1 year later....still glad u went to law school?

[cen]

[...] she has not yet learned to take responsibility for her stupid actions, in fact mommy and daddy are paying for law school. This JD student operates under the principle, "My parents' loss is not my loss."

That's especially true with private school deadwoods who are merely bludging off daddy's money.

[bratgirl9]

I will go on record and say it:

Choosing to attend law school was the worst mistake of my life.

I just finished 2L at a tier 1. My GPA is right at the top 10% cutoff and I am also on Law Review. So, my displeasure does not stem from my accomplishments in a classroom. Instead, I have found that with each passing day, I simply just like the law a little bit less. There is no particular reason except I am just not interested in it any longer. The possibility that I may have to deal with law every single day until I die is almost enough to have me pull the trigger and withdraw. But, b/c of the loans, I am sticking it out. I have to pay them back and cannot figure out how I could do so if I quit law school now.

But, in answer to the OP's question, NO -- I am not glad I went to law school. Further, I would encourage every single person thinking about law school to NOT apply until you have dealt with the law in some capacity and know without a doubt that you want to pursue a JD.

If I could do it all over again, I would go to med school, or dental school, or hell . . . maybe just make cocktails on the beach ala Tom Cruise in "Cocktail."

I agree with your comment on being sure.  I feel that things will be different for me because I have been in law for 13 years.  I am a paralegal for an IP firm, and the main thing that I do is legal research.  I am given the responsibility to research complex legal issues, and I write about them.  I took two legal research classes of increasing difficulty and both of my teachers were very impressed with my work and said that I had the best legal research and memorandums in the class.  I have had a love hate relationship with law for years.  I have thought about law school for 12 years.  I have an advanced degree (in education, which I do not use and do consider a waste of time except that I gained intrinsically from it by volumes).  I need to reach the next level, and I have come to a place where I love more than hate law.  What I hated in the beginning was being support staff and having to mix the research and legal stuff with stupid clerical stuff.  That's what I hated.  It is funny though to hear you say how you feel as a student in a 1st tier school.  I would pull my eye teeth to study at a first tier school, and I know that I would do very very well.  However, I am forced to choose from amongst the lower tiers. 

Realize that all people go through burn out especially when you have been studying your brains out for years.  Grad school was the same way for me.  However, you may find something to do with your law degree that you really love.  You may just need to get away from the academia side of it.  There is tedium in law, but there are alternatives that you might be quite pleased with.  I think having a law degree from a first tier school is going to open up doors you cannot yet imagine.  Hang in there and good luck.

[multifarious]

I believe DAT's PAT specific questions types are these ones

• angle discrimination
• block counting
• paper folding
• form development
• two forms of object visualization

The Keyholes present a challenge I would say:



e.g., you are asked which hole the 'key' on the left will fit through. The object on the left can be rotated in any direction prior to entering the hole, but can not be rotated while going through. Also, the hole must be an exact fit for the key.

[santropez]

What the hell is going on in this thread

I was expecting to read the woes of naive people who jumped head first into law school without realizing what it entailed....

Instead I got some weirdass diagrams...entertaining nonetheless

[hotel]

[...] Just look at the statistics on job-related depression. Law is #1 by far. A majority of lawyers say they wish they had gone into something else. [...]

[...] I don't care much about money, status, etc. I enjoy interacting with people in a more personal way. [...]

One'd have to figure out for oneself whether this is just as important as that, or that is just as important of this ..

[mucho]

[...] Just look at the statistics on job-related depression. Law is #1 by far. A majority of lawyers say they wish they had gone into something else. [...]

[...] I don't care much about money, status, etc. I enjoy interacting with people in a more personal way. [...]

One'd have to figure out for oneself whether this is just as important as that, or that is just as important of this ..

You mean whether money is equally important to one's well-being or you're better off entering into a less stressful field although you may earn less money? 

[becky]

[...] Just look at the statistics on job-related depression. Law is #1 by far. A majority of lawyers say they wish they had gone into something else. [...]

[...] I don't care much about money, status, etc. I enjoy interacting with people in a more personal way. [...]

One'd have to figure out for oneself whether this is just as important as that, or that is just as important of this ..

You mean whether money is equally important to one's well-being or you're better off entering into a less stressful field although you may earn less money? 

Interesting avatar as well! The question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

[ismile]

Interesting avatar as well! The question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

It points out the futility of identifying the first case of a circular cause and consequence. The predestination paradox (also called either a causal loop or a causality loop) is a paradox of time travel that is often used as a convention in science fiction. It exists when a time traveller is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" him/her to travel back in time. Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time travelling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveller attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating history as we know it, not changing it. The predestination paradox is in some ways the opposite of the grandfather paradox, the famous example of the traveller killing his own grandfather before his parent is conceived, thereby precluding his own travel to the past by canceling his own existence.

A dual example of a predestination paradox is depicted in the classic Ancient Greek play 'Oedipus'. Laius hears a prophecy that his son will kill him. Fearing the prophecy, Laius pierces Oedipus' feet and leaves him out to die, but a herdsman finds him and takes him away from Thebes. Oedipus, not knowing he was adopted, leaves home in fear of the same prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Laius, meanwhile, ventures out to find a solution to the Sphinx's riddle. As prophesied, Oedipus crossed paths with Laius and this leads to a fight where Oedipus slays Laius. Oedipus then defeats the Sphinx by solving a mysterious riddle to become king. He marries the widow queen Jocasta not knowing she is his mother.

A typical example of a predestination paradox (used in The Twilight Zone episode "No Time Like the Past") is as follows: A man travels back in time to discover the cause of a famous fire. While in the building where the fire started, he accidentally knocks over a kerosene lantern and causes a fire, the same fire that would inspire him, years later, to travel back in time.

A variation on the predestination paradoxes which involves information, rather than objects, traveling through time is similar to the self-fulfilling prophecy: A man receives information about his own future, telling him that he will die from a heart attack. He resolves to get fit so as to avoid that fate, but in doing so overexerts himself, causing him to suffer the heart attack that kills him. In both examples, causality is turned on its head, as the flanking events are both causes and effects of each other, and this is where the paradox lies. In the second example, the person would not have traveled back in time but for the fire that he or she caused by traveling back in time. Similarly, in the third example, the man would not have overexerted himself but for the future information he receives. In most examples of the predestination paradox, the person travels back in time and ends up fulfilling their role in an event that has already occurred. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the person is fulfilling their role in an event that has yet to occur, and it is usually information that travels in time (for example, in the form of a prophecy) rather than a person. In either situation, the attempts to avert the course of past or future history both fail.

[nyt]

No regrets whatsoever -- the most exciting thing I've ever done.

[BlueGreen]

tagsies...highly entertaining.