My windshield wiper fluid had been empty for a week, so I was really proud of myself when I finally bought some fluid from Wal-Mart.
In fact, I was SO excited that I popped my hood in the parking lot and filled the wiper fluid right there. Just because I’m that classy.
But when I got into my car, the “you need windshield wiper fluid” light was still on.
On the way home I realized why the light was still on – I poured the windshield fluid in the radiator!
The next day I was on the phone with Valvoline. They wanted $79 to flush my radiator.
I then called my car dealership’s repair shop – they wanted $125.
A few minutes later I’m speaking with a very knowledgeable boyish-woman at Valvoline. The amount of mechanics was amazing. It looked like a setup for a Bollywood dance number.
While my car was being pumped, yanked, and greased, I crossed Hennepin and went to SpyHouse, aka, the indie coffee shop.
I had two Time magazines that had been in my car for weeks. I got my overpriced coffee from the spot-bleached and pierced barista, and then found a seat among the macs and skinny jeans.
This was my first time “hanging out” in a coffee shop for months. I had done a substantial part of my law review petition at another indie coffee shop, but my café life basically ended once I got a car and a job.
The cliché in law school is “to do the things that make you happy so you don’t get angsty.” But the problem is that it’s hard to realize that you’ve stopped doing something that makes you happy – I didn’t realize how much I missed just hanging out until that day.
Somehow, during the dog walks and commutes to work, my extracurriculars became guilt-laced. And although my social life is now on par with the my best days in Miami, I forgot how important side projects and “me time” are.
And it took a windshield wiper fluid mix-up for me to figure that unstructured time needs to be a priority.
Something else was bothering me this week. Actually, I missed class on Wednesday and almost didn’t go back.
I didn’t fully understand what the problem was until I had a drink with Mobs at the Eagle.
The problem? Morale at the law school is low because a lot of us feel shafted. There was this unspoken expectation that if we went to a prestigious school and worked hard, that we would have some sort of job security.
Obviously, a quick glance at Above the Law reminds everyone that the job market is bleak.
Now, neither of us feel completely unemployable – it’s just that if we knew that we would have to do this much leg work and face this kind of uncertainty, then we would have done it for free at a less prestigious school.1
I don’t know how Mobs feels, but I definitely consider going to the University of Minnesota a mistake. My scholarship is a joke, and tuition for out of state students is the equivalent of a bitchslap.
The only problem is that there was no way I would have known that this was a bad idea. During undergrad I forwent Macalester, NYU, and Georgetown to go the University of Miami.
Sure, I was on a full ride and got to stay in a fun city, but I felt that I had shortchanged myself for the money.
So for grad school I went to my first choice school, despite getting full rides at dozens2 of schools.
My point is that the mild inferiority complex of going to a tier 3 school is better than cementing yourself into debt and jumping into a river of unemployment.3 And no, that’s not dramatic at all…
But with debt comes freedom. I’m going to finish my degree at UMN because a single year of law school is even more useless towards paying off loans than a JD degree. And since gainful law-related employment4 seems unlikely, I can focus what law interests me without worrying about “what looks good” to a non-existent employer – which I would have done anyway if I took a full ride at a third tier.
So this week I recommitted to me-time and focusing on law that I enjoy, which was the plan before I started law school. It only took trip to Valvoline and a $150,000 loan to get back to that goal.
1 There’s also the other inherent problem of going to a prestigious-but-not-top-5 school: there’s a curve and our peers are smart. Most of the people in our school are used to being in the top 10% of their class, but 90% of us can’t achieve that. All it takes is one question on an exam or one nutball professor and you’re screwed – and it’s too late to snatch that full ride at NoName University.
2 Yes, I applied to almost every school that sent me a fee waiver…
3 Fashion analogy? The girl with the cheap purse covets the Guess Bag. The girl who went into debt to buy the Guess bag realizes that the stupid bag is not worth the debt, and that Guess is still a few steps away from Gucci.
4 Gainful as in, “I can pay my student loan payment and still feed my dog.”
27 Comments
Huma
July 7, 2009 at 5:06 pmAw, honey, there are so many more intricate Bollywood dance numbers you could have cited. 😛 Like this one! The choreography is INSANE.
