>> Well if you're going to be a lawyer you have
to obviously go to law school but there's a lot
of paths that can lead you
into law school itself.
There's a lot of people that have Poli
Sci majors or Political Science majors.
That is a natural path into law school
and we did have a lot of my colleagues
from law school were Poli Sci majors but what's
nice about law school is you get a big diversity
of students from all different types of majors
there because they all have different goals.
So the Political Science majors a
lot of them went in to be litigation.
We had a lot of students like me who were
business majors and so we went into law school
and our path is more about business transactions
or even business litigation or estate planning.
But to be a lawyer you got absolutely have
to go to law school and the worst thing
about that is once you graduate law
school then you have to spend two
or three months immediately in
study for the Bar Exam and hope
that you pass the Bar Exam at that point.
Well if you want to be a lawyer or you think
you might want to be a lawyer you probably want
to take some type of pre-law classes
as an undergraduate student itself.
I know for example I teach business law
here at the Merage School of Business
which gives you good exposure to
how the legal system works itself.
I know that the Department
of Social Science, excuse me,
the School of Social Sciences they
have law related classes as well,
Criminal Justice classes as well.
I think you have to see if you
are really interested in the law.
A lot of people say they want to be
lawyers because you know I think lawyers
or doctors are probably those two
glamorous careers that everyone thinks
about where people think you make
a lot of money, people respect you
because you're a lawyer or a doctor.
But being a lawyer is not
all it's cracked up to be.
It's a really difficult life to have
and so I would recommend taking some
of these pre-law classes to see if you
really are interested in how the law works,
how you analyze problems, if you're
interested in solving problems
and also whether you're equipped to
deal with the stress of being a lawyer.