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Thesaurus posted:Is it wrong to assume that the prospects for low paying public interest jobs (I am very interested in immigration issues) are equally terrible? I could handle making $30k/year if I didn't have debt and didn't feel like I was working for Satan. Or are even these jobs being swarmed by people from top law schools who can't find work? No those jobs are swarmed by dogooders from top law schools.
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Aug 16, 2012 23:15
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Thesaurus posted:Is it wrong to assume that the prospects for low paying public interest jobs (I am very interested in immigration issues) are equally terrible? I could handle making $30k/year if I didn't have debt and didn't feel like I was working for Satan. Or are even these jobs being swarmed by people from top law schools who can't find work?
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Aug 16, 2012 23:34
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Thesaurus posted:Thanks for the feedback! My current plan is basically to stoop to any low provided that I don't have to pay for it.. This was alluded to above, but it is also not unheard of for schools to grant generous scholarships to incoming 1Ls. However, these scholarships often have very onerous eligibility requirements; they are only so generous because the administration expects large numbers of the students receiving them to be ineligible after their first year. In some cases, grade curves make it a near mathematical certainty that many students will lose their scholarship. Given that law school grades are a crap shoot at best, I would make sure to do some pretty thorough due diligence to ensure that, even if you qualify for a great scholarship, you have a reasonable chance of keeping it.
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Aug 16, 2012 23:38
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Also, when you say you're interested in immigration issues, what do you mean? Do you mean you want to bilk clients what little money they have (barely enough to keep you in ramen and McDonalds dollar cheeseburgers) by giving them false hope before they get deported? Or do you prefer to bilk their families both before and after they get deported, lying to them about their brother/son/father/daughter/wife/best friend's chances of getting back into the country if you can just get in front of a BIA judge to explain why your agriculturally employed client with Mexican/Guatemalan/El Salvadoran/Canadian citizenship who has turned to a life dealing drugs is totally different from all the others that judge sees today? EDIT: I realize this post is awfully cynical, but 1) it's the Lawyer & Law School Megathread - it's expected - and 2) lawyers only very rarely actually "make a difference" in the way people interested in social issues think lawyers do. If you want to "make a difference" lawyers are necessary, but they're not the movers and shakers - legislators, donors, and fundraisers are. Possibly policy wonks working for the same (JOKE it's not true). The lawyers just write up whatever their clients tell them to write up. There is a very minor exception for the 2-3 Harvard/Yale/Stanford grads each year who go to work for the ACLU, but most of them end up law professors anyway, at which point they lose any ability to "make a difference". Arcturas fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Aug 16, 2012 |
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Aug 16, 2012 23:40
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Thesaurus posted:I could handle making $30k/year if I didn't have debt and didn't feel like I was working for Satan.
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Aug 16, 2012 23:44
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Green Crayons posted:Honest-to-Satan, the mandatory minimum wage for entering the white collar work force for the League of Evil was supposed to rise with the cost of living! If it's still stuck at $31k/year -- and I bet the benefits have been reduced too -- then I just don't know why I joined to have my Lord and Damnation to be Lucifer. The best part about working for Satan is that you're pretty much always suing/defending against other members of the League of Evil anyways. EDIT AGAIN: I know I've been posting way too much about this, but whatever. You know what you should do? You should find whichever school's in your city that fits your criteria for acceptability - someplace that you think you could get in, someplace that has a possibility of the mystical full ride scholarship which can be realistically maintained. Go to that school, and talk to both their admissions officer and their career development office. Ask the admissions folks about scholarship options/their policy, and ask the career development people exactly how many of their graduates last year have public interest jobs which don't expire in one or two years. If you can get data like that for the last 3-4 years, you'll have a good idea of what you're getting into. Arcturas fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Aug 16, 2012 |
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Aug 16, 2012 23:46
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I met a 2011 grad yesterday who was working for the department of child support enforcement. She had that look... like a veteran who just got back. Like she'd recently seen things, things that nobody is supposed to see.
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Aug 16, 2012 23:52
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Thesaurus posted:Forgive me for asking a question that has surely been asked at various points during the last 500+ pages. However, I did not see this addressed in the OP, nor could I find the answer in my frantic clicking through the thread: I have basically exactly those stats: slightly under 3.7 GPA and 172 LSAT. From what I remember, I was offered a full ride at Brooklyn Law, half scholarship at Fordham, and nada at NYU. Other posters have touched on this, but you want to do some diligence on the terms of any scholarship. I hear that Brooklyn in particular is notorious for attaching a GPA requirement to a scholarship, then putting all of the scholarship students in the same section (and therefore on the same curve), meaning that a certain percentage are guaranteed to lose their funding. If you're really interested in public interest, I know that NYU has an LRAP program available where if you make under a certain amount for a certain number of years, your debt will be forgiven, or something like that. Potentially up your alley. I don't know a lot about it because I am in the middle of interviews for soul-crushing big law work.
