After 16 years of practicing law, Sara Beachy Waters ’08 craved a career change.
“Law is intellectually stimulating,” said Beachy Waters, a trial attorney who focused on eminent domain and land use litigation. “I liked the people I worked with, I loved my firm and it was financially satisfying. But then I started thinking: How do I want to finish my work life? What’s my legacy going to be? I wanted to do more heart work and more soul work.”
Inspired by the family counselor she saw growing up, Beachy Waters decided to return to her alma mater for a master’s degree in social work with a focus on mental health counseling. And it only made sense to practice her new profession in a familiar environment: University of Wisconsin Law School, where she now provides individual and group counseling services to law students as a practicum mental health counselor with University Health Services (UHS).
Beachy Waters practices under the supervision of John Schneider, a UHS mental health provider embedded in the Law School. Schneider and Beachy Waters help students cope with the pressures of the legal profession. Research shows that lawyers experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicidality compared with the general population.
“Law is evolving, like many other professions following the pandemic, but it’s still fundamentally a demanding and stressful profession,” Waters noted. “It requires high degrees of perfectionism. It attracts people who are goal-oriented and highly motivated to be successful. And I would say that it invites you to turn off fundamental aspects of your humanity at times in order to be successful.”
Beachy Waters understands the stress all too well — she juggled law school with a newborn, worked as an assistant attorney general for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, powered through sleepless nights of trial preparation and eventually became a partner at her law firm. Now, she is committed to helping aspiring lawyers build resilience, self-care strategies and a sense of self that goes beyond their professional identity. She hopes to help students build sustainable careers that allow them to thrive personally and professionally.
One of the challenges is persuading ambitious UW Law students to slow down enough to focus on mental health and self-care.
For Sara Beachy Waters, it’s important to make time for fun and relaxation, whether posing with Bucky at her wedding to Dave Waters in 2024, cheering on the Badgers or making a Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Portugal and Spain.
“Law school and the legal profession are a marathon, not a sprint,” she tells them. “And when marathoners prepare, they don’t just run. You also have to cross train and stretch and strengthen and fuel and take rest days. Sometimes you’ll get an injury and have a setback. And I think the profession of law is like that, where if all you do is study and take tests and work, then your body and your mental health will break down over time.”
UW’s social work program has also helped Waters unlearn some of her own workaholic habits from her law days.
“I’m learning a new vocabulary that I’m then trying to share with students to help them reconnect with the things that bring them joy, the things that give their life purpose, and then thinking about how to integrate those things into their future profession as a lawyer,” she said.
Her advice for fellow alumni who might be experiencing career burnout: think about what you want to move toward instead of what you want to escape. “I think that creates excitement, that creates opportunity,” she says. “Uncertainty is where the hope is, and where the opportunity for change is.”
Waters graduated in May 2025, and she hopes to continue to work with young adults after her internship with UHS concludes.
“It’s just a really exciting, interesting stage of life, and I would love to continue doing that, whether that’s at the university or in a private practice somewhere,” she said.
By Nicole Sweeney Etter