<![CDATA[The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In]]>We thought it might be a useful way to check in anecdotally with the impact of the recession if we went back and emailed various readers who sent in their personal "views from the recession" this past year. Here's an update from the ten-year veteran of TV scriptwriting who was considering a jump to law school because of the industry's bleak environment. His friend was laid off in the writers' strike and hadn't been able to find work for over a year, so he was close to offering his friend temporary quarters with him and his girlfriend. The original post is here. The reader writes:

I began searching for work in the legal field in earnest to get away from my demanding job and my abusive boss. After things deteriorated with my boss and he started to insult me on a nearly daily basis I decided to dedicate myself to studying for the LSAT full time. Luckily I was able to arrange being laid off so I was able to collect unemployment. On my last day my boss called me a "fucking moron" for an obviously innocent (and small) mistake. Unable to say anything back and put my unemployment at risk I bit my tongue and pressed on to bigger and hopefully better things. Scared as heck that I was now unemployed in a worsening job market, I pressed on and spent 6 hours a day studying for the LSAT for the next three months, got my results and have now applied to a lot of law schools.

I also proposed to my girlfriend and have begun a lot of big picture planning for our lives together. It's disorienting, even as a 30-something to be making choices that will affect your life for literally decades.

Maybe i'm just a kid at heart but I feel these decisions are so big they can't possibly be mine to make. In the next 8 months we will plan, pay for and execute a wedding, sell our condo, buy two new cars, move, I'll start law school and my fiancee will start a new job. Stress isn't so much an occurrence as it is our environment.

Further complicating matters is the fact that I will be taking on six figures of debt and graduating into an unknowable job market as an older first year lawyer.
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