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| | Andrew, nice essay. The thought process that you describe is one that most law students can relate to, though probably only subconsciously. Incorporate whatever you want. I'll be happy to take another look at this anytime (this semester or beyond).
I'm adding section numbers to the essay so that I can refer to them below. |
| | I delivered like a champ. |
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| | You start attacking the Rational Man right from the get go. I think that it would be more effective to instead "build up" the Rational Man into someone that the reader thinks is a sensible and prudent person in Sections 1-3, so that you can more effectively knock down his thought processes in Sections 4 and 5. I think that you can get rid of this section entirely.
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| | Like any sane person I wanted to get the hell out of Ann Arbor after graduation. But, despite that, I wanted to live and work in Michigan for the rest of my life. At the beginning of my senior year I visited a university career adviser. She told me, considering the recession and my history degree, that my most realistic options for working in state were learning a trade or going back to school. |
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| | Learning a trade and going back to school seem like the two extreme options. Did the recession really eat up everything between them? What about getting a mundane office job somewhere in Michigan. If those jobs were gone, you could say so explicitly. Despite what your adviser told you, did you try to get a normal job (for a U of Michigan grad with excellent grades) anyway? If so, you might want to talk about that effort, since it would help build up the Rational Man into somebody who the reader thinks is sincere and reasonable. |
| | My spreadsheet listed law school (which I didn't know a damn thing about), separated and highlighted, up at the top. Two rows lower was a list of fifteen choice industrial occupations. |
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| | Why did the Rational Man only consider law school (and not business school, med school)? Why didn't he consider travelling the world for a year until the recession recovered - that would have been an experience AND may have been an better financial investment than going into debt for a law school education? (I know that the point is that the Rational Man was not actually rational -- but maybe there are some extra details that could go here). |
| | Bullshit. Law school, when analyzed strictly from a financial investment perspective, is a poor decision for nearly all applicants, all things considered. That didn't even begin to consider the highly bimodal salary range for lawyers if I wasn't "fortunate" enough to work in a firm. In terms of balancing earning power to risk, law school was the clear loser. |
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| | Did the rational man actually know about the bimodal salary structure when he put "100k" in the salary column before law school? Did he choose to remain ignorant for fear of finding out that law school isn't as great an investment as he wanted it to be? It would be interesting to make explicit what the Rational Man was possibly thinking.
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| | Also bullshit. The notion that I was “too smart to not go” was narcissism gone wild. My stellar grades and aptitude test scores were poor empirical measures of intelligence, and even if we assume they were perfect indicators of brilliance I had also ignored the thousands of people in Michigan alone who, because of a whole myriad of repressive social processes, were unable to be evaluated by these methods. As for social impact, I'm not sure how to go about measuring the “utility” of a profession. Even if we could, I'm not sure how to categorically weigh lawyers against, say, plumbers. Is a good plumber really worth less to society than a good attorney? Is there any reason to think that I would be a good attorney? There should have been a column for “megalomania factor” on my spreadsheet. |
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| | I liked the ideas you laid out in the subsection "The Social Utility" of Section 3. Here, I don't think this section provides the strongest possible counterpoint to those ideas. |
| | It didn't matter what being an electrician versus a lawyer was truly about, because the image of becoming “an attorney” became a proxy for achievement in my mind's eye. I'd reckon it has something to with those fancy glass doors. A plumber, a construction worker, an industrial worker - even to the son of an auto working family, those were repugnant positions of futility, of toil. Despite the spreadsheet, I evaluated prospective professions not by actual qualities, but by their projected appearance. Worse, I "stacked the deck" through self-deception by looking at certain statistics in order to make going to law school seem to be the best choice. Cloaked in the process of rational decision making, I reverted to anthropological needs by taking the bait and swallowing the hook. Agency versus contingency indeed. |
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| | I like the way you phrased this Section. The Rational man had a "fulfillment" column in his spreadsheet. Isn't the feeling of achievement you from your job part of fulfillment? Did the Rational Man take that into account, or did fulfillment mean something else to him? |
| | After my small awakening, I won’t be led by the nose to the profession that projects strength if it makes me weaker in the end. If I’m not here next fall, I might be holding a plunger. |
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| | But isn't making a long-term career decision based on your temporary enjoyment short-sighted? Being a 1L at Columbia and working day-to-day as, for example, a small practice lawyer in Michigan probably have nothing in common. The Rational Man and the Truly Rational Man seem to be motivated by a host of factors: living in Michigan, having a socially meaningful career that exploits unique talents, prestige and money. The Truly Rational Man also acknowledged that there are many people, in Michigan alone, without access to opportunities. I think that these objectives, on whole, would be better met as a lawyer than as a plumber. If that's true, wouldn't it be rational to plow through law school, and maybe even a couple years at top legal organization in NYC or elsewhere, to gain the skills to go back to Michigan and work on these issues? You wouldn't be able to do that if you had a plunger in your hand a year from now... |
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| | WRAP-UP COMMENTS
I liked this essay. As I pointed out above, I think that in a rewrite you could draw a sharper line between the Rational Man and the Truly Rational Man by building up the credibility of the Rational Man in Sections 1-3 (rather than attacking him from the get go). Also, I think you could dig even deeper into the Rational Man's and the Truly Rational Man's thought processes in the ways that I have described above. |