Meathook Reality

As some of you know, my current plans are to abandon my legal education, at least for the time being. After this semester’s finals, I shall call it quits, very likely forever. I’ve already started the job search in the technology field.

Elevator summary:
While I remain interested in the law, and find it very exciting in theory, in practice I find that I dislike the industry. Between the frequently artificial air of competition and the way that the ABA, schools, and firms work the ratings system to maintain their standards, it just doesn’t work for me. I seem to have underestimated just how much the school’s rating matters and the individual student’s skills and experience do not. For what I’m currently paying, I’m more and more certain that I won’t be getting a net gain. Because of this, I’m going to quit, not while I’m ahead, but while I’m behind by only the value of a sportscar.

And so it goes on:

I’m not the best student in the world. I’ll admit that I’ve probably spent some time this year playing video games or watching TV that I could’ve spent studying. On the other hand, I’ve yet to see that spending all the time in the world studying yields any better results then spending “enough” time studying. Judging from last semester’s results, there isn’t any real correlation, as I spent a lot more time studying for Civil Procedure then I did for Contracts, and the grades certainly didn’t reflect that.

Not all teachers are alike, and that is to be expected. In the last ten months, I was blessed by some pretty darn good instructors. For Contracts, I had a professor who’s been doing this for ages, and is committed not only to the subject material but to being an excellent teacher. This is key: people who teach not only need to know what they are teaching, but how to convey this information to others in a way that they can receive. Torts professor: great lecturer, not such a good tester. Crim. Law: very organized, somewhat abstract, decent tester. Civ. Pro: terrible – disorganized lectures, non-authoritative, non-inspirational, and capped off with a terrible test.
Perhaps I’ve been spoiled – while I had some crappy teachers at Oregon State, they generally didn’t obstruct me so much. Even though I’ve had some great professors, I feel that for what I’m paying, I deserve better.

Deciding to go back to school entailed a lot of thinking about money. Being unemployed in the bay area is ridiculously expensive. Putting private school tuition on top of that is even crazier. In the last 10 months, I’ve dug a hole of debt large enough to swallow a Porsche. Ok, I’m thinking in terms of the ‘cheap’ Porsche, but still – that’s one year. By the time I graduate, I need to buy myself three sportscars plus interest before I can break even.

In theory, by investing that $100,000+ in a bright and shiny degree, I will be raising my income-earning potential. In practice, however, there’s some issues. First, as a person with a degree in computer engineering, and a few years of experience working with real companies doing real things, I should be able to make $70k plus, here in the Bay Area. In fact, when I left my job to come to school, I was making more then that. That’s a little bit short of what many lawyers make, it is true, but the average salary of graduates of my school is about $63k. This is for various reasons, ranging from the fact that many of my classmates will go into public interest law to the fact that this is a “fourth tier” school. Basically, nobody who wants to pay money is hiring from here unless you are the top 3% of the school, and even then it is dicy. From where I am at the moment, I would be gambling $70,000 (Two Porsche Boxters, for those of you following along) on graduating near the top of my class and getting a good job. The other option is probably just to get a decent job with potential, and not only work my way up to a six-figure salary, but to gain income instead of debt for those two years.

A year ago, I started digging a hole. At the bottom of the hole, there should be a bigger shovel that I can use to dig my way out. I’ve discovered not only that I started with a pretty decent-sized shovel, and that the shovel at the bottom may not be as large as I had hoped, but that I may have dug in the wrong place.