Pigeonholing

I never wanted to go to law school for my own reasons. It was a decision premised on a relationship that didn't survive my 1L year rather than any particular desire to practice law for the rest of my life. As a means to that end, law school was a terrible decision, and I halfway realized that at the time.

I was concerned then, as now, by the idea of a resume gap. In essence, I wanted to take some time off before beginning my engineering career full time, and I wanted it to be justified on paper. Law school gave me that, although I discovered this solution in a short-sighted fashion. As I've attempted to leave the practice of law and sneak back into the measurably more pleasant field of engineering, I've come to learn that even that one year outside engineering made me less attractive to technology companies.

But wait! What of that oft-reinforced phrase "your J.D. will make it possible for you to do anything?"

Not really. People who have J.D.s do a lot of different things, but the J.D. is more often than not simply a gap filler. Those people could open the same consulting businesses, become the same artists, and run for the same political offices if they had gotten MBAs instead of attending law school. Ambition, vision, and luck place former lawyers in their new positions more than ancillary academic credentials.

Law schools, or at least mine, emphasize students becoming professional lawyers because it's a professional school. Law school is about one subject, and on campus interviewing is designed for one kind of employer. My first year, when I approached my school's career services office and asked them to help me find paid engineering work for my first summer, I was scolded. Partly because the CSO wasn't allowed to provide career guidance to me until November 1st, but mostly because I was supposed to be living like a lawyer. "Take a legal position. Volunteer at the public defender's office and work at a coffee shop at night to pay your bills, if you have to. The legal experience is too important for your future."

I could not convince CSO workers that for my desired position as a patent attorney, more engineering experience would help a lot more with my legal career than my ability to write an answer in to a DUI complaint. Similarly, they couldn't understand that if I couldn't ultimately get a position working in intellectual property law, I would rather transition back into engineering than anything else.

I don't say this to suggest that my law school was especially terrible or unique in its focus, but law schools and administrators could care less about people with non-lawyer aspirations. Unfortunately for me, I spent half a decade of my life learning that I wasn't interested in the future they built for me.