Words to the wise, from Scheherezade, a lawyer who loves her profession, but only because after college she spent a few years away from school growing up:

Don't go to law school right out of college because you're smart and you've been encouraged to by various history professors or relatives or because you like debating or arguing and you vaguely think you might want to get into politics someday. Don't go to law school because you're not sure what else to do, or because your parents really want you to. Or, at least, don't go to a really expensive law school for those reasons, unless you have the means to do so without incurring big big debt. Don't go to law school, in other words, to avoid making a decision about your life as an adult and what you want it to be like. Because if you incur big debt and make your peer group an extremely competitive and perhaps atypically unhappy group of people you will limit your ability to make that decision, clearly and well and for the right reasons.

Law school is fun. I worked harder and learned to think better than I did when I was at Yale. Partly that's because of the nature of law school, but a lot of that was because I wasn't mature enough to be particularly focused on my classes while I was an undergraduate. And when I got done with my undergraduate degree I wanted nothing to do with smart, highly critical and highly articulate people for a while. I went off to the woods and fell in love with a schooner captain and worked in a library and learned about computers and started a nonprofit and hung out with organic gardeners and carpenters and boat riggers. And I learned a lot about how to manage on a very little amount of money, and how to cook interesting dishes and how to get my laundry done before it became a crisis and how to make sure there was enough money in my checking account when rent was due and how to be a professional colleague with people who were much older than me and different in style and background and aspirations. I learned what made me happy and what made me frustrated and what I needed in my daily life to feel like I'd had a good day that day. And I began to learn that part of what I need in my daily life to be happy is contact with smart, articulate people, and some connection to a world where ideas are being pursued. I don't need highfalutin' intellectual stimulation the way some people need it, and I need a LOT of other things too (friends, fresh air, and fun) or I get restless and depressed. But I like to play with words and ideas, to engage with smart people, each day. And when I went back to law school knowing this, and knowing how to keep balance in my life, I had a fantastic time.

I really think if you go to law school before you've done that -- figured out, not just how to live as an adult, but what the elements are for you of a happy life, it's a lot harder to do it afterwards, when you're encumbered with an enormous debt, a status-crazy profession, and a whole lot of friends and family and peers who have a particular view about you and your ambitions. Suddenly you have to reject something, rather than assemble something. And I think that's usually harder to do.

There's more along these lines from Michigan law student Carey, who reflects on how our obsession with school rankings encourages bad, uninformed, immature career choices, which in turn contribute to the moral waywardness that seems to define so many professions (particularly the lucrative and prestigious ones):

It isn't that the students are bad. They're not (most of them). They are simply unsure of why they want to be lawyers. I don't mean that they don't know what legal specialty they'd like to pursue, or that they don't know if they'd prefer to work in government or in the private sector. What matters is that they don't know how or why a legal career will allow them to contribute anything of value to their fellow citizens. And this uncertainty is what draws so many law students into the insane world of Biglaw: big prestige, big money, big spending. Why? They don't know. They don't know why they do what they do. So they do what others tell them to do. It starts with automatically picking the higher-ranked law school. It continues with automatically working for the most prestigious firm which will hire them. And it ends with doing work which may be meaningless, unfulfilling, and occasionally simply evil.

It isn't that practicing law at a prestigious firm is boring or evil. Usually, I suspect, it's the opposite. Especially if the lawyer knows why she is there, if she's thought about how her work contributes to the community and is valuable beyond just the paycheck it earns her. If she hasn't, though, she's an automaton, and that can sometimes be evil, not just at Biglaw but at small-law, government law, and non-law (doctoring, accounting, street-sweeping, and bus-driving).

The rankings insanity is insane because it reveals the occasional thoughtlessness which can ripen by force of habit into blindness. This blindness can lead to scandals like Enron and Tyco. It can lead to governmental evil, like Naziism, fascism, and Stalinism. But usually, the blindness merely leads to the daily, low-level grunginess and lack of joy that plagues modern working life.

Something about being in school--even when you are good at being in school, which is a kind of subservient, sometimes unctuous skill and is not the same thing as being intelligent or educated or independent-minded--artificially stunts you. There are things you just don't have to learn about the world and yourself; the fact that your daily rhythms in college or law school or grad school are simply sophisticated, variegated versions of those you had when you were six speaks loudly to this fact.

I went straight through. I couldn't conceive of taking even a year off between college and grad school. I couldn't imagine what I would do with that time, didn't want to disrupt my momentum, didn't have time to lose. There was only one thing I wanted to do, only one thing I could imagine being. I mistook this for clarity of vision. I now understand that it was total lack of imagination--that special blinkered consciousness you develop when you spend your life in school, look up to your teachers, treasure their praise, and eventually, in the claustrophobic cycle of ambition that insularity creates, decide you want nothing more or less than to be like your professors when you grow up.

