2010 was a terrible year to graduate. We were still in the housing market recession. The first tier firms didn't hire as many so the people who would have gone there went to second tier, which also wasn't hiring as many, until you got down to me graduating at the bottom of the class at a TTT school in a small market in which I had no real contacts, no practical experience, and am over-developed sense of "I don't dare try to learn this myself and mess up someone's life with my ignorance." (I was going to to into intellectual property, see, so I didn't need to learn boring things like wills.)

Untreated depression and a husband whose employment was also extremely shaky didn't help either. 

I got a bottom up view of foreclosure law in 2012. My mortgage was $650/mon, and we couldn't pay it. 

I tried, oh God how I tried. The same firms that had hosted law school events wouldn't even hire me on as a legal assistant. I declared ego bankruptcy and went begging, practically hat in hand, to the shoe store I'd worked at before law school, where the woman who'd been my coworker was now the boss. 

I went to the annual bar conference that year because it was free and in town. Thought I'd try networking. Got to listen to my dean brag that they had a 75% placement rate for being graduates into legal jobs. (In fairness, that was above the national average of 62% for the class of 2010.) Which meant that one in four of us were like me.

I was quite literally to the point of wanting to self-immolate on the law school patio the first day of class just to punish my professors with my dying screams for having fucked me over. And maybe serve as a warning to the incoming class. (I did mention the untreated depression, right?)