How the devil temps me…

I came to law school wanting to find the marriage of fulfillment and financial viability in my career. And maybe some Intellectual Street Cred (not to be confused with Actual Street Cred.) A Masters in Public Policy just wasn’t going to do it. I also wanted options. Litigation, legislation, policy, nonprofits – I can be involved in any of those things with a JD, unlike many other, more specific degrees.

 

No matter which way I end up using my law degree, the plan has always been to do something good – whether it’s straight up helping people or changing the world they live in for the better. This will likely entail starting my career in the public sector – either the government or a nonprofit organization where salaries are not much better than what I was making as a Louisiana school teacher. It shouldn’t matter though – there are ways to make the money work, and other people have solved this problem before.

 

But then the devil tempts me.

 

Now by the devil, I mean the money that one can possibly earn by working for a big firm. Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to make a lot of money at a big firm. It’s the temptation to deviate from my actual career goals in order to get some of that money that may be the road to hell. The temptations come at you in the form of assumed desires. So many people assume that if you are in law school you desire a job at a prestigious law firm that will start your salary at $160,000 – and that is what a good number of people want. But when that’s not your primary goal, but your career information is tailored to that audience, you begin to think, hey… maybe that IS who I am! Maybe I DO want that! It’s there for me to take (depending on the market…)

 

So why am I so easily brain washed by this information? Besides the fact that I’m personally susceptible to advertising?

 

It’s the debt. You have a career goal that requires law school – say, in policy – so you take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to pay for your JD. Then you realize that the salary of your dream job is going to make paying off those loans a total bitch. Even though it’s completely possible to pay off the loans, albeit slow, you start eyeing up the big firm and its big salary. Maybe the firm doesn’t seem so bad, even though it’s not what you came to law school to do. Even though it was never in your career plan and takes you in a completely different direction than any of your interests, dreams, or core life-long intellectual questions.

 

It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. I knew the cost. I knew what the debt would look like in relation to my projected future salary. The government is trying to make it easier with the revamped College Cost Reduction and Access Act, reducing the amount of time you have to work in the public sector to 10 years in order to be free from debt. Additionally, the question of work/life balance is a mitigating factor. But the temptation to sell my soul is there all the same, with every AboveTheLaw entry I read. So now I’m setting out to stay the course – to do what I came to do rather than take off in another direction. There would be no point in having a career I never wanted just because it will pay for the degree I needed in order to have the life’s work (and Intellectual Street Cred) I actually desired.