But to do well at something is not to know what you are doing. To want to be like that professor you admire is not to know who you are. And to stay "on track" by staying in school is not always to grow up--for many, it is to defer growing up indefinitely, sometimes until it's too late to grow up at all.

Carey describes how a lack of genuine purpose combined with a drive for prestige produces a dangerously conformist, ethically unstable mindset in many beginning lawyers. But it's not just the law. It's business, possibly medicine, and most definitely academe. I wonder sometimes what this country would look like if we could magically eliminate the fast track--get rid of the idea that you have to commit to a profession at twenty-one and be a homeowner with kids and multiple cars by age thirty, and introduce the idea that the twenties are a time of continued learning and growing that should be spent exploring one's options, supporting oneself, and not being a student. Would we just artificially extend adolescence even further by deferring for a decade the always awkward moment of professionalization, or would we become a bit wiser, a bit more able to think for ourselves, a bit more likely to choose the right work for the right reasons?

Yep - that's the one thing that I would do differently: take time off between college and grad school. Of course, if I did that differently I might have done lots of things differently; this isn't regret, but it's certainly the advice I give students about graduate school -- wait a year.

People have to take their own paths to self discovery and happiness. I'm going to suggest a path that is completely heretical.

I was married at the age of 19 and had children not so long afterward. And I still managed to finish college. I still lived a life of adventure and exploration. And I found my way to the work that I wanted to do.

The modern life of endless adolescence never had much appeal for me. Giving up something of myself for other people made things happen for me. The notion that friends were an adequate replacement for a deep love relationship and family always struck me as complete nonsense.

Children are better off without the excessive focus on material goods. In other words, they are better off with parents who don't have so much money. Children learn better values that way. Putting off having children until you can satisfy a laundry list of material wishes is, I think, counter-productive.

The insistence that marriage and children should be delayed until everything is in place does not, I think, make for happy people.

I am glad I took the path of marriage and children at an early age. People should have the right to do what they want with their lives. I'm not arguing that everybody should do this. I'm just suggesting that it should be one of the paths that young people consider.

Being in a deep love relationship and attending to the needs of family can be the route to self-discovery and freedom, too. Too many young people are depriving themselves of this, particularly the intellectual ones, out of obedience to fashion and ideology.

I took three years off between grad school and law school - ski bummed, worked on a newspaper, etc. That third year I audited some law classes at the local law school and fell in love with the law. So of course I ended up going to law school, which turned out to be great fun - intellectually stimulating plus I made a lot of friends. I only wish there was more law in the practice of law.

Time off to grow up, it's never wasted.

Wow, Stephen. I thought I was challenging societal norms when I got married as a second-year undergraduate two years ago. Good for you.

We're having our first child -- a daughter -- this summer shortly after graduation, and I'm going directly to graduate school in the fall. Personally, I don't see any benefit in waiting between undergrad and grad school. But then again, like Stephen, I didn't see any point in waiting to grow up and get married, either.

Thanks, Roy. I've never regretted my decision. I'm 54 now and my daughters are grown up and college educated. The only thing I do regret is that I did not have more children. I, too, could not entirely shake off the dictates of fashion and ideology. Have as many as you want and don't listen to anybody else.

Everything has its limits, including the cult of the individual that now rules western educated society. I think that limit was reached some time ago. Excessive individuality can be destructive, just like anything carried to extreme.

One of the issues seldom discussed in relationship to child-rearing is the enormous psychological and emotional growth that the process delivers to the parent. I work with young people every day in the arts and publishing. So many of them are obsessively trying to be more individualistic and struggling to focus even more attention on themselves. In many cases, it's obvious to me that what they really need is to focus their attention on another person. And, yet, everything is pushing them toward an even greater focus on self.

Young women, in particularly, have been relentlessly indoctrinated in education and career, often to the loss of the personal. It's odd that I am a member of that Boomer generation of men who stepped back and thought seriously about whether we wanted to march lock-step into the job like The Man in Grey Flannel Suit. The women took exactly the opposite route.

It is long past time for the women to reconsider and reflect. Life is more than the endless pursuit of self-gratification.

When a person is in school, it's basically all about them. They are not, at least in their roles as students, doing anything that is of direct value to other people.

When a person has a job, it's *not* all about them. It's about what they can contribute to the process of raising the crops, pouring the steel, or writing the code...all things that are needed by other people.

