International

Anna,

I read your blog before making the decision to attend law school and right on through my 1L year. I've learned a lot. Thank you.

I attend the [deleted] School of Law and received a public interest fellowship to do a summer internship at [deleted], an NGO that provides free legal services to poor farmers in Cambodia. I'm part of the land law unit, which tries to protect rural farmers from land seizures.

In a nutshell, I signed on for a summer internship in a foreign country and have done almost no substantive legal work, partly because I was placed in a dysfunctional unit, partly because of the low English level of my colleagues, and partly because I'm having a hard time creating good opportunities to do legal work.

My dysfunctional unit. One problem is my colleagues and supervisors don't seem to do much. I nicknamed one attorney "man that stares at his cell phone" in honor of his 8 hour a day activity. The lack of work is partly due to the fact that government doesn't respond to motions, follow its own laws, or respect the court system. It's common to wait months for rulings, only to find out the court is "too busy" and will not issue any ruling at all, or the case file has been lost. As a result, the attorneys often wait around and do nothing.

I think my boss is depressed about the corruption. The program's two showcase lawsuits have been going on for 7 and 4 years respectively. In the first case, the local prosecutor has refused to correctly implement the presiding judge's verdict, and in the second case everyone involved in facilitating the fraudulent sale of indigenous land has admitted to taking bribes in a transaction that was, on its face, against the law (the land was sold to the sister of the Minister of Finance).

I should provide a little more context. At the end of the Vietnamese occupation following the Khmer Rouge, there were only a handful of lawyers in Cambodia. By 2007 there were 574. A good number work for NGOs and legal aid organizations. So it's understandable that attorneys have only a shallow pool of legal experience to draw upon when considering legal strategy, but we mainly do nothing. (A side note: At our organization the lack of activity is partly due to poor organizational structure. The bylaws allow the employees to elect the management team, which creates a huge disincentive for the management team to "crack the whip" leading to the current very weak executive director).

I know that one of the themes of your blog is that Gen Y's self-involvement leads to unreasonable expectations and more than an acceptable level of complaining. So I decided to create a writing project for myself where I would investigate how to go about filing a complaint in US courts against a Cambodian-American that dispossessed 23 families using armed men and bulldozers. I thought several allied NGOs were representing the families. I went to the province and met with people from the 3 other NGOs, but no one spoke sufficient English to discuss the case. I had to get the moto taxi driver to translate, which of course didn't work since the taxi driver's English was limited to "right, left" and not "motion, complaint." Then I went and interviewed an American ex-pat restaurant owner who witnessed the seizure. He was smoking pot during the interview. Anyway, long story short the NGOs weren't representing the families anymore because they never had actual title to the land and the Cambodian-American is politically connected and paid an acceptable bribe to the local families. The memo, while a nice academic exercise, would be functionally useless. Instead I'm writing another grant proposal and shadowing my boss to his infrequent meetings with court officials (going to an hour meeting in the provinces can take 3 days after factoring in driving).

But that's it. I've got an interesting story or two about the outrageous facts in the cases, but I haven't done much substantive legal work. In on campus interviews, I can show an attorney a picture of a client meeting with a monkey in the background but not a legal memo.

I am concerned about on campus interviews. Although I am doing public interest work this summer and will have meaningful service in my legal career, I would like to have the opportunity to work for a mid-size to larger local firm next summer and after graduation. My big hairy audacious goal is to be part of the legal community that shapes [US city's] land use regulations to meet the transportation and environmental challenges of the next century.

What advice do you have? I'm actually pretty down on my summer experience. The land law unit has a poor reputation with its donors and will probably lose its funding because of its failure to do much for its clients. For me personally, the unit's inactivity means I have a lot of dead time. I also haven't learned directly from any legal professionals that speak English well. When I'm asked to comment on what I did and how I liked it, I don't want to be too negative or dishonest. But honestly: "I sat around a lot in a foreign country, went to meetings that I didn't understand, and helped absolutely no one, in part, because the judicial system is utterly corrupt" is probably a conversation killer.

A final thought. Friends and family point to the value of a foreign experience and I think they're right. But for me, I think the marginal value of this experience is low. Like a lot of students that graduated from college around the time I did, I was fortunate enough to study abroad. I went to [deleted] for a semester. I also taught English in [deleted] after graduation for six months. Granted Cambodia is very different from either of those countries, but I still have a hard time saying with conviction that for me just being in a foreign country is a good use of my 1L summer.

I look forward to your thoughts. Any advice on how to spin gold out of this straw will be carefully studied. Thank you.

