<p>Regardless of what college you attend, you need high GPA and high LSAT score to get into law school. However, depending on where you want to go, your undergraduate college can be one factor considered. Example, Harvard and Yale law take a lot of applicants from places that are top colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, U Chicago, Stanford, etc. They also take many others. In other words, attending a top college is not necessary but it can help for entry to get into top law schools.</p>
<p>That you dread math and science is not conceptually a reason to become a lawyer. You should not assume that all lawyers may not be good at those subjects; in fact a lot of engineering, science and math majors end up becoming lawyers. Also, you should not assume such areas are not needed by lawyers. A lot depends on what you do. I am a litigator who has been involved in a lot of complex case. In one group of nationwide cases, I basically had to learn the science of epidemiology and the science and practice of immunology and rheumotology. My college majors were economics and math but I had had chemistry and biology. For those cases, I spent three months reading and studying basic and advance medical textbooks on the subjects, about 250 articles none of which seemed to be less than 50 pages, and another two months going through about 1,000 medical files, and prepared detailed outlines of everything. What did that get me? The ability to challenge and essentially destroy at depositions 7 medical and epidemiology experts on the other side with the result that a perceived billion dollar problem for the client turned into something that went away. </p>
<p>What law can be is a constant learning exercise and you can spend a lot time learning and mastering details that relate to a case, which can often be mundane and boring and in subjects you never had any training in. The stress can be high and it can be high for long stretches at one time (had one trial that lasted six months and we basically spent 16 hours a day seven days a week doing the trial, preparing for next day at night, researching and writing motions and briefs on various issues throughout). And clients don’t like losing and if you do you can be second guessed to death.</p>
<p>You develop confidence in your own abilities but live always with uncertainty and wonder far more often than you should whether you have made the right decisions or you could be doing better in a case. Young lawyers spend long hours reviewing documents, researching, preparing memoranda, conducting discovery (written requests for documents and information and many depositions questioning witnesses) on cases and dealing with the dreaded term “billable hours” and always wonder whether they will be chosen for the holy grail of partnership or even if they want it. After five years, they wake up one morning and ask themselves, “Is there life after discovery disputes?” And begin to realize that in the scheme of any case everything has to have a beginning and an end but it is not necessary to have a purpose in between. Then after being a partner for years you learn you don’t work fewer hours. And though you love having clients, you deal constantly with their strong desire and insistence to cut costs (yours) but at the same time want you to produce top quality work and results. Things in a case can become gutter-like combat if you get against lawyers who may have been normal people when they became lawyers but have developed a style that pushes the ethical envelope beyond any perceived limit and they use deceit and trickery and believe that he who screams the most and makes the most preposterous accusations wins.</p>
<p>Moreover, the perception that most lawyers make a lot of money is not reality. There are many that do but there are far more who don’t. Those $150,000 starting salaries in mega law go to less than 8% of law school graduates and you can end up with huge debt out of law school and struggling to find a job if you are not not from a high ranked school or in the top of your class, and the job you finanlly get pays $55,000 or less.</p>
<p>At the same time there can be a lot of satisfaction. There is no feeling like the one you get when the jury comes back in your favor. Also, those long hours of research can sometimes produce brilliant legal arguments and just constantly learning the law (and many other things) is a joy. And once in a while you can win a case and the next call you get for another case is the party you just beat. You learn that winning is not everything but maintaining your integrity and ethics is. And you can sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and have an eureka moment where you suddently realize you have a great legal argument in a case that no one had thought of before. </p>
<p>Not everyone here is a dissastified lawyer and if it is something you dream of keep the dream. You are in high school and may change your mind and have a lot time to do so but don’t make the decision based on reading internet boards.</p>