Huma
July 7, 2009 at 5:09 pmAlso, of course, the most important part of my reply that I forgot to mention: great post. Still cracking up at your pouring the fluid into the radiator. 😛 Dude, even I know better, and the last time I learned about cars, I was about 6 years old, sitting on the porch and watching my dad tinker with his Diesel. Hah. (I tease because I love.)
Jansen
July 7, 2009 at 5:53 pmHaha, the Bollywood link is a music video for JCA, one of my favorite German DJ’s/popstars 😀 Haha, and apparently it’s a common mistake!
Katie
July 7, 2009 at 7:50 pmI read this earlier at work from a link on Twitter, and I’m trying to figure out whether I agree with you or not (I know, you’re waiting with bated breath). I guess the thing that bothers me about Above the Law is that until I read it, I really didn’t know that people actually thought that they would hang out in law school, not work very hard, and be entitled to a job. That’s not what I read you as saying, but it seems to be an undercurrent in a lot of the ATL posts, and certainly in the comments.
I went to law school both because I want to be a lawyer and because I think that legal education is good. I have really enjoyed the past year, even if you’re not supposed to admit it. Obviously, everyone has to figure out what the right path for them is – and I think it’s definitely true that law school (or at least the U) that despite efforts to the contrary, there’s this huge emphasis on the jobs that only 20% of students end up getting, and most probably don’t even want.
Anyways, the point of that ramble: I’m glad you’re figuring out what you want to do. Maybe better to figure out now than 5 years into a soul-sucking job you hate? I don’t know.
Jansen
July 7, 2009 at 8:38 pmI enjoyed my first year as well.
I think the problem is that the education I’m paying $150k for is not substantially better than the education I could have gotten for free at another school. I somehow thought that UMN would offer better quality, and improve my employment opportunities (compared to a less prestigious school) and that doesn’t seem to be the case.
It’s not a bad school, but it’s not $150,000 better than tier 3 either.
Katie
July 7, 2009 at 10:29 pmMakes me wonder if Mitchell’s getting more transfer applications this summer?
Jansen
July 7, 2009 at 10:58 pmI doubt it, because transfers don’t get scholarships.
MBW
July 8, 2009 at 7:22 amSorry to hear morale is so low there, Jansen. I think if I’d not made the change to Ithaca, I’d be pretty pissed with the huge tuition increase, as I felt that I’d minimized my loans by choosing UMN over other higher and lower ranked schools (lower ranked but in better locales.) But I think my class (2012) is still in denial that things are going to be so bad when we get out – hell, I’m considering doing a dual just to postpone the day of reckoning (and hopefully increase my chance of gainful employment.)
Great post, btw. And thanks for reminding me to make sure I schedule in that unstructured time too this year. I’m still a bit sorry I won’t be there to bug you for all your 1L outlines and great advice.
Jimmy
July 8, 2009 at 9:07 amWell written post. I agree that there seems to be an unspoken but palpable angst in the dungeon. I too forwent lower ranked schools, which would have paid me to come, with the incorrect assumption that going to a slightly better school would dramatically increase my odds of employment (and my wages when employed at a presumably better place than I would have otherwise been). In the past, it may have been the difference at a mid-law or lower-end big-law firm. I have to forgo reading the layoff and deferral reports on ATL, lest I should fall into a deep depression.
The worst part is that I feel more screwed because I left a well-paying career that I loved to pursue the only thing I thought I could enjoy more. Now I’m left in a panic about whether I’ll even be employed upon graduation (plus I have a wife and baby to support). On the bright side, there’s the new student loan repayment plan, plus I have that really useful BA in Political Science to fall back on… wait, what?
Jansen
July 8, 2009 at 10:24 amHaha Jimmy! Couldn’t you just go back to your previous career?
MBW – I think Cornell is probably a better idea, especially considering the 15% hike. And the thing about outlines is that they aren’t super-useful when they come from other people. It’s the whole “You study and learn by creating the outline” cliche. The outlining process is more useful than the end-product.
And I dual degree could work!
