North by Northwestern

Thinking about attending law school after undergrad? What should you know about your choices, and about what Northwestern’s graduate program has to offer? We interviewed four NU law students to get their perspectives. They are:

• Julie Kaplan, a first-year law student, earned her undergraduate degree at NU. She majored in theater but found it “unfulfilling.” Law school remained “on the back burner” of her thoughts during junior and senior year, but eventually she realized that she wanted to take the LSAT and apply to law schools. Kaplan says she is “very glad” she ended up at Northwestern.
• Kristina Kallas is a second-year law student who majored in creative writing as an NU undergrad. She said that after working for Teach for America in a Dominican neighborhood in Manhattan, she realized returning to school would offer the opportunity to use law to help in the struggles of immigrants, women, children and those in poverty.
• Greg Bassi, a second-year law student, was a Georgetown undergrad who majored in government and worked for three years as a paralegal in Washington, D.C., before he applied to Northwestern. Bassi said he always knew he wanted to be a lawyer and is originally from the suburbs of Chicago, so he was happy to return to the city he loves.
• Daniel Hodgman, a third-year law student, started at Chicago Kent College of Law and transferred to NU after his first year. He previously studied archaeology as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania and spent several summers digging in Central America as well as working as a paralegal in New York City before deciding to apply to law school. Part of his decision to return to school was to acquire more marketable skills for better job opportunities, he said.

These four students offered their perspective on what undergrads should think about before applying to law school, and why their experiences have been worthwhile. Here are some of the lessons they offered.

Think about the costs before decide to go. Know you want to do it. Give it your all.

Greg: Really think it through and make sure that’s what you want to do.

Daniel: That debt is serious. There aren’t a lot of scholarships. They should be aware of the reality of it. I’m all for people going for it. It opened my eyes a lot when I was a first year.

First year is a challenge. You’ll be busy studying and learning a new way to think.

Julie: The reading takes forever. In law school, I feel like everything that you read is important. So your class might assign you only 10 pages of reading, but it will take you almost an hour to read 10 pages because it’s just so dense and hard to understand.

Greg: First year was really study-intensive. Learning new material, stuff you’ve never seen before. It’s all focused around studying, learning these new concepts. I was always at the library or in a coffee shop, studying. That was my year.

Learn to balance your time.

Julie: You have about four to five hours of homework every day, which doesn’t always get done depending on what else it is you want to do

Second year and third year are still hard, but in a less frantic sense.

Kristina: You become a lot better at time management, out of necessity. I think if you had asked me [about law school] a year ago I would have said, ‘This is a disaster. I have no life.’ But now I’m pretty much fine.

Daniel: I would say that first year and second year were similar as far as time commitment, but second year I did more work. You become more efficient because you learn what’s important and what isn’t.

Greg: Second year has been generally busy but there are other things going on… you have interviews; you are more active. Second year hasn’t been as intellectual as first year, but more work-intensive.

There are many areas of law; find out which interests you.

Julie: I’m really interested in alternative dispute resolution. [It’s a form of law where] instead of going to trial, you go to mediation. You have the parties sit in a room with a non-biased third party and their lawyers and they talk out the problems and try and reach a settlement… It seems like a more hands-on way to solve a problem.

Kristina: I’m very concerned about my exorbitant loan commitment to law school, so money is definitely a concern — making a salary. But my ideal job would be something in asylum and refugee work.

Think about balancing career with a family life.

Julie: I’ve been at some job interviews where they ask you, ‘Where do you plan to be in 10 years?’ and it’s really hard to know. In 10 years I would love to maybe have children, but I always feel like that’s not a correct answer. I feel like [employers will think] you’re not actually serious about the law and they won’t want to hire you because they’re afraid that you’ll work for two years and then quit. Somehow I feel like I might be sacrificing some of my happiness for something that’s socially acceptable as a response. But that could also all be in my head…

A law career isn’t for everyone.

Daniel: I feel like everyone [in law] can be [cut-throat]. One of the canons of being a lawyer is being a zealous advocate for your client. If ‘zealous advocate’ means make the other side miserable, I think a lot of people will say, ‘So be it.’

Daniel: [The time commitment] ebbs and flows but I think most lawyers average… 60 hours a week minimum. The people that are stars and make partner and go on to do great things, they bill 2,500, maybe 3,000 hours a year. So, do the math, that’s a lot of hours. They’re hard-chargers, they’re type A, they thrive on success, they thrive on ascension. Whatever it takes — 100 hour weeks. They’ll do whatever it takes.

Early internships aren’t always great.

Daniel: As a paralegal, I was doing the kind of things you could train a drunk monkey to do — shuffling paper, carrying boxes… I felt like my brain was turning into toothpaste, like slowly oozing out of my ears.

The social side of law school can be interesting, in both positive and negative ways.

Daniel: You form a bond with each other. First year, everyone makes an ass of themselves and everyone does well. You stop being embarrassed — the professor calls on you and you just have no idea what to say. It happens to everyone; it’s not a big deal. So I remember after the first final just looking at people, and we were like, ‘We just finished our first year of law school. We’re done; we just did it! None of us are dead.’

Daniel: Law school is like high school. It’s clique-y; everyone’s in the same building all day. You have lockers. You’re in the same class with the same people all the time. It becomes really incestuous: You start relationships, you hook up with other people… this is the social side. People try to reinvent themselves between schools; they come into a new place and try to go through ‘nerd rehab,’ like ‘I’m the cool party guy now.’ You see a lot of that.

Northwestern’s Law School offers students great opportunities both during and after their three years there.

Greg: I participated in this program called International Team Project. Since we have a two-week spring break, you study a country in the fall and then you go to that country for two weeks during vacation. It was really cool. You break into groups and study specific topics. We studied judicial independence in Ecuador. It all fits into your spring break and you get credit for it. I haven’t heard of other law schools that have something like that.

Greg: Being right here in the city is great. We have a great clinic. It gives you more real-world opportunities. There’s more for actual real-world law here than there would be in a college town.

Daniel: I loved Kent. The only difference between Kent and Northwestern is job opportunities. I think the top five students [in each class at] Chicago Kent get the kind of job I wanted, and at Northwestern, 88 percent get the kind of job I wanted. So, it was sort of a no-brainer.

Northwestern attracts people of different backgrounds. Most NU law students are older and have some work experience when they come here. The atmosphere is more serious, intense and rewarding.

Daniel:Dean Van Zandt has placed a pretty heavy, extreme focus on having work experience, which is really helpful. I worked for three years and felt a huge advantage [over] these people who had come straight from college: They didn’t know the stakes. [You also acquire more] maturity and refresh your appetite for learning. Work at a firm; do something where you see what it’s like to be a lawyer because it’s not all like the courtroom.

Greg: When I started looking at law schools, I focused on places where I heard good reputations about what kind of people were there. I didn’t want to go to a place where it was a real cut-throat atmosphere. Northwestern had the reputation of [a place where] everyone is pretty collegial. I knew I was going to be a little older and Northwestern tries to recruit students who have worked for a little while. I liked that.

Greg: I think that Northwestern does a good job of trying to get good people. It’s got its problems, just like any other school, and there are things about it I don’t like, but for the most part I’ve met a lot of really cool people and I like it. I’m happy here.