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Aug 17, 2012 00:00
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The staggering negativity in this thread is both unfounded and unproductive. While immigration law doesn't necessarily pay as much as corporate law, it is a fast-growing practice area and it can be both financially and personally rewarding. A close friend of mine from law school - with average grades and an unspectacular resume, no need to be a top achiever if this is the career path you want - easily found a job paying $85,000 in a secondary market with low cost-of-living doing the kind of immigration work that you probably have in mind when you think of public interest. I'm talking about stuff like: -- Helping recently graduated Ph.D.s and professionals stay in America with their families. -- Helping migrant farm laborers who want to raise their families in the U.S. and have followed all of the procedures, but are getting screwed by the system for minor procedural oversights. -- Even some petitions for political asylum and refugee status for people who are trying to escape political persecution or homophobia in their home countries. His clients are all wonderful people and they and their families are profoundly grateful for his help. On more than one occasion, he's actually been invited into their homes and served amazing, delicious traditional meals as thanks for his services. His job satisfaction is through the roof, his security is good given that his employer is thrilled with his performance, and he's comfortably living a middle class lifestyle while making all of his loan payments. Thesaurus - this thread is full of people who think that anyone who isn't making $160,000 slaving away for 14-hour days in some soul-crushing Manhattan glass-and-steel prison is a failure and shouldn't go to law school. This is bullshit. Don't listen to them and follow your dreams. You'll find that it IS still possible to do well by doing good.
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Aug 17, 2012 00:01
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Sure, Secret Asian Man, your friend made it. But how many people like your friend make it? The plural of anecdote isn't data, and the jobs numbers for most legal fields (including immigration) are pretty abysmal right now. If we're just talking anecdotally, then sure, go to law school - there are people in the thread (like me) who are enjoying school, have lots of fun with it, find it's not too much work, have summer jobs with firms, and reasonable expectations about future offers and long-term employment. (and get anal about oxford commas and the lack thereof) That's just not the reality, particularly in the bigger markets in the US.
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Aug 17, 2012 00:07
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Family law is a license to be obnoxious. OC: "You're going to get rear end-raped in front of the judge." (actual quote) Me: "No, you're going to get rear end-raped in front of the judge." I have never met OC before today. G-Mawwwwwww fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 00:15
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One interesting thing I've noticed about this thread is that even the people who have themselves succeeded are incredibly eager to dismiss law school as a bad choice, in spite of the fact that their own lives belie their advice. Arcturas - why are you so quick to dismiss the stories that don't fit with the doom-and-gloom view of the professions as anecdotes, but not nearly as quick to dismiss the weird random failure stories of unprepared kids who took on idiotic amounts of debt at bottom-feeding schools? Why are you so quick to leap to the conclusion that the successes are aberrational and the failures are the norm, especially when your own experience paves the road to success that you want everyone to believe is unattainable?
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Aug 17, 2012 00:16
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Sulecrist posted:If you get a 179, break 3.5ish, and have a minor disability, you may be able to get a full ride at Northwestern... 3.79 (3.77 LSAC). But scholarships are much, much harder to predict than basic admissions. There's so much luck involved; I must have filled all the right niches at the right time. If I hadn't thrown an application at Northwestern along with the roughly 15 other schools I applied to, I would have been screwed. I also made a lot of mistakes though, like letting my undergrad grades lapse after applying and getting bad grades while studying abroad. If you want a full scholarship somewhere, get the best numbers you can and then apply to as many law schools as you can. MoFauxHawk fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 00:19
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MoFauxHawk posted:getting bad grades while studying abroad. This is possible?
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Aug 17, 2012 00:25
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Bold Robot posted:This is possible? Yeah. I knew they would only be counted by my undergrad as pass-fail, and that made me lazy. But then when I got back, even though they didn't affect my LSAC or undergrad GPA, the grades were still listed on my transcript as letter grades rather than P/F. I really should have pressured my tiny undergrad to change them to P's, which they may have been willing to do, because they wanted me to get into a top school as much as I did, but I never did it. They weren't horrible grades, but they were definitely sub-par.
