- Exploration: You do not need to know your destination
High School -> Legal Assistant/Paralegal -> Clerkship -> Graduate Job
When a first- or second-year law student asks me for advice, I often get startled. What advice can I even give when I don’t know what I want? Then I simply just say “You will figure it out; you do not always need to know everything yet.” Maybe I am just saying what I wish someone had told me during those years.
Like thousands of other law students in Sydney, I was, for a long time, under the misconception that if my life didn’t follow the infamous law student trajectory, then I would be a failure.
Unlike my peers, I did not even know whether I wanted to be a lawyer for the first three years of my degree. I would indefinitely avoid the conversation.
However, what became apparent this year was that there is no one pathway or destination. Who knows where life will take all of us? Rather than trying to control where you end up, I believe we can all try to enjoy the journey and the setbacks that come along with it.
2. Mindset: Prioritise Yourself
My serial problem will always be “I want to do everything.”
I often ask myself how I can go out Saturday night and then be all prepared for my 8 am class on Monday. There is often so much discourse about balancing your life in your 20s that I think we often forget to sit down and just take a deep breath.
Maybe it’s ok to not go to a 6 am Pilates class and then travel two hours to go to university. Maybe it’s ok to say, “No, I want to prioritise myself today.”
These days, we are constantly told to get the HD, be fit, build our careers, maintain friendships, network and still find time to enjoy being young. And those influencers talking about morning routines on social media don’t really help.
However, maybe prioritising yourself does not mean juggling all these responsibilities. Perhaps, it means recognising that you can’t perfectly balance everything and that you don’t have to.
3. Personal Journey: Stop comparing your progress to others
“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
I believe we have all heard this aphorism throughout childhood. However, I think it has a special role when we reach young adulthood where insecurities are sky-high and all you can notice are endless paralegal jobs on Seek that all require a minimum of five years of experience.
I have also fallen into the trap called the “Network” tab on LinkedIn where all I see are LinkedIn warriors who started their careers as soon as they took their first breath. The never-ending scrolling, where the only thing that progresses is my anxiety. For my own sake, I decided to lay off LinkedIn for a while.
What I believe we as law students don’t recognise is that if we keep glorifying other people’s achievements, we will not be able to appreciate our own. Our journeys are personal to us and ours alone to share. So yes, maybe that classmate from high school might be doing their tenth internship; however, you are also two steps ahead
of where you were in January.
And that should count!
4. Challenging the Timeline: There is no Deadline to Figure it Out
I believe we all try too hard to control our timelines and law students can be particularly notorious in believing the structured timeline made for us is the only one we can follow.
As a fourth-year law student, I would like to challenge it.
Why should there be a deadline? Why can’t we all just decide to remove it?
Maybe the goal is not to have everything figured out by a certain year of law school.
Maybe the goal is just to keep moving, keep learning and keep improving.
There is no “right” way to build a legal career. There is only the way that you decide.