I'd Like that Life in the Hermetically Sealed Bag, Please

[gurdonark]

I admit to the vice of reading internet careers message boards. Law message boards have the usual flaws of the genre. One portion of the participants are folks in undergraduate programs who think of attending law school. These folks divide into roughly two camps. One camp is comprised of genuine seekers, who really want to learn about law school. The other camp is comprised of folks who have read two career guides and ten message board postings, and now are "qualified" to pontificate at leisure on the topic at hand, laying down commandment upon commandment in a fashion that would bewilder Charlton Heston's Moses. Another portion of the participants are law students trying to justify or denigrate their choice of law schools, or very young law associates trying to do the same. A material portion of the participants are non-lawyer hangers-on, who finished law school but never latched onto that first job, and now set out detailed rules about the need to attend a top school and make top grades that, if true, would exclude essentially 99 percent of all practicing lawyers who do have jobs from the profession.

Law's a funny business. Law employers do care about things like school rank and law school grades. Law schools, by contrast, attach frantic importance to the Law School Admission Test, which is applied in a weighted formula with GPA to determine most admissions decisions (a sizable minority are admitted based on discretionary factors). Each year we see the sad spectre of kids with 4.0 GPAs failing to get into top law schools because their LSAT score was 159, while a kid with a 3.3 GPA but a 170 LSAT gets into a great school. Law is an odd duck business at entry level as well. Some folks don't thrive in it, because they would rather do deals than represent the players in deals or litigate them. Some people don't enjoy the conflict and stresses of the job, or realize that the initial years of more sophisticated practice can be very document intensive and involve less courtroom/deal time. A lot of folks don't get that a lawyer is this curious professional specialist, a sort of odd bike wrench to turn the unconventional bolts our legal system has in its design. The market for law work fluctuates a great deal generally, but individual success in that market fluctuates wildly. Since modern lawyering has existed, some lawyers make a huge professional success of it, while others earn merely a good sensible living, and a few souls never find a job at all and must do a different profession.
This has been so for hundreds of years--it's not some new revelation.

Yet reading the law message boards always has me intrigued.
If only life could be as simple as the world of the message boards. In the message boards, all one has to do is go to a "top 14" (don't ask me why 14, for I have no answer, other than that the No. 14 Georgetown grads get touchy if we talk of a top 15) law school, get top grades, and one is made for life. The message board theory goes on to say that unless one does these things, one ought to refrain from law.

Although school rank and grades are important in law hiring, I am always a bit amused by the notion that the message board posters would tell all of the most successful lawyers I know that law school would not be worth their while. In our city, as in many, most of the lawyers at the top firms went to law schools outside the top 14. Many top lawyers did not go to top law schools or top law firms, but instead made their names with trial or deal skills they picked up at small firms or in government work. The formulae in the message boards are simplistic in the extreme. They also ignore the many kids who get out of law school at the top of the class in a top school and then lack the real interest, or in some cases, the aptitude, for law practice. Career success does not come in bottles like detergent does. You don't just go to the shelf and hunt for the blue bottle that says "Guaranteed Wealth in Profession", or some catchier name, like "Cash!".

My observation from the message boards is that people want their lives hermetically sealed, like products. "Teach me the incantation for the career success charm, so I will never be in danger of failure, worry or stress". Ah, but life is so much more dynamic than that. Life is a gun with no safety switch on it. There is no one career code that will solve all problems. Sure, it's harder to get a position as a musician, an actor or an English professor than it is to get a position as a lawyer, an optometrist or a welder, but that doesn't mean that one can attend the "right" school, make the "right" grades, get the "right" entry level job, and suddenly, life works.

I guess what intrigues me the most is that these kids--and really, the non-kids who are disaffected because they chose the 'wrong' detergent bottle--want lives so free of risk.
Wealth is not something these kids see as a matter of fortune and pluck. Instead, someone should have a roadmap--go to x school, make y grades, get a job at z firm--so that they can instantly qualify for that home in Mission Hills or Highland Park or Beverly Hills.

