u/nova0175

Browsing through lsd.law and just noticed pretty much literally every single applicant has a T4 at the very least.

I am hoping to be a splitter with a higher end LSAT score because my undergrad GPA is a 3.63. i'm nontraditional and pivoting careers at age 30 with a BS and MFA under my belt but no legal experience.

I'm starting to wonder if not having ANY softs is going to negatively impact me, especially since my GPA is lower and I have no relevant experience. anyone else in this boat?

I don’t have any law related experience on my resume, so I’m not sure if I should dedicate my entire essay to essentially explaining why I’m choosing to change careers. And, how to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like an abrupt change, and shows that I’ve thought it through deeply.

But also to be fair.. there isn’t always a perfect narrative thread, and idk if it’s worth it to invent one. Part of the reason I’m switching is honestly that the industry I’m in is dying, and I also feel particularly skilled in the reading, writing, reasoning involved in this career - and I enjoy those activities a lot.

I know this might seem like a silly thing to care about .. but unfortunately I do. all the most prestigious schools have such beautiful architecture but I know there are many non T14 that do as well and I'm looking to find them. What schools have beautiful or historic campuses, grand architecture, etc?

My career so far has been as a product designer at tech companies, nonprofit, freelance, etc. I also have a couple empty years in my 20s and some tech consulting. None of it really adds up to anything relating to law, but I guess I could tone down the more design-heavy metrics in the descriptions and focus more on reading/research/etc the kind of skills they might look for.

Do you think that would be a good idea, or should I leave as is? Does this lack of anything law-related professionally or academically hurt me in a significant way?

Edit: I'm referring to the resume in the law school application.

I really thought I had a pretty good shot at a lot of schools with my undergrad gpa but now I realize all the community college courses I took and failed are going to heavily bring that number down. I was going through pretty major depression in those years and managed to pull myself together before transferring colleges and graduating with honors. this sucks

No, this isn’t another AI related post. And it’s also not meant to be an insult/disrespectful to the industry, PLEASE take my words with a grain of salt from someone feeling very confused about what to do in their career after getting two degrees in Design and working professionally in the field.

Over the past year I’ve been feeling increasingly disillusioned with the entire concept of design. It’s feeling harder to really believe that this is something that “MATTERS” in the grand scheme of things. Often I wonder if we are just saying all these phrases about psychology and impact but ultimately we make screens look pretty. Okay yes, we make it more usable or delightful or whatever. But at the end of the day, it’s screens.

This isn’t a critique of the digital world, if it was even creating products that would make more sense to me, but we aren’t usually the ones creating products. We help, yes, and can mold and shape things into better directions… but it’s still so auxiliary to the true value of a great product. Some of the biggest companies and most successful ones have severely lacking UX, and it didn’t seem to matter.

A lot of my disillusionment actually comes from studying design in school. Design itself isn’t a “real field” but rather something that almost all fields employ to make their endeavors better. Architects are designing, urban planners, even teachers are designing an effective curriculum, etc. So when I think about it that way, it tends to reduce a lot of the lofty language surrounding UX design to me. I think a big reason that AI has had such a big impact on this field is precisely because it was overinflated in value.

It’s also weird because I’m becoming more and more of the mindset that we should all get off our screens more, so it’s weird to dedicate your life to making a few screens a bit better. I actually studied under Don Norman (at UCSD) and his focus on the design of real world objects, like in Design of Everyday Things, feels so much more meaningful to me than making a dropdown menu feel more delightful or something.

I’m just curious if anyone else in this field has hit upon this feeling before and overcome it in some way, or if there’s any lenses I’m missing that would be useful to employ in thinking about this. Maybe I shouldn’t have such aspirational feelings towards it and just take it for what it is, a career. I’m also curious if anyone has managed to translate their design career into something else that perhaps feels more real, stable, or meaningful to them.

Honestly I don’t know anything about law, but I’ve always been skilled in reading and writing and I feel unfulfilled in my current career. I’m 30 and feel scared of pivoting and starting over only to realize I don’t like this either and wasted more time. But I want to feel like I’m using my brain, helping people, and making money. I want to feel confident that jobs in this industry will exist and me being older than everyone won’t be a detriment to me or weird in terms of internships and networking. And finally I want to know what the day to day of this life actually looks like, both in school and beyond. Are there any resources for this?

AA has an extra seat policy like other airlines, but basic economy doesn't allow seat selection. I don't care where in the plane my two seats are, just that they are (obviously) next to each other. I think the point of booking an extra seat is pretty clear in that they need to be adjacent, but I don't know if AA would override that since its a basic economy ticket. Anyone has experience with this?

There have often been times when I think a certain layout or placement looks better and a fellow designer or superior think it should look a different way. These are often minor things that don't really have research or metrics or 'best practices' — I just think one looks better but they don't see the vision; it probably won't have a measurable user impact, but there are hundreds of these minor visual choices that add up to a final "feel". I feel pretty confident in my choice but it often comes from just my sense of "discernment" rather than a UX principle all the time.

I usually just do whatever they say because they might have more power than me in the org, but I also think my reaction to always do that is why I've never garnered any power of my own as a designer. I don't really know what to do in these situations.

I acknowledge this might be a stupid question but i’m genuinely confused about this.

Most companies have like one main product - sure features are added or evolve over time, but ultimately it’s kind of one user experience. I understand the role of designers at the stage of ideating and workshopping the core design of this product.

But after the main product is designed and shipped, what do designers do the rest of the time - often years at a given company? Adding features here and there would definitely constitute some work, but it doesn’t quite seem like it would add up to a full time job over years. Plus, most companies wouldn’t really want their product or brand to evolve THAT much constantly with new UX or new features.

I realized this as i’m coming up on a year at my latest company and I’ve already redesigned for them their core product, and now I’m unsure what my real value is.

Please let me know what i’m missing!

In all the good portfolios I see, it looks like the designer also apparently puts in a ton of work for just creating the graphics for portfolio purposes. These look better than a standard screen recording, they often look like they were created through after effects or something, just tons of really engaging motion graphics and animations and even graphics just to showcase the design process or making visuals for random user problems.... where are you guys learning how to do that / have the time to? Is there a tool that creates this kind of stuff?

I think a large part of why I'm having such a hard time and keep fantasizing about somehow pivoting to a different career, is that I do not do well with feeling inauthentic, and in design in particular, I have to pretend to be a lot of things that I am not. I feel like designers are required to be personable, bubbly, and fast thinkers (I struggle with impromptu app critiques, etc). And now, more than ever, we are required to worship AI and desperately prove to interviewers that we LOVE AI, and use AI deeply and profusely in every stage of our work, the recruiters are quite literally looking for an obsession with AI. As someone who really believes AI is inherently negative, it is so hard for me to keep playing this persona, I just feel exhausted.

Moreover, although I have been in this for 4 years, I am still definitely in the "fake it till you make it" stage - the constant requirement to prove your impact, when you have not worked in a brand name company that would give you legitimacy, is also so exhausting. All the impact metrics on my resume are made up, I always only worked at small companies or nonprofits that did not measure much.

It is a unique pain of being a designer to have to upkeep a visual record of your work over years and years throughout your career to prove to people that you actually have value.

I don't know if other industries are like this, and if interviewing is always a game of posturing and acting like someone you're not. or if maybe in a different industry, I would feel more able to just "be myself." Maybe this is wishful thinking. I don't know..