(Part 1 of 2)

Hey there /u/-RyT-!

I took the liberty of looking through your post history to get see if I could get a vibe for what your life story and the context is, and I noticed that you've also been thinking about whether you'd like to go in a totally different direction in life and training to become a pastry chef.

The very first thing I want to say is: it is totally okay for you to be having a dozen and one conflicting feelings about where you want to go in life after your undergraduate degree. I've noticed some people in the other thread have suggested that this panic is a sign of immaturity and a natural part of being young, but that's really not the case. Some people go to university aged 18 with a super clear idea of where their life path is taking them; others start their first degree aged 50 with no idea of what career change they want other than the fact they want something different out of their degree. If you've got a lot of different ideas floating around in your head, I would strongly encourage you to go to the careers service at your university and have a chat with them about some of the options you're considering.

Let's focus on the LLM first. You will hear a lot of people saying that a postgraduate qualification is largely a waste of time and money if you can't tie it directly into a career. This is actually a myth. As a hiring manager, I can tell you that postgraduate qualifications really do stand out in a job application - they tell you a lot not just about the person's interests and passions, but they also tell you that the person has spent more time than the average graduate honing certain skills, particularly critical thinking skills. I look very favourably on candidates who have taken on a Master's degree, even if they didn't complete that degree. What is true is that you will have a hard time standing out if the only thing the distinguishes you from other candidates is a postgraduate degree.

It sounds like you've already accrued quite a bit of professional work experience from internships and extracurricular activity. This is the kind of thing that will make you stand out in a job application, and which will help you hit the person specification for any graduate job you go for. I recruit for graduate jobs and internships alike in higher education, and for the former it's the extracurricular experience that really lets me sift through candidates and find my shortlist. So in that sense I wouldn't worry too much about pursuing an LLM in Legal History being something that could undermine your career - it sounds like you've got a good base of experience to draw upon, and you can argue that the LLM is an example of how you've decided to develop your knowledge and problem-solving skills as well as accruing professional experience. Both will bring you transferable skills for other professions if you decided that neither academia nor law are for you.

Now let's turn to the academic career side of things. Here's where I need to get brutally honest with you: British academia is profoundly classist and privileged. It isn't quite true that you can just buy yourself into an academic career - you genuinely do need skill, ability and commitment to pursue a career in academia. But you will find it much, much easier to make a career in academia if you have the cultural capital to 'fit in' in that world and talk the talk, and especially if you have the financial capital to not worry about the cost of tuition or getting through periods of low-pay, unstable work. The central government funding available for a Master's degree is absolutely laughable compared to undergraduate funding and nowhere near enough to live on even before tuition is paid, and whilst doctoral funding is not quite as stingy as it seems because stipends are generally tax-exempt and there are opportunities to do teaching work alongside the PhD, the competition for PhD funding is absolutely brutal.

This isn't to say that you can't make an academic career work - but it is a risk and, if you don't have money behind you, one that could potentially have financial ramifications for you down the line if it doesn't work out. This is especially worth giving careful consideration to if you're also contemplating a total career change down the line - this has always been an expensive proposition, but since the trebling of undergraduate tuition, changing tack into a career that needs a whole new undergraduate degree has become essentially impossible for most people who can't secure sponsorship for a second degree. I've considered a career change myself in the last few years from professional work to skilled vocational work, but the direction I know I would love to go in would set me back a sizeable amount of money I just don't have, and I am also getting to the stage in my current career where the move would mean a loss of income, and I have responsibilities to live up to that make that difficult to swallow. As it happens I am quite happy in my career path and I don't regret any of my decisions - but it is frustrating to know that if my family was wealthy, I would have that option open to me.

Now, I'm going to take a stab and try to guess some more things about you here from your post history. It sounds to me like you're a solid student who has done well in legal studies, but you've found your internships generally lacklustre and feel absolutely uninspired about the traditional career paths that your undergraduate degree would open up in law or finance. You're also a little bit older than the average undergraduate from the sound of things and in my experience, going to university even just a year later than the typical student gives you a greater appreciation for the potential of higher education because it doesn't just feel like the next step on the educational treadmill. You have a real and genuine interest in aspects of legal studies, and you're maybe wondering if a career path in academia would maybe let you make the most of your studies so far without requiring you to go into a sector you really just don't like at all, and would be an easier sell to friends and family. But you're also discovering a skilled vocation that you find thoroughly rewarding and fascinating as a hobby, and really wondering if a total change in your life plan is what would make you happy.

Here's the most important piece of advice I'll give you: don't do something you'll hate. If you just know that working for some big shot law firm isn't for you, don't do it. Yes, you have to be pragmatic about the realities of making your way through this world as an adult - nothing is ever as simple as "just keep chasing your dreams" in real life - but it's also true that you need to think about your own fulfillment and happiness. There are a ton of decently paid professional jobs you can go into with your degree and work experience that you might find more rewarding. Believe it or not, the vast majority of graduates don't go into employment through a formal scheme - and many people who do regret getting tied into two or three year 'development' contracts. Job hunting for individual vacancies is a bit harder and usually means more rejection, but there are plenty of opportunities out there in smaller firms, universities, charities or the public sector. The pay won't be as good but it will still be decent, usually for better conditions and a nicer working culture, and a wider variety of job opportunities that might not directly relate to your (or anyone's!) degree but for which you have the skills. You have options if professional work is where you'd like to go! Please, please keep that in mind. Stop worrying about what other people think is a legitimate life plan and start worrying about your own happiness and well-being.

So for academia, I would strongly encourage you to think carefully about why you might think this is a career path you want to take. If you think the LLM in Legal History is something that you want to do in its own right because it would be a valuable personal development experience, then I would absolutely encourage you to go for it. A Master's degree is such a rewarding thing if you commit to it like a full-time job, and if you decide an academic career is for you, it's very much where you will 'mature' as a scholar and see the biggest improvement (in terms of output compared to time invested) in your thinking and your work. But if you're thinking of it largely as a stepping stone to an academic career then you want to seriously evaluate if that's the career you want, or if you're looking at this as a kind-of-compromise between pursuing something you really love and enjoy, and satisfying demands that you have a very traditional professional job of some kind (it's especially worth keeping in mind that whilst academic jobs usually have the highest ultimate earning potential in British universities in the sense that the highest job posts very rarely go to anyone who isn't an academic, you are also much more likely to hit a 'wall' in your career at which your progression stops than in, say, student services, and job security is extremely hard to find).