X_Soda wrote:Dude. What is up with you guys? You are prospective and/or current law school students. You spend a large amount of time on law school forums. And yet you incessantly post bitter portents projecting a dismal future for all law school graduates. Your purported "realism" is dripping with insincerity. You scoff at students who are confident that they will place in the top 10 percent of their class, writing off their drive as arrogant folly. But how could you "pragmatists" possibly believe that you will be in anything but the 10%? Are you so pompous as to laugh at everyone's chances of being in the top 10% but your own? And your obsession with BigLaw as the only viable option for law students due to the high costs of school begs the question: if landing a BigLaw job is so difficult, and if law students' post-graduation plan is all about securing a comfortable salary, then why the HELL aren't you following your own advice and just getting a job now? Is there some sick masochistic mechanism lurking within you that forces you to expose yourself to the things to which you seem the most averse? Or do you just love making posts crushing others' dreams and ambitions while secretly harboring your own?
By the way, I'm not a troll. All of my other posts on here have been simple inquiries about the application process. I am simply trying to add to what I have discovered to be a very one-sided debate here on TLS. I'd like to see some genuine responses to this. I'd like to understand why there is such bitterness, such an inferiority complex with the medical profession, and such aversion to all things law on a forum dedicated to law school.
Many of the current law students on this site are simply attempting to make prospective students aware that success in law school and in the current legal market is not necessarily based on how hard you work or how optimistic you are. We've taken exams, and seen the arbitrary nature of grades for ourselves, we've been through interviews where firms ask 0 substantive questions, we've personally experienced great successes and resounding failures, and seen up close the despair of our classmates who realize that they are deeply in debt with no real means of repaying that debt and, in some instances, no desire to practice law.
The advice on this website is laced with pessimism because it needs to be. You need to understand what you're getting into. You need to realize, that there are more lawyers than jobs, and, despite what you think at this moment in your life, 160k+ in debt on a 50k salary with a 25 year IBR is probably not going to be a very good life.
The fact of the matter is, most of the 0L's on this website come in bright eyed and idealistic about the world they are about to enter. It's a world they really have little understanding of though. I'll agree that some posters are obnoxious, elitist, etc..., but I really believe that there is also a lot of good advice handed out on these boards (especially in the legal employment forum). We post because we care, we scoff because we care...
"And he said, Truly I say to you, No prophet is accepted in his own country."
