Exams, Jobs
So today is the first of four exams. I haven’t been this unprepared — as in, done so little work — for exams ever. But yet, I think they’ll go over fine. It’s almost as if in the 2.5 years of law school, the main skill I'’ve learned was how to take and prepare for these exams. Its amazing the difference from first year. There, we were all nervous, hand-wringing. Exams were, to some extent, a great unknown. Now they feel like just a pile of work, a predictable but annoying process we have to go through.
On the other hand, I did spend quite a bit of time this semester looking for a job. I’m happy to say I got basically a dream job. I’m going to be a Skadden Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
At the end of the summer I spent with EPIC I proposed that we do a project to help legal service providers protect the privacy of their clients. The idea is that these are vulnerable populations that would see privacy violations as part of the harms they face. Furthermore, these legal service providers may not have the resources, or even the local need, to justify investing in privacy knowledge. So the idea is that we would step in and create materials and consult for these service providers.
We decided to focus the project on domestic violence clinics, where the privacy risks were intense and varied — ID theft of survivors, stalking, etc. . . . Just imagine that as relationships are the domain of the private and intimate, so too is this privacy abused when the relationships are abusive.
I spent the rest of the semester refining the project and trying to find funding. Everyone I talked to in the service commnunity said there was a great need for this project, both from the point of view of the harm the population faces and from the point of view of the capacity of the service providers to mitigate these harms. There was a lot of excitement — and I got great results.
Goes to show what you can do if you think that interviewing at firms is an unexciting use of your mind. There are still other ways to get a job and take charge of your future, rather than hypothecating it to firm life.