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In the long term, I'm better off doing a full time JD, getting much better grades, and getting a great law firm job rather than doing a part time JD while holding down a job and getting lesser grades (I have one rule-never bite off more than I can chew-it's worked pretty well for me so far). My JD won't be worth the paper it's written on if I had a 2.7 in law school.
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<p>The presumption is that you actually will get strong grades at a full-time program. What if you don't? </p>
<p>In fact, I would argue that you might actually get better grades at a part-time program than at a full-time program. How's that? Simple: most law school grading is curved. Sure, I agree that you will probably be harried for time if working while going to law school part-time. But what you forget is so will your competition. Hence, you may well end up as the top performer on a relative basis, and that's all that really matters.</p>
<p>In fact, I would argue that a truly brilliant strategy is to simply find a cushy, stress-free jobs where there really isn't that much work that needs to be done. Surprisingly, there are many jobs like this. (I know quite a few people who hold these kinds of jobs.) Granted, they tend to be with boring, mediocre companies and they don't usually pay very much. But who cares? What matters is that you have ample free time with which you can study. </p>
<p>I'll give you an example. I know a guy who is a cracker-jack IT guy: basically the guy who maintains a company's computer servers and network routers. He took a job at a small, no-name company that had significant problems with their servers, and within a month, he had fixed them all and made them all run smoothly. What that meant is that he now had very little work to do - he estimated that from that point on, while he still had to show up, he only had to do real work for only 1-2 hours a day, because everything was working well. Granted, he could have quit and moved on to another job which would have paid him better. But he realized that he had a quite cushy job, as the company wouldn't dare terminate him because he's the only guy who understood their server systems, and he could always say that he was working on new IT projects which nobody at the company would be able to question anyway. {And besides, he figured, why should he be 'punished' for being competent enough to know how to fix the original problems such that there isn't much work to do afterwards?} So he kept the job and spend most of each day working on his own side projects, including launching his own startup firm. It hardly looked suspicious at all, because he was clearly working on some technology, just not a technology that had anything to do with that particular company. </p>
<p>Similarly, I'm quite certain there are plenty of jobs out there in which you could probably spend a good fraction of the day just studying, and nobody would really notice. Or even if they did notice, the worst they could do is fire you, whereupon you just find another job. Again, keep in mind that you don't really care about being a great employee with a great career. You're not really interested in getting into the best possible company and then being the best possible employee there, because after all, you're going to be making a career change to becoming a lawyer anyway. All you really want is a low-stress job that provides you with ample free time to study.</p>