Ten years ago this August, when I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (if, alas, prematurely bald) rising 3L, I was no-offered by my summer firm. As the financial crisis whipped through the ranks of our profession, my career in BigLaw ended before it started.

A decade removed, I can look back on that moment, and on what followed, with a certain amount of perspective. After all, some flailing notwithstanding, I landed fine—where I should have been, in fact. And what seemed like a long and painful struggle to right my career is contextualized by privilege; as a straight-passing white guy from the ‘burbs with Jewish-mom-approved educational credentials, I was at no great risk of starving.

But ours is a profession with clear expectations for what a legal career should look like, and those of us who graduated during the Great Recession experienced what happens when those shopworn rules go out the window. Our experiences, both good and bad, show how our profession can be surprisingly brittle in times of crisis.

So as law-school applications show signs of ticking up, and the current generation of graduates prepares to move up and out, a look back is in order, as there is much to learn from the years where it all went wrong. I’ve organized this into 10 bite-sized nuggets, one for each year.

First: Things can change in an instant. There is a temptation to believe you will see the storm clouds gathering—some did, although I don’t know how many clueless 20-somethings numbered in those ranks. But when crisis struck, it came as lightning, not thunder.

My class of 2010 entered law school amidst warnings of “waning momentum,” but inside it was business as usual. Law firms held 1L receptions in the typical spare-no-expense style. One jaded teaching assistant summed up the expectations: “You’ll all get Bs, and you’ll all get jobs.”

On-campus interviewing was August 2008. Then, in September, Lehman Brothers collapsed. Cue law-firm layoffs and headlines about how big firms were “shrinking.” By the time they welcomed us into their ranks in summer 2009, our summer firms were not the same places that had extended offers a mere 10 months prior.

Second: Don’t assume that even the strong norms of the profession will hold in a crisis. I believed, as did many of my classmates, that no-offers were for people who jumped into the Hudson River. The merely meh? Worst-case scenario, “cold-offers” (wink-wink). My firm had planned well, and my summer class was far smaller than usual, so I thought we were all safe.

I was wrong. As a summer, I was unspectacular. But although I did not purify myself in the waters of the river Muhheakantuck, I was one of six or seven members of our class of around 20 not invited back. Many of the others were far stronger candidates than I.

(In case you’re wondering: a phone call, from a managing partner, as I was browsing the racks of the late, lamented 1st Avenue Kim’s Video—a perfect place to receive that kind of news.)

Third: This “profession” is a business—and a cutthroat one at that. Reacting to the flood of no-offers, my school’s career office gave some excellent advice: If they didn’t explain why, don’t ask.

Businesses do not like to look weak, and admitting to no-offering summer associates on economic grounds, even during the Great Recession, simply would not reflect well on those firms. Some classmates disregarded that advice and asked, only to receive chapter and verse about how they had screwed up—which many likely did, because they were summer associates. That did not help when going on future interviews.

Fourth: Our profession is far more interconnected than it first appears. The contracting economy and funding cutbacks meant that both the government and many not-for-profits put up “no vacancy” signs—especially with free deferred BigLaw associates to pick up the slack. The ripple effect hit aspiring public-interest lawyers just as hard as firm associates. Everyone was adrift, and as my cohort spent 3L year and long after applying to everything under the sun—as was, I should note, already the expectation for folks pursuing public-interest careers, a path that has always been less regimented—this new state of affairs became more and more apparent. There were simply no jobs, and the few that were available were awash in candidates.

The unexpected silver lining: Nobody was alone. An upheaval of the profession and the global economy does wonders for providing comfort in community—something about misery being fond of dinner parties.

Fifth: There is little room for bitterness or taking things personally. In the aftermath, I cursed, I stomped, and I dreamed of (light) arson. But most of all, I dreaded calling for my character-and-fitness affidavit when applying for bar admission. But I did call, and you know what? They didn’t even seem to remember what had happened.

Law’s a business. Things move fast and memories fade. It wasn’t personal for employers to decide against making offers, even if it was deeply so to me. So as hard as it was to move on, we all had to.

Sixth: Even an obvious departure from the norm is sometimes very hard to accept. That the classes of 2010 and 2011 were struggling was public information, set against the backdrop of a financial crisis that sent unemployment rates skyrocketing. Yet when our no-offers came up in interviews—as they did, for years after—there was often a sense of suspicion: “What really happened? What did you do?” The implication was that economics masked a deeper deficiency, about which we were not being candid.

Seventh: Though it may seem obvious, career uncertainty begets delayed decisions. A familiar theme is how millennials take longer to launch, putting off “adult” milestones like buying houses. The same goes for career progression. A friend recently applied for an AUSA position nine years out of law school, and the interview was peppered with repeating variations on a theme: Why now? After all, the usual pattern is to head to BigLaw for three or four years and then become a federal prosecutor. She would have loved to do that. But she was no-offered, and it took four years even to find steady work at a firm, and then four more years to make a dent in her loans, and only then was she ready to jump ship to the USAO.

In a profession governed by well-established expectation and “normal” timelines, seasoned with endless conventional wisdom, we could not and did not meet our marks.

Eighth: Relatedly, sometimes what you’re doing until your real job comes along is, in fact, your real job. I recall a colleague who, while spending a nightmarish few years striking out in interview after interview, took on a few cases here and there to keep himself afloat. One day he woke up and thought, “Wait! I think I’m a solo.”

Planning out your career is a luxury. It won’t always happen the way you expect, even without a global financial collapse. Many of my classmates and colleagues, especially those on the public-interest side, are not precisely where they expected to be. But there is joy and fulfillment to be found in happy accidents.

Ninth: Beware of confirmation bias. I was ready to write that “most” of my classmates who had been no-offered or otherwise displaced ended up fine. Except a not-insignificant number left law entirely, or dropped off the radar. It is tempting to say that things have returned to normal, but for a lot of people, things never got even close to normal in a profession for which “lockstep” is the ideal.

Tenth: Never take anything for granted. We could be on the verge of another economic crash. Or everything could just be perfectly fine. The point is to be ready. Even if you aren’t bracing for impact every moment of every day, do consider what might happen if, like us, you suddenly found yourself in world where the old rules of progression simply did not apply anymore.

“Back to normal” lasts only as long as we agree it does. And there are storm clouds on the horizon.

David L. Goodwin, a graduate of NYU School of Law, is a public defender in New York.