Law School and Career Switching

Didn't say which direction... It seems like I know as many people who are lawyers and are looking to do something else as people on the outside trying to get in. What do you do when you invest in an expensive credential and find out it's just not for you?

For some people, law seems to be a ticket to a high-quality professional life, defined one way or another - the star litigators, the well-paid specialists, the judges, the law professors, etc. For others, the credential actually limits their options.

(I'm told there are stories of medical school graduates who never practiced medicine. But how do you explain that to people? I once knew an Air Force pilot who was like that - he found that all he wanted to do was fly, and that was that. It would take a lot of both courage and sudden self-certainty to be able to do that.)

For most people, the usual first step in becoming an attorney is to go to law school and graduate. Then you have to sit for the state bar exam and pass it. And then that's no instant ticket to heaven. There are probably lots of blogs out there about professional trajectories after that - getting hired, making partner in a firm or not, etc.

There are some states where you theoretically don't have to go to law school to become a lawyer; see http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0603/p13s01-lecs.html. But I suspect that's harder than going to law school would be, which is pretty hard. My father went to law school at night and from what I've seen, that is wretchedly difficult and exhausting.

One distance part-time education provider I've actually heard some good mention of is Kaplan's Concord Law School; see http://www.concordlawschool.edu/. But I'm suspicious. Law pedagogy by its nature doesn't seem like it would work in a distance program.

Would be interesting to hear from some lawyers who successfully entered the field at mid-career and find out how it's gone. The culture of the law firm seems to favor an apprenticeship of the young.

Free iTunes Courses (no degree, though)

The free iTunes courses at Stanford get a mention in the US News education "paper trail" blog.. Interacting with them, taking tests and getting them graded, etc. is a new feature.

Unfortunately, there's no way I know of to "credentialize" these free iTunes courses - the schools aren't going to turn loose of that without charging for it - but getting the material for review might be useful.

Distance Education - Guam?

The University of Guam is having a distance education workshop.

This idea might be a golden opportunity for UOG to become an affordable virtual US university of the future - and one with a front-row seat on the important Pacific Rim. Roughly half of "distance education" is, well, distance, and Guam has plenty of that. It might be as far away from the US as you can get and still be part of the US. But that shouldn't be a problem. You don't have to go to Phoenix to take courses from the University of Phoenix, and according to one report they have 330,000 students.

Kudos to them for thinking and talking about it. More kudos will follow when they develop some actual distance degree programs. I didn't see anything on their website, and their distance education workshop should be available as a distance offering - didn't see anything about a podcast or webcast. But you have to start somewhere.

Industrial Design, anyone?

I could see this being a field a person might never know about, depending on what path their lives took, because it's outside many academic tracks:

http://www.collegeboard.com/csearch/majors_careers/profiles/careers/105108.html

Career: Industrial Designers

Calvin Klein may have designed your jeans, but who designed the chair you’re sitting on? Industrial designers work behind the scenes to shape everyday products, from food packaging and appliances to toys and cars.

While their work may not seem glamorous, they serve a very vital function -- and they make better money than most other types of designers, too.

Industrial designers work with engineers to design everyday goods, most of them mass produced.


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Neat stuff. So how do you access this field, what credentials do you need, and where do you go to get them? This seems to span fine arts schools and engineering schools.

Here's what the often irksome US News ranking list says - but at least it identifies some. I had not heard of several of these, but that doesn't mean much.

Still to come: how accessible any of this is for a midlife career switcher?

Industrial Design Schools

Fine Arts Specialty Rankings: Industrial Design
Ranked in 2008
1 Art Center College of Design Pasadena, CA
2 Rhode Island School of Design Providence, RI
3 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh , PA
4 Pratt Institute Brooklyn, NY
5 Ohio State University Columbus, OH
6 University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH
7 Cranbrook Academy of Art Bloomfield Hills, MI
8 California College of the Arts San Francisco, CA
Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, NY
10 Arizona State University Tempe, AZ
University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL

Astronomy career switch

Couldn't pass this one up:
Career Switching to Astronomy

Nuclear Engineering Making A Comeback?

Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia is apparently setting up a new program in nuclear engineering: http://www.news.vcu.edu/vcu_view/pages.aspx?nid=2904.

This may be an interesting not-so-weak signal of a counter-trend. Not so long ago, universities were shutting down nuclear engineering programs. Including, in the same state, the University of Virginia, just a couple of years ago. I seem to remember that there were once several other schools with research reactors in Virginia, such as Virginia Tech and VMI.

More from National Academies

The Summer 2008 issue of the NAS/NAE Issues in Science and Technology's cover theme is adult education, "The Path Not Studied". I haven't read it yet but plan to.

Back issues of this magazine can be obtained from http://www.issues.org/backissues.html.

There is also a podcast of this at
http://media.nap.edu/podcasts/nax73pathnotstu.mp3.

Professional Science Master's Programs

A comment to the last post had three good information links on PSM programs. Here they are:

http://www.sciencemasters.com/

http://www.npsma.org/

http://psm.illinois.edu/

Many thanks to IllinoisPSM!