Gianna Cilluffo ‘22
Amelia Cabral ‘22
Abigail Gallo ‘22
Many EA students are beginning to formulate career goals without first figuring out what will best fit with their personal life philosophies. A surprisingly large number of EA teachers who were once lawyers might advise students that knowing one’s personal philosophy is an important part of career making decisions and that though the law can be great, it is not for everyone. Steven Schuh, History Department Chair, “started out in criminal defense, and did a lot of criminal and civil litigation” as well as “some real estate transactional work.” His choice for being a lawyer was clear because he majored in history. He says, “it just seemed like a natural progression for me.”
Math teacher Tanuja Murray, on the other hand, ended up sort of “falling in” to being a lawyer. She was majoring in chemical engineering in college, but says “in my junior year I decided that was not a career I wanted to pursue.”
Because of her engineering background, she states, “I fell into patent law, which is what I specialized in for most of my law career, but I did go into corporate at the end.”
English and history teacher Jenn Maier “specialized in labor and employment with a concentration in workers compensation” and “was a litigator” in court. She originally started college pre-med, but like Murray, it did not seem like a fit.
In business law for around six years, French teacher Christelle Furey became a lawyer after working in transactional banking because she felt that “lawyers did the more intellectual and fun work so I thought, ‘I want to be on the other side of the table.’”
History department member, Rob Maier, was “a mergers and acquisitions lawyer” after majoring in art history because it seemed to be something he “could do and make a good living at.”
After working as a paralegal for seven years, Classics Chair Stephen Bosio decided to go to law school because he thought, “it seemed like an interesting career path.” He notes,“The language of law and latin are a lot alike because both have objective rules and subjective components.”
They all loved the complex reasoning and analyzing of their work, and enjoyed the challenge of practicing the intricacies of the law, but all were uncontent with their jobs.
Schuh recalls that he “hated being a lawyer. It was not satisfying in any way and I think I always really wanted to be a teacher, but just got diverted on the way.”
The Maiers also felt like law was not the most fulfilling profession. Jenn Maier said, “When we would look ahead at the people who were partners in our firms, there is no one that we said ‘I want to be that person.’ It seemed as though the higher you got in terms of responsibility, the less fun it seemed.”
She remembers that the teachers “we worked with (as subs) were my kind of people, very fun, really cared about what they were doing, and they were doing it, in my mind, for all of the right reasons. It was kind of just a fun place to be and very rewarding.”
Furey also felt the law atmosphere did not fit with her own personal philosophy. “It was the adversarial nature of the work itself that didn’t suit my personality,” she remembers.