<p>I'm a '13 graduate taking a gap year before heading back to school. I am not sure whether that will be law school or a different grad program (I'll be applying to both in fall '14). </p>
<p>In terms of employment over the next year I seem to have two possibilities. One is to work as a teaching associate in an inner-city school (a Citizen school in the Boston area if anyone is curious). The other possibility is to do paralegal work or something similar. </p>
<p>I would prefer to take the Teaching Associate job. My question is: how would this impact my law school application? How desirable would paralegal work be as opposed to being a T.A. on a law school application?</p>
<p>It won’t make any difference towards your law school application. However, work as a paralegal may help solidify whether you really want to be a lawyer. The fact that you want to pass on working in law to work in another field is definitely a red flag. There’s nothing like actually working in law to get a taste for what it’s really like, and after a year you may decide it isn’t really for you.</p>
<p>Take the paralegal job, or teach for a year and then take a paralegal job. I don’t think that either one will really change your law school applications that much - it’s not like you’re choosing between i-banking or working in retail - but it will change your employment opportunities. A lot of the former paralegals did very well in OCI (on-campus interviewing); the paralegal experience showed a commitment to law and an understanding of what happens in law firms.</p>
<p>Whether or not the paralegal job will inform you as to what it’s like to practice depends on where you work as a paralegal. For example, doing work in a small personal injury firm will only tell you if you want to practice in that small personal injury firm. It will tell you nothing about what it’s like to work in other types of practices or firms. I say take the job that pays the most.</p>
<p>Working for a small law firm as a paralegal will be much more likely to give you the experience of “practicing law” as compared to the large firms, where you will be pigeon holed into doing the same thing day after day. If you want to know whether you would enjoy being a lawyer, that’s where you should go. At the small firm you will do everything. Keep in mind that most lawyers, sooner or later, end up practicing in small firms. There are thousands and thousands of small legal practitioners throughout the country and they are the real lawyers because they are the ones that engage in the day to day practice of law in Court and out of Court. You can waste away in a large firm doing document review or being at the beck and call of an associate or partner there, but I would guess your learning curve will not be that great. My opinion only of course. I’m sure the big firm lawyers will disagree.</p>
<p>BUT, law is a prestige driven business, especially at the larger firms. A paralegal degree probably won’t make nearly as much difference in getting a job as a lawyer as will the school you attend and your class rank.</p>
<p>Despite what admissions staff may tell you, your LSAT and GPA almost entirely will decide whether you get admitted or not. This is allegedly because of rankings like USNews weighing LSAT and GPA so much.</p>
<p>The only major exception occurs when you get to the top, top schools (e.g. Stanford). When you get to choose between applicants who are all 99th percentile, you suddenly have the luxury to care more about the little stuff I guess.</p>
<p>Between the two, working in an inner-city school will be a better boost to your app. Yes, LS admissions is 95% two numbers, but beyond those two, other factors do come into play.</p>
<p>I agree with bluebayou. I don’t think either will help your law school app that much, but the teaching associate in an inner city school position will help a very little bit.</p>
<p>However, if you really don’t know if you want to go to law school, taking the paralegal job may be more useful in figuring that out.</p>
<p>Inner-city teaching would be marginally better if you want to work in a law firm in terms of the interview process. It’s the kind of thing that would make sense to interviewers, whereas most lawyers know paralegals and often have mixed feelings about them.</p>
<p>But it really is about GPA and LSAT, so you could make the case quite well to go for the money. And in some places, paralegals make $150k with overtime and trial work, so if you need the money . . .</p>
<p>A kid I know is a '13 BA from a top Ivy with a top GPA (PBK, Summa), looking for a paralegal position, in part because he can’t decide if he wants to apply to Law Schools or academic grad programs. This person has done well in a sprinkling of quantitative classes that he took (Econ, Calc, O-Chem), in the couple of law-related seminars that he took, and of course in his major. He has so far received one job offer, at a smallish NY firm, with a salary of $35K. Is this a realistic salary offer? I was surprised at how low it was.</p>