Career Paths: How Many of Your Classmates Are Still Doing What They Trained to Do?
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I had dinner with an old friend from law school last week, and we found ourselves doing what old classmates always seem to do: trying to remember where everyone ended up. Who made partner? Who became a judge? Who moved in-house? Who seems to spend half the year posting from fabulous vacation homes on Instagram? (Good for her!)
One thing that struck me was how many of the women we knew were no longer practicing law (myself included). It reminded me of something I'd read years ago: women have made up more than half of law school classes for quite a while now (apparently since 2016!), but several years into practice, they become much harder to find in the traditional legal career pipeline.
Obviously, people leave for all kinds of reasons. Some switch careers, some stay home with children for a while, some build businesses, some move into adjacent fields, and some simply decide practicing law isn't what they want to spend their lives doing. (I also wonder if maybe those who move to smaller law firms are harder to track!)
It made me wonder whether this is unique to law, or whether medicine, consulting, accounting, engineering, academia, finance, and other professions see the same thing.
Some questions for today:
- If you think back to your graduating class (whether from college, graduate school, law school, medical school, business school, etc.), roughly what percentage of people are still working in that profession?
- Did you notice a point where a lot of people seemed to leave? (Was there a “five-year mark,” or did departures happen at various points?)
- Were the people who left mostly women, mostly men, or about evenly split?
- If you left your original profession, what pulled you toward something else?
- Do you think your profession has gotten better at retaining women than it was 10 or 20 years ago?
I graduated way back in 1988. I haven’t kept up with many of my classmates but I would say most of them stayed in law. A few are BigLaw partners, many of them have their own firms of various sizes. At least one is a retired judge, a couple are or were law professors. Of those who left the law before retirement age, most of them are women.
Of the people I am still close to or have kept track of from my law school years, one is the dean of a law school (amazing story — she got fired by our BigLaw firm while on maternity leave(!) but went on to have arguably the best career of any of us), one got into appellate law and worked part time as a career clerk in our state Court of Appeal and now takes appellate cases very part time, one is a recently retired judge, one has his own successful firm, one is high up in-house at Disney, and a few are BigLaw partners.
Me personally, I left BigLaw after less than a year to go to MidLaw, made partner there and then moved to government after I’d been practicing for 12 years. Most people who made big moves seemed to do it early-ish in their careers, except of course people who go on the bench often do it very late in their careers.
Oh, and one of my male law partners quit after practicing for maybe 10 years and became an elementary school teacher and loved it and recently retired from that.
STEM grad, and only one of my classmates ever worked in the industry we all trained for. Most of us took something outside that field because it paid enough to both eat and afford rent. Some of us made careers out of that first job, others pivoted to other areas.
That’s surprising. What area of STEM? Everyone in my area is in their field except one who left his PhD program to go into consulting.
Very niche, very competitive, very poorly funded, vilified by current administrations (US and abroad). The people who do make a career of it are usually only able to do so because they are not the breadwinner, or because they are okay with living like a broke grad student indefinitely. Side hustles are very common, and my classmates and I didn’t want to do weekend gig work and live with roommates in our 40s just to make ends meet.
That’s surprising to me. I went to a tech school for undergrad so most of my friends got science or engineering degrees. The vast majority of engineers still work as engineers and a lot of the science majors got PhDs and became professors which I count as the same industry since they’re using their undergrad degree. Only a few pivoted and went to law/med/business school.
Different anon in STEM who did get a PhD and become a professor, but I’m in the tiny minority who did so, both in my own experience and backed up by the statistics on this (something like 10-20% of bio PhDs get tenure track positions, and obviously lots of people don’t even go to grad school and many drop out without a PhD, close to half in many programs). There are a lot of people who still do something related to their field, but also a lot who don’t or the connection is pretty vague.
Went to an engineering school; imo there’s a big difference between the S and the E career paths ever though it’s lumped into STEM. Plenty of S degrees have niche or non lucrative career paths & IMO a lot of people don’t end up working in them.
There’s also degrees of “how close to your field are you” – like, I’m not an engineer but I’m in a role that my degree is a prerequisite for.
Chem eng, I think only one of us is a true Chem eng these days and she’s our city’s chief water engineer, so I think of her often and fondly whenever I use our city’s wonder tap water.
I’m in a STEM field that has pretty poor work life balance. Pretty much every woman I graduated with (myself included) changed to adjacent fields when they had kids. The late nights hit different when it means time away from kids. I saw some male classmates make a similar choice, but others doubled down (ex. “it’s just easier on the kids if I come home after bedtime instead of riling them up”). The field doesn’t really need to have long hours, it’s just the culture and it makes it clear the culture was created by (mostly) young men.
Graduated from a T50 law school in 2005. Most people I know are still practicing law in some capacity. Maybe 20% (men and women) are doing something else now. The men seem to tend towards business or sales, and often starting in that direction right or soon after school. The women went more law-adjacent (HR, insurance, etc.) anywhere from right away to 10+ years out.
I am surprised how little correlation there is between “law school success”/big deal first job and being in high powered jobs 20+ years later. Most of the very high law school performers did not stay in biglaw – the people who are still there as partners are the ones who were hard-workers willing to put up with the lifestyle and headaches of biglaw … and were not smarter than others who weren’t.
When I was in law school, they used to say “The A students make the law professors, the B students make the judges, and the C students make all the money!”
Journalism and hardly any.
One retrained as a teacher after a few years, lots of us moved into PR for better money and hours. Comedy, acupuncture and music are other careers my peers went off into.
It’s such a shame for journalism. Journalists are far outnumbered and outgunned by corporate communication.
I graduated in 2008. The years jobs were rescinded and the market contracted. I never got to do what I trained for and I’ve never taken a job I’ve truly wanted. I’ve cobbled together a string of jobs but I’ve never had a career. A few years ago, I started with the federal government. Now I’m psychologically traumatized but there is no off ramp (until I inevitably get RIFed). Nobody wants to hire a middle aged woman with a spotty resume who has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I approached this question first as a law school grad (currently in-house after 10+ years as an associate in biglaw). Then after reading others responses, remembered I’m actually, originally a PhD level STEM grad! There is definitely a frequently trod STEM PhD to law pathway via patent prosecution and patent litigation. Careers are long and twisty. It’s part of the fun of being an adult.