Some thoughts about law school before I get there, here for posterity (or more to the point, for my future 1L self who wonders what she's doing in law school). More to come. Don't worry, they won't all be this long.
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I don't have lofty goals in going to law school. I don't have my heart set on saving the world or becoming filthy rich, although both would be nice. Basically, I'm looking for a career I'll enjoy.
I never really wanted to be a software engineer. In high school, I won awards in writing and foreign languages. Science was always my worst subject, to the chagrin of my engineer parents. I always loved words and reading and writing. I wanted to be a linguist, and applied to colleges based on whether they had a linguistics department.
When I got to school, I realized that the linguistics department wasn't for me. First semester freshman year, I placed out of the introductory linguistics class and somehow got myself into a seminar full of grad students that was WAY over my head. I didn't get along with the professor at all, either -- not that I blame her if she disliked me; I shouldn't have been in her class in the first place. But with only three professors in the department, I didn't think I could get through the major.
The same semester, I took my first computer science class and LOVED it. Well, I sort of hated it. I thought I was going to fail. As hard as I tried, I couldn't make heads or tails of programming. At the very end of the semester, when I was working on my final project, it suddenly clicked. I understood. I still remember feeling like something had physically shifted in my brain when CS finally started making sense to me. It was like a religious experience. I decided to major in CS based on that one class.
I stuck with CS, even though I was never as much of a geek as my classmates. I never felt caught up, either. From the first day of my first class, I felt like I was behind the guys. It seemed like they had all been programming and building computers in the cradle, and I was just learning this stuff and struggling with it. I enjoyed the challenge of adapting my brain to this new way of thinking, but it didn't come naturally to me at all. The general attitude toward women in the department didn't help; I always felt incompetent. Even though I became a TA, a lab consultant, and a research assistant, I felt like I couldn't prove myself. Later I learned that there were plenty of guys who were also beginners and felt the same way, but they dropped out of CS during the first year.
I double majored in "American civilization," a fluffy Brown major that let me take all the history and literature and music classes that I wanted. I was always happiest with my nose stuck in a book, reading an obscure Middle English poem or researching eighteenth-century female scientists. In fact, one of my favorite academic experiences in college was doing original research for my history classes. After years of reading books, it was exciting to tread new ground on my own. But I never thought I could make a career out of doing the stuff I really enjoyed. It was just for fun.
Besides, the job market for software engineers was amazing. This was 1999, when the b-word that came after dot com was boom, not bubble. I had no experience, but companies were still throwing money at me to come work for them. I moved out to San Francisco and had one job I hated and one job that was pretty good. I couldn't escape the feeling, left over from college, that I didn't know enough and wasn't competent enough. I decided to get my master's degree to put those feelings to rest.
I spent one year, full time, in grad school. I picked that program because it was so short, and I figured I could get through it even if I hated it. Which I did. I realized that I wasn't excited enough about computer science to think about it all the time. It was interesting reading about technology from a fifty-foot level -- what was possible, what was coming, how the world might change -- but I didn't want to be in the trenches messing with bits and circuits. I just didn't care.
But I needed money and I didn't have any better ideas, so I finished my degree and went back to work as a software engineer. JW (who also works in software) and I were always talking about how neither of us really liked what we did, but we didn't know what we really wanted to do, so we might as well do this. Still, I started to feel more and more unfulfilled. I started doing volunteer work, thinking that it might fill the gap between what I did all day and what I liked to do. I became an ESL tutor.
After a while, I realized that volunteering didn't make up for spending my days doing something I had no interest in. I thought back over all the jobs and volunteer opportunities that I'd had, and why I liked or didn't like them. The ones I liked all had a teaching component -- being a TA, being a tutor, answering people's questions in a lab, teaching classes at a summer camp, teaching ESL, mentoring kids and college students. But I didn't want to be a teacher. There's too much discipline involved, and I had no desire to have control over a group. The jobs I didn't like all involved working on a product that I didn't care about. At the end of the day, I felt like I had done nothing that anybody had any need for. Selling things has never appealed to me, and working on a product whose only real purpose was (it seemed to me) to make the company money was one step away.
First, I thought about how I could stay in the software industry and be satisfied with my job. I had one job that I liked, doing web stuff at an educational software company. I applied for a similar job, but realized a few things: these types of jobs were few and far between, they didn't require very advanced skills (which meant people less qualified than me could fill them), and they paid much less than the type of work I had been doing. I had also seen the effects of outsourcing firsthand, and I could see even more of these jobs leaving the country. The prospects didn't seem good. I turned down the job and started thinking of alternatives.
I thought about what all the jobs I liked had in common besides teaching. I realized that they had something more abstract in common -- providing information to people who needed it. I knew that actual classroom teaching wasn't for me; I was happy to help the motivated kids, whether they were struggling or whizzing through the material, but I let the unmotivated kids play video games. If they didn't want to learn, I wasn't going to make them -- not a good attitude for a teacher. But I loved helping people who came to me with a genuine need, whether they needed tech support for their computers or needed to know how to write a check. I decided my ideal job would be a guru on a mountain. People would come to me and ask me their burning questions, and I would answer them, and light would dawn and they would see that their problems were really manageable and now they knew what to do.
But there weren't too many entry-level guru positions available -- I checked craigslist and everything -- so I thought about other career paths I could take. I knew that I wanted to provide a service, not work on a product; that I would love to spend my days reading, writing, editing, or generally working with language; and that I wanted to provide necessary information to help people work through difficult problems. Ideally, I would also like a stable career where my job wouldn't get sent to India, with a salary that my family could live on.
Law.
It seemed like such a drastic step, though. I've spent the past ten years studying and working with technology. Was it worth three more years of school, all that debt, and the uncertainty of a completely new career? I talked with lawyers, read blogs and books, and thought about it for a long time.
One night I had a dream. An old friend from high school, who I hadn't talked to in years and is now an attorney, was talking about some law certification exam and asking me how I did. It took a while to convince her that I hadn't taken it and wasn't even a lawyer. Finally she said, "Really? But I thought you were. You've always wanted to be a lawyer." "I have?" I thought. "She's right, I have."
I woke up in the middle of the night. I had thought about it enough. In real life, I haven't always wanted to be a lawyer; but when my subsconscious tells me something, I listen.
And that's why I applied to law school.
