To find a dream job today pick a path with twists and turns

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Today’s workers have three, clear priorities: Flexible hours, work that leads to personal growth, and the ability to spend a lot of time fostering personal relationships.

These are not the characteristics of jobs that typically attracted the best candidates. Most lawyers have terrible hours, most doctors have little flexibility, and most consultants sacrifice personal time for time on the road.

So, what’s left? What are the dream jobs today? What are the career paths that challenge assumptions of conventional success but achieve the top priorities of today’s workers: Flexibility, personal growth, and fun co-workers.

A big piece of the dream career path is to get out of doing entry-level jobs by taking a career path that allows you to jump. Some people start companies in their dorm rooms so they have good experience on their resume by the time they graduate. Some people freelance after graduation so they can find good work for themselves, prove themselves, and then get a mid-level job when they look for an employer.

Some entry-level jobs are still good, though, because the company offers so much in exchange. These jobs are inflexible and demanding, but they provide a couple of years of high-level, intensive training. Examples include being an analyst for an investment banking firm, going into a structured training program at a company such as Procter & Gamble or General Electric, or going to a top-tier consulting firm that makes mentoring and training high priorities.

Doing these jobs is almost like going to business school but, instead of paying for it, you get paid. And then you leave.

Today’s dream jobs are different than those of the past, but just as competitive — tough to position yourself for and tough to keep. Take the example of bloggers. Some, like Heather B. Armstrong at dooce, or Darren Rowse at Problogger, do a great job of supporting themselves and their families with their blogs. They have flexible, interesting work, they learn a lot, and work in a community they really connect with. But the percentage of bloggers who can do this is very small.

Working at a venture-capital firm or a hedge fund is also a great way to go. Good hours, fun work, great money. But very few people will be good enough at what they do that these sorts of jobs will be open to them.

If you cannot figure out how to get to the top of a field, figure out how to keep your options open. The worst career track for today’s worker is one in which you’re stuck — where career change would require you to start at the bottom again. Multidisciplinary, knowledge-management paths give you flexibility to move among disciplines and departments. Careers that are brain-intensive but not time-intensive allow you to work on developing your next thing while you’re doing your current thing. These are dream jobs because they allow you to create work around the life you want to lead.

And, of course, don’t forget entrepreneurship. The reason so many young people are starting companies is not because jobs are hard to find; it’s because dream jobs are hard to find. But starting your own company allows you to work with your friends, pick your own hours, and learn on a very steep curve.

So, what does this look like in real life? Take a look at Nataly Kogan’s career. She started out working for a top-tier consulting firm. Then she got a job at a venture capital firm. And today, at age 31, she has founded her own company, Work It, Mom — fittingly, a community for women to figure out the answer to their own dream job after they’ve had kids.

Kogan is a great example of someone with a dream job because the job doesn’t feel steady. She’s at the beginning of a wild ride through entrepreneurship. There used to be a smugness to the partner at the big law firm or the brain surgeon with the de rigueur, stay-at-home wife. The people with dream jobs today don’t know where they’ll be 20 years from now — or even next month.

Even those who may appear to already have their dream job may be scheming to move on to their next one — at a start-up, for example. Google is a big matching service for smart people who have ideas and smart people who want to work on a new idea. A huge number of Google employees are waiting to go to a start-up founded by someone they know inside the company.

We do not have a finite set of respectable jobs anymore. We do not have a single path to the American dream anymore.

What we have is multiple paths that converge on flexible, rewarding work that accommodates a personal life. And we have paths that do not get you to that.

The dream job of the new millennium plays to your strengths. So find them. Because that dream job will not unfold in front of you like a 1950s-era corporate ladder.

You need to go after the dream job every day of your career if you want to get it.

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Choose a career path that makes you scared of failure

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It is clear from a wide range of polls that the majority of both men and women under 40 are willing to give up power and money to get flexible and interesting work. The problem is that this is not so simple. Taking a low-paying, unimpressive job is not going to give you flexibility. In fact it will probably put you on track to be serving fast-food on a schedule that is so inflexible you have to negotiate with six people to cover your shifts during vacation.

The best way to get flexible, interesting work is to be great at something, and let everyone know your focus, according to research by Ezra Zuckerman, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This doesn’t mean being great at climbing the corporate ladder or great at working tons of hours to make partner at a law firm that will dump you. This means getting great at something because, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at Claremont University and author of the book Flow, we feel best when we are doing work at a high level of competence.

On top of that, though, employers give flexible deals to people who are in high demand. It’s fortunate that the best way to be in high demand is to do the work you’re great at. Theoretically everyone will be very happy with their flexible, interesting work life.

So, how do you get to that point where you’re great at something?

It’s hard. It’s all about risk, honesty, and, frankly, shattered dreams. Your parents tell you that you can be anything, but you know what? You can’t. If you’re tall you can’t be an Olympic gymnast, and if you’re short you can’t be a runway model. If you’re great with numbers you probably can’t be a talk show host – the skills of a mathematician and a crowd pleaser seldom overlap.

So one of the most important things you can do is come to terms with what you are uniquely suited to do , and what you’re not–and to understand which is which.

Once you admit that some things will suit you better than others, you have to start trying things. Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, wrote a whole book – Stumbling on Happiness – about how terrible we are at predicting what we’ll like, and nowhere is this more salient a point than in the job world. So start trying things.

Most of what makes people great at something is not raw talent but how hard they work at it, according to research by Steven Levitt, economist at University of Chicago and author of the book Freakonomics. So choose to do something you are excited enough about to work very hard at it, and keep testing things until something grabs you.

Paul Hatziiliades went through this process of self-discovery by starting as an accountant at a kitchen remodeling store. The sales guy left, with no notice, and Hatziiliades found himself greeting customers. And making sales. And liking it.

Then he kept learning about other aspects of the business until he was essentially designing kitchens, which he turned out to have great talent for. He’d have never known this about himself if he had been rigid in what sorts of roles he was willing to take on.

Even when you find that thing, though, at some point you will get stuck. You will see that you are probably great at something, but still not be sure of it. Maybe it’s a startup that you think you can make a go of; maybe it’s a freelance career that is almost sustainable; maybe it’s a big project that could change your career but is very scary.

All these things approach what Seth Godin calls the Dip. In his new book, The Dip, Godin explains that the things that are really worth doing in life – the things that will get you the passion and competence necessary for flow – require getting through a dip. And it’s at the dip where you decide if you can actually get to greatness.

Hatziiliades saw his Dip when the store owners decided to sell. Hatziiliades bought it and turned it into a high-end kitchen design company, called Moda Cucina, that leveraged both his talent for putting together kitchens that customers loved, and his talent for sourcing the right products and materials from all over the world. He had no idea if this business model would work, and he put all his cash into the business. This was the Dip for him. Today, he is on the other side of the Dip, doing what he’s great at, and being recognized for owning that niche he risked everything to get: high-end kitchen design.

Not everyone has Hatziiliades’ experience, though. Sometimes you’ll find you can’t do it – you can’t get past the Dip. Maybe you are trying something that is not the best idea, or you need to shift. Maybe you had an impossible goal. It’s hard in the dip. It’s the time when you doubt yourself, or your ideas, or both. Or you fear failure or you fear success, or both, because both will change you. These are times when you really find out what you can do.

Godin says if you’re on a path worth pursuing, you will walk into the Dip. If there’s no Dip ahead then you are not challenging yourself. You already have accomplished what you will accomplish on that path. And if you never experience the challenge of that Dip then you’ll miss out on the interesting, flexible work, yes, but most of all, you’ll miss out on the great feeling Csikszentmihalyi describes when work is at a high level of competence and engagement.

Sure, sometimes your Dip will come in an area that is not work – for example if you are training for a marathon. Usually, though, the time and energy we spend on our work is so great that it behooves us to look for opportunities that have a dip in them.

With the goals of work changing – from power to personal growth – the process of work will change as well. Work used to be about safety and stability and the Dip was for the risk-loving mid-life-crisis-suffering entrepreneurs. Today a Dip is the necessary path to the dream career where you can control your time and you can be engaged in work at the same time.

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My own marriage and the myth of the stay-at-home dad

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For those of you who don’t know what’s going on in my marriage, please read My First Day of Marriage Counseling, and maybe you will want to leave a comment about how if you were my husband, you’d divorce me for blogging about my marriage.

My husband, in fact, has brought up divorce for other reasons. I am not totally sure which ones, to be honest, but I think it is career related since I have a great career and his sort of stalled when he became a stay-at-home dad and then went to hell from there.

I know that there are a lot of stay-at-home dads. But while it may seem like there are a lot who are happy, I think it’s really just that every single one of the happy ones is blogging.

There are a lot of stay-at-home dads in my neighborhood. After all, I live in a town where you can buy a house for under $200,000, so living on one income is not that hard here. That’s part of the reason we moved to Madison.

So my friend who writes for a very huge and widely read publication needed some stay-at-home dads to interview. And I said, “I know a bunch. I’ll give you names.” But you know what? None of them would talk. And of course my husband would not talk, because stay-at-home parenting has been a disaster for us. And if you ask all the high-level women who have men at home with their kids, (there are tons) their husbands are not talking.

So I’m going to tell you the truth about stay-at-home dads: The happy ones are working part-time at something they love. This is not surprising because the majority of women with kids would rather work part-time than either stay-at home full-time or work full-time. Which explains why we’re done with the stay-at-home dad routine.

Not that I really know what my husband is doing, though, because we are barely talking. We are doing what I imagine lots of couples do when things fall apart: Acting totally normal at events where normal families show up as families, and then pretending we don’t know each other at home.

And I do feel a little like I don’t know him. Last night I accepted a LinkedIn invitation from a friend. I went immediately to see our common connections – my favorite thing to on LinkedIn — and, there was my husband.

I wasn’t shocked that she knew him. I was shocked by what he wrote for his profession. Stay-at-home dad, former online game producer.

Surely writing stay-at-home dad on a LinkedIn profile cannot be good. But that’s what he is, so what else is he going to write? I went to LinkedIn to investigate the stay-at-home situation. When I searched the string “stay at home”, I got 471 results. It makes sense, I guess, because the biggest problem people have when they leave work to take care of a kid is that they lose their contacts. So LinkedIn would be an obvious thing to do to make going back to work easier.

The list was mostly moms. The first guy I saw was not only a stay-at-home dad, but in his special skills section he lists “baby stuff”.

As the career expert in my household, I always think I’m ten steps ahead of my husband. But I didn’t know that somewhere in the back of his mind, while we’re at soccer games and swimming lessons, he has been wrestling with the question of what to write on LinkedIn, which is really the question of how to present himself professionally when he’s abandoned his profession. I feel very lucky that I’m the one who kept up a career.

So we are interviewing babysitters because my husband needs time to think, and you can’t think about the state of your life and what to do about it when you are taking care of kids.

While I was conducting an interview, my husband was scurrying around getting camp lunches ready for the next day. This is an endearing thing about my husband – he is the king of details, and I am terrible with them. Every time there is something wrong in the lunchbox, my son comes home and asks if I could please not pack his lunch anymore.

So my husband was running around the house and he bumped into me. A normal thing to do would be to say I’m sorry. But we are not talking to each other. And the babysitter saw that an opportunity to be normal was somehow missed.

I needed to say something to explain the weirdness, because good babysitters do not work in homes of messed up families. I thought a little story might make things feel like I have some control. So I said, “Um. My husband and I are, uh. Well. We are…”

And the babysitter said, “Oh, don’t worry. I know. I read your blog.”

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My guest column in Time magazine: What Gen Y Really Wants

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With 85 million baby boomers and 50 million Gen Xers, there is already a yawning generation gap among American workers–particularly in their ideas of work-life balance. For baby boomers, it’s the juggling act between job and family. For Gen X, it means moving in and out of the workforce to accommodate kids and outside interests. Now along come the 76 million members of Generation Y. For these new 20-something workers, the line between work and home doesn’t really exist. They just want to spend their time in meaningful and useful ways, no matter where they are.

The first challenge for the companies that want to hire the best young workers is getting them in the door. They are in high demand–the baby boomers are retiring, and many Gen X workers are opting out of long hours–and they have high expectations for personal growth, even in entry-level jobs. More than half of Generation Y’s new graduates move back to their parents’ homes after collecting their degrees, and that cushion of support gives them the time to pick the job they really want. Taking time off to travel used to be a resume red flag; today it’s a learning experience. And entrepreneurship now functions as a safety net for this generation. They grew up on the Internet, and they know how to launch a viable online business. Facebook, for example, began in a college dorm room.

Read the rest of this article at Time.com.

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Career ideas for a warm summer day

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Here’s an idea: Instead of thinking of your summer vacation as something that detracts from your work, think of it as a way to boost your work performance — or even your business.

The weeklong getaways that run a day or two over, the hour-long siestas that turn into three hours, and the three-day weekends that go on for four can all help your career. You just have to use the time well to take care of your physical and mental health.

Why? A healthy body makes for a healthy, balanced mind, and that’s the chief asset of a truly good worker. It’s not about the hours you spend behind a desk — it’s about what’s going through your head while you’re there.

Here are four ways to ensure that your summer fun in the sun enhances your career success, whether you’re still on vacation or are back from one:

1. Go for a run in the park, or swim in a lake at sunset.
It used to be that working out was optional. Now we know that regular exercise makes you calmer, smarter, happier, and richer. So how can you possibly say that it’s not one of your highest priorities?

It makes sense that if you feel better about yourself and the world you’ll do better in business. Because business is about thinking clearly, acting with confidence, and making good connections.

But don’t work out just because people who work out make more money. Do it because it’ll change your outlook on life. Really. You’ll be less likely to be depressed and more likely to be optimistic.

If you’re younger, join an athletic team. People who play sports do better in their careers. This is true whether you’re on a small liberal arts college fencing team or a Big Ten football squad. The self-confidence, teamwork, and drive that athletes display makes them higher performers at work.

Sure, there are exceptions, but the advantage is so pronounced that some corporate recruiters at colleges ask to see only the athletes.

2. Mentor a summer intern.
Each of us needs mentors to guide us through our careers at different points in time. Sometimes we need help navigating office politics, sometimes we need advice on making a life change. At each point, knowing how to ask for help is essential, and the best way to learn how to ask for help is to give help.

If you mentor someone, you help yourself as well. You’ll find out what a mentoring relationship is like from the other side. For example, you’ll learn what feels useful to the mentor and what’s annoying. You’ll also discover why it’s important to ask good questions, because as a mentor you’re helpless if the person you’re trying to help doesn’t know what he wants.

Summer interns are ripe for this task. They’re there because they want to learn. You can teach them not only about the workplace but about themselves, and how to figure out where they fit. You can be an advisor and a coach and a friend. These are all great ways to mentor, and after the experience you’ll have more confidence in seeking a mentor of your own.

3. Curl up in the sun with a book.

Information overload comes from sifting through ideas all day. In a knowledge-worker environment, with the Internet constantly streaming new ideas, the most successful workers are those who can sort information most efficiently.

Learning top-flight productivity skills is essential in today’s workplace, but that can only get you so far. At some point, you’ll need to read 300 pages on the same topic. For most of you, this means turning off the computer, but luckily summer is a great time for curling up with a good book.

I don’t mean a Tom Clancy novel, either — I’m talking about big ideas. This means that instead of sticking with a subject for the time it takes to scroll down a page, you have to stick with it for an entire weeklong vacation. That might sound dire, but remember the thrill of the rigorous thinking you did in college, when there were no all-department meetings and no memos to read during lunchtime?

Big ideas take time to understand, and they need to grow in your brain so you can make them your own. Take the opportunity to do so this summer, when the world gives you more permission to take long breaks.

4. Differentiate yourself by lying quietly in the grass.

When was the last time you had a grand epiphany in an important company meeting? Probably never. If the meeting is important, then you prepare and you concentrate and you think about what everyone else is doing — all things that keep your mind from being open to something random and profound.

Grand thinking requires space, flexibility, and time. These things are hard to come by if you lead a life that doesn’t allow for stillness. We owe it to ourselves to take time to be alone and do nothing, or almost nothing. Even if no big ideas come to you at that moment, there’s a clear, still moment where your brain gets a rest. And lying in the grass lets your body rest, too.

Career coach Susan Bernstein says that success and fulfillment in a job come when you connect your body and your mind to your work. The first step in acquiring this balance, I believe, is quiet contemplation.

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Twentysomething: Young workers are impatient with good reason

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By Ryan Healy – I have read that my generation grew up with constant change and amazing new technologies like cell phones and the Internet which caused us to not appreciate patience and experience.

I don’t buy that.

Surely there are a variety of social and cultural factors influencing impatience, but as far as I’m concerned, the big reason for all this impatience is one thing: family.

My family is the most important part of my life. My brother is my best friend. My parents are wonderful, caring people who raised me right and spent lots of time with me. When I have my own family, I will spend my time on family outings, vacations, baseball practices, piano lessons and everything else that comes with being a responsible father. These things will take a backseat to nothing, including work.

I also have a burning desire to be wildly successful in the business world. Typically, to be a huge success you must put more than eighty hours a week into your job. Balancing that with piano practice on Tuesday, a baseball game on Wednesday a dance recital on Friday, and family dinners nearly every night is just not practical.

Luckily, I am 23 years old and most likely won’t have this family until at least my mid thirties. If you do the math this leaves me with about a decade to become a successful business person. Once the wife and kids come, the career must take a backseat. This is why I’m so impatient!

The chances of me making millions of dollars in the next decade are slim; I’m not naïve enough to think it’s easy. However, this does not mean I won’t give it my best shot. For the next ten years I am going to be as impatient as I can possibly be, because maybe, just maybe, I will become the wildly successful business man that I always knew I could be.

Slowly climbing the corporate ladder is actually counter-intuitive to this type of thinking. You start young at work, no spouse, no kids and not much responsibility outside of work. Slowly you get a new title, and with it, more hours. Then you get married and have two paychecks rolling in. Then you become a VP with more responsibility and of course, more hours. After a few years of marriage, you have a kid, you get a promotion, and you work more hours. All of a sudden, your kids are on their own and you were so damn busy working for the past twenty years that you can’t even believe where the time went.

Well, at least you get that great retirement in Florida, if you make it to 65….

Luckily, my father worked for a non-profit and made his schedule fit around my basketball games and my brother’s golf matches. Despite her workload, my mother always made time for us as well. They put family before work because they were responsible parents. I will do the same. However, I will do whatever it takes to become successful before that time comes.

Best case scenario is I start some type of business and build it for ten years. When it’s time for work to take a backseat to family, I will be able to hand over the reins to my impatient apprentice and I will only work when I need to. Worst case scenario is I try to start a business, it doesn’t work out, and I either go back and get a job that allows me plenty of family time and pays enough for me to support them or I start some type of safe business that will not consume my life.

Sure there are plenty of twists and turns my life will take along the way, but I know that nothing is more important then family and working your way up so you can have tons of responsibility and no time when your kids are growing up is idiotic. I would much rather be impatient now and think of my family years as a mini retirement, than miss my children’s childhood chasing an outdated dream of retiring in Florida. There is no better time to be a success than the present, waiting around to gain “experience” is a waste of time. Impatience is an asset.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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Twentysomething: Problems with working at a big company

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By Ryan Healy — If there is an overarching impact my generation is already having on the corporate world, it is entrepreneurship. Roughly 80% of my friends and acquaintances plan to start their own business at some point. Both males and females, college grads and current students, everyone wants to run their own business, and many of us will.

However, it is not practical to assume that everyone will. In fact, I would bet that less than half of the aforementioned people will take the plunge into entrepreneurship. The economy needs both entrepreneurs and employees to run successfully and let’s face it, not everyone is cut out for the risky, constantly changing life of an entrepreneur.

That said, I don’t think my friends will land at large companies, either. They’ll go to smaller ones. Here are three reasons why large companies will have an increasingly difficult time trying to recruit and retain their young talent.

1. Following the crowd is boring.
To me, there is something very unsatisfying about being one of many. This does not mean that I want to rebel or move to a remote village and drop out of society. This means that I know I am an individual and I know I can achieve what I set my mind to. Because of this, following the crowd and working in a large organization with hundreds or thousands of people doing the same tasks is very disheartening.

Ben Casnocha, the best example of a young entrepreneur I can think of, sums it up best in his book, My Start Up Life. He says, “I don’t want to be normal, I want to be something else.” Simple, straight forward and to the point, this quote sums up how young, ambitious people think. These days, it’s all about going above and beyond “the crowd.” And where do you follow the crowd more than in a massive organization?

2. Bureaucracy is a waste of time.
During one of my far-too-common discussions with a friend about paychecks, raises and the corporate BS involved with them, my friend said, “I’m going to start looking for another job that pays more money. I can’t ask for a raise –I don’t even know who to ask!”

If you have a boss who reports to a boss, who reports to another boss etc. it is going to take weeks or months to get your request to the right people. And who exactly are these right people anyway? Many people I know have multiple supervisors. Which one do you ask?

I guess my friend could go to the HR department with the request, but the chances of the HR folks knowing his job responsibilities or knowing which manager to contact about the request are slim. When HR finally figures all of this out, my friend would have missed out on three or four paychecks that could have been paid at the higher rate.

So it’s not hard to understand why he is about to begin interviewing with other, smaller companies.

3. I can be a CEO and an intern at the same time.
Because of the hierarchical structures that nearly all organizations adhere to, big decisions and big-picture work happen at the top of the food chain. Smaller organizations can be much less rigid and more lenient then large organizations because of the high visibility across the organization. Even if a young person isn’t able to make the huge decision, at least they know the person who did. And they can decide if they trust the decision-maker to lead the company in the right direction.

It’s ironic that I am barely a step above an intern at my corporate job, but one could argue that I am the CEO of Employee Evolution. During the day I often perform low-level intern-type tasks, but at night I have meetings with entrepreneurs and authors, record podcasts for the Wall Street Journal and discuss my vision for the future of Employee Evolution with my web designer. It’s not hard to see why 9 to 5 at a big company probably isn’t the quickest way to the top.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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Twentysomething: The Paradox of Choice, gen-Y style

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By Ryan Healy — Go to college, graduate with a technical degree and become a professional, preferably a doctor, lawyer or accountant. Join the workforce for a few years, then get married and have a kid or two.”

According to my father this was the typical advice given to young baby boomer boys growing up. Their parents expected them to follow the same straight and narrow path as them. They had a few choices; follow the advice or rebel and make it on their own.

“Be whatever you want to be. Find something you love and pursue that passion. With enough desire and enough hard work you can do anything you set your mind to.”

This was the advice I received growing up. Flash forward to today and I’m still trying to figure out what it is that I love. There are too many choices! Should I join the Peace Corps and rebuild houses in Mongolia? Should I work for a presidential campaign for a year? Should I go to Wall Street and become a money making machine with no time for a social life?

Not only can I choose any career, but I can choose any city, state or country. My family lives all over the United States and my friends live all over the world. I can communicate and keep relationships with them through the internet no matter where I move. I feel no pressure to get married or start a family any time soon. I can do all of these things when I am ready.

The choices go way beyond career and family. I can choose from hundreds of TV channels, and if I don’t like the graphics I can choose to watch them in HD. The Internet, where I spend too much time, is a big black hole of decisions about information. Even the cereal aisle at the grocery store can turn into a painful decision process. Life in the 21st century is a constant choice.

If you don’t have you’re head on straight it is much easier today to become paralyzed into inaction because you don’t know what the perfect choice is. Many of my peers will probably never specialize in anything because we will never be satisfied. How can we be? There is so much more to do and so much more to explore. And it’s just a click or two away!

Having an unlimited amount of possibilities is one reason so many of my friends move back home after college. They just don’t know what the right choice is. I can see why some people think this is a problem. Living at home until age twenty-five was not the norm in the old days, but neither was working eight different jobs by the time you are thirty. As long as you are working towards an end goal or figuring out what line of work will be best for you, living at home for a few years is a great option.

One of the most difficult realizations I have made is that there is no such thing as the perfect decision. Whether you are picking out what type of cereal to buy, what TV show to watch, or what career path to venture down, you can only make a decision based on what you know at that particular time. This is why it is so cool to be joining the workforce today. If you make a bad decision and enter a new career that doesn’t align with your strengths, wants, or desires, then you can simply pick up and make another career change with very little consequence.

Making the wrong career choice is not nearly as life altering as it was thirty years ago. It’s a different world today. It’s a beautiful world filled with endless possibilities, and maybe too many. But you know what? I would never trade a life filled with unlimited possibility for a pre-written script. Luckily, that’s one choice I don’t have to make.

Ryan Healy’s blogs is Employee Evolution.

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5 Myths about going to law school

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By Stephen Seckler, Managing Director, Boston Office, BCG Attorney Search and author of the blog Counsel to Counsel.

The cost of a legal education is now reaching stratospheric proportions. Anyone contemplating this enormous investment of time and money should think long and hard before applying.

Here are five common myths about what law school will do for you:

Myth 1: I’ll be able to use the law degree in whatever career I decide to choose.
Go to law school if you want to be a lawyer. But don’t go if you believe it will “open doors” for you. It won’t. By the end of law school you may still have no idea what you “want” from your career; only now you are likely to limited by huge law school debt.

Myth 2: I’ll get a job when I graduate law school.
If you graduate near the top of your class from a top school, then your job prospects are likely to be strong. But if you have an average performance from a second-tier school, finding your first job may be a big challenge.

Myth 3: I’ll get to be in court and try cases.
Most lawyers never see the inside of a courtroom. About 95% of all civil law suits that are filed are settled before trial. Much of the work of a “litigator” involves reviewing documents, preparing court filings and negotiating with the lawyer from the other side of the case.

Myth 4: I’ll be able to advocate for the little guy.
If you are independently wealthy, you can advocate for the poor, fight for environmental justice, defend civil rights, etc. But if you are like the typical law school graduate today, you will finish with substantial debt. Public interest jobs are too low paying to accommodate a heavy debt burden. Some law schools have a debt-forgiveness program for people going into public interest jobs, but the salaries are so low that they are often hard to manage even in light of debt forgiveness.

Myth 5: I’ll have intellectually challenging work.
Early in your career, you will probably spend a lot of time reviewing documents all day rather than tackling great intellectual issues. Even litigators – many of whom go into law to argue exciting, constitutional issues — will spend most of their time researching mundane procedural issues at the beginning of their career.

If you’re thinking of going to law school, make sure you have a clear plan for how you will make that degree useful (and essential) when you graduate. Find some practicing lawyers and spend time with them to find out what they really do for a living.

If you are already in law school and reading this, don’t panic. Rather, start doing some of the harder thinking that you put off and figure out how you want to make the best use of your degree when you do graduate. The work you do now will surely pay off in the long run.

 

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Five situations when you shouldn’t go to graduate school

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Most people don’t need to go to graduate school. Sure, you need an MBA to run a Fortune 500 company, and you need to go to medical school to be a doctor, but in most cases, a graduate degree doesn’t provide a ticket to play – because anyone can play – but rather, the degree provides a security blanket.

And at some point, you need to admit that walking around with a security blanket makes you look bad. You can do adult life without one. Wondering if this applies to you? Here are some reasons why you shouldn’t go to grad school:

1. A humanities PhD makes you less employable not more employable.
Most people who get degrees in humanities will not get teaching jobs. And people who are looking for jobs in the corporate world, with a humanities PhD under their belt look like someone who tried to teach but couldn’t. Or, worse yet, it looks like you spent five years getting a degree you had not made a plan for using. Both cases serve to make you “probably not even qualified to run a cash register,” according to Thomas Benton, a columnist in the Chronicle of Higher Learning who is discouraging people from pursuing these degrees.

2. You can shift careers by enrolling in a night-class.
Marci Alboher did this – she was a lawyer and took a class in writing, and now look: She’s writing for the New York Times about, what else? How you don’t need to get a degree to change careers, you just need to take a class. Of course, this won’t work in all circumstances, but the majority of fields require some knowledge, but not a degree.

3. Grad school is a bad way to deal with uncertainty.
If you don’t now what to do, and you go to grad school to buy time, and then you figure out what you want to do, you will always have to answer the question, why grad school? It will be hard to come up with an answer that doesn’t reveal that you went back to school so you didn’t have to deal with adult problems. Better to flail in the work world and learn what you like then put it off. Grad school is too expensive to be a backup plan.

4. People who love to learn don’t need a degree for it.
Don’t go to grad school because you love poetry. If you love poetry, read it. No one dictates to you what you have to do after work. If you want to read poems, fine. Why do you need a degree? What will that accomplish besides putting you into debt? Anyway, a good job allows you to learn so much that it is like a continuation of school anyway.

5. Use LinkedIn instead of an MBA.
Okay. I’m sort of exaggerating here, but so many people say they are going to business school for the networking opportunity. Instead, these people should consider spending all that time on networking instead of going to class. Business school makes connections for you, but they might not be for the best; I once read an essay that suggested that business schools are merely headhunters who charge a fee to the employee.

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