Get a jump start on what you want do in college or test your interest before you get there by taking a class in law! What are you most looking forward to learning about?

Take a law class. 

Ask your counselor if there's a tutoring or after-school program at your school that you can volunteer with. Helping your peers will help you discover if you like to work with students.

Volunteer as a tutor.

Learn how to create and implement learning experiences for students by taking a class in instructional design online or at your school.

Learn more about instructional design.

There are many paths to becoming a teacher. Learn more about helpful tips and steps you can start taking today to start your career in teaching! 

Find out how to become a teacher.

Find a mentor at your school and ask if you can talk to them about their path to education. Be ready with 4 or 5 things you want to ask, from what the job is like, to how they overcame any obstacles.

Interview an educator at your school.

Interested in pursuing a career in human rights? Explore the different avenues and options available that best match your interests. 

Explore careers in human rights. 

Talk to some people you look up to and ask them about their lives and careers to see what worked for them and what didn't. Talking to your favorite teachers is a good place to start.

Find a mentor.

Law Teachers, Postsecondary

Teach courses in law. Includes both teachers primarily engaged in teaching and those who do a combination of teaching and research.

Social occupations frequently involve working with, communicating with, and teaching people. These occupations often involve helping or providing service to others.

Social

Investigative occupations frequently involve working with ideas, and require an extensive amount of thinking. These occupations can involve searching for facts and figuring out problems mentally.

Investigative

Enterprising occupations frequently involve starting up and carrying out projects. These occupations can involve leading people and making many decisions. Sometimes they require risk taking and often deal with business.

Enterprising

Artistic occupations frequently involve working with forms, designs and patterns. They often require self-expression and the work can be done without following a clear set of rules.

Artistic

Conventional occupations frequently involve following set procedures and routines. These occupations can include working with data and details more than with ideas. Usually there is a clear line of authority to follow.

Conventional

Realistic occupations frequently involve work activities that include practical, hands-on problems and solutions. They often deal with plants, animals, and real-world materials like wood, tools, and machinery. Many of the occupations require working outside, and do not involve a lot of paperwork or working closely with others.

Realistic

As a Puerto Rican kid in New York, going to some terrible schools, nobody ever told me as a kid that I could amount to much at all.

Professor of Law

Job Zone Five: Extensive Preparation Needed

Knowledge of laws, legal codes, court procedures, precedents, government regulations, executive orders, agency rules, and the democratic political process.

Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.

Knowledge of principles and methods for curriculum and training design, teaching and instruction for individuals and groups, and the measurement of training effects.

Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.

Knowledge of media production, communication, and dissemination techniques and methods. This includes alternative ways to inform and entertain via written, oral, and visual media.

Knowledge of principles and processes for providing customer and personal services. This includes customer needs assessment, meeting quality standards for services, and evaluation of customer satisfaction.

Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.

Knowledge of group behavior and dynamics, societal trends and influences, human migrations, ethnicity, cultures, and their history and origins.

Knowledge of different philosophical systems and religions. This includes their basic principles, values, ethics, ways of thinking, customs, practices, and their impact on human culture.

Knowledge of administrative and office procedures and systems such as word processing, managing files and records, stenography and transcription, designing forms, and workplace terminology.

Talking to others to convey information effectively.

Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.

Selecting and using training/instructional methods and procedures appropriate for the situation when learning or teaching new things.

Understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work-related documents.

Understanding the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making.

Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions, or approaches to problems.

Communicating effectively in writing as appropriate for the needs of the audience.

Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.

Identifying complex problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions.

Law, Criminal Justice, and Social Work Teachers, Postsecondary

Education, Training, and Library Occupations

Postsecondary Teachers

Initiate, facilitate, and moderate classroom discussions.

Evaluate and grade students' class work, assignments, papers, and oral presentations.

Prepare course materials, such as syllabi, homework assignments, and handouts.

Compile, administer, and grade examinations, or assign this work to others.

Keep abreast of developments in the field by reading current literature, talking with colleagues, and participating in professional conferences.

Prepare and deliver lectures to undergraduate or graduate students on topics such as civil procedure, contracts, and torts.

Maintain student attendance records, grades, and other required records.

Conduct research in a particular field of knowledge and publish findings in professional journals, books, or electronic media.

Plan, evaluate, and revise curricula, course content, course materials, and methods of instruction.

Maintain regularly scheduled office hours to advise and assist students.

