I finally got my bachelor’s degree in law. I can’t even believe it. It seems that I had just entered the university, dreaming of a career as a civil lawyer, but the time passed so quickly and so much has changed in 4 years of study.

In this post, I would like to tell my story of getting a higher education. Let’s start with my high school days.

School

I was pretty good at school, but my favorite subject was history, which I spent most of my time studying in the last years of school. By the way, my eyesight got worse because I read a lot of history books on the screen of the iPhone SE before going to bed with no light in the room.

Before 9th grade, I thought about my future profession. I considered that out of all the existing professions, being a lawyer was the best fit for me. It seemed to me that my character traits and mindset would be conducive to a career in law. Honestly, I have no idea what the hell I was thinking.

So, in the 9th grade it was necessary to choose two subjects for exams in addition to the two compulsory subjects (Russian and mathematics). I chose history and social studies, of course, because they are required for admission to faculty of law.

I passed my 9th grade exams quite well, which gave me confidence in my choice. The 11th grade came, I passed my final exams in the same subjects as in the 9th grade, and I was granted government funding to go to the university.

I’m actually a little frustrated by the fact that, at least in Russia, you have to choose your future profession at a fairly young age. It’s pretty hard to predict at the age of 16 what you’re going to do for the rest of your life with no experience under your belt.

University

In the beginning, I was very enthusiastic about my studies and the fact that most of the subjects would be useful for my future career. It can be said that I made no extra effort, studied like a normal student, took exams. I’ve also made a few like-minded friends. Anyway, it was great. That was the first year.

In my second year, I decided that civil law was something that I was interested in, and I began to study it in depth. But then I realized that something was wrong. The illusions I had created about my ideal career as a lawyer began to crumble. To make a long story short, I had my doubts.

Doubts

The thing is, ever since high school, I’ve only studied what I’m interested in. For the first year of university, the illusion of interest persisted. And when I decided to study law in depth, I realized it wasn’t my thing. I was reading civil law textbooks and counting how many pages I had left, which isn’t like me. To be honest, I was even disgusted.

I finally realized that I didn’t want to become a lawyer when I got to practice in the Arbitration Court (in Russia: a public authority that administers justice in the sphere of business and other economic activities). I had the opportunity to attend court hearings and see for myself real lawyers in action. It seems that here I could regain my interest by seeing real work, not theory from textbooks. But no, everything about this profession doesn’t resonate with me at all. I told myself that I would never work as a lawyer.

Rethinking

The moment I decided that law was not for me, I started to remember what I was interested in. And I remembered my aunt, when I was in 10th grade, she came up to me and asked me what I wanted to do for a career. “Do you want to work with computers?” she asked. Of course, I said no, which surprised her.

In fact, I had been interested in computers and everything related to them since I was a kid. I spent a lot of time at the computer, studied different programs, even tried to program, but I thought that you have to be a math genius to program, so I gave up.

I did a lot of thinking and decided to give programming a second chance. I chose to learn Frontend Development. I will write a separate post about how I learned and what resources I used to learn.

Realization

You can imagine my surprise when I didn’t realize how quickly the time flew when I was learning to program (remember when I was counting how many pages of the civil law textbook were left). I realized that this was what I really wanted to do.

I was given additional confidence in my choice by an event that happened a year ago. I decided to take an offline course and met a guy who came to learn programming just like me. He then offered me a project job to develop a website for a construction company he worked for. It was the first real money I’d earned for coding, and I was incredibly happy.

At this point, I’ve been studying programming for two years now. And you know what the most important thing is? I may sound naive, but that’s how I really feel, I haven’t lost interest and I don’t think I ever will. Once I get deeper into a particular subject or problem, and there it turns out to be even deeper — it just drives me. Having an interest in what you do is a privilege that not everyone can afford. I can confidently say that I am lucky to have found what I want to do professionally.

Graduation

Yesterday, I got my law degree. My explanation for deciding to finish my degree is as follows. Firstly, I did not burden my mother because I studied for free, secondly, I received a scholarship, and thirdly, I had enough time to study programming alongside my university studies.

It’s hard to tell yourself that you were wrong and change your life plans. It’s hard to admit that the decision you made seven years ago was wrong. But that’s life, and you don’t have to regret anything. You have to be thankful for what you have, draw conclusions, and move on.

What am I thankful for in my law degree? I gained a lot of useful skills. I learned important skills of self-learning, teamwork, problem-solving, how to complete tasks in a limited time and how to systematize knowledge to pass exams (by the way, I did not have a single retake during the whole period of study).

I also see a certain parallel between law and programming, since lawyers, like programmers, have to analyze documentation and logically determine ways to solve the problem based on that documentation. Of course, this is a rather distant and abstract parallel, but I think that the ability to study documentation in depth that I acquired at university has come in handy in programming.

Future

So what’s next? I plan to find a permanent job, to get fundamental knowledge that programmers get in universities, to study new technologies, in general to improve my qualification as a specialist.

That’s my story.

I would like to thank my girlfriend (and future wife) Lisa for all her patience and support.