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Summer Series: Mastering the In-House Track
Our Summer Series continues! This series highlights different Latina students and law grads as they embark in their summer jobs and/or bar prep all across the country. We hope to provide a variety of work experiences, options for a healthy work-life balance, and general motivation through different guest contributors to help you to take charge of your summer and professional goals! Today we also hear from Yadilsa, a rising 2L who spent her summer doing working as an in-house intern. She shares the amazing lessons she’s learned in private practice that will propel her career forward! Hi, my name is Yadilsa Diaz and I am a rising 2L at Rutgers…
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Finding Mentor: Using This Summer to Find the Mentor You Need
If you’re a current law student by now you should have settled in nicely at your summer gig. It can be easy to lose focus in the day to day of assignments and deadlines of what your big goal for the summer should be–securing a job (or a job lead for next summer/semester). While that is the main goal, there is something else to work towards, especially if you’re breaking into the field, and that is finding a mentor that may help guide you in your budding career. How do you find a mentor?! That is the million dollar question. If you are me, a kind law professor takes pity…
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Do You Ever Need to Tone It Down At Work?
“It” being your latinidad? Ok so first, if you’re not watching Insecure–do what you must to get HBO because this show is so amazing! I’ve been a huge fan of Issa Rae forever–from Awkward Black Girl to Ratchet Piece Theater and even love her brother’s show The Fly Guys. LOVE them. Anyway, one of the characters is an attorney–a third year associate at a good firm. Molly has definitely learned how to play the part of being a woman of color in a mostly white firm. There’s a story line (video) where there’s a summer associate, a young black woman named Rashida, who either has not learned to adjust her…
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The Vital First Steps to Take to Find Your Mentor
We’ve discussed before how awkward networking can be when you’re new to the profession. We’re told so often to “network!” during school, but it can be a foreign concept. Actually, to me it always felt icky that we’re going to these events to “make contacts,” which is often code for “what can this person do for me?” See? Gross. Instead, when I flipped this concept to make networking feel more reasonable for me, I found that I really enjoyed it. It can still be a little nerve-wracking to go to an event, unsure if I’ll know anyone, but it’s very rare when I go to something and feel like the…
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What Can Mentorships Look Like?
We have spoken before about finding mentors that work for you. And having someone (or many someones) guide you is vital to a flourishing professional career. But when you’re new to this profession; when your family doesn’t consist of professionals—how do you find someone to take you under their wing? Because I came up without having much (any) connections to the legal industry, I thought it would be helpful to show what my mentorships have looked like and how these relationships formed. Overall, the main theme has been that my relationships grew organically—I never sought anyone out and asked if they would mentor me. Rather, I formed relationships with professors/professionals…
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Finding the Mentor You Need
My image of mentorship is something that I have never really experienced. Starting my career, I always envisioned having a mentoring relationship with another attorney, hopefully Latina, who would be able to guide and advise me throughout my work. Someone who I would touch base with every couple of months that was interested in helping me succeed. There are mentor relationships that are like this, but this isn’t something I have experienced. Instead, I have been really lucky in connecting with professors, lawyers, and other professionals that have given me bits and pieces of guidance and advice. When I look back at the people who helped me, I realize that one…