GrzeszDeL
July 8, 2009 at 10:52 amHm, reading this post made me feel slightly better about my choice to go to a low-ranked school (St. Louis Univ) based on a generous financial aid package. The upside is that I am paying only a pittance (a few hundred a semester) to go here. The downside is that a SLU degree is really only worth that few hundred. When I ponder the limitations on my employment prospects that come with a SLU degree, I console myself in thinking that I will emerge with no debt and the ability to keep working in my current job (which pays decently) until I find a law job.
That said, I wonder if you should really be so down on your school choice as you are. As I see it, graduates of Tier 1 schools were once on a fast track to BigLaw. As a result, smaller law firms were once reluctant to hire Tier 1 grads, for fear that they would lateral to a larger firm at the first chance they got. Now that BigLaw is feeling such a pinch, smaller firms know that Tier 1 graduates’ prospects are not so rosy in BigLaw, and thus these smaller firms will be more willing to hire Tier 1 grads. In other words, you guys are losing out on one source of employment, but I would not be at all surprised if another is not going to open up for you shortly. Meanwhile, Tier 2 grads like myself, who were once the bread-&-butter of the smaller firms, will find ourselves squeezed out in favor of the newly available reservoir of Tier 1 grads. In other words, I expect that your prospects really would be worse if you had taken the Tier 3 offers you received; you likely made a better choice than you are presently giving yourself credit.
Jansen
July 8, 2009 at 11:47 amThank you for the comment – I think part of the problem at my school is that we have four law schools in this market, and our career services office is pretty gloom and doom.
As far as tier 1 crowding out tier 3, I think that’s hard in my market because the three tier-3 schools have pretty strong alumni bases.
I’m employed for the duration of law school, we’ll see how things go afterward. I’m still not convinced on the price tag.
GrzeszDeL
July 8, 2009 at 11:10 amP.S. – Great blog. I always make it a point to find five minutes a day to check it out.
Jimmy
July 8, 2009 at 8:25 pmJansen: SERIOUSLY, I went to the career office today… wanted to kill myself when I got done just to free up the space I exist within. I’ll add that to my list of things not do do again in the near future. As for working in my old career, it paid well considering I had no debt and a poli-sci degree. It doesn’t pay enough to dent $150k in loans. Hopefully I’ll be able to arrange a transfer at the end of my internship to a more long-term situation, like yours.
GrzeszDeL: I hope it is the case that the market can absorb all of this, and it will eventually be fine, it just sucks being on the cusp of it.
Jansen
July 8, 2009 at 8:48 pmThey are supposedly under new leadership next year…we’ll see how it goes.
I do think the career center is useful if you have a very specific idea of what you want to do…then they can do things like fix up your resume…but anything else you’re on your own.
"Mobs"
July 8, 2009 at 9:11 pmJansen,
Thanks for such flattering pics. 😉
That said, yes, I do regret coming here. There were days (toward the end of the semester in particular) when my morale was completely in the dumps about it. All of it – not just the Fourth-Tier JD mills that ought to be sanctioned by the ABA – has felt like a scam. “Everyone knows” that lawyers have good jobs, just like “everyone knows” that you can do anything with a law degree (because, hey, that immediately makes you infinitely more qualified to work at Mega, Inc. than every other English Major). All lies fed to us by admissions committees and student loansharks.
For me the biggest part wasn’t just that I could have gone to some perfectly respectable Tier-1 law schools for free, but chose MN for its urban location and top-20 pedigree. It was the fact that I gave up three years to wake up to daily reminders on ATL that I’ll never have the kind of career future I’d been told my whole life was coming. Two years ago I wish I’d had someone to shake me out of “I think I want to go to LAW SCHOOL” syndrome. Imagine what you could do for free in three years. Become fluent in another language. Work 20 hours/wk at a nonprofit. Publish two articles or give two speeches every month. Coach a local team. Become an expert at PHP and SQL. Compete in a triathlon and stick it at the bottom of your resume (send it to 20 employers – one will be a triathlete). Imagine my career options if I’d spent three years working every bit as hard at all of those things as I have in the Mondale Hall library. Beats the $150K house payment I’ll be whining about for 30 years. I’m still tempted to drop out and spend the next two years doing those things.