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Aug 17, 2012 00:31
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Stop fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Mar 14, 2013 |
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Aug 17, 2012 00:34
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Secret Asian Man posted:One interesting thing I've noticed about this thread is that even the people who have themselves succeeded are incredibly eager to dismiss law school as a bad choice, in spite of the fact that their own lives belie their advice. "I'm going to let you in on a little secret...Being a lawyer is just like being in love. No one can tell you to go to law school, you just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones." - The Oracle
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Aug 17, 2012 00:45
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Secret Asian Man posted:One interesting thing I've noticed about this thread is that even the people who have themselves succeeded are incredibly eager to dismiss law school as a bad choice, in spite of the fact that their own lives belie their advice. In short? Because the results of law school are so unpredictable, and many applicants accept admission offers and go to school thinking there's a guaranteed job at the end of it. I'm not trying to dismiss your experiences entirely, and you're probably right int that I'm over-dismissive. If so, I apologize. I just don't want people to assume school is an automatic job merely because they think they're a good fit for a particular type of work, or because they have always been the one person among many who succeeded. That's why I told Thesaurus to go talk to local law schools and get the numbers on how many of their grads actually ended up in public service work. To the extent I'm dismissive, it's because I see so many of my friends struggling. They're mostly people who were always the one in ten that did very well, and expected that to continue in law school. Unfortunately, law tends to reward people who either are at the very top of their class, or people with excellent people skills, such that their internal ranking within a class isn't terribly important. And those two are very hard for an applicant to predict. I've got friends who flew to other cities to volunteer for free, while the law firm they're working at billed their time. Heck, the firm my wife worked at this summer didn't pay her, but billed her time. Granted, it was a tiny three-person office that's struggling to get off the ground, she got excellent experience, and has some good prospects now. Is it possible to succeed in law school/law? Definitely. It's just very unpredictable, and I don't want people thinking it's a guaranteed win. If you've got an excellent scholarship, that reduces the downside substantially, and if you get into a T14 school, that also reduces the downside - that's why we tend to be less doom-and-gloom for people in either of those boats.
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Aug 17, 2012 00:50
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I know Northwestern, GW, and (possibly) BU have a full tuition early decision program, where if you get accepted early decision you have to attend but get a full scholarship. I'm not sure how competitive each is, though obviously each is more competitive than the general admissions for each school. I looked into them briefly, but ended up too tempted by the possibility of going somewhere higher ranked. I feel like GW and BU, at least, would be possible with your GPA and a good LSAT.
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Aug 17, 2012 00:53
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calling law school a crapshoot implies that statistically, you break even over time after you account for the free drinks also, I got bored and decided to write a manga  
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Aug 17, 2012 05:34
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Bro Enlai posted:also, I got bored and decided to write a manga uguu...
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Aug 17, 2012 06:46
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There are certain schools that have a reputation for being more generous with scholarships than others. But seriously, don't go.
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Aug 17, 2012 07:46
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Also, have you guys seen this poo poo yet?quote:This Year’s Ross Essay Contest Is a Haiku Throwdown: Winners Get a Share of $5,000 in Prize Money
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Aug 17, 2012 07:49
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Oh it's OCI season again? Here's my one piece of advice: don't blaze weed right before an interview. Your interviewer will have a ridiculous pedo-stache and you will waste every last ounce of concentration stifling both giggles and the overwhelming urge to ask him how he gets the blood out of his clown suit. Clearly this is why i'm not working in biglaw.
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Aug 17, 2012 10:49
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Secret Asian Man posted:The staggering negativity in this thread is both unfounded and unproductive. While immigration law doesn't necessarily pay as much as corporate law, it is a fast-growing practice area and it can be both financially and personally rewarding. I agree Soothing Vapors fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 12:18
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Incredulous Red posted:Also, have you guys seen this poo poo yet? Join S&C. Live in a Steel and glass prison. Aspire for greatness, And join BigLaw. Spend your life Sucking partner dick. How will the Court rule? Five to four in favor of Screwing black people. Innovation in Legal practice is a crock. No jobs, die alone. Ani fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 12:24
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Stinking, half-pinched loaf, Brown crime in porcelain bowl: Duke, turd of the South. Gimme my grant money
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Aug 17, 2012 13:08
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I'm tempted to apply to that with my cover letter saying "go gently caress yourself"
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Aug 17, 2012 13:09
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Baruch Obamawitz posted:I'm tempted to apply to that with my cover letter saying "go gently caress yourself" Do it and post the response (if you get any)! 
