'Cause The Man said "That's the way it is," and The Man said "It don't get better than this, no no no."

There’s some online discourse on “selling out,” which got me thinking. Despite sometimes feeling very old in law school, I’m solidly a millennial, not Gen X. So other than the movie release of Rent, I didn’t grow up with the cultural more that selling out is a death sentence for any kind of artistic or personal integrity. Quite the opposite, rather, especially after the 2008 financial crash. We’ve all got bills and rent to pay, get that bag - that was the thinking. We couldn’t get by working 10 hours a week at a coffee shop anymore, not even in Portland. So get paid. And if you can make money doing art, for God’s sake grab it with both hands and don’t think twice.

And to an extent, that’s a healthy way of being. Working a boring desk job that pays the bills while art is a side hustle or passion project doesn’t seem to me like a death sentence. (Hell, if that job comes with dental insurance, it sounds damn near paradise to me, thinking about how much my cavity is going to cost to fill tomorrow.) If some shitty light beer wants to use your song in an ad and pay you enough to send your kid to college for it, signing the back of that check doesn’t mean your art isn’t worth a damn. Insisting that your favorite artist never reach a broader audience and remain “pure” might also mean insisting that your favorite artist is one bout of appendicitis away from financial catastrophe.

But “hey, it’s okay to make money doing art” can turn into “hey, it’s okay to make literal millions performing for brutal dictators.” And even when the buyers aren’t that bad, the wealthy backers like a certain type of music. A year or so ago, the New Yorker had a great article about the rise of famous musicians doing private gigs. There are certainly benefits - streaming doesn’t pay artists nearly enough to replace lost CD/record sales. But this quote, about a Flo Rida private gig at a private equity firm, jumped out at me about what kind of song you write to get that gig:

I have nothing against Flo Rida. (“Low” and “Wild Ones” are bangers.) But two of my favorite albums of the year so far are about very different life experiences. Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff spent years hopping freight trains and busking as a street performer in San Francisco and New Orleans after running away from a difficult home life, and their album The Past is Still Alive is the first time to my knowledge that they’ve talked about this experience in publicly released music. It’s a joy to listen to, capturing both the romantic and the difficult aspects of life as a runaway, on the margins of society. But you don’t go to a hedge fund party to listen to someone sing about camping on a toxic waste dump and shoplifting to afford food.

Micah Schnabel has spent years trying to eke out a living as a musician, both with his band Two Cow Garage and as a solo artist, while working minimum wage jobs to (just barely) pay the bills. His latest album The Clown Watches the Clock is incredibly frank about the challenges that come with living that life, from the cost of keeping one’s teeth to risking your clothes catching on fire to use the quicker laundromat dryer. I think it’s extraordinary, his best work, even if during my own money and job hunt anxieties late this summer it was sometimes too much for me. But as much as Micah would like the paycheck that comes with stardom and private gigs, he acknowledges the downside himself in another song: “if you’re willing to sacrifice who you really are, people will pay you money to not make them uncomfortable.” But art that does make them uncomfortable doesn’t get that money, even when the patrons probably deserve to be made uncomfortable at least once in awhile.

There is a cost to selling out, as there is to staying broke. We just stopped talking about the former awhile back. But maybe we should start again.

And that brings me to law school.

Unlike music, where my musings are purely theoretical (I sing off-key in the car and can barely play guitar, even if I wanted to sell out nobody’s buying), what to do after law school is an open question. And it’s one where a lot of pressure seems to only go in one direction.

Most big corporate law firms follow a hiring pattern that’s unusual in non-law contexts. In summer or early fall, they hire a class of associates for the next summer, many of them through on-campus interviews set up at the law schools they like to recruit from. Most of these associates will have just finished their 2L year when they start work as summer associates. After the summer, if they’ve done a decent or better job, the corporate firm will extend offers to those students for full-time employment after they graduate the next May. There were disruptions to this pattern during the 2008 financial crash, but it seems to have come back among big firms.