Holy cow, you've lived a lifetime in a summer. The only thing that could have been worse is if you'd spent the summer at Latham/Cravath/Kirkland/Perkins/BlahBlah. Seriously.

To prepare for interviews, you need to take the email you wrote me, put a far more positive spin on it, and outline at a practical level the barriers that stand between land-reform-in-theory and land-reform-in-practice. That’s the perfect (short) law review article to start writing now, and the fact that you've got it under way is a great talking point during an interview. "What did you do this summer?" "I started the summer trying to protect rural Cambodians from property seizure. The summer I got was more interesting than what I signed up for – I ended up studying what’s broken about the Cambodian legal system in practice, and now I’m writing an article about it." You're going to call it "Three Barriers to Real Property Protection in Cambodia," and I will be expecting a signed copy.

I also told a lawyer friend of mine about your predicament, and here's what he said:

It’s interesting because we’re trying to get a legal clinic going in Tanzania; that’s my next uber-project, I think. Same challenges all around, though we do expect less corruption than in Cambodia. We also expect just as much inactivity, lack of movement in the courts, etc. Property rights is a big thing.

If you take the narrow view of "what law did I practice?", then yeah, his experience is limited. But that’s not what law is in developing countries anyhow. My work in Tanzania so far has been spent trying to *see* a copy of the Tanzanian legal code. I finally did in South Africa, at the supreme court.

Incredibly experienced lawyers have a tough time getting anything done in the developing world, and you are at the teeny, weeny start of that learning curve. You have to start there, so try not to get frustrated just because you're facing as many hurdles as the superstar lawyers who are also getting stuck in the mire of "international law."

Back to interviews. What else can you do? You can talk about how grateful you are to be an American living in a country with laws and rights. You can talk about how hard it is to do any real legal work in a country where the government and the courts are hopelessly corrupt and no one bothers to do much about it. That’s not an interview killer; it’s an interview opener, especially if you approach it with humor and grace.

In the meantime, there's no need to mope around being depressed. You're there to help people, right? OK, you can’t do much legally, and I think you're right about that part of it. But you can do two things – you can learn and you can help. You should learn all you can about Cambodian law and government so that if it ends up being a country you care about, you can work for change there the rest of your life. You should go out into the community and do anything you can to help them. Teach English. Help with infrastructure projects. Pitch in at the local medical clinic. Anything. You went there not only to get experience for yourself, but to serve, right? So serve in whatever way you can, whether it's through your NGO or not. You'll be helping the people you came to help, albeit not in the way you originally intended. Add to that a positive attitude, good war stories, and a sense of humor, and law firms would be crazy not to hire you. They'll see a self-starter, a team player, and a smart guy who knows how to make lemonade. What more could you want in an employee?

You are also infinitely wiser than you were at the start of the summer. You've been up to your elbows in the glamorous world of "International Law" that every law school applicant and his brother swears he wants to practice. Good for you that you've gone out and done it, and figured out what that really means, and have a bunch of stories to tell.

And to think you could have been sitting around in some air-conditioned American law firm writing memos that no one will read about Section 226 of the Labor Code ("Social Security Number Truncation on Pay Stubs"). You are way, way ahead.

The topic of graduate school admissions can pop up in the most unexpected places. I'm a fan of Salon.com, and one of their advice columnists (Cary Tennis) recently published a letter from a 20-year-old called "I'm wasting my semester abroad watching TV in my apartment." Subtitle: "Could I really be blowing the definitive period of my college life?" Tennis's advice in this column is spot-on: humane, productive, sympathetic. He gets it. I love him. I want to send him flowers.

I'm very familiar with the reader's plight, because it's a common one for college students and recent graduates. College students are encouraged to seize opportunities to stretch, but then they find that stretching experiences are inherently difficult and uncomfortable and unfamiliar. This article gives great advice about how to get unstuck in those situations.

In other news... I'm excited to welcome a new member to our team. Jennifer Lee will be offering career coaching to college students and graduates who are considering business careers (finance, consulting, etc.) and/or MBA degrees. Below is her bio, which gives a sense of the interesting twists and turns one's career can take. Jennifer spent eleven years as a cello student at Juilliard before attending Harvard College, where she played varsity lacrosse, founded a conductorless orchestra and double majored in Music and Anthropology. She earned her M.Phil. in Musicology and Performance at Oxford (Lincoln College) and currently attends Harvard Business School for her MBA. She spent a year at a music conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, and her solo and ensemble performances have taken her to France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea. Prior to HBS, she worked as both a for-profit and nonprofit management consultant. Most recently, she has worked at JP Morgan in London as an investment banking summer associate in the Technology, Media, and Telecom Group. Jennifer is conversant in German and Korean.

