The Lions' Pride

As a spouse of an attorney who was with her through law school I feel that I can testify to the fact that it sucks. She was a rare scholarship student in law school so not only did she have the pressure of the innate competitive nature of law school, she had to maintain an even higher standard to keep her scholarship. Through high school and Penn State she was a straight A (maybe an occasional A- or B+) and getting a lot of B's and C's in law school was very, very hard for her to adjust to (C's are actually average!). Also, the attrition was something like 50% for her school and about 1/3 didn't make it through the first year. It's not something I would wish on anyone. The advantage though is if you can find a job upon graduating, you make decent money relatively quickly and REALLY good money within about 5 years. She graduated law school at 24 and passed 2 bar exams before her 25th birthday. She is close to making partner at a 40+ attorney firm and she just turned 30.

I went the academia route and went back for my PhD at 29 years old. I have 4 years of school (2 in the books to date), a year long internship, and 2 years of post doc work before I'll see any substantial monetary return on all that work. The good news is that I'm not paying a dime for my degree and actually get a paid throughout the process.

Before going back to school I started my saturdays with gameday and didn't look back until the primetime matchups or even the late night pac-10 game. I can say that law school and a competitive PhD program like mine are extremely time consuming and will eat up you free time. I also have a 1 year old and a wife that works 60+ hour weeks. I find time to watch football every saturday, but it's pretty limited to PSU and primetime games. I like catching a thursday or friday night game if it's interesting or if it's a team I like to watch lose....

Used to watch or listen to any game I could. Last year I watched 2 quarters(guess combining many games) total I think of football outside of PSU, in the college ranks. To compensate, I watched more NFL than I have in years(which was very little)

My father, and brother went to law school, and I have a sister who's a 1L right now.

My dad has worked 60-70 hours a week for as long as I can remember, but he's always loved what he has done so I've gotten a good impression from him. Law school and the practice of law have changed since his time though (he's 50), and class ranking is a lot bigger deal than it was back then. He used to skip class two times a week to go play golf with his buddies- something you absolutely cannot do anymore. My brother was a scholarship law student as well, but he's much more disciplined than I am in his study habits. He was the one who told me not to get married before law school ("I used to be able to spend all day at the library, and play golf on weekends. Now I have somebody calling me if I'm not home by 6 for dinner."), and that if I wanted to do as well as he did (great job with an oil company out of law school, on the fast track) that is the kind of schedule I have to keep. Probably more because I don't study as efficiently as he does.

I think my golf game would take an even bigger hit if I went to law school, because I'd watch football every Saturday instead of hitting the links. Tradeoffs are part of growing up though I guess.

Remind me to chew that fat with you some time. Very interesting.

I actually had a donut with pink icing earlier. Bosses brought em in today. Funny stuff.