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Aug 17, 2012 13:11
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It's already deleted...so, which one of you took that job?
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Aug 17, 2012 13:49
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Soothing Vapors posted:Stinking, half-pinched loaf,  Ten Thousand Below. The Weekend Is Mine Alone. Midlaw, not so bad. HiddenReplaced fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 15:52
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I'm sorry Karen, You can't sue over steak knives. How did I get here?
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Aug 17, 2012 16:13
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Paper crinkles soft Looking for a smoking gun Twenty years too late No client, there still is absolutely no evidence of asset hiding in your 20 year old breach of settlement agreement case 
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Aug 17, 2012 16:30
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Thanks for the excellent advice and tough love, everyone. If things don't turn out well for me after applying and giving it my best shot, I will take your advice and "seriously, don't go." For the record, I'm more interested in working on migrant labor issues (safe working conditions, fair wages, etc.) than in bilking ignorant Mexicans until they get deported... although I'm not going to rule that out entirely  Another question for you hard-nosed types: -How realistic is it to make a living with your own practice?
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Aug 17, 2012 16:42
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Depends, which side of the issue do you want to work on?
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Aug 17, 2012 16:56
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As someone who spent an entire summer intensely studying the history and theory of English-language haiku, I am disgusted and offended by that ABA "haiku" contest. The most glaring issues: 1. The 5-7-5 structure is rigidly applied in the Japanese haiku tradition, but it makes little sense to apply it to English haiku. The 5-7-5 structure for Japanese haiku is built entirely on the linguistic infrastructure of the Japanese language. Japanese phonemes differ from English phonemes, and the amount of meaning that can be packed into a Japanese syllable is different from an English syllable. English-language haiku poets have long discarded the rigidity of 5-7-5, usually in favor of a total syllable count somewhere in the range of 11 to 15 syllables, divided up between two or sometimes three lines. (Nevermind that the English concept of "syllable" is different from the Japanese concept.) 2. Haiku, whether Japanese or English, are image-based and nature-focused. Haiku poems work by juxtaposing two images from nature in a way that provokes an emotional response. Haiku are not about word-play, jokes or social commentary. They aren't about the inner mental workings of humans either. There is a separate category of short-form poems for those other things, called renku. 3. Haiku traditionally require the use of a special "season word" which, by convention, is pre-loaded with connotation and meaning. Haiku poets would carefully select the season word to draw out very subtle distinctions in the imagery that they are using. Although "season words" are not nearly as developed in the English-language haiku community, the principle is still followed. So that ABA contest? Awful. Totally wrong subject matter for haiku, stupid adherence to the 5-7-5 concept, and complete disregard for the modern traditions of English-language haiku. 
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Aug 17, 2012 16:59
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Thesaurus posted:How realistic is it to make a living with your own practice? Very realistic, depending on your definition of "living". If that means having a full-time satisfying job and the ability to make ends meet, that's difficult but realistic. But if living means "making enough to do things that involve money", then it's not as certain. Some solos do fantastic and make a good living, others fizzle out and "filling in the off-hours at home depot" becomes "I work at home depot". There are a lot of severe pluses and minuses to going solo, and I'm probably biased because I'm a solo. I think the best advice I can give is that if you go to law school, you'll probably end up doing a job you didn't know existed. That's not a bad thing, I'm not trying to crush your dreams or anything. But no matter what field you go into, it usuallly becomes a job you didn't expect. I like boats, but if I went to work on a boat I'd end up doing some specific task I never knew existed that has nothing to do with my love of boats. That's how it is with most anything. entris posted:As someone who spent an entire summer intensely studying the history and theory of English-language haiku, I am disgusted and offended by that ABA "haiku" contest. Five syllables is trash. Air and Earth: Think about it! Season word is boobs. woozle wuzzle fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 17:12
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Thesaurus posted:
How much money you got in savings, how willing are you to do doc review, how willing are you to do family law and how many clinics you gonna do in law school? First year sucks but it's picking up.
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Aug 17, 2012 17:21
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Thesaurus posted:For the record, I'm more interested in working on migrant labor issues (safe working conditions, fair wages, etc.) than in bilking ignorant Mexicans until they get deported... although I'm not going to rule that out entirely Go into politics.
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Aug 17, 2012 17:34
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Welp just got a call from the General Assembly offering me my dream job. Seeya later Patent Office, I guess. Go to law school kids, dreams do come true.
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Aug 17, 2012 19:37
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