My mother went to law school in 1975 because she’d spent a few years bumming around with her hippie friends and living in her parents’ basement in New Jersey, and she thought she ought to learn a trade. She got in to NYU but went to New York Law because it was a thousand dollars a year cheaper. After law school she got a job at the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development. Over 35 years later, she still works there. My uncle also went to law school in 1975. He went to Duke, because his goal was to go to a better law school than his sister. He is now a partner at a big law firm and spends the majority of his time defending big tobacco companies. He donates his money to various liberal causes, and I suspect he feels that he makes more of a difference than my mother does in her public interest job. Until recently, I somewhat unconsciously saw those as my two choices. Route One: secure, easy hours, work-life balance, low but stable pay, predictable, safe, ostensibly “promoting social justice” (whatever that even means), being a cog in a machine who reacts to policies and orders and rules that you don’t set yourself. Or Route Two: working all the time, never sleeping, always hustling for clients but having more freedom to pick who you represent and how you do so, and using your paycheck rather than your time to support what you believe in. And I thought I’d found a middle ground – working at firm for a few years for training and credentials, moving in-house to some sort of media company, getting a nice stable job with nice easy hours doing work that wouldn’t be terribly stressful. I worked in publishing for a while, I’m interning in-house at the New York PBS station this summer, and I could easily float down that path. Take some soft IP courses, take the arts and entertainment classes that Columbia offers, do an internship or two. But as I’ve been thinking more about this over the past few weeks, that feels pretty unsatisfying. Long-term, I could never lead my uncle’s life – I need to have a life outside of work. But it would probably get pretty depressing to push contracts around all day, year after year. And in choosing this path, I realized I’ve forgotten the key ingredient to both careers – my mother and my uncle, in their own ways, like what they do and get satisfaction from believing that they somehow contribute to the betterment of society. When it comes to that component, I think my uncle’s way is bullshit. I believe he loves what he does. I believe he cares about the causes he supports outside of work. Maybe if his goal was tort reform and the defeat of frivolous class action lawsuits that would be one thing, but his politics and values are not really aligned with that. A certain degree of irony and contradiction are practically inevitable is any career or life path. But I’d rather derive There are so many problems to fix and so many things that so clearly need to be changed and protected and strengthened, it’s hard to pick what’s most important, what’s possible, and what I’d be best at. It seems easier to make choices selfishly, to base your happiness and self-worth in things you feel that you can control, like your salary or your hours or your job security or your location. Focusing on the day to day rather than the big picture as much as possible, and when focusing on the big picture, looking at personal success rather than at your role in the system and at the effect you have in the world. But in today’s legal market, flexibility is key, and being tied down to a very specific career track for solely selfish reasons is not a wise choice. There are plenty of jobs that I think are incredibly important that I would be really terrible at. Teaching, for example. Likewise, there are plenty of issues I care about that I would not want to do on a day-to-day basis. While I think Planned Parenthood is wonderful, I worry that working for a reproductive rights organization would be too emotionally fraught and that I wouldn’t be very good at the kinds of work that the majority of these organizations seem to do (grassroots activism, fundraising, policy shaping, direct legal services). While I also wouldn’t want to be a writer or artist, I deeply admire artists and writers. Well, at any rate, good artists and writers – those who produce beautiful, meaningful things that make people glad to be alive, or at least things that make them think. I worry that there aren’t enough incentives to create really great things, that it’s very hard distinguish high-quality things among the mountains of other content, that the avenues for widespread recognition and publication are not finding the best things. There is so much content being produced in general, cultural commentators tend to focus on the bad stuff. And there’s plenty of worthless drivel out there, but there’s a lot of beautiful, great, interesting stuff being created every day. I’d like to make sure these things keep happening; that the system for selecting books for publication becomes less arbitrary and elitist and more creative; that we think of new ways for getting ideas and content out there while also fairly compensating artists. Maybe I can do some of that working in-house at a media company, maybe not. Law school could help really set me up for the simple path I’d first envisioned, but I’d like it to be more than that. My original plan, before I got here, focused on all the pre-professional opportunities Columbia offers. Now that I’m here, I’ve realized it’s equally important to broaden my philosophical horizons. So what I’m really saying is I’m more lost than ever. But at least I’m learning to be more comfortable with uncertainty.

-- TamaraO - 25 Feb 2013