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The Kind of Lawyer I Want To Be

-- By JulieParet - 19 Apr 2013

Phase I: Getting Here

I never had dreams of working at a top law firm, or even of attending a top law school. I told myself early on that I would be happy even at UConn, a great law school where my tuition would be cut in half and I knew I could easily excel. I applied to Columbia partly on a whim, and partly at the insistence of my mother, honestly thinking that I had no chance of getting in. My GPA was respectable but not stellar. I had a lot going for me, but I definitely didn’t consider myself ‘Columbia material’ per se. And even though my LSAT score was the only thing I thought was getting me past the “presumably reject” pile, I was still convinced my test results were just some utter stroke of luck that the admissions committee would somehow see through.

When the envelopes started to come in, my future, which for months and months was full of musings and “what if’s,” suddenly turned into a hard and fast reality.

There were many factors that went into my decision to attend Columbia. Above all, I knew that in my parent’s eyes, only a fool would pass up the opportunity to attend an Ivy League law school, let alone the fourth-ranked law school in the country, although they would never say so. They insisted that the choice was mine, but as the funders of my education, I could not help but feeling obligated to make the decision I knew they wanted. At the eleventh hour, I informed Columbia that I would be accepting my seat and my parents happily cut the check.

Phase II: Entering the Jungle

In my first few months of law school, I slowly began to realize what I had gotten myself into. A new language, a new environment, and a new species, where everyone is impossibly smart and each person has more drive than the next. Between the so-called “gunners” and their endless need to prove their intellect, there were many times when I wondered if Columbia was the right fit for me.

It was not until this fall that I ever remotely considered myself a “minority.” But as I looked around at my fellow classmates, that is exactly how I felt. I prefer watching The Bachelor to C-SPAN (most of the time), and prefer talking about day-to-day things to endlessly discussing the casebook or politics or Supreme Court decisions. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not ignorant, and I read the news as much as the next person. I also love to learn, and learning about the law, but I am a firm believer that there can be too much of a good thing.

It was a hard adjustment, and one that I am still continuing to make. As I struggled to adapt to this new environment while acquiring a new language, I slowly began to realize that there was an entirely separate dialect that I was unfamiliar with. It was the career talk. It was subtle, in the way people would say Wachtell, and the bits and pieces that I slowly began to parse through. I still remember the first time, when I asked, “what is EIP?”, and someone asked me if I was serious.

I am not convinced that everyone here wants to work at a big firm, although at times it certainly feels that way. Certainly, there are people who want to do M&A and that’s that. But there are also people who want to work at a law firm for a few years, while receiving training and a six-figure salary, pay off their debts, and be on their way. The truth is, though, that we are all trapped inside a tiny bubble where there is so much emphasis on “big law.” It seems inevitable to escape it, because Columbia prides itself on it, and is self-reinforcing in this way. Students who had never heard of Skadden before entering law school suddenly worship whoever will be working there. I remember when someone proudly shared a ranking provided by Above the Law Blog, which ranked Columbia at #2 for career prestige (which from my understanding was calculated based on graduates obtaining clerkships and jobs at top law firms). And then suddenly everyone has the idea that that is what defines a “prestigious career” because the idea has been implanted. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Phase III: Where To Go Now

It is easy to lose sight of who you are at a school like Columbia, where self-worth seems to be measured by your grades, what journal you’re on, or what firm did or didn’t extend you an offer. It is especially easy for someone like me, who came to law school with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do, to see the clearest path and take it—go work at a firm, because we are taught little else.

Ironically, I came to Columbia because of the doors it would open for me. But they all seem to lead to the same place. Although I never imagined myself at a school like Columbia, I feel like I have been given an enormous privilege that I do not want to let go to waste. I don’t yet know what I want to do with my degree; however, I have come to realize now more than ever, with the horror in the news recently, that I want to affect positive change in the world. Quite frankly, I don’t think I can do that while sitting at a cubicle being told what to do.

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