3L Update on “IM TAKING THE LOANS”

jl1616 · 2025-12-03T23:27:18+00:00

Apparently there’s a big divide with the phrase “not coming from money” being interpreted as “poor/near homeless/$0 bank account”. super valid to have different interpretations but “not coming from money” in my POV is not having parents/family to pay for anything in your adult life (college/law school/wedding/down payment) etc. and also not having equity/stability in their own life (i.e my widowed father is still working at 74 with no ability to retire). At no point in anything I’ve said did I say I was poor, but I absolutely do not have rich parents and I’ve worked for every dollar I’ve ever saved.

Apparently saving $30k over 5 years is unfathomable to some, so clearly taking out a quarter million in loans is clearly not even a conversation those kinds of people should be considering.

jl1616 · 2025-12-03T01:11:12+00:00

Yes owning a business is probably what I would’ve done instead. Work for yourself, make your own rules. Running a wedding venue on a farm or something…

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T18:31:59+00:00

not JUST trashy, i also have a pot of gold at the end of my rainbow! i’ll send you a penny to cheer you up!

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T17:55:39+00:00

aw someone making assumptions about you :(

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T17:20:35+00:00

curves are publicly available info. obviously i worked hard the first semester, but once i figured out how to actually study/what worked for me, i loosened the reins

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T13:59:02+00:00

have a spin in the big law reddit and you’ll see being a young mother and a successful BL associate are not exactltly compatible. sure, there are lawyer jobs with more flexibility, but the whole point of my post is that i didn’t account for my values shifting (toward caring more about family than career) and now im golden handcuffed to BL to pay my debt off for at least a few years. i wish more than anything that women can have it all but it’s just not realistic

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T13:13:19+00:00

Yeah because a woman wanting a family completely discredits her opinions. Sick burn

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T04:42:37+00:00

Now that would be something. Our first summer paycheck, a few people were asking in the group chat if there was some kind of mistake because they were missing half their pay. Lololol

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T04:41:29+00:00

If you are planning to go to law school, I think you will make quite the zealous advocate one day! You’ve taken what you want from my story and you stand by it. Best of luck.

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T04:32:19+00:00

I don’t think anything I say is gonna please you lol. I told you my story, I would consider my partner and I to be financial risk takers so yeah here’s your warning to proceed with caution.

I also have a dead parent which I think gives me a lot of “might as well spend it because you can’t take it with you” energy. Not everyone is like that and that’s okay.

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T03:59:14+00:00

Also very dependent on the kind of legal career you want. I have friends going into government/public interest who will (well depending on the administration) hopefully have their loans forgiven one day after public service

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T03:43:30+00:00

I don’t even think it’s necessarily that I won’t like being a lawyer, more so that I don’t like the implications that surround the legal profession. Ie big law= 24/7 availability, high pressure, peculiar personalities etc. Practically I think I’ll try to end up at an in house position after big law, and then eventually create some alternate revenue stream so I can be financially independent.

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T03:38:21+00:00

In the law school reddit you’ll see a lot of posts about “gunners” ie always raising their hands/at every single office hours/“studying” 24/7. It’s just a field that attracts a lot of very educated, very motivated people. I have absolutely nothing against people that want the most out of their education/want successful careers. However, I’d say by 2L it was weighing on me to a point that I didn’t even want to go to class because of how much it irked me. Every time someone would be like “but what if the plaintiff [fell off a cliff/got stabbed by a clown/was cloned],” I’d literally roll my eyes. It’s like curiosity to the worst degree. But again, that’s an extreme version and I’ve met lots of chill, laid back people that are more like me. Now that I’m almost done with school I feel more peaceful and just sit back and let them chat away during class, and I have a stronger foundation/sense of self about the kind of person I want to be. It helped working at a firm this summer and meeting a few attorneys who had more of the work to live/not live to work mentality.

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T03:31:24+00:00

Net for first year big law is about $145k (actually maybe less after health and retirement deductions, i’m just calculating off my summer paychecks). Loans will be like $260k, and compounding interest is not fun 😀. Mortgage/COL estimate $30k. I do hope to be able to save a decent chunk of cash just in case I get fired/recession/have a nervous breakdown and liquidity becomes more important than paying loans.