No, we’re not unemployable. But this was, I can say with confidence, the wrong choice.
Jansen
July 9, 2009 at 1:15 amMobs – a lot of the things you listed can still be done…they are going to take a little longer, but you still have time to do sthem.
Plus, now that we are stuck, we have to make the best of it!
2L – I still think it’s a mistake that was unavoidable, since people who choose not to go to law school are usually wondering “what if?”
Fellow2L
July 8, 2009 at 10:10 pmMust agree with you here Jansen, talking with a lot of our rising 2Ls we’re all feeling shafted. People who two years ago would have had no reason to bitch are shaking in their boots.
You’re right about one year of LS being more useless to paying off this ridiculous debt than just finishing the damn thing…it does suck though. Still have fantasies of just taking the one year debt and running.
I’m like the other guy…no debt from undergrad with a shitty BA…should have just shut up and kept my job. A low, but guaranteed, income with no debt is a lot more palatable.
Prospective law students, 80% of you would be much happier just wiling away time in low-stress, low-paid positions with your BA. Stay out of debt.
GrzeszDeL
July 9, 2009 at 9:54 amHm, based on this response I am given to suppose that I was not entirely clear in my previous post. I definitely agree that it sucks being on the cusp of it. That is true regardless of where your school stands in the rankings. I did not, however, mean to imply that the market will absorb all the newly minted lawyers coming out of law school currently. Rather, I simply meant that, as I see it, you folks in the higher ranked law schools will be better off than those of us who took the low-rank-for-scholarship deal.
The learned host of this blog is skeptical of my hypothesis that Tier 1 grads will crowd out Tier 3 (and Tier 2) grads “because the… tier-3 schools have pretty strong alumni bases.” Speaking as student in one of those lower ranked schools, all I can say is “from Jansen’s lips to God’s own ears.” That said, I guess I am not nearly as confident as he is in the strength of alumni ties. To my mind, there are two reasons why smaller law firms have traditionally done most of their recruiting from the same low-ranked schools from which their own partners graduated: 1) alumni relationships and 2) these firms knew that Tier 1 grads would not stick around any longer than was necessary to lateral into another firm based on their own Tier 1 alumni bonds. Now that reason #2 has less force behind it, it seems to me that it is an open question whether reason #1 is going to be strong enough to keep these smaller firms (the AmLaw 200 etc) from snatching up the Tier 1 talent that is coming on the market. Indeed, already here in St Louis I am seeing firms that once did almost all of their hiring from SLU and Mizzou taking on Wash U grads (folks who, in the recent past, would never have bothered even to send such firms a c.v.). I think that Tier 2 grads like myself need to be very worried that jobs that traditionally would have gone to us are going to be taken by T25 grads who would once have gone into BigLaw.
In other words, I would not be surprised if the market will absorb most of the Tier 1 grads, but I very much doubt that it will absorb all or even most of the Tier 2 or 3 grads (even the ones on scholarship). Therefore, I am not at all certain that those paying Tier 1 tuition instead of going to Tier 3 schools on scholarship are really making a bad decision. I would be delighted, speaking as someone who went the low-rank/low-debt route, to be wrong, but I am not convinced that the high-rank/high-price route is really as poor a choice as some here suppose.
Jansen
July 9, 2009 at 11:06 amI think the tendency is to only consider three things: 1) your class 2) higher ranked schools, and 3) schools in the market.
Unlike Texas, the situation in Minneapolis seems pretty tight. In the Minneapolis area you have UMN, St. Thomas, Hamline, and William Mitchell.
According to lawschoolnumbers.com, the four schools account for about 1,000 1L students.
I think the growing pain is that UMN students are starting to realize that we have to work harder to make ourselves marketable. (Which is something that students of the other 3 schools, especially Hamline, are well aware of.) This is probably the summer of whining for us, then the grind starts. I think in the end it will make us better assets to employers.
I am very interested to see what next year’s 1Ls will think.