Right now, many of my peers are excitedly announcing their plans for summer associate positions at corporate law firms on LinkedIn. I do try to be happy for them and usually succeed. They’re bright, talented, kindhearted people who I really enjoy spending time with and learning alongside. They don’t have to have the same career goals I do. They should make the decision that works best for them.

But I can’t help but notice the ways, big and small, students can feel pushed toward this, and I wonder if this is what we really want or if it’s just the easiest next step.

That early hiring timeline is a security blanket. It’s reassurance that you’ll have a job that looks good on your resume and a steady paycheck come next summer. (Having spent 1L summer working for free and ending up flat broke at the end, I know not to take that for granted.) The “do-gooder” jobs hire later and pay less, if at all. It’s hard not to feel anxious, logging into LinkedIn or chatting with friends and seeing someone else announcing their exciting summer associate position.

Career services and (some) professors can push people in that direction, too. The on-campus interviews are the focus of endless emails for weeks or months on end, with detailed explanations of how to prepare, while jobs that don’t fit into the OCI boxes get posted on the job website and otherwise ignored. Corporate law firms dominate career fairs on campus. And I still vividly recall the last day of a legal practice class where the professor brought in four alumni to talk about how we would use the skills we’d learned in class out in the real world. All four of those alumni worked at corporate law firms. It was hard not to take that as a message of “this is what I want my students to be.” I tuned out the conversation because I’m not that and never will be.

I know why UConn Law wants that for us. I know why people want it. There’s a lot to be said for a job that you know will not just cover the basic necessities but allow for financial breathing room. Student loans are a menace and many of us will have to pay back huge sums (I’ll probably owe about $75k when this is over). No one should be ashamed of wanting that.

But there are other reasons that I think corporate law gets pushed pretty hard and why law students respond to that pressure. Law can be obsessed with prestige, and working for a corporate law firm is viewed as prestigious in a way other jobs like working at a legal aid clinic or for a plaintiff’s firm aren’t even if the latter jobs help more people. UConn prides itself on being the premier law school for Connecticut firms looking to hire lawyers (we have Yale, but very few Yale grads stay in the state after graduation), but that means aggressively placing students in the state’s massive insurance and defense contractor industries, and law firms that support them, without really thinking about whether this is the best use of our talents.

And perhaps more than anything else, for students who aren’t sure what they want to do next, corporate law makes it easy to see it as a stepping stone. You can follow the process Career Services set up just for you. You can get familiar with somewhere ahead of time. You can get your post-grad career wrapped up in a bow almost a year before you ever graduate. It’s easy. It’s the path of least resistance.

Wanting to practice in a niche field, by contrast, can feel like always swimming upstream. I don’t want to discount the support I have received - my labor law professor is an incredible mentor who has tried to light the way for me and others, and I have received help from UConn Law career services, such as resume critiques and financial support to attend a labor law conference next month. But labor law firms don’t hire through on-campus interviews. I’ve had to do the legwork to find people to talk to, to learn about where to go and what to do to prepare myself. I’m happy I did that legwork, but I’m also juggling school, a part-time job, and plenty of extracurriculars, and some days it feels like it’d be so much easier to take the path of least resistance.

I know, in my heart of hearts, that the corporate law road wouldn’t really be easier for me. I might have more money, might have an easier time finding a job, but it isn’t worth my happiness. And I suspect that for at least a few of my classmates, the same is true for them too, but they don’t know it yet.

Sometimes I find myself thinking of an absolutely wonderful essay by the late Marina Keegan, who was killed in a car accident shortly after graduating from Yale University right around the same time I got my undergrad degree from UConn. I only met Marina once, but we had some mutual friends from our time with College Democrats, and after her passing many of her works went viral, including her essay “Even Artichokes Have Doubts.” In it, she lamented that a quarter of her classmates at Yale would go on to work highly-paid consulting jobs despite not wanting to pursue that line of work when they came to Yale, despite having ambitions that were far less financially renumerative or prestigious but far more personally satisfying and beneficial to the world.

