Comment by checkyoursudo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by checkyoursudo | Hacker News Reader

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I started out in technical writing a little more than 20 years ago with a masters degree, which turned into building websites. I built websites for a few years, when I became involved in a lawsuit with family/community/environmental org in a really novel and interesting area of law at the time. I thought that was quite enjoyable. So I decided to go to law school and become a lawyer, which I did.

Then I was a lawyer for around 15 years, and now I am moving on again. I am currently pursuing a masters degree in cognitive science, and I am planning to see if I can get into working on human cognition and AI/machine cognition in some interesting ways. (If anyone is doing anything like this, then hit me up. I am really interested.)

I do not regret my path at all. It is entirely likely that I could have made as much or more money if I had stayed with building websites and then gone into SWE or something, but a career in law was fun and challenging. And you can leave what you are doing at any time. I think a lot of people could stand to learn the lesson that you can, you really can, just say "screw it" and go do something else. It'll be ok, as long as you are even a little self-motivated.

I still follow HN because it is still one of the best online communities I've found, and it produces some of the more interesting and thoughtful interactions online. You know, it still has its faults, but overall I like it. HN is the primary way I discover new and interesting tech-related news, which still greatly interested me as a lawyer.

I love your mentality checkyoursudo. I started in civil/environmental engineering before getting into software development. For the past 5 years though I have been thinking about cognitive science in my free time and all of my idols are psychologists and neuroscientists. Might I ask where are you pursuing a masters in cog sci? This is exactly what I have wanted to do but the schools offering these programs are few from what I have seen. I'm in central florida currently.

I was living in Germany when I decided to do this. I am studying at a university in Sweden.

I don't really know the programs in the US very well. I didn't look at any when I was considering the field. Do you want to try to do a masters and then get into industry, or rather then continue with a PhD?

Ah thanks for the reply, that makes sense. I'm more interested in phd and academia than I am getting into the industry. Unfortunately cog sci still is still a bit of an obscure academic track given its "interdisciplinary" nature. I'm currently trying to find a highly regarded online psychology program I can take post-bacc to bolster my resume to apply for a masters/phd in cog sci in a couple of years. (It'd be easier for me to relocate at that time as well)

Thanks for sharing your story! I work on the machine learning side of things and have recently become very interested in the intersection of machine learning and law - for ex. disputing decisions made by algorithms, usage of machine learning in sentencing etc. How did you find going back to law school after tech?

Law school was fine. Some parts of it were quite difficult, while others were super simple. I had the advantage of already having a lot of experience writing professionally, and exams and papers (and lawyering) require a lot of writing. To do it right, it also takes a lot of reading. Like, a lot.

My best courses, I think because I was already scientifically/technically-minded, were the very math and technical based topics, like tax, retirement, real estate finance, etc, while the ones that I often had more difficulty with were things like family law and criminal law, for example, which were often much less intuitive and much more arbitrary-seeming to me.

Ultimately, law school was pretty easy for me overall. Certainly, I had friends and classmates who thought it was beastly difficult, though I suspect if they looked back at it now, most would say that it wasn't as bad as they felt at the time. It's different for everyone, right? Like anything else, how much you put in is how much you get out. I think that really probably anyone who can make it through an undergraduate program can make it through law school.

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