Quote:
Originally posted by Curiousgirl
why does everyone want to be a lawyer? Do people think becoming a lawyer is that easy and it just happens like that? Just because their choice of study didn't work out for them? 
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"That easy?!" I don't think so!
Maybe it's a little easier than it ought to be, given the number of shoddy lawyers who get through, but I wouldn't call it easy. Law school was hard. (What's more, I'm still waiting for my bar exam results, so this is a bit of a touchy subject with me....)
I was a philosophy major in undergrad. The stuff that most interested me was practical, ethical, moral philosophy -- the stuff that involves what happens in people's day to day lives. This stuff doesn't interest a lot of people in abstract analytical philosophy. I thought about getting a Ph.D. in philosophy and trying to get a teaching job, but, as my advisor put it, "there are several thousand philosophy Ph.Ds in the American Philosophical Association, plus who knows how many thousand more driving taxis." A friend of mine told me that for an opening teaching philosophy at a small midwestern liberal arts school, there were over a hundred candidates, some of which had come from very prestigious schools indeed.
So, I thought, "in what field can I continue to explore the sorts of things I like thinking about, hopefully finding an avenue to put it to productive use in the world?" Law seemed the best bet. It could give me opportunities to work with at least some of the things in my wide range of interests.
One thing that made me a lot more interested in law practice was the year I spent working in my law school's civil practice clinic. I worked with three real clients, doing a marital dissolution and two Social Security disability denial appeals. I realized just how important it can be to have a lawyer at the right time. I realized the kind of responsibility that implies for the lawyer. I also started to learn how to handle it when you have a losing case and there's nothing you can do to save it. I became very interested in the client counseling aspects of lawyering.
Aside from the relative brutality of law school, the only downside now is that I still don't know exactly what I'm doing next. It's hard to move to a new area and find a legal job there when nobody there knows you and the market is already pretty full. The economy changed a lot while I was in law school. Still, I'm optimistic. If I'd gone for my Ph.D, I wouldn't be $70,000 in debt, but then, I would be a lot less likely to find a job in the next month.