I was so excited to hear about Princeton's plans to formalize a Princeton-sponsored gap year for their students before they start college. In this case, the gap year program will be for applicants who have already been admitted to Princeton, but gap years are also a great idea for high school students who have not yet finalized their college plans.

I have almost daily conversations with parents in which I recommend a gap year for their high school students, and most of the time, those parents are resistant. Many of them aren't familiar with the concept, worry that admissions officers won't like it, and wonder if a gap year will put their children at a disadvantage.

I've written here before about gap years, but here are my two cents in summary:

Admissions officers love gap years. Freshmen who arrive on campus after a gap year have had an extra year to mature, see the world, learn about themselves, gain a better sense of what they want out of college, and recharge their batteries. Every day I see what happens when people start college before they're really ready to make the most of it -- you can spot that in their transcripts a mile away. It helps when heavy-hitters like Princeton and Harvard and Yale officially get behind the gap year concept.

To get a sense of the cool things people do during their gap years, see Harvard's admissions website. Below is an excerpt from their page called "Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation." Note especially the last sentence: "While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college."

Perhaps the best way of all to get the full benefit of a "time-off" is to postpone entrance to college for a year. For over thirty years, Harvard has recommended this option, indeed proposing it in the letter of admission. Normally a total of about fifty to seventy students defer college until the next year.

The results have been uniformly positive. Harvard's daily student newspaper, The Crimson reported (5/19/2000) that students who had taken a year off found the experience "…so valuable that they would advise all Harvard students to consider it." Harvard's overall graduation rate of 98% is among the highest in the nation, perhaps in part because so many students take time off. One student, noting that the majority of her friends will simply spend eight consecutive terms at Harvard, "wondered if they ever get the chance to catch their breath."

During her year off, the student quoted above toured South America with an ice-skating company and later took a trip to Russia. Another interviewed in the article worked with a growing e-commerce company (in which the staff grew from ten to a hundred during the year) and backpacked around Europe for six months....

Members of one recent class participated in the following activities, and more, in the interim year: drama, figure skating, health-care, archeological exploration, kibbutz life, language study, mineralogical research, missionary work, music, non-profit groups, child welfare programs, political campaigns, rebuilding schools, special needs volunteering, sports, steel drumming, storytelling, swing dance, university courses, and writing - to name some chosen at random. They took their interim year in the following locales: Belize, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mongolia, Nepal, Philipines, Scandinavia, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, United States and Zimbabwe.

Many students divide their year into several segments of work, travel, or study. Not all can afford to travel or to take part in exotic activities. A number have served in the military or other national service programs. Some remain at home, working, taking part-time courses, interning, and still finding the time to read books they have never had time to fit into their schedules or begin to write the "great American novel." Others have been able to forge closer ties with parents or grandparents from whom they may have drifted away during the hectic pace of the high-school years....

Students taking a year off prior to Harvard are doing what students from the U.K. do with their so-called "gap year." Other countries have mandatory military service for varying periods of time. Regardless of why they took the year off or what they did, students are effusive in their praise. Many speak of their year away as a "life-altering" experience or a "turning point," and most feel that its full value can never be measured and will pay dividends the rest of their lives. Many come to college with new visions of their academic plans, their extracurricular pursuits, the intangibles they hoped to gain in college, and the career possibilities they observed in their year away. Virtually all would do it again.

Nevertheless, taking time off can be a daunting prospect for students and their parents. Students often want to follow friends on safer and more familiar paths. Parents worry that their sons and daughters will be sidetracked from college, and may never enroll. Both fear that taking time off can cause students to "fall behind" or lose their study skills irrevocably. That fear is rarely justified. High school counselors, college administrators, and others who work with students taking time off can help with reassurance that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Occasionally students are admitted to Harvard or other colleges in part because they accomplished something unusual during a year off. While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college.

Can entrepreneurship be taught in the classroom? Many business schools (both undergraduate and graduate) seem to think so, and they are booming. In an article in the current University of Cambridge alumni magazine, some entrepreneurs weigh in on what makes them successful.

An update email I received from the Department of State:

Hello:

You have subscribed to the U.S. Department of State careers website listserve. We would like to inform you of the launch of our new U.S. Department of State's career website. Please update your bookmarks, the old ones will not work with our new navigation.

We would also like to inform you that we are now accepting registrations for the 2007 Foreign Service Officer Test.  Please click here to read about the new Foreign Service Officer Selection Process, and also about the medical and security clearances, as well as an explanation of the Super Critical/Critical Needs languages.