Collaborative editing software

Google Docs

Microsoft Word

Blackboard Learn

Learning management system LMS

Panopto

Piazza

DOC Cop

iParadigms Turnitin

LexisNexis

Thomson Reuters Westlaw

Email software

Microsoft Outlook

AbacusNext HotDocs

CT Summation iBlaze

LexisNexis CaseMap

Collateral Consequences Calculator

Thomson Reuters WestlawNext Litigator

Microsoft Excel

ACD Systems Canvas

Microsoft Publisher

Handheld microphones

Wireless microphones

Liquid crystal display LCD televisions

Television monitors

Interactive whiteboard controllers

Student response systems

Computer projectors

Multimedia projection equipment

Projector screens

Webcams

Photocopying equipment

Microphone podiums

Computer data input scanners

Videoconferencing equipment

<p>The RV breaks down as the team heads from Los Angeles to San Francisco before they interview law professor and children's rights activist Thomas Nazario. Then they go to Golden Gate Park to talk with David Miles, Jr., the "godfather of skating." Driving east into Utah, they visit the Great Salt Lake and talk with theater owners Eric and Sandy Jensen. The team pushes on to New Mexico and meets up with Christina Heyniger, an adventure tourism consultant.</p>

Los Angeles - Santa Fe

Hello. Mariana, nice to meet you. Hi. (Roadtripper) The three of us are here because we don't know what to do with our lives. Did you go through this conflict when you were our age? In some ways I was lucky. Maybe I can start by saying, when I was four years old something hit me. I grew up in Spanish Harlem, which is kind of a ghetto in New York City and on Thanksgiving day, that's the only day my parents would take me out to dinner there was this woman going through a garbage can with her little daughter, about three or four years old picking out her Thanksgiving dinner out of a garbage can. At that point in my life I think I began to think about, you know, it's not as good on this planet as I think it might be and so uh, one of the things I wanted to do when I grew up was to try to make the world a better place but I didn't have an awful lot of confidence around getting there because as a Puerto Rican kid in New York going to some terrible schools, nobody told me that I could ever do much at all. In fact when I was in high school I could still barely read because I spoke spanish at home, no one ever really taught me how to read, I was dyslexic, things weren't coming together but finally I met someone who helped me and I was able to make the leap. Do you feel that if you hadn't had that encouraging factor or that person in your life that you would amount to this position that you're in now? No, I think it was very very important for me because society tells kids of color very different things. I wasn't born in privilege, so it was very important for me to hear that and then when I got into college and met some professors who had some faith in me and encouraged me to go to graduate school and so on and so forth, I always pointed my life in that direction. (Roadtripper #2) Does it frustrate you when you talk to, well me for example, I'll talk about myself, when I've had a very easy life, things have been good and great and I have nothing to complain about, does it frustrate you that were just stagnated and can't make a decision when you can see that there's so much work to be done out there? There's part of me where I have difficulty with that. I'm not angry at people for having it nice or being born into privilege, it's not your fault. But I do have problems with people who have the capacity to do so much good and do nothing. 

Interview

I always wanted a house in the suburbs with a back yard. And so part of me going to college was driven by the fact that I could probably make more money. And I do want that little house somewhere, where I can raise my kids in a way different than I was raised. In my house there were rats and cockroaches and i just wanted something different for my kids. So that was at least one of the driving forces, yeah, yeah. But it's never been the biggest factor, because money doesn't make people happy. And unfortunately you don't know that until after you get the money. 

Fulfillment

Money & Financial Security

Money Doesn't Make You Happy

People always encourage you not to leave a paying job and to take a risk. If you look at the most successful people in the world, they have all taken huge risks to get there. They've worked hard, they've taken risk, and they've gone with their passion and their strengths. And that's what you gotta do. And sometimes, you know what, it doesn't pan out. And you try it for a year or two or maybe five years. And you gotta at some point back off. But as long as you can keep going, the chances will increase that you will get there. 

Passion

Perseverance

Risk

Success Through Risk

Sometimes what a lot of young people do is they wait till they graduate from college and they go, okay now what do I do? And in college they were busy partying or busy going to class, or busy doing stuff that really didn't bring them or give them a good sense of, okay what really turns me on? And then you're already kinda behind the eight ball, because you gotta make money. People are looking to you to make money and of course, some people are getting little job offers that bring them a little bit of money, and so it's really hard at that point to go with your passion. But I very, very much believe that that's what you should do. If you work at something you love, you will always do it better than working at something you hate. And if you work at something you love you will do it so well that you will almost automatically be successful. If you decided, for example, that after this year, you wanted to be a journalist, you wanted to put together documentary films, you wanted to put together stories that compel people to think about the next 100 years of this planet. And that was your passion. You could do it. 