In my life, I've known only a person or two who actually followed the "formbook" to go to a top law school, get a top job, and make partner at a megafirm. Similarly, I've only known a few people who got their PhD and then did academic research and landed a full professorship, a few people who became MDs, and a few people who got their MBA and then simply climbed the corporate ladder. For almost everyone I know, school and careers have been a matter of advances and setbacks, of success and failure. I once knew a man and his wife, both lawyers with top firms, that had "ascended" from being two midwestern school teachers through law school success together to two partnerships in prestigious downtown law firms. They moved into a home in the best neighborhood, where they had built a palace that would have made Jay Gatsby blush. They had it all. Within 5 years, a change in the law relied upon by the man's key client, coupled with various problems with some investments they had made, had essentially laid them low. I believe that they ultimately took bankruptcy. The man stopped practicing law. The couple divorced. All 52 cards now lay flat on the floor, even through their particular house of cards looked to the casual observer as though it had been designed like one of those Fay Jones outdoor churches--amazing, natural, eternal.

I worry that high school kids and college kids are raised now with more pressure in some ways than we were when I was that age. That's not all bad--in some ways, I feel that my generation was not told that in our cold economy the "rubber hits the road" on vocational matters, and one must learn a trade or skill with which to earn a living. Now, though, the kids seem to be pressured that there are only a handful of "right" ways to do things. Also, I believe that they are told that unless one is "making the big bucks" or "really saving the world", then one's career is badly flawed. The reality, of course, is different. Most of us will not be career dynamos. That doesn't mean we can't make good money, have a nice home, and all that. But the gerbil wheel of big dollars, predictable results, immunity from economic downturn, guaranteed success doesn't really exist. Every one is another leaf in the economic winds.

I think that life doesn't come in neat packages. I'm a huge believer in economically geared career planning, don't get me wrong. Just wishin' it were so, or cursing the gods, will not make it easy to get a job in liberal arts academia or sell a novel or ensure that one can take a college degree with good hiring prospects while taking nothing but face painting classes. But there are so many ways to succeed, and so many avenues that don't lead to success.
Most educated folks end up in the middle or upper middle class, not rich. As the book The Millionaire Next Door illustrates, most millionaires live relatively modest middle class lives and acquire their fortune by running successful small businesses and not spending their money.
Many folks succeed in trade skills rather than through education. Some folks with multiple degrees lack any skill but school, and fail.

My chief worry is that we endlessly send the message that "there is only one road--take it or be damned", when the reality is "there are many pathways. Money is not everything. Careers are fluid. One frequently has many careers. Hard work is often rewarded, but not always. Life comes without a warranty. It's okay to be quirky--everyone else is, too. Thrift, rather than genius, is often the best way to live on one's income. It's okay to try to succeed, and yet more people are hoisted on their arrogance than are hoisted by quiet hard work. The goal is not riches per se, but a livable life. Material things do matter, but it's also nice to sleep at night". Maybe if people got more realistic that most college grads have good, but not stunning, work lives, then we will stop people feeling as though life is an endless choice between being a multi-millionaire corporate chief and a failed actor. There are thousands of careers, and yet career education focuses only on the obvious and the glamorous.
The seals are broken, though, the air breathes into career life, and I wish careers talk for collegians and high schoolers was more extensive and less rigid.

Comments

[reneesarah.livejournal.com]

It would be a gift to people entering any profession, or trying to, to read this post. I really hope you do send it out for publication because I do believe it would be so helpful to so many people.

I can especially relate to the idea that life is quirky. You know what I went through with the hospital job, and I certainly posted quite a bit here over nine months about how it feels to be unemployed. Then a company hires me, and I am a supervisor, a program director, and manage a facility. This leaves me totally unimpressed however, because it could all be gone in an instant. The lesson in this going from unemployment to employment and around again several times has been for me that I do seem to get another job eventually, and that whatever and whoever I am essentially is not my job, is not my status as an unemployed person.

I am going to share this post with my son who says he wants to go to law school. I hope you will share it with many, many others.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thanks for such a kind comment. I liked what you said about how it all can go away. I've seen it come and go and come and go to so many people over so many years. One need not believe in reincarnation, really--just watch the average 25 or 35 year career professional.

If your son ever needs ideas or input on law school, he can always feel free to drop me an e mail.

Re:

[reneesarah.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I totally agree... I have certainly had my career go up and down lots of times. Part of it seems to be about what skills are brought to the table when looking for work, but so much of it is just "fit" with the people in the organization, how they like to see themselves, and how they imagine they would feel about you showing up to work every day. Just as in dating, there is a lot to be said for "chemistry."

