Are there people who keep going for several consecutive cycles and never make it? Wondering if I’m deluding myself by pressing on
I think many just try different types of firms and eventually get the right match. But yes, I have seen plenty of people not make it into law. Interestingly many of them seem to have highly successful careers in other industries/sectors. Law isn’t the be all and end all.
But there are plenty of people who persevere and do make it - sometimes after many cycles/attempts.
@Cantab_95 I think @Jessica Booker has provided some really useful insight in her post and I wholeheartedly agree with her.
I think there's a lot to be said about the impact that your perspective has on your applications. When I graduated from law school in 2018, I had absolutely no intention of becoming a lawyer and went on to pursue a career in journalism. When I decided to come back into law a short while later via the LPC MSc, I started making applications with unwavering confidence that since I had gone to law school, I had all the tools I needed to make strong training contract applications. It was only in hindsight that I could appreciate how wrong I was and that simply going to law school did not make me a strong applicant- it needed much more work, which I thankfully put in eventually.
One of the best things I did for myself while figuring out how much more work it would take to go from a string of rejections to a training contract was to evaluate 1) if I had the motivation and drive to pursue a career in commercial law i.e. should I consider other city careers and see if they're a better fit and 2) if commercial law was indeed the right path for me, then what I was doing wrong and how I could I improve my applications. Doing this exercise strengthened my perspective about pursuing a career in law, which in turn fueled me to improve my applications by working on my commercial awareness, rigorously checking each application for the quality of my answers and sincerely practising for each stage of the process till I got my training contract.
One could have said that I was deluding myself by pressing on- but I saw it as me hustling to get my foot in the door as a first-generation non-UK applicant trying to make it in commercial law, and I guess this was the only perspective that mattered at the end of the day.