Spending a long time in school, not broken by significant work experience, probably contributes in a big way to the growth of narcissism.

These are some good insights, and I'm going to pass them along to my kid as soon as exams are over this week. (I think she'd explode if I gave her anything else to think about.)

"Would we just artificially extend adolescence even further by deferring for a decade the always awkward moment of professionalization...?" I think in most cases we would, unfortunately. But I've also thought that school, in addition to youth, is wasted on the young. I understand things better than I did when I was around 20 - not just life things, but academic things. I've thought, too, that when a person makes a career decision and then follows it, over the years that person changes in ways he wouldn't have with a different decision. I decided to major in chemistry at about age 16 for what were actually pretty shallow reasons, but now I can't imagine not working in a lab. My schooling and work experiences have gone a long way toward making me the person I am. Who would I have become if I'd majored in something else I liked - history, for example? It's really kind of strange to think that we make such momentous decisions while we're still children, really.

I really don't think that somebody who is out of school, working and earning enough to be self-supporting, should be described as "in extended adolescence", even if that person may not be working in the field where s/he will ultimately have a professional career.

Ah, but Steve, the caveat is that they have to be 'working and earning enough to be self-supporting'. I suspect the more likely scenario is that they will live off of Mom and Dad, who will continue to subsidize their ongoing immaturity. In fact, that is exactly what is happening now with many kids of Boomer parents. Mom & Dad are now well off, and don't want Johnny to do without anything. So Johnny spends his time 'finding himself' and living off the parents and waiting for them to kick the bucket so he can inherit their nice little next egg that he is ENTITLED to, and thus continue his ongoing immature life.

Kids should know what it's like to count pennies. They should know about eating lots of rice casseroles, because you can't afford meat and still have enough to pay the rent. They should know about paying all the bills by the 15th of the month and having $25 left to eat and buy groceries for two weeks. They ought to know about wearing the same clothes for over ten years because you can't afford new ones. They should have to face not going out to dinner for a lifelong friend's farewell party, because they can't afford it. They should have to live without a TV for 4 months until they can afford a new one when the old one finally expires.

Uncomfortable as these are, they were growing experiences. Without difficulty or adversity, children usually don't grow and mature.

For what it is worth, in order to be admitted to a top tier MBA program (in fact, what may well define "top tier" in some circles) you have to have worked for a while. They don't take students who haven't had experience outside of school.

Some students fudge it a little (e.g. LDS/Mormons who have spent two years on Church missions often use that as "time off" when it is part of the culture track they come from), but it is critical.

In addition, a long standing issue in the Academy of Management is studies that show that getting an MBA doesn't add anything to earning capacity over continuing to work and career advancement over the two year period.

Interesting issues all around in higher education.

Which is why so many schools are doing their best to avoid becoming pre-med programs.

e.g. if you are in the automatic admit category for Brown and they discover you are pre-med, your chances of getting in drop to 40%. Much of what goes on at prep schools is providing students a methodology for being pre-med without looking pre-med.

And every discipline seems to be be generating its own version of Planet Law School, except for Medicine.

What is being pre-med? Is it more than just "planning to go into medicine after your BSc"? I knew lots of premed keeners (as we called the people who wanted to go to med school) -- they were all competitive, but they covered pretty much every discipline in the sciences and quite a number in the arts (psych is a science at that school).

I'm not clear why being pre-med would make a school less likely to admit you.

I've thought for a long time that it should be mandatory for U.S. students to take a year to travel between high school and college, and graduate schools should, if they don't already, frown upon applicants coming straight from an undergraduate degrees.

I took a three-year hiatus after 3.5 years of undergraduate work, and I came back to finish my undergraduate work with a very strong sense of what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it. It's clear to me that the vast majority of my college students these days are just going through the motions, and that many of my colleagues who were accepted to graduate school straight out of an undergraduate degree were applying to grad school because they didn't want to face the world outside a classroom.

Perhaps it's idealistic to think that sending teenagers and college graduates out to see the world and meet and interact with people different from those they went to school with would make for a better college environment and a much more informed culture. It's the kind of idealism I wish colleges and governments would value, though.

...and graduate schools should, if they don't already, frown upon applicants coming straight from an undergraduate degrees.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

I took a three-year hiatus after 3.5 years of undergraduate work, and I came back to finish my undergraduate work with a very strong sense of what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it.

Some people know what they want to do, and how, when they're 14 (or younger). That should be the ideal, not this endless prolonging of education.

