Some people (many of you, I'm sure) have wanted to be lawyers ever since childhood.
However, others decide to take the LSAT on nothing more than a whim. If they do well, they go to law school and become attorneys. Others take the LSAT (with or without studying) and bomb it. Rather than improving their study habits and retaking, they go on to pursue other paths.
Who are these people? What happens to those who let nothing more than an LSAT score decide the course of their future careers?
Today, we have the stories of two different individuals who allowed little more than their LSAT scores to determine whether they'd go to law school and become attorneys.
One woman listened to a fortune cookie, scored decently on the LSAT, and became a prominent attorney. She's successfully litigated more than 100 cases. The Palm Beach Post has the details:
[She] contemplated changing her major. But it was a fortune cookie that predicted "you would make a good lawyer" that sealed the deal. Public speaking and advocating for others came naturally to her, and she had pondered a career in law.
"So I took the LSAT and scored in the top 5 percent," the Nova University Law School grad recalls. That was all the prompting the former psychology major needed.
Now, the 45-year-old Boca Raton resident can't imagine not being a lawyer...
I'm glad it all worked out for her in the end. This woman sounds like the kind of person for whom law school was probably the right decision. Her parents must be glad that she didn't get the fortune cookie telling her she'd make a good stripper.
In contrast, this guy wanted to be a lawyer but bombed the LSAT. Luckily, he's now happy as an opera singer, even though his parents discouraged him from law in favor of pursuing a musical career. As the kids say, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?" San Joaquin County News gives us more:
As a college student, Samonsky wanted to follow his father into a career as a criminal defense attorney. His mom and dad urged him to keep pursuing his musical muse...While studying opera, he "got kind of fed up with classical training and structure. So, I wanted to become an attorney." His parents set him straight: "They were very supportive." The Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) wasn't.
"I ended up just bombing it. I didn't get anywhere close. I started laughing: 'What are you doing? Why give up music?' I just kind of took that as a sign on this musical path."
What kind of parents tell their kids to go into the arts instead of law? Someone call Child Protective Services.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. Unlike the guy discussed above, I don't have a dad who happens to be one. (It would've been awesome to have his clients over for dinner.) However, too much unsupervised TV time as a kid gave me plenty of exposure to what goes on in the wee hours of the morning. These days, I continue to get my fix of criminal action by watching old episodes of Oz and The Wire. I'm sure they're just like real life.
Having a great LSAT score doesn't mean you have to go to law school. Plenty of LSAT tutors, like myself, ultimately decide that the LSAT provides plenty of excitement. What's more fun than figuring out the ordering and grouping of arbitrary variables?
Further reading:
Highly rated attorney says career allows her to help people each day [Palm Beach Post]
It'll be quite a 'Night' [San Joaquin County News]
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Read Lawyer Diaries for more on life as a lawyer.
Photo by craftygoat
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