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When Law School Sucks
Nikki, Esq. has hit a low low on the road to becoming a lawyer, the low point which I'm currently most afraid of facing myself all too soon: drowning in debt, hating what I'm doing, and trapped doing it because of said debt. The advice from Bill Alltreuter in Nikki's comments are helpful, and I hope he's right. The trouble with big life decisions like this is you just can never be sure. Is X better than Y? There's no way to know until you're in the middle of it. And even then, it's hard to know because once you're through the middle, on the back side somewhere, things can look different yet again. In optimistic mode, that's probably what makes life fun. In pessimistic mode, it just sucks.
Posted February 9, 2003 09:57 AM | law school
I can really sympathize with Nikki's pdebt/school/life choice issues. I've been there myself (only it was grad school, not law school but my total debt is over $100,000). I can tell you from experience that you just find a way to work it.
So you discover you don't want to be an X, but you have the skills of an X -- and you ask yourself, what else can you do with those skills, and who will pay you for it? It really, really sucks and it's a hard process, but eventually you find a way to take the X skills you have and apply them to Q, which perhaps you never knew you were interested in, but through luck you learned about from a friend.
And Q turns out to be really interesting and fun, and your X skills turn out to be more useful to you than you thought they would be, and one morning, you find yourself thinking "thank god I have X skills, because now I have a unique take on Q that no one else has, and that improves both my market value and my job satisfaction."
I'm sorry to hi-jack your comments like this, but I really want to assure you that even if these "worst case" fears come to pass, whatever skills you've aquired can become assets (and your post hit close to home).
I know a handful of people who have advanced degrees in "law and BLANK" (fill in the blank). And even when they are no longer working in law, that background is seen as a marketable asset in whatever other career they have subsequently pursued. You just have to work it.
Posted by: Katxena at February 11, 2003 04:30 PM
