Ask HN: 200k student debt, degrees not very useful. What to do?

1. What about entering a military JAG program? I believe they'll pay back a large part of your loans at some point. I honestly don't know much about this option, just throwing it out there.

2. If you're interested in startups there's very serious demand for people that really know how to do startup marketing. Things like this: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...

There are 100 great programmers for every great marketer. If it's something that resonates with you you could certainly build a lucrative career out of it, either highly paid consulting for startups or to your own benefit as a founder.

3. If those too-many-years in school have made you good at writing you might try your hand at blogging. Arrington was a somewhat middling lawyer if I have my history right, but he had the perfect personality to cover startups effectively.

You can make real money if you have the right set of networking and writing skills.

2 and 3 are interesting, thanks.

As to 1 (JAG) I've looked into it extensively. Every branch except Army is insanely competitive and Army is just super-competitive. I might have a decent shot at Army though, but decided that it wasn't for me.

If you want to try your hand at Startup Marketing, perhaps you could practice your chops at Avvo.com. That way, if nothing eventuates at least you have built up a good online profile for your lawyering career.

Don't worry about self-teaching engineering right now. You're planning too far ahead like you did with all the years spent in college pursuing law only to find out you don't like it (something you could have learned in a significantly shorter amount of time had you just interviewed, volunteered, and intern for a couple weeks/months prior to studying for it).

Point being, same thing here. Find something interesting but relatively simple you may want to code out. Ask your friends for some help, if needed, but work through it. Read books and websites where applicable and get a feel for whether you even like it or not. If not, you'll save yourself a lot of time rather than worry about all the other junk and move onto the next thing. Same thing with hardware. If it all works out, you can figure it out step by step once you're pass the basics.

yeah this is a good point, thanks.

Here's the truth, you never end up doing what you studied. Not these days anyway.

The working world is changing and although you are disilluioned with Law, everything you learnt is valuable, but you don't have to be what you studied to be. If there's a message in the start-up world - that's it.

Reading between the lines:

You have a huge debt that you want to clear asap

Startups can make loads of cash

You hate law - but feel obligated to it because of your qualification

You want to be around startups (hence HN membership)

Sounds like a perfect candidate for a VC.

So how do I do this?

More school seems pointless and financially infeasible besides, plus i am burned out on academia. plus i'll be working full time to support myself -- can't take out any more student loans, especially for a second bachelor's.

Just to throw an idea out there... maybe you could attend a community college part-time and get a degree in something unrelated to law. Since CC's are much less expensive, you could probably swing it without taking out any more loans or anything. And you could take night classes while working at whatever job you have.

Yeah, yeah, I know, but here me out... first, there is nothing wrong with attending a community college. Forget any elitist dogma bullshit you may have been taught growing up, this is about making the best of things, and doing what you have to do. Next, consider this... you have a degree from a prestigious law school... that looks good on your resume no matter what. Even if you don't pursue a law job, you'll get more interviews and find more doors open to you just because you went to $TOPTENLAW.

So... go get a 2 year degree in business administration, or marketing, or computer programming or something that interests you, and you will undoubtedly be able to transition into some other field. Yeah, you might not start out making big bucks from day 1... sorry, but life isn't always fair. But, cynicism aside, the world we live in (at least in the US) is actually moderately meritocratic. If you're good at something, you can work your way to a nice living. Just accept that nothing is going to be handed to you, and that you'll (probably) have to work your ass off. But if you really want to achieve, you can.

Another possibility is to learn to code (as you said, you can teach yourself) and eventually jump into a tech startup.

I think this is actually a good idea. Your "Degree" is always your highest degree. So lets say you went to Harvard, you are always going to be a Harvard grad, the community college degree is not going to affect that. But if you take say a CS path at the community college you would be a Harvard grad with an IT focus. I think there is some merit to this. What I don't believe that you need to do though is now go to MIT to get a CS degree, it's just too much debt for what you can realistically command in salary.