This service is provided free of charge by the Office of Recruitment at the U.S. Department of State.  Visit us on the web at http://careers.state.gov.

I'm a bit of a design nut, and recently I've been salivating over the most beautiful vacuum cleaner I've ever seen (the Electrolux Pronto, pictured over on the left). It's gorgeous, as in iPod gorgeous, although the photo doesn't do it justice.

I've had mine for about a week (lots of dog hair at my place), and I thought I was going to blog about what a great product this is for people still in college, or people who live in small quarters, or people who are too lazy to push around a big, hulking machine, or people whose aesthetic sensibilities weep when they have to look at ugly design every day (twenty-somethings think beautiful design is their birthright, thanks to Michael Graves for Target and Jonathan Ive at Apple).  And then I stumbled on the Electrolux Design Lab, which is even more exciting. It's a design competition for undergraduate and graduate design students around the world, and this year's Design Lab challenges aspiring industrial designers "to create eco-friendly, sustainable household appliances for 2020." How cool is that? The contest closes in 5 days. More design competitions here.

Hylô! Bore da! Cymru am byth! (I’m showing off my limited Welsh.)

My vacation is supposed to be over today, and I’m supposed to be flying back to Boston as I write this. United has completely bungled its flights out of Heathrow, so while it turns out I’m not flying today after all, I’m officially getting back in the blogging saddle.

Two things I learned from my holiday:

1. I’m the only person who comes back from remote Wales with a sunburn and
   
2. even in remote Wales, it’s impossible to escape societal hand-wringing over Gen Y or the abject misery of highly paid lawyers.

Who knew?

From the Daily Mail (“Mothers are Raising a Generation of Wimps”):

Enjoying a glass of early evening wine at a friend's house the other day, we were rudely interrupted by the wailing tones of her 12-year-old son. His plaintive yelp of hunger was swiftly attended to by his mother, who instructed him to "raid the fruit bowl".

He would, he said, but could she "peel an apple" for him. Embarrassed by my hearing this, she attempted to ignore him. He continued, repeating Dalek-fashion: "Mum, I'm hungry, Mum I'm hungry."

Finally, exasperated, she crashed her glass down on the table, stomped through to the kitchen, bashed a couple of doors about and returned with a face as a red as a tomato.

"Why couldn't he do that for himself?" I asked her.

"He doesn't know how to," was her snappy reply.

My friend's son is a wimp. Not in the traditional sense. He is not physically scrawny or the target of bullies (he plays junior rugby for our Gloucestershire town, and is popular with his peers) but he lacks backbone, gumption....

So who is responsible for this unenviable state of affairs? For more than 30 years, and heightened in intensity over the past decade, the women of Britain - as primary carers either with a husband or partner, or as a single parent - have systematically mollycoddled their sons to within an inch of their lives.

And not one but two headlines from today’s London Times:

• “Children to Get Lessons in Money – and Debt,” about a new mandatory curriculum “to help youngsters to prepare for financial pressures after leaving school” and
  
• “Never Letting Go,” subtitled “Are we in danger of producing a generation of tethered teens who are so cosseted and indulged that they will never be able to withstand life’s hard knocks?”

While we're on the subject of helicopter parents: I read an interesting article in a German newspaper last week. It quoted a high school geography teacher complaining about parents who threaten to sue if she gives their kids a C, and she talked about how she has to document all of the kids’ failings in the classroom, CYA style, in case she gets hauled into court. What strikes me as so interesting about her experience is that teachers are obviously still able to distinguish between good and bad achievement, but parents do so much bullying and buffering that their kids never hear anything but praise. What horrible Hilton-Lohan-style parenting, and what a disaster for their kids.

Also in the news over here? How much big-firm lawyers hate their jobs even as they make gobs of money. From an article in the London Times (“One in Four Lawyers Wants to Change Jobs”):

Almost a quarter of lawyers want to leave the profession because of stress and long hours, according to a survey published this week.

The poll of 2,500 lawyers also indicates that assistant solicitors — those who are not partners — are even more unhappy, with more than a third wanting to give up their jobs.

The YouGov survey for The Lawyer magazine confirms that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the work-life balance in law, despite record levels of pay.

It coincides with an inquiry by the Law Society of England and Wales into the long hours and lack of career prospects for lawyers with families.

The survey also shows that 20 per cent of managing partners — those in charge of the the firm — wish they were in another job. But few lawyers feel able to leave their jobs, chiefly because of the pay cut.

