-- CourtneySmith - 14 Jan 2010 I came to Columbia Law School in a roundabout way from the other side of Amsterdam Avenue. After getting an interdisciplinary master’s degree in the graduate school of arts and sciences (my thesis was an anthropological study of readers of Marcel Proust), I worked in the university’s oral history office for several years. I noticed that a ridiculous percentage of the people we were interviewing (and a lot of the people we had interviewed ever), regardless of what they actually did or why they were in the collection, had law degrees. Their stories were fascinating and sort of a revelation to me; growing up (in West Texas) the only lawyers I ever knew were the divorced dads of some of my friends, so law had never really struck me as an appealing profession. There were obviously several other steps in the process, but that’s the big one. I concur with the sentiment expressed by others that being able to provide comfortably for one’s family is also a motivating factor.