An Ending and a Beginning

SUMMARY

I read this paper as tracking how your goals and plans to reach those goals changed (or didn’t change) over the course of the semester. Very basically, I understood it as:

At T1 you have goal G1 and plan P1. Then, there were two intervening events, E1 and E2. Subsequently, at T2 you had G2 and P2.

You define E1 and E2: this semesters classes and the changed economy. You define P1 and P2: random job at EIP and specializing in prescription drug policy.

However, you never fully elaborate what your goals are at either point in time. What are G1 and G2? Are they the same or different? What made them change – E1 or E2? Why? All of this is ambiguous. This also makes it unclear what goals P1 and P2 are attempting to reach and which intervening event made them change.

The result is a paper where, in addition to the basic building blocks being unclear, the first and second half don’t seem to be in dialogue with each other.

DETAILS

1. Did your career goals change over the course of the semester?

The final sentence of the first paragraph suggests that your goals have remained static, but your means to reach them have changed: “Now, I realize that if I want to achieve what I came to law school for, as I discussed in my introduction 3 months ago, I need to give up this fantasy.” Off the bat, you really need to include these goals directly in the paper itself. It is confusing as it currently is – the first paragraph suggests your pre-law school goals were making $160,000 to $3,000,000 a year without hurting anyone. However, your intro included intellectual satisfaction and having a “tangible impact on things that matter” to you. This inconsistency makes it unclear what your goals were before this semester – making tracking any evolution pretty difficult.

After suggesting your goals remained the same, the paper proceeds to introduce potentially new goals. You claim that you have “come to realize” that you need to develop a niche and not do more harm than good. These two statements are distinct from the two omitted intro goals, but “developing a niche” seems related to intellectual satisfaction, and not “doing more harm than good” seems related to impacting the “things that matter.” By not establishing that you did have very related goals at the outset of your legal education, you make them seem more novel than they probably are. If they are novel, I’d emphasize how they are distinct from the other two goals from your intro.

Looking into these two categories – the “niche” category and the “do good” category – more questions arise. The “niche” category is discussed more under my next question. The “do good” category seems to be a direct goal in and of itself. However, this goal's evolution is not clear, despite the central role it plays in the paper.

Your intro says that you wanted to “have an impact” on what matters to you. Did you actively want to do good in the world? If so, your goal seems to have shifted from actively doing good to nonfeasance – not doing more harm than good. Or was “what matters to you” limited to your wallet and your intellectual satisfaction? If so, the “realization” you claim in the paper would seem more logical – but that seems like a questionable interpretation.

If your ethical goals did not actually change then all the discussion about the ethical motivations of your employment in the pharmaceutical industry seems questionable. “How I intend to change the pharmaceutical industry” could be the topic of a paper, but if you have always been concerned about doing good, it doesn’t seem to fit in with this papers discussion of “endings” and “beginnings.”

If your goals did in fact change there is a problem with the relevancy of the initial discussion of the changing economy. If you have different goals now than you did before, why should an economic change which precluded you from achieving your old goal also preclude you from achieving your new one? It may, but I don’t think you’d be able to take it as assumed.

The ambiguity surrounding the importance of these ethical concerns undermines the weight they carry in the paper. You start the paper saying you don’t think you’ll be able to get the high-paying job you want through EIP, and you close suggesting you’re dedicating your life to fixing the pharmaceutical industry. As it stands, I’m unconvinced. It seems to me that now you think you can’t get that job through EIP, but you can through specialization. Though your ethical concerns are somewhat convincing in isolation, when read in dialogue with the first part of the paper they seem more like window dressing than an actual driving force.

2. Which are goals, and which are the plans to reach those goals?

It is also difficult to distinguish what are ultimate goals, and what are means to those goals. For example, realizing that you need to find a niche seems to be both a new goal and a means to reach your old goal. This relates to some of the previously discussed confusion -- if “finding a niche” is in fact a new goal, you need to make the economic change relevant to finding new means to reach that particular goal. If “finding a niche” is in fact a new means to reach your old goals in light of the new economy, I think you should communicate it as such, and explore more actively how it will help reach those goals.

Despite the initial emphasis on difficulty finding a job, the final section seems to assume that once you pick a niche, you will be able to find a job. So the only relevant discussion is whether that job satisfies your ethical requirements. I’m not sure you made a strong enough case for the “niche”/specialization strategy being a cure-all for finding a job after the economic change to let you rely on this assumption.

Again, over the semester, did your principal goal stop being getting a high paying job? If so, say so, and some of these problems will go away. If not, then you really need to explore how this career plan is actually any different from the one you discussed as foreclosed in the beginning section. Otherwise, the beginning and end of the paper really don’t seem to be in dialogue with each other.

3. What is the basic thesis?

Trying to reduce this down to an oversimplified summary, the most likely arc I could find was: “I wanted to make money and not hurt people. The economy made it hard to make money randomly through EIP placements. Eben’s class made me realize it’s really easy to hurt people. So now I’m going to specialize in an interesting area, and get a job that way. Then I’m going to mitigate the harm I may do to people in the short term by gaining access to people who make decisions in the long term.”

Is this the arc you’re attempting to create? If so, I think your focus should be on eliminating some of the hubris (Maine Sardine Workers), and refocusing on logically linking each of these steps. How does wanting to work specifically in the pharmaceutical industry actually address the role of the changed economy? How will your “access” and “dialogue” actually keep you from hurting people?

If not, focus on clarifying what that arc is. There are other potential stories in here – you need to pick the one that is the real story, and move it to the forefront.

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