I think we can all agree that putting pressure on a bunch of teenagers with no real life experience to pick a degree that will (supposedly) determine a career path for the rest their life is not exactly the best aspect of the secondary education system. It’s a choice that many agonize over while in school, not realizing that nearly half will ultimately wish they had chosen differently and probably end up in a job completely unrelated to what they originally thought. A survey conducted by PayScale in 2019 found that 43% of the 248,000 respondents regretted their major. Another survey by the consulting firm, Accenture, found that 41% of recent college graduates regretted their major. Safe to say hormonal adolescents aren’t the greatest at making important life choices, who would’ve thought.
Everyone naturally has their own reasons for wanting to pursue a particular career path, some reasons are profound while others… a lot less so. Take mine for example, for 16 year old the idea of arguing with people for a shit load of money while wearing top of the line suits seemed like an absolute no brainer, how hard could it really be…right?
But like with many things in life the truth of the matter is rarely as fun as one might imagine. Because two years on after graduating college, in a job nowhere remotely close to what I studied for and with no real prospect of me ever actually using my legal degree it’s safe to say that I fall into that 40-odd percent of people that didn’t make the wisest choice. And that can largely be attributed to my unrealistic expectations of what I was actually walking myself into. So since I don’t have a time machine to go back and smack some sense into younger me, the next best thing is to help someone else make a more informed decision about the reality of picking law as a career path. So here’s 5 things I would tell younger me and anyone else looking to pursue law as a major in college.
1. IT’S NOTHING LIKE SUITS (OR ANY OTHER LEGAL SHOW FOR THAT MATTER)
You would think this one is kind of obvious, and look maybe you’re just smarter than me to realize that real life would not in fact be like a scripted tv show. But you would be shocked at how often I’ve heard a law student say “yeah this is nothing like the show”. Shows like this are like influencer posts on Instagram, they only show you the best parts of the job and not the gruelling amount of effort it takes to get into that top percentage of people who reap the ridiculous benefits of it. The fact of the matter is the large majority of people who enter the legal profession won’t reach those heights of resolving multi-million dollar deals over brunch every other Tuesday that’s so often portrayed in the show.
Despite this though it doesn’t stop some faculty from using shows like Suits to hype up the degree and promote enrolment. During the open day for the university I ultimately ended up going to, the head of the law department asked the full auditorium of wannabe law students who had seen Suits. I reckon about 80% of the hands in that place went up, to which he replied “doing law is just like that”….
Picking a career should be based on the merit of the work you will be doing day in and day out, not the awards you think doing the work might bring you. Cliched as it might sound, you have to enjoy the process, if you’re just in it for the shiny things and the perks then making it through the hard days is going to feel near impossible. Getting to the top starts with plenty of stress, long hours, more reading than any normal person should do in one lifetime, and repeatedly asking “how do you Harvard reference again”
2. JUST GETTING GOOD GRADES IS NOT ENOUGH
There are 3 certainties in life – death, taxes, and that someone in your class will be way fucking smarter than you ever thought possible. I can promise you no matter how smart you are or how good your grades were in school, you WILL meet someone in your course that will make you feel like the village idiot. So that’s why doing extra curriculars is a must in order to give yourself a competitive advantage over the Jimmy Neutrons of your course.
Specifically mooting, which are mock trials designed to simulate a real court environment. These mock trials let you experience what it would be like to stand in front of a judge, argue a case on behalf of a client and the process of a trial as a whole. What good is knowing all the law in the world if you can’t present one argument without stuttering your way through it. Experience is king, the more you can get before graduating the better your prospects are of getting hired after the fact, and this is true for just about any profession.
Hand in hand with mooting goes debating. Participating in a debate society will go a long way in helping you develop critical thinking and the ability to critically argue your point of view, a skill that is highly desirable for any lawyer and really helps in producing high quality assignments, exams and presentations.
A no brainer one is joining the colleges Law Society. I can’t stress enough how important it is to make connections in this field as early as possible. You might hear people say that law is just one big “boys club” and there is a vague element of truth to that. Getting good work opportunities can often come down to a case of who you know. And if you don’t purse the practice yourself it’s nice to have a lawyer friend on speed dial in case you end up having one too many shots on a night out and get locked up for getting in a fight with a traffic cone.
