Hi j99,
I'm CU's friend.
I went to Boston College Law School right after college (1997) and, as CU said, I lasted a whole 6 weeks before I decided law was not for me. The only difference in our situations is that I took 2+ years after withdrawing to "explore" different fields (health care consulting & bioethics/human subject research mainly) and volunteer in a hospital prior to applying to med school. Like you, I was strongly dissuaded from mentioning law school in my personal statement. I felt a strong desire to explain myself and show my "growth," but in the end I did not mention it. Instead, I talked about why I wanted to go into medicine and what I had done to show that I knew what medicine was about and how it fit my personality and goals. In my secondaries, I really did not touch the issue either. It was in the interviews where I had to "prove" myself worthy.
What your advisor said is right -- Adcoms will be highly skeptical that you are sure that this is the right decision and that you will stick with medicine throughout the good and the bad. Their perspectives are quite skewed -- they believe that if someone "quits" one professional school, they have a "pattern" of quiting everything and thus will be a risk to drop out of med school. Some will see it as a character flaw that an applicant dropped. Others will understand that many people who are capable of going to medical school also might be interested in law -- and that they may make the wrong decision the first time around. For those people, all they want to know is that you have really thought about what medicine entails and that you are eager to take on the challenges.
For example, my interviewers at Univ. of VT and Chicago Med understood my situation (they had family members who went from one career to the other) and were supportive. My Chicago Med interviewer mentioned that his Adcom prefered to see people "take time" between leaving law and going into medicine - to make sure that it's what they really want, etc. However, my Georgetown interviewer definitely viewed me a flawed from the outset. Her questions continually revolved around whether I knew what medicine entailed (she was NEVER satisfied with my answers) and she flat out said to me: "How do I know you just won't drop out again?" Bad interview from the beginning. When the interviews were open file, I had to answer a lot of questions about law and sometimes it distracted the interviewers from asking questions about ME, my motivations for medicine, other experiences I've had, etc. You have to really be able to steer a conversation to make it workable. I would have loved to use the Socratic method on my interviewers for a while -- to pay them back for making me feel like I was BACK in law school while they asked those questions!
But, for the closed file interviews (like UCSF), I did not bring the issue up, so they could not ask me about it. It seems like not talking about it is BETTER than facing it head on. When Adcoms see law on the transcript reports, they'll come to their own conclusions. It seemed as though my answers about leaving law school were never "perfect" and that, except for a few instances, it was better to leave the issue alone rather than raise it. But, I'll never know for sure.
Just a quick thought - your advisor probably told you to drop out of (or take a leave of absence from) law school before applying to medical school. This is the best thing to do (if you are serious) because the medical schools will not really want to consider you if you still have two years left in your law program. A couple of schools asked for a letter from my law school dean verifying that I had withdrawn from school. (See the "Poaching??" thread in the pre-allopathic forum for more info re: what I am talking about.)
Anyway, I hope that this is helpful to you. There are a few people out there who have gone into law first (then medicine) and there are tons who have thought about both professions seriously. You can definitely make it - you just have to focus on why you are a good candidate for med school, rather than about a "bad" decision you made. Good luck!
-- Becky