You will have to forgive me but I don't know much about the Law profession from an employment perspective. Is their not a way to join a top law firm at an entry level. Below where the good GPA candidates enter and work your way up. It is a foreign concept to me because in the development industry you ascend the ladder by proving yourself. If you are good people will notice in my industry.

As well, what about organizations like the EFF or the ACLU do they have programs where if you join them they help with the debt. I would like to think that they do, but again I don't know much about law employment.

Thanks for your comments. I'll comment on joining the legal profession at the entry level and on public interest law.

How legal hiring works at big law schools is this: you go through your first year and get your grades. At the beginning of your second year, you interview with big firms. You hopefully get an offer to work at one summer of your second year. You do well that summer and hopefully get an offer.

This is the primary hiring pipeline for all big firms. A much smaller pipeline is lateraling over from another big firm after you've worked there a few years, but still, you need get through this pipeline at some firm.

If you miss this window, you're basically finished in terms of prospects at a big firm. A couple of people manage to pick up a job their third year but its pretty hard (I tried but failed).

It's a really weird system I know. But yeah, there's no way for me to go to a big firm and say "I'll work for free if you give me a shot."

I could do that with much smaller firms but then instead of 160k market salary + high-level, interesting legal work being the end game its more like 40k and much less interesting work.

As to public interest orgs like EFF, if I work at some place like that, then between the federal government program and my school's program I can get some assistance and, after 10 years, get my debt forgiven. I'm looking into this seriously and this is my "backup" plan. 10 years is a long haul for something I'm not too excited about (see post) and at a very low salary, though.

What about doing corporate law at a company like IBM or Oracle? Dealing with contracts and corporate agreements and what-not; is that stuff an option for you in any way?

Not really no. In-house counsel are hired pretty much exclusively from the ranks of associates at firms with several years experience. I guess most big companies don't like to pay and build out the capacity to to develop in-house legal talent when they can just let the law firms do it.

The legal hiring model is like the opposite of a "let the talent rise" kinda system. It's pretty depressing. If you don't get tracked with a good job early on, good luck with decent-paying private sector work.

10 years is a long haul for something I'm not too excited about (see post) and at a very low salary, though

Right which is why, if I where in your shoes I would start down that course and build up experience. Look for problems in the legal profession and think of solutions of how to fix them. Maybe learn some code or find someone that does code that is interested in the legal market. Then build something to fix a problem in that market. You contacts in the industry by the time the 10 years is up will be the key that a developer that is just interested in Law will not have. Look at the 10 years as a plan to utilize your education and by then experience to solve problems in the form of productized solutions. If you hit before the 10 years is up, all the better, you walk from the job and pay the debt with the proceeds from hitting it off. I would imagine that there are not a lot of lawyers turned solution providers, I may be wrong but it seems like after investing that much education most would be looking to directly work in the field.

This is a good way of approaching the situation. Thanks.

but here me out...

Crap, can't believe I made that mistake. "Hear me out" was what I meant to say.

It isn't exactly the most popular option for a lot of reasons, but one possibility is going on an income based repayment plan for as much of the debt as you can. The debt sticks around for 25 years but it allows you not to worry about not having enough money. Also, what are your interest rates? If they are in the 3-4% range, you may be able to do better taking your extra money and saving with it rather than paying off the loan.

Yeah I'm going to be on IBR no matter what, it's the only way I won't go into default.

My loans are all mixed but a good chunk of them are at the GradPLUS rate which is 8.5%.

The best I can do is advise you a little on dealing with that $200k in student loans. The rest of this comment applies to just federal loans. For private education loans, you'll need to contact your lenders for details.

With that amount of loans, I'm assuming you maxed out your federal loans (which happens around $120k -- maybe a little north of that because of capitalized interest) and the remainder is in private loans. I don't know a whole lot about private loans, but, as far as federal loans, if you're making $50k with $120k in loans, you're certainly going to qualify for reduced payments, which will at least ease the monthly burden on you. You'll need to talk to your loan servicer, but, since the payments on income-based plans are based on a strict percentage of income (IIRC, 15% of your gross income is the max), based on the info you've provided, I don't see any problem whatsoever with you qualifying.

