My first job paid $19,000 a year, and I was able to pay all of my bills and was truly happy (and I lived in Manhattan). My biggest fear right now is that I will spend a huge amount of money and put in three years of hard labor here and end up making myself miserable (or at least less happy) in the end. Eben's story of the drunk driver with a horrible family life terrifies me more than the prospect of a B- or not making $160K in 2013.

Also, Ron: I like the law firm lobby thread. I think many firms need to create a false (and posh) reality for the bright young things working for them. You're right: no one outside of the firms has heard of most of these places. On a related note, I worked on the support staff at a big firm for a while and was shocked to really feel for the first time in my life the presence of a CLASS system. There was an amazing divide between "attorneys" and "staff," and it really shocked me. My background is privileged by no stretch, but I had never been in a situation where someone flat-out treated me as a total inferior without a second thought. The divide was reinforced by the firm in countless subtle ways that I think were designed to mask the anxiety and tell the associates that they were really important ("See! You're far superior to the secretaries and the receptionists and the woman who fixes your blackberry!").

-- CourtneySmith - 07 Feb 2010

Just to clarify, I don't actually think that working in a law firm is enjoyable. What I was trying to convey is that, despite knowing that firms are sweatshops, the vast majority of us still sign up for OCI. Even worse, we soon start to measure ourselves based on just how high we can reach in the firm pecking order. I'll guarantee, come next fall, people will be debating the relative merits of working for the no.4 litigation firm in Chicago vs. the no.23 firm in New York. As though these rankings actually have meaning.

In short, I was trying to remark upon the transformation that a lot of law students go through, and which I was starting to observe in myself. Suddenly, the game of where you can get hired becomes an end in itself. Suddenly, our sense of self-worth becomes tied to the relative prestige of a job offer, even though no one you know outside of the law bubble has ever heard of these firms. And the biggest irony of all is that most of us don't even want these jobs. That the firms can be so successful, despite the fact that we know these jobs are barely short of hellish, speaks to their great skill at playing off of our fears and anxieties. They present us with a manicured image of success, and we bite.

-- RonMazor - 07 Feb 2010

I agree with Ron that the there is an “apparent” seductiveness about working in a big law firm, but as David pointed out, the image they sell is completely false. I worked in one of those firms and my experience was that after working the whole day seven days a week, in which your life is completely controlled by other people, you simply forget why you got there in the first place. I did not have time to do anything else and if I had some free time I was so exhausted that I did not have enough energy to do the things that I used to enjoy.

I know that I am at a different stage in the educational/professional process than the rest of the class (I am “the” LLM in the course), but I believe that the fear and anxiety are still the same. I have to choose what to do with my life now (I can stay here or return to Chile and I have to find a job here or there) and I am terrified about not taking the right decisions. I do not want to look at this moment in the future and to think that I should have done things differently.

My main concern is not about finding a job. I agree with Glover and Jeff that there are many chances for students from a “top” law school as Columbia. My concern is to fall in the stereotype of the lawyer of the big law firm who literally “lives to work”. I am not saying that I want to work little, but I want to be able to have enough time to do the things that make my life meaningful. Among other things, I would like to have enough time to be with my wife and my child (he is 20 months old). I would hate to be an absent father and husband no matter how much money I could make. At the same time, I do want to be a very good lawyer and to make a difference through my work. The problem is that I do not know if it is possible to achieve all that or even if it is doable at all. In the meantime, the anxiety is growing and growing.

-- FranciscoGuzman - 07 Feb 2010

So, I'm down in D.C. this weekend -- or maybe I should say stuck in D.C. this weekend -- visiting a (1L) friend at Georgetown Law, and I've had a couple of conversations with both him and a few of his fellow students about fear and anxiety in law school. And the interesting thing is that they don't seem to have much -- at least of a certain kind. Most of their anxiety is concentrated on the present, not the future -- and though what misery they have that stems from grades and the curve seems to bear a close relation to ours, it is by no means of the same degree as some of us seem to be experiencing. They are, as far as I can tell, much more chill.

Regarding jobs, my friend related a story from the first day of his constitutional law class, when the professor asked how many people intended to pursue public interest careers. About 100 of the 110 or so students present raised their hands.

The students I talked to were worried about finding summer jobs, but not overly so. And none of them had given much thought to their actual career opportunities -- by this I mean real jobs they might apply to -- aside from gesturing towards things like national security, criminal prosecution and defense, policy think tanks, etc. Nor were they particularly worried about the demise of firms, because, by and large, they had no interest in working for them.

Now, Georgetown's a big school, and by no means was this a representative sampling. And of course its location in D.C. lends itself to a certain appreciation of the possibilities of government and public interest work that, to an extent, we perhaps miss out on in New York. In many ways its probably on the opposite end of the spectrum from Columbia Law.

This is by no means a well thought-out post, but I guess I'm not so much trying to assert anything as I'm wondering to what extent New York in general -- or maybe I should say Manhattan -- and Columbia Law's culture in particular, are responsible for fostering the neuroses that seem to be plaguing several of us. How much of this is law school, and how much of this is this law school, in this place? I think probably a lot. And so it helps to get out occasionally and realize that not everyone, and not everywhere, is so crazy, and that in many respects we spend our days in a pretty parochial place.

-- GloverWright - 06 Feb 2010

Jeff- your point about "buying back our freedom" really resonated with me. I hope that we can talk about loans one day in class, Eben...practically, how will taking a meaningful job that pays less money (but doesnt qualify as "public interest " in Columbia's eyes) allow us to pay off our debt?

-- JessicaCohen - 06 Feb 2010