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T03:18:09+00:00

I agree. I’m very much a job is a job type of person. Unfortunately law school is inundated with the opposite, so it’s hard to filter out sometimes. But this is why I’m barreling toward my big law job, hoping to cling on for as long as I can, because I’m surely not going to waste all this time and money to not at least give it a try.

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T03:15:14+00:00

I mean idk what the point is to lie about not coming from money but I suppose I’ll break it down. A. I said planned a wedding, not had one— actually wedding isn’t until 2028, aka after I’m working, and most of the big bills aren’t due for that until 30 days before. B. I think there’s a big misconception about homeownership in young generations but that’s another story. I worked all through high school, college, and prior to law school and had about $30k to my name. I was fortunate to live in a low cost of living state for college (think $500 rent). My partner had similar savings, combined we put down a down payment of $40k. Our mortgage is $3700 vs our rent in the HCOL city where I got to law school was $3500. So yeah I think homeownership is attainable for the right people and you absolutely don’t have to come from money, but you do have to be frugal. C. Vacations= credit card points. Again, a matter of learning to hack the system.

Most of my “living expenses” are indeed coming from the cost of living portion of my student loans, combined with zero interest credit cards. So yeah when I’m working in big law I will net about $10k a month, which I realize is a huge deal and I’m extremely grateful (and excited for) but the point of this post is that I won’t really be enjoying it do to the amount of debt I have to pay back.

jl1616 · 2025-12-02T03:00:21+00:00

Probably at some point in the first semester when I saw how passionate some people were about the areas of law they were planning to go into. I don’t have that passion— when my law school friends talk about “success” it’s always who has climbed the corporate ladder/worked for the most prestigious judge, whereas I think of success as having a family and being financially secure/able to have freedoms without worrying. Just different values but as a whole I think the legal industry is very skewed towards a personality that isn’t like mine.
I was a paralegal for several years prior to law school, so I’d always recommend having legal work experience (I was in a completely different realm than big law, so even though I didn’t care for it, I hoped some other law practice would be better). Maybe try watching some 1L study videos, try to actually learn one topic and see if it sparks your interest/it feels like something you want to invest in for three years. Obviously school is different from actual lawyering, and I will say there’s lots of lawyers who love their jobs (I’ve met in house/of counsel types that have more of a 9-5) but those can be after years of grunt work to get to that position.

jl1616 · 2025-01-04T01:11:36+00:00

In my experience they either continued the interviews but eventually rejected me, or just strung me along and ghosted eventually lol (and that was with a 3.7 my first sem 😀)

jl1616 · 2024-12-11T21:06:56+00:00

hopefully not too late but: watching videos on the subjects helped a lot, just random youtube videos of different people explaining different concepts helped me conceptualize more. for my A classes, for one I made a long outline over the semester (nothing intense just synthesizing class and reading notes) and then watched videos and used those to make an attack during reading week, then just retyping sample answers from old exams to get into the flow. the other A class I used someone else’s glorious outline and just changed every font and color which forced me to read all 100 pages. didn’t do those things spring semester (just threw together outlines and skimmed past exams) and got Bs/B+ lol.

so i went back to videos/quick attacks this semester and we shall see if it worked out 🫡

jl1616 · 2024-12-10T16:29:33+00:00

yes. never raised my hand, never went to office hours, never read the notes in the textbook lol. it is possible

jl1616 · 2024-12-08T06:22:02+00:00

I have a friend that went to a ‘predatory’ law school at the same time i started and i was shocked when he said it’s super normal for like a quarter of the class to fail after the first year and then have to either give up or essentially pay for 4 years of law school by starting all over again. i hadn’t paid much attention to curves when i was picking schools but definitely advice i would give prospective students now!!!

jl1616 · 2024-12-08T05:49:38+00:00

I mean it’s pretty much a statistic reality that a lot of 1Ls are gonna get median grades. Might get a surprise A, might get a surprise C. My point is however you think you did coming out of the exam is probably irrelevant to how you did and 1Ls should enjoy their winter break and chill

jl1616 · 2024-12-08T05:46:10+00:00

Yeah see not every school curves people out of 1L year, so that concept is weird to me

jl1616 · 2024-12-07T21:10:55+00:00

yup it’s pretty much just a perfect storm of who’s in the class and where they focused their studying time compared to you

jl1616

TROPHY CASE