With your debt and income numbers, if you take a reduced payment schedule, you might end up with a payment less than the interest on the loan, which means you essentially never make progress toward paying it off. However, if you have this type of financial hardship for the next 25 years, your federal loans will be forgiven.

Now, if you work in a public interest-type job, there's the possibility you can qualify to have these federal loans forgiven in 10 years instead of 25 on the income-based plans. You'll need to contact your loan servicer for details on that.

Finally, because interest rates are essentially as low as they can get on federal student loans, you're going to be well-served by obtaining a federal student loan consolidation. Contact either your loan servicer or the William D. Ford Direct Loan program (http://www.loanconsolidation.ed.gov/) for details on consolidation.

This information came from three years experience at a company that consolidated federal student loans. I can also recommend the site finaid.org if you have any questions I haven't answered. I haven't read every word of every page there, but what I have read seems spot on. Specifically, you might find the following page to be of interest to you: http://www.finaid.org/loans/publicservice.phtml .

I hope this helped a little. Believe me, I understand the psychological and financial burden these types of loans can put on someone.

Thanks for your comments.

Overwhelmingly majority of my loans are either federal, or a type of loan (GradPLUS) which you can consolidate with federal and get debt forgiveness on.

So yeah I've factored IBR into my plans, and might do public interest for the debt forgiveness (and because I don't have a lot else going on at the moment anyways).

Even 10 years is a long haul though!

If it's of any consolation, I'm in medical school, hating every second of it, and will likely be in your position very soon. I regret not getting into engineering almost every day of my life. Not much help, I know, but know there are others who can empathize. Good luck.

What is the worst thing you hate about medical school?

That I'm wasting my 20's on a profession that offers no room to innovate, whose training is no more difficult than learning how to drive a tractor, where the work is not stimulating and involves seeing the same patients with the same diseases day-in and day-out, and that will soon be uprooted by technology.

The career is hardly meaningful, despite what others romanticizing the profession might have you believe.

wow really? I thought being a doctor is as stimulating as it gets... trying to find out causes for diseases, evaluating worst case scenarios, etc.

Have you thought about partnering with someone with an IT background to pursue something with mobile health, EHR, or something that's in the crossroads between the 2? There's a lot of innovation there.

That's rough dude.

The best I can say is at least you have relatively secure and decent-paying employment at the end of the road, but I know that isn't much consolation.

How about a career in medical informatics? If you're interested in technology and have a medical background, there are many interesting opportunities for innovation out there.

Listening to NPR while browsing HN, this story came up just as I clicked on your link:

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/16/145179563/do-law-schools-cook-...

Patent law is becoming a serious issue in I.T.

Don't worry about low paying jobs initially, as long as it is in the right area.

The debt is already going to kill you, so don't sweat it anymore. It is irrelevant to the discussion. Just don't take on further debt.

I have lots of friends going into patent law.

But most of them have PhDs in the hard sciences and if you look at job listings they tend to want that.

Oh and don't worry about more debt, I don't think that's possible at this point :)

While PhD may sound like a qualifying area, I don't think you should necessarily give up.

The reason is a PhD in, say, Chemical Engineering, doesn't really help with electronic patents do they?

Read up on Groklaw the issues at hand and see if you can mount any interesting arguments / twists. If you have enough knack, then at the very least you'll sound like a qualified candidate.

Otherwise, try for a side entry via some kind of pro-bono work for the EFF.

I found your story very interesting. Some might question how you made it so far without a plan, but I get it.

So, what would you do if you had no debt, and no obligations? What do you do on weekends? Any hidden career desires?

Oh I had a plan it just hit the skids when I didn't get any offers from law firms...I think it was a bad plan from the get-go though.

I'm not sure what I would do.

I have an idea or two for an app but I need to develop the coding skills.

I game to relax. Steam for the win!

I don't know much about law school, so bare with me if this sounds far-fetched.

Have you considered trying to offer legal consulting as a service, especially for start-ups?

I mean it cant hurt as a side job to pay the bills.