Now, there’s a fair critique to make of this work: Marina, like many of her classmates, was coming from a place of privilege. She attended an elite private high school in Massachusetts (I don’t know what it cost when she went, but annual tuition is now over $60k a year) before going to Yale. We both graduated from college in 2012, but many of my UConn undergrad classmates took on jobs like bartending, cashiering, and (yes, this was mine) customer service representative for infomercial products because of the lack of available good jobs at the time. No one was offering a McKinsey-type job to my 3.0 GPA from UConn, but if they had, I don’t think I’d have tried to justify taking it with something about building skills - I’d have been over the moon to be able to move out of my mom’s house. And I wonder if any of Marina’s Yale classmates who grew up with more modest means (though there are far too few of them at Yale and other Ivy League schools), who had to take a well-paying consulting job to help support their families, looked askance at that essay judging their choices.

And yet, she got one thing exactly right. For many of her classmates, it wasn’t about needing a solid paycheck or even about Career Services pressure. It was about being a risk-averse high achiever who has had the path spelled out very clearly since birth and, upon graduating from college, is being thrust into the unknown. For them, consulting was something that made the path forward easy. It checked a box. It made them feel like they got something out of their elite education they wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. It made them reassured that other people would be impressed and validate their choices. It felt safe.

I think many of my law classmates are in similar circumstances. We aren’t Yale-tier elite, but we’re a damn good school, and my classmates are high achievers. But many of us are also rule followers, who have gotten ahead by playing it safe and doing what we’re told. So it’s easy to take the next step, to have that security of a prestigious job that pays well and that you can line up well in advance.

But 12 years after we graduated, I have something that Marina sadly never got to have: knowing what happens after people decide to take the high-paying jobs. Many of her classmates that she quoted express wanting to only work in consulting for a few years and then leave to pursue their real dreams. At the time, I’m sure they all meant every word, and the consulting industry sells itself as something you do for a few years and then move on to the next thing, making it easy to believe your next thing will be what you really want to do. You tell yourself you’ll build up a little nest egg while you make that money and then use it to support yourself while you chase your dreams. You can tell yourself the same thing in law: that you’ll work corporate for a little while, pay off your loans, but you don’t want to stay and make partner. You want to go back later to what you said you wanted to do when you started law school.

I know this because I heard many people in DC use that train of thought to explain leaving jobs in politics, the Hill, or nonprofit advocacy for lobbying and PR work. But the vast majority of the time, they didn’t actually come back.

There’s all sorts of reasons not to go back. It’s hard to readjust to a lower standard of living once you’ve gotten the good paychecks for awhile. (Ask me how long it took to kick some of my more expensive habits after giving up my full-time job for law school.) There’s always something you’ll need the money for, even after the student loans are long gone: a car payment, a down payment and mortgage on a house in a neighborhood you don’t want to leave, a wedding, daycare for the kids, elder care for the parents. It’s never going to be easy to make that switch.

What is easy is to tell yourself it’s okay that you still do it. There’s so many things you can say to yourself to explain why you should stay and usually they’re true. I’m doing it in an ethical way. Everyone deserves good representation, including corporations. The work is intellectually interesting. I don’t have the expertise to do a different kind of work as well as it should be done. It’d just be too much of a risk to switch paths now.

And yet, there’s a cost. The cost of using the law to benefit the privileged and not those in need. The cost of shaping your own perspective by spending time with the wealthy and powerful, so much that if you’re a judge later, your decisions will benefit the powerful more than they would if you became a judge after practicing a different kind of law. The cost of shockingly high career dissatisfaction rates. The cost of giving up on what you wanted to do when you came to law.

I can’t speak for any of my classmates, but I know I can’t pay that cost.

I’m going to close this with a text I got from a dear friend when I badly needed it. 1L year right before finals, I was fretting about likely having to give up a day of work to take my Civil Procedure final. I recalled the very bad advice in a “classic” 1L advice book telling prospective law students not to work during their first year so that they could focus on the bloodsport of beating the 1L curve (I’m exaggerating, but only barely). Obviously that wasn’t an option for me, and I worried to a couple of friends that maybe that godawful book was right and students like me who had to work just didn’t belong in law school. My friend Craig gave the perfect response, which I will post here unedited:

Sometimes it’s worth it not to take the easy way. Fuck ‘em.