Elle
July 9, 2009 at 10:12 amOh dear. Well:
As with Jimmy, I’ve got an incredibly useful BS in Political Science to fall back on [aha…hahaha…] but, my $.02 –
I was offered a full ride to a tier 1 school [Baylor, ranked 60 something this year by the USNWR gods] and was then accepted to UT [ranked 15] last week. I chose to attend UT, in spite of the loans I would incur [70k instead of 50k at Baylor]. I chose to go to UT because they offer me the opportunity to study something I love. National Security/Foreign Policy was my focus as an undergrad and UT offers a National Security/Human Rights clinic as well as a dual in Global Policy Studies. There are also many many courses in the realm of international law and international relations. Baylor didn’t offer those things. I could have been very happy at Baylor and gotten a job [their alumni network is tight and active], but I figure if I’m going to be making a small house payment for the next chunk of my life, it may as well be for a house I love, right? Right. [Where the house is academics and a fantastic city.]
I think part of the job doom and gloom has to do with the region you’re in as well. Here in TX, we’ve got 9 law schools. That’s a lot of schools, but TX is huge. Only SMU/Baylor/UT/UofH are tier 1 schools. One is in Dallas, one in Waco, one in Austin, on in Houston. There is also one school in San Antonio, one in Lubbock, one in Forth worth, and there are 2 more in Houston. You can almost move where you want to practice and go to school there, and then stay there after graduation. If I stay here in Texas after going to UT, I’m pretty likely to find a job. It might not [well, more than likely not] be the 160k/yr job the admissions people and other loonies try to sell us, but it’ll be a job.
“If we knew” – well, c’est la vie, no? You made a decision you thought would be best for you, so it wasn’t a stupid or a bad decision. It’s just one out of many others. Your realization and acceptance that going to a more prestigious school won’t really make THAT big a difference [I’m sure it will matter a little] will make you happier in the long run. I’ve accepted this already. I’m sure many of my peers will receive the bitch slap heard ’round the world when they are not, in fact, making $246872098274 after graduation just because they went to a top 15 school.
You’ve got the right attitude – study what you love and do the little things that can make you happy. In the end, if you get an awesome job – AWESOME. But if not, your life will suck a little less because you’ll still be doing something you enjoy.
Remember, Bob Marley is right. Throw on some Three Little Birds and take Harley for a walk.
Cheers.
ekgekg
July 10, 2009 at 3:09 amIm not even a law student and I feel depressed after reading this post and all it’s fine comments.
It is what it is, Jansen and I trust there will be better days when you will feel you made THE BEST CHOICE.
Chin up!
P.S. Now I’m also extremely thankful for my shitty 2,948th tier $30,000 education. Go me!
Jansen
July 10, 2009 at 12:54 pmHaha, I think it’s what you make of it. Remember, Branson and Gates are degree-less.
Jimmy
July 10, 2009 at 5:00 pmGreat discussion. I agree that I would have always wondered “what if” had I decided not to go to law school. I’m not even ready to say that my law school choice was a mistake, I like the school quite a lot. I just thought my prospects for paying the debt off would be more sure.
Really, my issues are my own fault. I came in with the attitude that I, like those in years past, only had to be in the top-ish part of my class at a good school and then I wouldn’t have to lose sleep over my employment prospects. Maybe that was a false attitude to begin with, maybe it’s not going to be as bad as I think it might be. I’m just going to hunker down (who uses that phrase these days?) and work as hard to find a job as I do to take an exam (or harder, if we’re talking about crim law). If it works out, great, if it doesn’t I’ll turn to a life of crime (is AIG hiring?).
Sorry to be all gloom and doom earlier. Hindsight is always 20-20 and life is rarely exactly how we thought it would be. We just need to do what we can to make it through a situation we didn’t anticipate.
[If you’re wondering, the theme for that semi-inspirational message was the scene in the Land Before Time where Duckie tells Petrie: “Petrie, do not feel sad. It is alright. Many things cannot fly. Rocks, trees, sticks, Spike…”]
Jansen
July 10, 2009 at 10:58 pmUGH. You cannot bring up Crimlaw. I don’t want to think about that class ever again.
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