Extended adolescence is indeed an interesting term, and being a Gen-Xer, I can totally relate to how many of my peers are still in that stage in life. Although it is a good thing to take time off between undergrad and graduate school, I would not recommend that route to just anybody. In any case, extended adolescense should not last two long, such as a decade or so, but rather only a year or two. The time it takes to get back on track has much to do with who your peers are. There have been many people I've known in college who were driven, had a clear vision of what they wanted to become, and pursued it diligently and are still growing up as mature and responsible professionals as well as heads of households. Pre-meds especially were most likely to be 'straight-shooters'. Humanities majors were more likely to experience this extended adolescense, but for a very short period of time, say a couple of years between college and graduate school. The pressure brought about from your ambitious peers can often lead one to drop out of this extended adolescense rather quickly and enter a purpose driven life. On the other hand, being surrounded in college by immature loafers tend to encourage one to bum around longer than necessary.

I am one of those people who went straight from college to graduate school and then, before going into the private sector, spent 12 years in various academia, in the extended sense, by which I mean universities and also government research institutions that have the same research goals and atmosphere as research universities. I found much of this post and many of these comments to be insightful. In some important senses working in academia is like staying in school your whole life, particularly if you work at major research universities or major government institutes. At these high levels a huge, soul-crushing premium is put on being smart and showing everyone how smart you are, a display which can go to ridiculous extremes in an environment in which everyone is, by any reasonable standard, smart. A common effect of such a narrow career path is to become dismissive of those who chose other paths. This effect is particularly marked in many high level academics, who never left school and who have usually won the contest to be the smartest person in class. The end result is an environment in which not all, but surprisingly many, view the purpose of society as the support of them and their fellow academics. I must be careful to note that I am talking about the very highest levels of academia here and still not everyone at those levels. None the less, this attitude is sufficiently prevalent to create a very strange work environment. This attitude also leads to serious consequences for people's ethics. I have met many academics who have great difficulty comprehending the possibility that they may be involved in anything unethical. For example, I have seen situations where professors were encouraged to systematically expliot their graduate students, yet when people have brought up the ethical problems the responses were 1) I'm a nice person (often true, but irrelevant), 2)everybody else does it (completely true, but irrelevant), 3) I have to do it to stay in my field (also completely true, but irrelevant) and, most annoying and illustrative of their attitude, 4) I could make more money in the private sector (dubious and completely irrelevant). Thus, systemic problems in the organization of a field can take decades to confront. Another bizarre aspect of a high level academic environment is the combination of ambitious, extraordinarily talented people and an entitlement mentality, the latter stemming from the vision of the rest of society existing primarily so that they, the enlightened intellectuals, can lead it forward to greater knowledge and self-awareness. In any case, although I do have more to say, or more accurately, rant about, this comment is getting long. If you are an academic and reading this rant, remember that it does not necessarily apply to you, however, do keep these observations in mind as you look about.

One other consideration re long, unbroken intervals of schooling. Peter Drucker has observed that when a person does not hold significant management responsibility before age 30 or so, they are unlikely to ever evolve into a really good manager. Obviously there are exceptions, but in general I think Prof Drucker is correct on this. Anyone with career aspirations that involve management should probably bear this in mind, as the point will come at which credentials are no substitute for performance.

Roy W,

While I think it's great that some people know what they want to do when they're 14, I don't think my interest in having graduates from high school and college take some time away from school necessarily contests that at least some of those graduates know what they want to do. I think that, as Average Joe articulated, classrooms, perhaps particularly in the states, are in many ways hermetically sealed environments, and I think most students would benefit greatly from testing (if only to reaffirm) or contextualizing their "life choices" outside a classroom.

If it's true that there's a growing divide between academics in the humanities and the "real world", between theory and practice, if you will, I don't see how encouraging students to buckle in on the academically-motored conveyor belt--the Great Degree Machine™ that universities and high schools have become--from age 5 to age 20-x and beyond will do anything but perpetuate and deepen that divide.

Also, please note that I didn't say that graduate schools should ban students coming straight from undergraduate degrees. I just think that statements of purpose describing a "real-world" (I hate that term) context for academic goals should be privileged over statements which merely state an interest in a particular field. It has been my experience that the distinctions between these two types of statements of purposes correspond quite strongly between applicants who have taken time off and those that haven't.

Lastly, I don't think any system which forces or idealizes people forming strong senses of who they are by age 14 makes much sense to me. In a culture for which any sense of self in regards to work is, even (if not especially) for adults, fleeting at best, a 14-year old claiming to know what they want to do for the rest of their life seems like a psychological disaster waiting to happen. I'd be totally thrilled if my kids, when I have them, know at age 14 that they have a good amount of time to figure out who they are and what they want to do, and that any decision they make will probably only be practical for a limited amount of time That mentality would seem to me to be more in line with the realities of late capitalism, both inside and outside the academy.

