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Dear TLS-ers,

I have recently graduated from well-known public university from a computer science curriculum. I have had a few prestigious internships in the past but was intending on going to law school straight out of undergrad because I am tired of engineering and have always been interested in becoming a lawyer. Because of this plan, I chose to do an internship this summer (the summer before law school) as opposed to taking a full time offer from a previous job just to get some extra cash and some more work experience. The law school I intend on attending is BC/BU (with a hefty scholarship). I am currently a manager intern at a well-known tech company in Silicon Valley. My internship ends late August; BC/BU starts late August (a week before my end date). If I were to be offered a full-time job here I would be in a relatively high-end position that interests me (as someone who is passionate about technology). The problem is that one word: IF. One could say I am a pioneer in this position; in that no one at my education level has received this internship and so therefore I have no reference as to how likely it is I will receive a full time offer and if I do receive one, how much $$$ I could be making. The internship is paying very well, but I am not sure if it is wise to assume that if I extrapolate that number out to a year's salary, that would be what I would make full-time (since benefits and other things probably need to be accounted for if I were a full time employee). I am not sure if I will find out whether I am in the running for a full-time offer until late August...which will be too late for me to ship my butt off to Boston from California to attend my first week of law school....

So, the problem is this: I have an internship for a job that I am thinking I could love and could lead to a career that sounds amazing. However, it is only an internship and the odds of receiving an offer and my knowledge of the salary are completely unknown to me (it is very difficult to get any feedback from my mentors right now as to how I am doing in relation to their expectations, but my mid-point eval is in 2 weeks). I also am not sure that because of my lack of graduate school (MBA/Masters) if the position I will get a full-time offer for will actually be the one that I want. On the flip side: I am deposited at BC/BU and would love to get into BigLaw (Boston or NYC). But with a 20-25% chance of that happening at BC/BU, law school is looking more and more bleak for me. On top of this, I have a family. So, my family needs to know where I am going to be...soon! Neither option seems all that secure, but I am not sure which is better...

...This is why I come to you! The cold-hard wisdom of TLS can give me some perspective, perhaps.

Thanks,
Random dude

TL;DR-version
I have internship for awesome job; I am first to get said internship at my education level (recent undergrad graduate); no idea what odds of acquiring full-time offer are; no idea what salary will be; I am deposited at BC/BU; want BigLaw from BC/BU but odds are slim there; I have family...therefore, things require urgent/careful planning.

Could you quietly ask some people in your office/department how they go about making job offers? Do they historically hire interns at the end of the internship? What are the odds of this happening? When does it happen?

Adjust your expectations accordingly. If there's a chance you might get an offer, maybe start dropping hints to management that you want to stay on, but law school starts before the internship ends or something to that effect.

Law school will always be there. You don't need to be in a rush to go.

Doorkeeper wrote:

Law school will always be there. You don't need to be in a rush to go.

This. Sounds like you have a pretty nice deal going on with your company, whereas pursuing a law degree may not be as secure as far as employment is concerned. Obviously, I haven't been posting on TLS very long at all, but I've lurked quite a bit and a lot of posters tend to believe it's best to attend law school a few years out of undergrad anyway.

Good luck on whatever decision you make.

What were your GPA and LSAT and if you do not get this job is it conceivable that you could make a decent living for the next year with your degree and not be too miserable?

Thanks a lot for all the replies!!

2014 wrote:What were your GPA and LSAT and if you do not get this job is it conceivable that you could make a decent living for the next year with your degree and not be too miserable?

This is a possibility, perhaps. I am just scared of the unknown. Currently my family is scattered all over the country/world and we need a place to finally settle down for at least a few years together. If I were to take a year off, getting a job within my field is a possibility but I am not sure if it is a probability. Currently, I am hedging my bets by dropping tons of applications at other places, but as of right now I am not sure if: odds of getting a job > odds of getting a job out of BC/BU in 2015 or vice versa. A year off would be productive as far as law school is concerned because: 1) I could boost my LSAT score and 2) it is one more year for the legal market to recover. But a year off would be less productive when it comes down to supporting my family.....

I graduated with a 3.3-3.5 gpa and a 167-169 LSAT (pardon my being vague, but I am paranoid haha). So my GPA is crap for law school's intents and purposes but for a CS major from my school that is actually above average. The LSAT is alright, but as I said before, if I were to have a year I could retake and get that coveted 170+ and maybe (just maybe) I would be able to crack the T14...but with my GPA -- irrespective of my curriculum's difficulty -- it is still an unlikely prospect I think (perhaps a 50% shot, at best, of getting into at least one T14 with a 170+ score). The point is that an empty year of complete uncertainty is a very very scary thing with a family.

I choose BUST.

But we could be talking about two different things.