Yesterday I quit Emory Law School.
There are a lot of reasons why... mostly law is never something I really wanted to do; it's just something that I ended up doing after I graduated from college by way of default. There's not many clear paths to take with a liberal arts degree, and getting a decent-paying job after you graduate from a respectable law school is a fairly safe bet. But I was dying a slow death with each class on accounting, taxes, the federal rules of evidence, and contract drafting. (Although some classes were neat. I had a great one on ancient Roman law, and there were a few interesting ones on Torts and Criminal Law.)
I had narrower interests: since high school, Japan and medicine were the two main ones. I talked myself out of getting a Japanese major because it didn't seem like something I could trade for a job, and I gave up on medicine because I was entirely too caught up with grades and rankings when I was in college. I figured I'd have no career as a doctor if I didn't go to a top 10 or so Medical School, and I figured I'd have no shot at that if I wasn't in the top 15% or so of my class. First year Calculus quickly taught me that I wouldn't end up in that part of the class if I stuck on a medical track, if nothing else. For whatever reason, other jobs in healthcare didn't strike me as options. So - I gave up. I switched to a major in political science, which I did quite well in, and then slid right into law school. There's something painful and soulless about that path. There was for me at least.
Mentally, I died around the end of high school when I gave up on following various dreams. They may have been naive in hindsight, but every day since then, I've been unhappy to varying degrees over the failure to stick to my ideals.
Getting out of law school is a huge and exciting event. It's giving me a chance to go back all those years and head down the right path. It's a chance to uphold my old ideals again, and a chance to redeem myself.
I'm looking at becoming a nurse practitioner/anastheseologist for now, but keeping an open mind towards other options including trying for an MD.
It's also a big risk.
I'm lucky enough that my family has an extra apartment I can move into in a few months, when I exit my lease here, but I'm giving up what's a fairly guaranteed well-paying job for the chance at getting another job, which is unlikely to pay as much. In the interim, I'll have to raise the money for food/some needed undergrad courses /my new graduate courses on my own this time around.
Whether it's a wise decision or not, it's a very imporant personal one, and it's the inspiration for this blog. I hope to use this to track the journey from my first day after having left law school to the first day of my new career.