Finally, the Holy Grail of extra things you should do to help you get ahead is getting an internship, and this one I learned the hard way. You’ll often hear people say things like “first year grades don’t matter…they don’t count towards your final grade so don’t stress…etc, etc.” Well not when you’re a law student. Since internships are so highly competitive, often when applying for them the only body of work you have to flex your academic knowledge is those first year grades. This is because most often your internship is completed in your 3rd year of study, meaning you apply for it sometime before you finish your 2nd year aka before you’ve sat your exams. Now in some universities an internship is a compulsory part of your course, and if that’s the case then congratulations, a lot of this will probably be explained to you ahead of time. But if your course does not require a compulsory internship, it is essential to be aware of this well in advance, because when internship season comes around, and you only start caring about it then, it’s already too late.
3. YOU HAVE TO BE COMMITTED TO ONE LOCATION
The thing they don’t really tell you before law school is that once you finish, you’re not actually a lawyer (although not knowing this might just be down to my own poor due diligence). Instead your reward for completing 4 years of stress, agony and developing an insatiable caffeine addiction is a set of even more difficult exams that ACTUALLY qualify you to be a practicing attorney. Every country has a different name for these exams, FE1, SQE, The Bar etc. Whatever it may be once you pass it and qualify as a lawyer you are tied to the country (or in the case of the U.S the state) that you passed the exam in. There is no such thing as a “qualified to practice law worldwide” credential. Meaning that if you decide you want to move somewhere else and start up a practice, you’ll have to take the state exams of whatever country you’ve decided to move to.
Again, this seems so obvious, like no shit of course different countries have different laws, and yet it’s not something that’s exactly at the forefront of things you consider when initially applying to study law (at least I didn’t anyways). But the versatility of use (or rather lack thereof) can be very off-putting because unlike a business degree or a practical trade, where you can apply your expertise virtually anywhere you go, law, more so than other professions, requires you to be tied to a specific place. Given the ever changing nature of legislation and new precedents, it only makes sense that to be a good lawyer you’d have to be dialled into the specifics of one place.
So if a life of frequent travel is something you aspire to do, this profession may just not be for you.
4. COLLEGE JUST ISN’T FOR EVERYONE
Like I said at the onset of this post, deciding on a major for college is a lot of pressure, and what you don’t often hear teachers and advisors tell you in school is that it’s just not for everyone. Education is not a one size fits all kind of cap. And what you’ll hear even less is, even if you start, it’s ok to leave if you don’t find enjoyment in it. I think above all else that’s the one piece of advice I wish someone had told me. But most often what I heard when I expressed doubts about being in the course is:
“Just stick with it.”
“Every course has parts people don’t like” (I hated this one the most)
“Sure you’re here now anyway may as well keep going”
“Sure what else are you going to do”
“You’re better off with a degree than without it”
Look I get it, if education is all you have known your whole life it becomes a scary prospect to not have that safety net, to go out and try find something else while many of your friends continue to pursue further education. The thought alone is lonely and alienating. It’s also equally as difficult to accept that you are the one who decided on doing a degree that has now ended up feeling like the wrong choice. So that seed of doubt that dropping out could also be a wrong choice will inevitably be there as you contemplate your choices. But in my experience it’s really not worth the turmoil and more importantly your precious time to continue pursuing something that you know in your heart of hearts is not going to do anything for your future. All staying does is just delay the prospect of better opportunities coming into your life.
The title of “drop out” has almost a dirty kind of association with it, it’s almost like a mark of shame, as if to say “that person wasn’t good enough to hack it, they didn’t have what it takes to tough it out”. Now this genuinely might just be a subjective experience coming from an immigrant background, where education is perceived to be the only possible path to success and anything an inch less means you’ve failed in life. But I think it takes far more courage to recognize that your current path doesn’t serve you and do something about it rather than putting your head down and “toughing it out”. Because what’s it for, who are you doing it for? Only you and you alone is going to have to live with the choices you’ve made. Sure you can try go out and do something else and potentially fail at it, but sticking at something you dislike certainly doesn’t guarantee success just because it’s “safe”.
5. YOU WON’T BE THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE
If you think any of what you just read won’t apply to you. That you can just skate by on your grades, walk into a top tier law firm and score a job first time with no experience, that you won’t question some of the decisions you’ve made along the way, well my friend here put it best:
