I need desperate help….Second year Law student and I hate Law.

I really need some help/advice.

I've just finished my second year and I got a 2:2. I really dislike Law, even in my first year, which is really surprising for me because I loved Law in college - got straight high A's.

My coursework marks are good - pretty much always get a 1st or a high 2:1 (68/69). I just freak out during exams. I have been working very hard and I don't understand why I got the mark I did.

I don't want to go into Law and I clearly don't even have a chance.

Can someone please tell me how I can go into other career fields. I know what career paths I can go into….I just need someone to tell me how to get in there - do I do a Master's Degree etc or…..

I don't know anyone whose done a Law degree and gone into a different path otherwise i would have asked that person.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

i don't mean this to sound rude, but if you know what career paths you can go into, i'm a little unsure as to how you need someone else to tell you to get in there (and particularly without specifying what paths you want to go into).

as a general point, law doesn't preclude you from the majority of career paths - you can enter them in the same way as anyone with any other degree, e.g. you can apply for grad schemes in other career paths without doing a masters - you can apply for any that are open to you, and the way to ascertain whether they are open to a law grad (and with whatever your classification will be) is to check with the individual recruiter, either via their website or through direct communication with them.

the only time you'd really need to do further study to get into a field would be if entry required a qualification you don't have (e.g. certain professions requiring a specific qualifying/accredited degree for entry - which you'd be able to find out through contacting the regulating bodies for those professions).

i have friends who completed their law degrees and went into the civil service, motorsports, marketing, PR, sales, IT, finance, accounting, publishing - and i'm sure there are more i've missed out!

in essence, the way to get into a different career path with law is to work out what career paths you'd like to try, research into how they recruit, and that will tell you if you need to do a masters or specific qualification. if not, you apply.

if you're wondering more how to find out what career paths you're interested in - work experience. apply for anything and everything that sounds interesting, and find out from firsthand experience if it actually is something you'd like to do.

Thanks for answering.
I totally get what you mean….you didn't sound rude at all.

I was doing some research….and I found that to get into marketing you need some sort of a marketing qualification…..i was under the impression that I will need to do a masters in marketing for example to get a job in that field. Te reason for this is because, in order to go into property investment, some big firms require either an undergraduate degree in property investment (not sure of the exact name) or a masters in real estate….so i thought the same apple for other fields. I wasn't sure how you would get into marketing with a law degree…….but work experience is what i was thinking though.

Needing a specific masters for a job is an exception and not the rule - property investment is fairly specific, unlike marketing, which is a broad field. No one I know in marketing (and I used to work in sales and marketing) had a masters. Only one had a relevant undergrad degree.

Given the cost of a masters - which you would have to bear entirely, as there is no equivalent to student finance for postgrad - I would advise you not to go into one in order to open up a career path unless it is absolutely necessary for your field - which I think it is unlikely to be for most fields, particularly if you're unsure of what you would like to do career-wise. It could end up being an expensive and unnecessary step (and particularly so if you decide afterwards you don't want to go into the industry to which your masters is related). Of course, if you decide that you have a real academic passion for your possible new career path, then it may be worth doing for that reason - but I wouldn't do it for career advancement without being 100% sure that it will actually benefit you. My advice would be to research into every specific career path you're thinking of - just because you may find that big firms in one field want a masters, does not mean that this is necessarily true of other fields.

If you figure out a specific career path you're interested in, it might be worth posting in the relevant careers subforum - people in the law forum may not be as well suited to advise on a totally different career path as others who want to pursue the same career path as you.

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