Yes, you read the title right right. For those readers who know me even marginally well, you may be thinking "What?!?!" or "He must be kidding!" In fact, I'm not, and here's the story.
Packing up and literally moving to the other side of the world was a medium-sized decision for me. Reassessing the career path that I've been solid on since I was 13 has been a gigantic one. It should have been a much bigger deal than I made it, but I just thought "New adventure, new country, let's go!" *oversimplification* Korea has led me to reassess not only how I view my future, but also what I want in life. To borrow from Paolo Coelho, I have redefined my "personal legend." To be sure, I'm not making a change as radical as law-->astrophysics, but rather reshaping the path that will take me to my end point. The nexus of my relatively wide array of interests has essentially always focused on international human rights. That hasn't changed. However, my thoughts about how I can most effectively uphold IHR while ultimately making myself happy and not feeling like a sellout...oh, those have changed quite a bit.
Long story short: As I've said before, living in Korea has given me time to think--more time than I ever thought I'd have. Although I've been insanely busy over the past several weeks (more on that in the next post), I am generally able to leave my work at work and focus on myself when I'm at home. This has led to mind mapping, researching, networking, and a whole host of other things. I had been stressing out about finding a job, likely in a paralegal capacity, to hold me over until law school. I had debated between moving to D.C. or back to Atlanta. I had seen everything as a means to an end, and envisioned an ethereal light at the end of a hypothetical tunnel that is now permanently closed for renovation. I was devoting so much mental energy into finding a holdover that I lost sight of what the goal (entering law school) even meant.
To remedy this, I got practical. I looked up job descriptions for human rights officers in the United Nations and for other positions that really excited me. The more that I read, the more I became confused -- none of them required a law degree! In fact, most things that I was really passionate about required a masters in public policy, international affairs, or the like.
Then I looked up the tuition rates for my target law schools for the 819284th time, this time projecting costs into the future. I crunched numbers on a range of schools, given a start year of 2015, and adjusted for 6% annual tuition increases, a modest 4% annual increase in other expense categories, and loan origination fees. I got really real with myself about these costs, and it was a slap in the face.
At this point, I must point out that I'm not deciding against law school because it's expensive. I was already quite familiar with that fact, as working in the Career Services Office at Emory Law taught me. However, owing $100,000 when I had an undergrad perspective and owing $100,000 now...not to mention fees, horrible compounding interest, and similar lions/tigers/bears...are so VERY different. Without interest, that's 13 years of apartment rent at my previous nice apartment in Atlanta. It's so many different things all neatly veiled under the label that "educational debt is good debt," which is not entirely true. See, even with a full scholarship to my top choice school, I'd still owe tons of money. The better the school, the more money I'd probably owe. So I said, "Willie, stop being a rankings junkie. Look at somewhere in-state with a decent ranking. That will be much more affordable." The main problem here is that attending such a school would vastly limit my options because for what I want(ed) to do, I could not just go to any law school. Not that I'd have been OK with doing that anyway, because I don't settle for less than what I want.
Anyway, I checked out in-state (Georgia) schools and found that the cost difference was significant, but not notable enough to make a difference for me." There seems to be a prevailing attitude of "Oh wow, you're graduating professional school with only $110,000 in debt? That's great! I owe almost $190k if you include my undergrad." I find this unfortunate, and quite firmly believe -- in the words of Sweet Brown -- that ain't nobody got time for that! Debt is a crippling, debilitating aspect that is regrettably an accepted facet of the U.S. higher education system. The more that I talk to other native teachers here who are from different countries, the more I come to realize just how absurdly, ridiculously, obscenely expensive education is in the States.
I don't like owing someone $5 for a sandwich, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands to Sallie Mae, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ella Ann...ok I made the last one up, but you get the point. Because I never wanted a "high-paying corporate law job" to begin with, I knew I wouldn't come out making $120k a year. And that's fine. But to afford the place I'd want to go, I'd have to take one of those jobs and thus enter a cycle of firm servitude that, all things considered, I'm not OK with. I always said that I wouldn't be the person who sold out to a big company (I'm totally not bashing BigLaw here--those firms have their place and I've interviewed with a few of them and there are certainly people who thrive in that environment) and ended up working just for money.
I patently refuse to work to earn money that I don't need to buy things I don't want to impress people I don't care about. That's a DUMB, destructive cycle that has come to be nearly archetypical of corporate America. I won't do it.
Don't get me wrong -- just about everyone that knows me knows that I like nice things. I wouldn't say that that has changed, but the extent to which I desire things has. I'm not changing my previous dream and relegating myself to a life as a starving artist by any stretch of the imagination. But enough about money -- the real reason that I've changed my mind about law school is that I don't think it will make me happy. My goal had been to work with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in order to implement change in human rights policy. This is something that I would only be able to realize after a few decades of work, assuming that I correctly navigated the highly nebulous path that is international human rights advocacy. This leads me to my main contention:
My life is not a means to an end. I will not spend 20 or 30 years doing something that doesn't really matter in the hopes that one day, my time will come and I'll be able to magically fall into my dream job. That, for me, is settling and allowing myself to waste my best years (I'd be paying back more than my rent or mortgage in each month of those years anyway). I know that I'm not going to leap into a field and change the world in one fell swoop; I am aware that with any job, there will be mundane, annoying aspects that I won't enjoy. But I sincerely believe that if you are where you are supposed to be, you will generally enjoy what you are doing.
Do I have a new plan? Of course I do. But if there's one thing that the last few years of life have taught me, it's that plans are important but more vital is a willingness to change. Now some of the unusual decisions that I made in the past -- like choosing an unpaid NGO internship in South America over a lucrative legal one with one of the world's top law firms in Chicago -- make more sense. I had to make tough decisions, and I've learned to err on the side of doing the thing that wasn't "safe."
The thoughts written above are about 0.0001% of what I have to say in total. But for the sake of everyone's sanity, this post is the semi-concise version of one of my largest life's decisions.
As I read back over the law school personal statement I wrote 4 years ago while at the Pre-Law Undergraduate Scholars Program, looking for some guidance, I found the following sentence:
Passion and a genuine desire to improve the human condition form the core of my aspirations.Passion. Desire. As crazy as it sounds, neither of those two things have gone anywhere. If anything, they've gotten more fervent, more radical, and more sincere over time. My task now is to figure out where my passion will take me next. (Hint: Foreign Service)
One last little thing: When I first started thinking seriously about changing my middle path (because the final goal is still the same), I was freaking out. Like "panicky, breaking-a-sweat, really uncomfortable as I sat in Starbucks writing things down" type of freaking out. But now I'm SO HAPPY! Closing one door has opened a myriad of others for me, and thinking about the abundance of options that I now have is thrilling. A little scary, maybe, because I now have so much more to learn -- I could tell you everything about the LSAT, the application process, career services, but none of that is very important anymore.
So now it's back to being a novice of sorts, one who is above all else determined to be the change he wants to see in the world.
~WTRJ~