In mental health no one has ever asked me what my grades were or even what my thesis was about. They only want to know if I graduated. This would be a disheartening comment to many people in graduate psych programs, given my experience is typical (and I believe it is), who like to believe that grades and their research projects matter much more than they probably will over the course of their careers.)

Nine months of unemployment has been a real reminder for me how thin the margin is for anyone, and it is a lesson well worth remembering since I am working at a homeless shelter. The distance between the homeless people living in the shelter and myself is very, very small. We could trade places any moment, and I go to work every day knowing that.

[lonestarslp.livejournal.com]

Isn't it funny how we never know what life will turn into. I'm sure that my high school self, being pressured to succeed in a technical career, would be aghast at the speech pathology path I have ended up on. But I am much happier in the new career, and I did not know it exsisted in high school. I feel I was limited in my choices, part by ignorance and part by family pressure.

I am trying not to pressure my son to pick a specific career. However, I do want him to have a rigorous high school curriculum. Therefore, he will have more choices when it comes to college. He can pick a traditional tech-oriented career or branch out into something else without having to play catch-up because he didn't have the right background. I think that is the best advice one can give a kid in high school--maximize your choices. And remember, nothing is permanent, even if you want it to be.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I don't think speech pathology is so far afield for you. But I do think that during high school years, career counseling recognized essentially only doctor, lawyer, teacher, computers and engineering, as well as something nebulous called "business". The reality is that there were and are so many options not addressed by these narrow labels.
It's funny to see years later what a wide career world it really proved to be.

[woody77.livejournal.com]

Quite the faceted post. Very interesting read. It struck a few chords with me, so I'll hit up each one.

*****

Success in school != Success in the 'real world'

I was one of the top students in High School, but wasn't driven to compete with those in the top ten, it wasn't a priority. Same with in college. I watched friends and roommates spends hours more time, going for those extra few percentage points (laudible, but worth it?). In the end, they just seemed much more frustrated about things than I did at the time.

My college (http://www.kettering.edu) had a mandatory co-op program, so we had to spend 6 months of each year working full-time in our chosen field, starting with our Freshman year. It gave the students a lot of experience, and also gave us different experiences that we could talk about.

About mid sophomore year I realized that while others were getting higher grades, they didn't understand the material as well. Both they (and it seemed their employers) focused on the "one right way" to do something. Circuit Analysis "needed" to follow certain rules, and if the problem required working outside of those rules, they couldn't function. They tended to work for larger companies, where they were given very focused tasks to work on.

I guess the point that I'm rambling towards is that people seem to be focusing more and more on the procedure for doing things, and less on actually doing them. Makes for people that can do the kinds of problems required by the tests, but nothing else. That kinda makes me sad...

*****

I didn't follow the formulae for a "perfect life", but I was aware of it, and ended up very frustrated for a while when it didn't work out. I went to a good school, got good grades, and thought that I'd easily get a good job. Turns out it look a while to find one, and that was almost by accident.

What I discovered in the corporate (or at least "tech") world, is that your resume needs to show that you're qualified for the job, and then you need to "fit" into the company. The vast majority of the interviews I've been told to give have simply been under the instruction, "find out if you'd like to work with them." No more, no less.

I do on occaision give "technical" intervieiws, but there's not much that you can divine about someone's programming/design ability in an oral interview. It pretty much has to come out over time. But you can find out if their personality fits well with yours, or at least seems to.

And it seems that groups that work well together always do better than groups that are made up of utterly brilliant people that can't stand each other.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I think you make a lot of very good points here. The whole grade/grind/insight issue could justify a book, much less a post and a comment. We all knew kids who got the grade, but not the insight.

I really related to what you had to say about interviews. It seems to me that career books focus way too much on writing somewhat "touchy feely" resume descriptions, and not nearly enough on how to figure out what the employer calls what one can do.
If one knows what an employer calls one, and then can send a concise resume showing one can be trained or can be that, then that's usually the trick.
Even in the narrow field of law, too many resumes I've seen try to paint the candidate in vivid hues, when all I need is a simple page--law school, college, directly relevant experience, polite cover letter.

You make an excellent point about group work.
I am not a great team player, but it seems to me that brilliance doesn't make teams work. Even teamwork doesn't make teams work. Figuring out what a task demands, and then doing it, that's what makes teams work. It's interesting to me how many group projects become about turf or about brilliance, instead of about just getting the project done.