Career Change from Law to Psychology

Career Change from Law to Psychology

I am now entering my final year of Law School, but I have decided that I do not want to practice law. Rather, I want to give my all to a career in Psychology, focusing my efforts at helping people more with their psychological than their legal issues. I am especially interested in and engaged with the ways that psychological and legal challenges often go hand in hand. Long interested in Psychology, it was a most natural choice among undergraduate majors at Tulane University and has helped me to do well in Law School. My increasing maturity, however, and the many things that I have learned while a student in law school, both inside and outside the classroom, have left me hungry to become a psychologist rather than an attorney. My first choice among PsyD programs is ____ University because I feel that I am the best fit with your program for a variety of reasons.  

Attending law school has been an invaluable experience, helping me to become a more disciplined and critical thinker, able to grasp the bigger picture by paying attention to critical details that enable me to simplify complex issues into fact patterns that guide my research. Especially pleased to serve as staff editor on The American Journal of Law and Medicine, where I have edited and helped to organize articles for publication that shed light on the complex interaction between mental health and the law – further strengthening my dedication to advancing in Psychology after graduating in Law. 

As an undergraduate at Tulane, I worked as a research assistant for Dr. ____ ____ for a full year in her Social Psychology Lab - exploring intergroup relations and wellbeing among marginalized populations. I coordinated scheduling, material tracking, and communication with study participants to ensure consistent and orderly sessions and data collection. Helping with collection, interpretation, and data interpretation, I managed two different IRB-approved studies, running participants keeping track of counterbalances prior to participant arrival, assigning credits, and inputting and coding data using excel and SPSS under the guidance of two PhD candidates.   

As the end of my sophomore year, I volunteered as a camp counselor for a summer program at a day camp for special-needs children, Camp ____, on Long Island. I was assigned to work with several children with a variety of developmental disabilities, one showing signs of parental neglect and abuse. I worked hard to help him feel important and cared about and we formed a strong bond that continued after the summer was over, since I kept seeing him as part of Camp ____’s weekend program. From this point forward, helping vulnerable and needy children has been at the forefront of my hopes, dreams, plans, and passion, my own quest for purpose. I want to make a difference in the lives of these children, their families, and the community at large. 

For two summers during law school I had the privilege of working in family court alongside the ____ County Family Court Supervising Judge, where I helped resolve highly emotional cases involving child custody disputes, domestic violence, and juvenile delinquency. I worked tirelessly to research out-of-court resources and ensure that the needs of vulnerable children were met during the course of turbulent family separations and in cases of parental misconduct and neglect. The more I worked on these cases, assisting the Supervising Judge to determine the best possible solution for the victims of abuse and volatile home-life situations, often incited by the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the more I realized how so much of what I sought to accomplish and offer these families was beyond the bounds afforded to me in the court room. I came to realize that I could better achieve my goals as a clinician, and that I would need to build upon the experiences and knowledge I had gained in family court and law school, to strive to become a clinician in order to make the kind of contribution to the lives of children and their families that I dream of making.  

My interests - especially with respect to the intergenerational transmission of trauma - led me to join Project ____ at the University of Rochester, working on a study examining the intergenerational transmission of trauma. I soon became totally immersed in this subject, and this greatly reinforced my decision to use what I have learned in law school to advance my capacity to serve as a clinical psychologist for families and children in need. Transcribing and coding stories of parents who experienced neglect and abuse at the hands of their own parents, and then going on to repeat these maladaptive behavior patterns with their own children; this shed new light on my experiences in family court, and, most importantly, my own sense of professional purpose.  

A twenty-year-old mother whose case I had assisted in family court, had been in front of the very same court room when she was five, but as a victim of her own parent’s neglect, it is both shocking and difficult to this day for me to understand how this pattern of intergenerational trauma and abuse was given no consideration when disputing the mother’s case. Although a Court may be aware of the factual evidence, it is the unfortunate truth that once a parent or a family is in the system, they often not only have the weight of their own trauma and mental illness to carry, but also the weight of the mistakes made ultimately by their parents and grandparents, at least to some extent. I hope to spend the balance of my career working to better understand the multigenerational effects of trauma, and to help families that acre crippled by mental illness and related issues to break through cycles of multigenerational misery in which so many of them unfortunately find themselves mired, especially members of marginalized or underserved communities. 

This fall I was hired as a research assistant for the Youth Development, Diversity, and Disparities Lab at ____ University, to work on a study examining college student’s experiences during the COVD-19 pandemic, identifying associations between different variables including health experiences, civic and demographic factors, stress and coping mechanisms - in light of prior health and civic experiences as well as academic engagement. I have particularly enjoyed creating transcription guidelines to follow for interviews and training undergraduate research assistants in the area of transcription.   

I thank you for considering my application to Clinical Psychology at ____

University. 

Career Change from Law to Psychology