Top Law Schools

dwil770 wrote:

daryldixon wrote:
This is the worst thread ever. It is pointless to try to argue with fools. We have two types of people in this thread. Those that have gone to law school, taken out debt, and experienced the job market for themselves and those who have not. Honestly, unless you go through it yourself you are never going to believe everyone else. So I say go. Get into debt and let the job market and the law school curve beat the "special snowflake syndrome" out of you. That is what happened to me and I am much better off for it.

I think you are missing the point. It isn't about denying that big law sucks. It is about the suggestion that big law isn't necessarily worse than other "similar" (in terms of prestige, money, and education I suppose) professions. For whatever reason people in big law take offense to this notion, I guess because they feel under attack (but I do see their complaints as legitimate). I would suggest that it is those people who have the special snowflake syndrome if they are unwilling to consider that other professions are similarly shit.

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I don't know about other professions, so I can't address them. I would point out some major flaws in assuming they are the same:

The bimodal salary distribution - either very high or pretty much you are making around $50,000 or less. Or you never even get to practice law.

The lack of job mobility if you don't get biglaw from school, it is difficult to work your way in

Many people make their highest salaries in the beginning of their careers

The lack of PI hiring due lack of funding, which forecloses a back up option.

The fundamental shift in biglaw post-crash: revenue basically flat and not predicted to improve much. The shift in client's willingness to pay.

Law requires an additional 3 years of education and a huge amount of tuition, whether you borrow the money or not. And then you need to pass the bar.

You don't leave law school with the skill to practice law without additional training.

Hiring is fickle. Grades and stats don't guarantee anything, unlike getting accepted to law school. The best you can do is hedge your bets.

Law is incredibly oversaturated. The competition for jobs is intense. edit to add: a very high number of lawyers are out of law within a 10 years or so, do other people leave their professions in DROVES?

Edit to add: the forced curve meaning there will only be a handful of A grades.(Do other professions have this?)
.....
I'm sure there are more but these are characteristics of law as it is now.

PrideandGlory1776 wrote:Bottomline the top professions all require insane commitment - Med School residency though its been scaled back in recent years still requires 70+ hour work weeks as a "right of passage" - "big law" for lawyers functions in a similar fashion - hard science PhD often take 7 years getting paid like 25k/yr - want to go into politics? long road of grinding for that too - everything in life requires 10 years of grinding before getting to do what you want it's just the way society is - even Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Mark Z. worked like crazy and had no lives before creating their brain-childs - thus is life.

One question I had was do other profession have a mandatory curve to effectively rank people solely on exam performance? I think medical school has a minimum, but I don't think there is a mandatory curve.

lecsa wrote: Hard science PhDs - requires brains, but not a lot of work. Getting a PhD is like being on vacation for 5 to 7 years if you're smart.

fra wrote:

lecsa wrote: Hard science PhDs - requires brains, but not a lot of work. Getting a PhD is like being on vacation for 5 to 7 years if you're smart.

Are you on drugs right now?
This is absolutely not correct.

edit: I feel bad for not adding anything to the conversation. A PhD in Engineering is 4-6 years of work, at an average pay of 25K per year, with no better job prospects than someone with a Bachelor's in Engineering once you get out. You will get paid a slightly higher average starting salary than a starting Bachelors, however you've now missed out of 4-6 years of industry experience. You want to go into academia? Tack on 2-4 years of Post-doctoral positions and then you still probably won't be able to find a tenure track position at a university.
The average work week is 60+ hours. Unless you find your research project incredibly interesting you will burn out. The only thing that gets people through PhDs is love for the science.

Basically unless you have a passion for research there is no reason to get your PhD in a hard science. Its something that you do because you love it - not something that you do for a paycheck or even for a job. Yes, the academy requires PhDs, but, again, going into academia is something that you do for passion.

lecsa wrote:

fra wrote:

lecsa wrote: Hard science PhDs - requires brains, but not a lot of work. Getting a PhD is like being on vacation for 5 to 7 years if you're smart.

