Luke Nichols, better known as the Outdoor Boys YouTuber who captured the hearts of millions of viewers for his outdoor survival videos from the middle-of-nowhere Alaska, knows what it feels like to graduate in a wrecked economy. After all, he graduated from law school during the 2008 market crash.
Standing before George Mason University’s law school graduates in May, the 47-year-old attorney opened with the line he’s built a career on: “Survival is not something we just do in the woods.”
He said survival is something we each have to do “every single day, whether you’re building a fire, or gutting a moose, or drafting a motion.”
Nichols was in his third and final year of law school in 2008 when the U.S. housing market imploded and roughly 16 million homes were foreclosed. He recalled that one in three law students in his cohort never landed a legal job.
Three months before graduation, the 35-attorney firm where he was clerking laid him off—and by the time he sat for the bar exam (which officially authorizes attorneys to practice in their respective state), he says he was in “panic mode.” He fired off 3,200 résumés to firms and lawyers across the country.