Success

I found a family, in India, they had migrated. Shortly before I got to India, there was a flood in Southern India. And 400,000 people had lost their homes, many of them had died, many of them had migrated North to try to find some work. In Northern India, when it rains, the monsoons the roads disappear because there's the mountains, and the water comes down the mountains and wipes out the roads. So, these impoverished people travel north because they know, during the monsoons they can build roads. There was this family on the side of the road that I was traveling on that day. A woman with five children. Don't know where her husband was or the father of these children. She was building this road out of rocks. You pick up rocks. You break them in your hands, and you lay them out. And every day you try to add foot to this road. She's dalit. That's the lowest caste in India. And it's the only way she could make money to find some way, some means to have her children survive. So I stopped on the road and I go to talk to her. I have my guide with me. She speaks Hindi. We speak Hindi to her. And on the side of the road next to her, she has a two and a half year old little girl. And this little girl has more mucus on her face than she has face on her face. And I put my hand on her forehead and she's really hot. And I tell my guide that we need to take the little girl to the hospital. And so we grab her up take her to the hospital and get her some medicine. About four days later I come by and she's better. And then a week later I come by again and the mother is holding her face pretty much in tears. And I ask my guy what's going on now? And she says, and my guide tells me, she has a toothache. And it's been there for several days, and it's really killing her. So I said, well, let's take her to the dentist. >> Mm-hm. >> So we grab her up, and we take her to a dentist. And this is the way things happens, by the way, in life. It's not the road that you're on, it's the sideroads. I never expected to make that money. I just decided to get off the road and that's when life happens. So I get, and we take her to a dentist and the dentist says, I just bring her to the dentist office and I say, I put her down and I say, could you fix her? I think she has a toothache or something. The dentist comes out and grabs me and says you gotta come in and see this I said I don't really wanna see anything, you just fix her. And she says no, you have to come see this. This dentist, by the way, has like a flashlight hanging from the ceiling, these filthy tools. It's ridiculous. It's how most of the world lives, or at least a big part of it. So she opens her mouth and this woman had pulled out her own teeth. And of course, if you're impoverished and you have pain in your mouth and you think it's coming from your teeth and you have no money to get to a doctor, you pull out your own teeth thinking that the pain goes away. And so she had this huge infection now in her gums because she no longer had molars there. So we of course fixed that. And we tried to talk to her about, that's not the right thing to do. So before I left her, I paid for her children's education for four years. All of her kids, particularly the girls. And then I said, you gotta get off the side of the road. And I said, what does it cost you to build a house? So my guide said it costs about $500 to build them a house here. So I said we'll built an house. So I left my guy $500, and my guy you can trust with your life, he's just great. I said I'll come back in about nine months, we'll see. I come back nine months, she's not in the house. So I said what happened to the house? [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> So when she sees me coming, she's in a plastic shack in a squatters place. And she sees me coming. She starts crying because she thinks she's in trouble because she knows she doesn't have a house. It turns out her little boy had tuberculosis. Had to put the boy in the hospital four months, it took 400 of the $500 I gave her to put her little boy in the hospital. That's about how much care costs in India. About a $100 a month. Over here of course it would costs a phenomenal amount of money. Starts crying and the guy tells me the story. And then she goes in the back of her little plastic shack and she picks up her son and she says, here you take him. He's now yours. You saved his life. He would have died without your money, without your help. And of course I said you know, this is not about taking your child. So we built her a house anyway. But again, when you have those kinds of encounters, that's what keeps you going. So it's those little days that you remember, the faces of the children that you helped. Stuff like that. That's what makes a difference. 

Chance

Exploration

Inspiration

Where Life Happens

One of the things that got me started in some of this work, and I've done a variety of different things, about two years ago I decided to take six very wealthy people to India, very wealthy. And I did this because about eight years ago I did a similar thing, but with only one person. And I'd like to just tell you what to that one person eight years ago, and it turned his life around. We were just out shopping in the city and actually, in Bombay. And he was getting his wife something to bring home. And he walked into this shop and at the back of this shop, there was this six year old little boy. And it was his job to heat the shop. And that means he gets coal, and he puts it in a little coal burner. And it heats up the shop, and he does that all day, so people walk in and it's relatively warm. And that's where he slept in the corner of the shop, and he was filthy because of the cold. And that was his whole job. Sweep up the shop, keep the shop warm, to go get more coal. That was his life. So my friend discovered this little boy. And on that given day, he gave him some candy. And then, a couple days later, we came back and we gave him some more candy. And we started talking to him a little bit. And before he left, my friend asked me, what can I do for this kid? And I said, I don't know, I guess you could give him some money. But if you give them some money, the shop owner might take the money or somebody else might take the money. And so we're kinda talking about it, and we're getting to the shop and a little boy runs out and sees his friend. And while we're talking about it, he decides, well, let me give him the rest of my candy at least. So he gives him the rest of his candy. And then, the little boy runs out of the shop and he gives his candy, all of his little candy, to all the other little impoverished children around there, and all of his little friends. He shares his candy. And when my friend sees that, he says, I got to do something more than just give him money. So he hires a tutor, and he leaves a tutor there for a year. And he says, when I come back, I wanna see this kid speaking English and knowing his numbers. And he came back a year later and he said, and this kid was. And then, he put him in school. And then, a year after that, he built a school for all the impoverished kids in that area of the city. That's 600 students in that school, and these are all kids that are dirt poor, they just live out in the street. And it was because that little kid decided to share what little he had with someone else. That turned him around. And so, it's stuff like that, that all of a sudden hits your heart and you know you gotta do something. 