Almost a quarter of lawyers want to leave the profession because of stress and long hours, according to a new survey published this week.

The poll of over 2,500 lawyers also indicates that assistant solicitors - those who are not partners - are even more unhappy, with more than a third wanting to give up their jobs.

Where are the headlines about investment bankers hating their jobs despite the gobs of money they earn? No such headlines. Law firms are deluding themselves if they think their lawyers are miserable just because of "stress and long hours."

Getting at the crux of the problem is a follow-on story in the Times called “Why Are Lawyers Miserable: Want a List?”

The juxtaposition of two stories in The Times last week – one reporting that top-flight City lawyers were charging as much as £1,000 an hour for their expertise, another that a quarter of lawyers wanted to leave their profession – raised a pertinent question: just why are those in the legal business so miserable?

. . .

You see, as with everything else, America has been doing lawyer dissatisfaction bigger and better than us for decades. Polls have at various times established that not just a quarter, but up to 40 per cent of US lawyers want to leave their profession; and whereas British lawyers are only just waking up to the fact they are miserable and want to die, their American counterparts have been alert to it since 1989, which saw the publication of Deborah Arron’s Running From the Law: Why Good Lawyers are Getting Out of the Legal Profession.

What follows in the article is a great -- make that a really, really great, dead-on, must-read --  list of reasons why highly-paid lawyers are so unhappy. Item 3 in particular caught my eye:

3. the yawning gap between the ideals of those entering the profession and the reality. Some go into law because they dream of fighting injustice, but discover on entering that most of what lawyers do benefits big business.

Others enter the profession because they are seduced by the apparent glamour of the trade, as portrayed in Ally McBeal and LA Law, only to find that the work is about as glamorous as getting a verruca (cf point 2). Then there are those graduates – as much as 47 per cent of the profession, according to a recent survey – who drift into the job because they don’t know what else to do, assuming vaguely that it might be fun, and find on entering that it is about as amusing as breaking a limb in a traffic accident (cf point 1). Repeatedly. For 90 hours a week.

Lots to chew on, and I hope I've made up for lost time. Happy reading!

Stanford GSB is now offering loan forgiveness options to its international graduates:The GSB International Loan Forgiveness Program (ILFP) was launched in fall 2006 and is already having the kind of impact it was designed for: helping international students who graduate from the Business School with staggering debt. “The program is part of the School’s increased interest in having a greater positive influence abroad,” explains Colleen MacDonald, director of financial aid and a key player in the creation of the new program.

For many international students, particularly for those in developing nations, financing their education becomes a huge obstacle. Securing a loan in their home countries can be challenging, and loans from the United States are tied to American currency. The average indebtedness for an international student in the MBA Class of 2006, for example, was more than $80,000. That spells tough choices upon graduation. Going back home where one’s expertise could make a real difference can mean not earning enough to keep up with loan payments. Working in wealthy nations has often been seen as the only option. . . .

“We want to enable students to go back to their home countries or other countries where they can really put their skills to work assisting developing economies,” MacDonald says. Eligible graduates may be awarded up to $7,500 each year, according to their level of indebtedness. Currently, recipients can receive funds for a total of three years after graduation.

“Our hope is to expand the program beyond the pilot so that it can function much like our nonprofit loan forgiveness program, which has been serving about 30 students a year since 1988,” Marine says. Some of those students are happily receiving grants for the life of their loans.More here and here.

For anyone thinking about taking the U.S. Foreign Service Exam, here's an update from the U.S. State Department:The U.S. Department of State is in the process of revising the Foreign Service Officer selection process in some important and exciting ways. We will not be giving the traditional paper-and-pencil exam in April 2007, and instead we tentatively plan to launch the new process sometime this summer. This new process will still include a test, but the test will now be computer-based, and somewhat shorter than the old. The process will also include some innovative new steps, which we describe in the following paragraphs. As the new process is finalized, we will update this website, so please check back from time to time. In addition, if you click on the "Keep Me Informed" tab, you will be able to sign up to receive regular updates by e-mail.

First, a question asked by many is "Why are you changing the selection process? What's wrong, what's broken?" The answer is that nothing's wrong, and nothing's broken. In fact, the quality of the candidates we are selecting is outstanding. But, like any strong organization, we want to do even better.

With that in mind, we have consulted widely, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of our selection process with best practices of the private sector. We have concluded that we can make our selection process better by adopting what we call a Total Candidate approach. The aim is to comprehensively assess the candidate's full range of personal attributes – knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences, and personal strengths.Read more about the process here.