Monday, May 01, 2006

Bad Reason for Attending Law School #9

I’ve been in the real world and I don’t like my job

Lots of people don’t like their jobs. It is the nature of the beast. You have to wake up early, put on decent clothes, go somewhere you don’t really want to be, do work you don’t really want to do, come home, and get ready to do it again the next day. And at the end of the week, you get handed a check for your services.

Law school is completely different. You don’t have to wake up quite so early, and you really don’t have to put on decent clothes. Then you go somewhere you don’t really want to be, and do work you don’t really want to do. After that, you come home and get ready to do it all again the next day. But instead of getting handed a check, you have to hand one over yourself, before you even start.

To do the math on that transaction: You are essentially paying for the right to sleep an extra hour or two, and to have the option of wearing jeans and a hoodie every day. Does that seem like a good deal to you?

The structure of our current educational system doesn’t really prepare college grads for the real world. It’s funny how four years of keg stands, beer pong, and living in squalor doesn’t transition well into having real responsibilities. Talk to the average college senior, and they expect that the world will be their oyster once they get out there. Personally, I blame Jennifer Aniston. A generation of girls saw her go from working at a coffee shop, to working for Bloomingdales, to having her dream job with Ralph Lauren after a few short years and relatively little effort. And a generation of guys thought that no matter how mundane their job was, a girl like her would be working at the local Bennigan’s-esque restaurant, ready to be swept off her feet. Sadly, reality hits them in the face like a bad Chandler joke. (Or should I just say a Chandler joke?) Suddenly, they have a job and a title and all the responsibilities that go along with it, but Ralph Lauren isn’t calling, and the waitresses at Bennigan’s are all either 19, or have kids, or both.

Soon, dissatisfaction sets in. Their mind begins to wander back to the good old college days, and nostalgia sets in. Then, one day, they have an idea: “I’ll go to law school!” The problem with this decision is that, for many of them, they don’t really want to be a lawyer. They just want out of their current situation, and law school is the most feasible alternative. They’ll give up their salary, and pay for three years of exile from the real world. Unfortunately, many of them find law school to be a drag, almost as much as working was. Many of them do the math and figure out that for a tenth of the cost of law school, they could have taken one hell of a vacation.

Perhaps the biggest question is, if you are dissatisfied with your current job, why would you then want to enter a profession with the highest rate of job dissatisfaction? If life in the real world is really that bad, why not move, or find a new job, or get a hobby, or do something less drastic than going to law school just for a change of scenery? I know that from your cubicle, the law school grass looks awfully green. But once you get here, you’ll see that it’s really just a big field of crab grass.