I have accepted my life is over until October 4, as that is when I, along with a few of you, will be taking the LSAT in an attempt to secure some sort of future in this crazy, crazy world.

To prepare myself for the process, I purchased “How to Get into the Top Law Schools,” a fantastic reference book with a self-explanatory title, and came upon a wonderful passage. I would like to share it here.

What else could you do with three years and $150,000?

Law school will take three years of your life and a lot of money. Before you commit to this, consider what else you might do. Here is just one possibility…

Start by going to Central America to learn Spanish. If you live in a private home and are tutored individually for five hours a day, you should go from zero knowledge to absolute fluency within a year (Price: about $800 per month)… After that, do a three month cooking school course in Italy during the summer (Price: about $10,000 for an expensive course)… Then, do a master’s degree in economics at The London School of Economics and Political Science (Price: about $40,000)… Next, spend a summer as a tour guide cycling through France (Price: you get paid for your effort)… Last, do another master’s degree, perhaps in politics (The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, for instance), perhaps in marketing (at HEC, the leading French business school, for example) (Price: Fletcher, about $44,000; HEC, about $33,000).

The net result of this odyssey: three years of exploring the physical world (Latin America, England, France, Italy); three years of exploring the intellectual world (fluency in Spanish, knowledge of Italian cooking, an outstanding master’s degree in economics, an outstanding degree in politics or marketing). The price: about $90,000-$100,000, minus any earning along the way… Whoever pays, are you sure that going into law - and working hard for three years at law school as a preliminary to working very hard as a lawyer - is your only option?

(Ch. 1: Why Go to a Top Law School? - p.16)”

Perhaps getting the perfect score on your LSAT may not be the most important thing in the world. Maybe its a signal to tell you that it’s not the end-all-be-all you’ve imagined it to be.

So stop worrying and studying so much, so I can get a better score than you on the LSAT. Thank you.

Tags: $150K, How to Get into the Top Law Schools, LSAT

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Higher Education, Penn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.