googling of the day reveals this fun piece:

Law school is held up in the humanities as the great rationalizer--that which will offer the artsy kid who majors in English because he likes to read passage into a lucrative, steady, mobile, potentially socially responsible career. At Penn, at least, a large number of English majors go on to law school, which their parents respect, and which as such justifies majoring in English (which many parents, thinking about how much tuition they pay, and how little earning power Jane will have with her B. A. in women's writing, do not respect). On the surface of it, this works out for everyone: English majors do have good luck getting into law school, and all that practice close reading novels and poems serves them well when it comes time to studying the textual and logical intricacies of the law.

If you're lucky, you'll end up at a big firm where you'll make decent money right off the bat. But even if you're quite smart, most of you won't. Fortunately, almost all of you find a job. But it'll pay only about $20,000.00 US. You'll make this for about 5 years, all the while working at least 60 70 hours a week. And here's the kicker, only about 50% of you will survive. You put in 5 years of slave labour and at the end about half of you are too tired/exhausted/burnt-out/bored/sick unproductive to go on. The profession counts on about 50% of you to do grunt work and then move on. Sound familiar.

It just keeps getting better from here (I've bolded particular areas):

The work itself is absolutely brutal. You need a thick, thick skin. Even if lawyers are sometimes unfairly maligned, by the very nature of the work you often find yourself in what is just about the moral sewer of the universe. A law office is a perpetual crisis, and there is always someone on the other end trying to prove you are wrong. And yet, while in these and many other ways, the work is incredibly difficult, and while it certainly requires what I call cunning, there is rarely much to directly challenge the intellect. You find yourself, incredibly, both absolutely bored and absolutely terrified.

So where does your interest in the arts or humanities fit in. Like to do any serious reading, well forget about it. In Search of Lost Time is just not compatible with 60-70 hour weeks. Survive those first five years, and maybe you'll only be working 50 hours a week. But perhaps, just perhaps your wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend will want to spend some actual time with you after barely seeing you for the last half decade. Not to mention children. No my friend your life of the intellect is OVER. This profession is one where you succeed only if you eliminate every other real interest from your life. You are a priest of the law; you must commit yourself absolutely to her. She is very jealous and admits of no rivals.

Just to interject again, this next paragraph is another argument I've tried to give my parents. They won't buy it, though... they won't buy any of it.

One thing is for sure, a legal career is not for someone who has any serious interest in the arts or humanities. At best you'll be able to cuddle up to your money at night after your long day of mindnumbing, soulless work, and at worst you'll end up as tired, and as broke, as ever a jobless humanities PhD. And to my mind, if you're going to suffer, better to suffer for something you really believe in, like John Milton or Emily Dickinson, rather than suffer for the statutory code of Nevada or your boss's bank account.

But, it's easy to just hate all over law school and lawyering. It's an easy target.. fish in a barrel. That's why I got that book (see post below) to help me look at things rationally and make a calm decision. I don't want to go nuts here.

There are a bunch of comments to this post. I didn't read all of them cause they started to make me panic a bit. But here's one that I thought was decent,

But here's a big secret: It's not really about the job -- but about YOU.

You see, also like everything else in life, being a lawyer will be rewarding in a fashion commensurate to the effort and sincerity with which you pursue it. There's nothing magical about the occupation: it won't make a happy person out of a cretin, and it won't destroy someone with clarity of purpose.

If you go to law school by default, or because your parents want you to, you are going to be miserable. But you'd be miserable no matter what you did, because you don't really have any idea what it is you want.

The reason the law chews up people and spits them out is the same reason grad schools chew up people and spit them out: there are a LOT of people there who don't really want to be there -- they just didn't know what else to do.

So for the wayward English Major who thinks law school is a ticket out of uncertainty, I can only say one thing: the only ticket out of uncertainty is certainty

I am afraid of that. What if I'll be miserable at anything because I don't know what I want? But the flip side, guess you don't know what you want until you try it and either love it or hate it.