My experience as a legal intern has definitely benefited my future career. I think it is a great way to gain experience and really see firsthand a day in the life of working at a law firm. This experience will continue to benefit me, especially since I am considering going to law school. Getting to experience the reality of what a career in law is like is a great stepping stone into seeing what your future could be like.
My major of study is in philosophy and I definitely think it ties into my internship. Law consists of reviewing and drafting legal documents, analyzing complex cases, and the ability to decipher arguments. Philosophy really emphasizes the importance of all those concepts and more. In philosophy, we have to analyze difficult texts and really try to understand the meaning of anything. You also have to be very meticulous in your wording as one word may change the whole meaning of what you are trying to interpret. These are all great skills to have in law which is why I do believe my internship ties into my major of study,
I definitely think the educational requirements you need beforehand in order to be successful in this internship would be to finish your English 101 and English 102 requirements. This internship requires a lot of reading, writing, and editing documents so having those credits would be beneficial prior to the internship.
After completing my internship, I am not 100% percent certain if I want to pursue a career in law. I really did enjoy the experience. However, I realized that I do like interacting with people on a daily basis, and my day to day had very little interactions. I think part of this had to do with being an intern, where I am limited in the amount of things I am able to do. While I still have an interest in this field, I would like to try to get a little bit more experience before fully committing to law school.
I think in order to secure a full time position in this field, you must know how to draft court documents and understand how to read them. A lot of the positions require a paralegal certification or equivalent experience so I definitely think it is a must in order to secure a full-time position. I think if you don’t have that experience, you could start up as a front desk legal assistant and work your way up. One piece of advice I could give incoming interns is to just be really open minded about the work you are doing. I definitely learned a lot of great information from my internship even though a lot of the tasks I was doing tended to get repetitive. The information I learned was very valuable and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on bankruptcy law because of my tasks.