Values

Volunteerism - Outtake

I feel like I sort of chose a degree that I don't know, will be able to help much. I don't know how to explain it. Like it was a selfish choice because it was my passion. And it was what I wanted to do. And so there's a guilt because I'm not enjoying it anymore. >> I think that's okay. As long as in fact you're working on something that brings you some joy. As to feeling guilty about it, I think people that make you feel guilty about it, and even if it's yourself feeling guilty about it, I think that's probably a mistake. I think you only have one life. And you've got to get some joy out of this life. Don't give it away. And so I wouldn't feel at all guilty about doing what you love, particularly if it makes a little difference. 

Regrets

Feeling Guilty

I used to be a public defender and I would go into jails and prisons and work with folks that were being accused of serious crimes. And once I had a case where a fellow had raped three women. And he had locked them up, and he had abused them for several months And he was up for something about 25 years and we got him 12 years. And after all of that, I said to myself, is this the way I wanna spend my life? I knew this guy had done exactly that. And I didn't, I said you know if I really wanna make a contribution, let me work with young people before they get to this stage. Let me try to work with kids that were very much like me in a ghetto when I was little, and let me try to do something that's preventative in nature instead of after the fact. So, yeah, it's, after that case, I quite being a public defender and I decided put together programs for kids. 

Honesty

Career Change

Do you feel that if you hadn't had that encouraging factor, or that person in your life, that you would amount to this position that you're in now? >> No, I think it was very, very important for me because society tells kids of color, very different things. I wasn't born in privilege, so it's very important for me to hear that. And then, when I got in to college and met some professors that had some faith in me and encouraged me to go to Graduate School and so on and so forth, I always pointed my life at that direction. [MUSIC] 

Education

Societal Pressures

Support & Encouragement

Encouragement

I grew up in Spanish Harlem, which is kind of a ghetto in New York City. And on Thanksgiving Day-- that's the only day my parents would take me out to dinner-- there was this woman going through a garbage can, ah with her little daughter, about three or four years old picking out her Thanksgiving dinner out of a garbage can. At that point in my life, I think I began to think about, you know, it's not as... good on this planet as I-I think it might be. You know, one of the things I wanted to do when I grew up was to try to make the world a better place. But I didn't have an awful lot of confidence getting there. Because as a Puerto Rican kid in New York going to some terrible schools, nobody ever told me as a kid that I could really amount to much at all. But finally, I met someone who helped me and I was able to make the leap. And then when I got into college and met some professors that had some faith in me and encouraged me to go to graduate school and so on and so forth, um, I always pointed my life in that direction. 

Thomas Nazario Highlight

At that point in my life, I think I began to think about, it's not as good down this point and this, I think it might be. And so one of the things that I wanted to do when I grew up was to try to make the world a better place. But, I didn't have an awful lot of confidence around getting there. Because as a Puerto Rico kid in New York, going to some terrible schools, nobody ever told me as a kid that I could really amount to much at all. In fact when I was in high school, I could still barely read because I just spoke Spanish at home. No one really taught me how to read. I was dyslexic, things weren't coming together. But finally I met someone who helped me and I was able to make the leap. 

Law Teachers, Postsecondary

Overview

Career

Roadtrip Nation Leaders in This Career

What Law Teachers, Postsecondary Do

Other Job Titles Law Teachers, Postsecondary May Have

Tasks & Responsibilities May Include

Law Teachers, Postsecondary

Overview

Career

Roadtrip Nation Leaders in This Career

What Law Teachers, Postsecondary Do

Other Job Titles Law Teachers, Postsecondary May Have

Tasks & Responsibilities May Include

Education

Level of Education Attained by Law Teachers, Postsecondary

Majors Related to Career

Related Careers

Related Leaders