...there's a growing divide between academics in the humanities and the "real world"...

Well, if we limit discussion to students in the humanities, I'd certainly be in favor of exposing them to the real world, with the purpose of discouraging their choice of major. But that's another issue.

Really interesting post, Erin. This is the sort of thing that inspires readers to chime in with their own experience.

I won't do that, except to say that it's hard even for me to judge whether I'm still languishing in an adolescent moratorium. It's fascinating to me that only retrospect gives us useful insight into ourselves. Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young. Most of us can't discern which road is best suited to ourselves until we've either taken it, or one less fitting. This leads me to the conclusion that it's dobly absurd to believe anyone can devise a one-size stratagem for the mass of youth.

My advice to a recent graduate would almost certainly be to wait a year, if not two, before grad school. The several years I spent out of college were too many. But I gained experience and knowledge I simply can't imagine graduating without.

My brother, the rocket scientist (how I love saying that), took a couple of years in between his BS and graduate school, and they loved him for it. As an engineer, there are things you learn 'in the field' that are better than years of schooling.

I'm actually rather glad no one tried to convince me not to go straight through from college to grad school. Many of my friends who took a few years off to work before starting in on the PhD are now in their early-to-mid-30s and have all kinds of stress about their biological clocks, financial insecurity, aging parents, post-grad options, etc. As a result, they end up either cutting corners to finish as quickly as they can (which makes them less competitive on the job market), or stressing so much that it gets in the way of their work (which prolongs their schooling even more). In contrast, I'll be done when I'm 27, and have far fewer concerns about "life issues" getting in the way of thinking and writing efficiently. likewise, being relatively young and "carefree" keeps my options somewhat more open than my older colleagues' - while they're all itching to land a permanent job straight out of school, I've got more freedom to consider post-docs or an extra year of field-research before I settle down.

Great post, Erin.

The only thing I have to add is that I see the same phenomena you describe in my experience in graduate school in engineering. What you write about is not limited to the humanities.

To answer:

[quote]

What is being pre-med? Is it more than just "planning to go into medicine after your BSc"? I knew lots of premed keeners (as we called the people who wanted to go to med school) -- they were all competitive, but they covered pretty much every discipline in the sciences and quite a number in the arts (psych is a science at that school).

I'm not clear why being pre-med would make a school less likely to admit you.
Posted by wolfangel at May 20, 2004 11:35 AM

[/quote]

Being pre-med is letting admin know that you intend to go to medical school.

There has been, for the last thirty years or so, a massive flood of students who have realized that while other fields may make money, the "sure thing" is medical school.

If you get into a bottom half law school, or end up in the bottom half of the class, your prospects are very limited.

If you don't get into a national or a regional MBA program, the studies reflect that you would make the same amount of money (and not have spent two years or tuition) just working along without the MBA.

Bottom half of a bottom half medical school? At the worst you will make 90k a year as a pediatrician, but you still have a good shot at the 2kk a year an orthapod makes.

Anyway, a number of schools have decided that they will not be submerged into being pre-med programs, which would otherwise easily happen.

My friend who attended orientation for his son's prep school was amazed to discover he was the *only* parent who did not intend for their kid to go to med school (and the kid is in law school now, having graduated from Rice undergrad). The only parent.

Interesting dynamics going on, including "doctor's wife" as a career track, etc.

Guess I should be bluntly clear.

I used to work with a kid who was a good attorney.

She had graduated in the top 5 of her class, law review, editorship, etc.

She also graduated from a bottom tier school. Best job she could get out of law school was working as an insurance adjuster. From there she got a job as a paralegal in a law firm and then was able to get a position as a junior subrogation attorney.

She worked her way up to a lateral transfer from there.

Now, a couple points.

First, I know and really like a lot of insurance adjusters, many of whom it turns out have law degrees and couldn't palatable jobs.

Second, there is a huge gap between the $13,000 a year jobs that seem like something out of a bad Grisham novel and the $130k jobs the top students from first tier schools get or even the 90k a year briefing attorney jobs available for those who go to work for federal judges. I know people with experience and background working jobs for $45k a year where they get *only* the holidays that fall outside the weekend (two of them this year), have a minimum billing of 2000 hours (which will take 60 hours a week to generate, no vacations) and get fined for various things, many beyond their control.

On the other hand, I love my job and really like my co-workers. Guess it is all relative.

But pay close attention to the placement statistics and ability of the law school you go to if you decide to go to law school.