Are you on drugs right now?
This is absolutely not correct.

edit: I feel bad for not adding anything to the conversation. A PhD in Engineering is 4-6 years of work, at an average pay of 25K per year, with no better job prospects than someone with a Bachelor's in Engineering once you get out. You will get paid a slightly higher average starting salary than a starting Bachelors, however you've now missed out of 4-6 years of industry experience. You want to go into academia? Tack on 2-4 years of Post-doctoral positions and then you still probably won't be able to find a tenure track position at a university.
The average work week is 60+ hours. Unless you find your research project incredibly interesting you will burn out. The only thing that gets people through PhDs is love for the science.

Basically unless you have a passion for research there is no reason to get your PhD in a hard science. Its something that you do because you love it - not something that you do for a paycheck or even for a job. Yes, the academy requires PhDs, but, again, going into academia is something that you do for passion.

Half my friends have PhDs in engineering or physics or math from MIT or something similar. They probably screwed around for 3 years and then did some work the rest of it. Maybe they are geniuses (they are the smartest people I know) but they spent more than half of it screwing around. I guess the lab work requires a lot of hours but for some hard sciences there's isn't that much typical lab work or maybe they are just geniuses who do things quickly.

lecsa wrote: Half my friends have PhDs in engineering or physics or math from MIT or something similar. They probably screwed around for 3 years and then did some work the rest of it.

NYSprague wrote:No other options? What about finance, etc?

BmoreOrLess wrote:I always love the "just do finance bro" advise from TLS, as if it is even remotely easy to get legitimate finance jobs.

yossarian71 wrote:It's so weird to me how the topic of career choice is always so divorced from personal satisfaction on TLS. Weighing careers based on education-required, starting pay, and relative ease is such a limited scope.

I certainly think personal satisfaction can be overstated. That is one of the problems with the undergrad system (I wanna study the environment cuz I like polar bears!). But different people feel more or less satisfied/energized through different types of work in different types of content.

Pay is relative factor. You basically need a little more than your parents (over your career) to feel satisfied if you're an average American.

Careers would probably be more productively discussed relative to personal satisfaction/contentedness/happiness (terrible word) priorities. Then, subsidiarily compared against similar careers on more specific criterion such as education and pay only as they relate to your personal contentedness goals.

Or do y'all view that as just hippie bullshit?

UVAIce wrote:"STEM" is kind of an insanely large category. It seems a bit silly to think of that category as narrow.

cotiger wrote:

UVAIce wrote:"STEM" is kind of an insanely large category. It seems a bit silly to think of that category as narrow.

I know, but included it like that because mostly people don't know what they're talking about and just say STEM as if it's a thing.

They also don't typically see that as a possible category for the but just throw it out there bc there must be good jobs there. You can ignore the inclusion if you like.

cotiger wrote:

yossarian71 wrote:It's so weird to me how the topic of career choice is always so divorced from personal satisfaction on TLS. Weighing careers based on education-required, starting pay, and relative ease is such a limited scope.

I certainly think personal satisfaction can be overstated. That is one of the problems with the undergrad system (I wanna study the environment cuz I like polar bears!). But different people feel more or less satisfied/energized through different types of work in different types of content.

Pay is relative factor. You basically need a little more than your parents (over your career) to feel satisfied if you're an average American.

Careers would probably be more productively discussed relative to personal satisfaction/contentedness/happiness (terrible word) priorities. Then, subsidiarily compared against similar careers on more specific criterion such as education and pay only as they relate to your personal contentedness goals.

Or do y'all view that as just hippie bullshit?

Agreed. It's also weird how the list of possible careers is so narrow. Finance, accounting, consulting, and "STEM" seem to be the only careers that exist outside of law on TLS. I think it might be bc law is such a prescribed route that people on here tend to think like this, but most of my friends do random shit without such a defined career path.