iLiza's eyes

Taking the LSATs and applying to law school was a recent decision. It's an idea that I've been playing with ever since I realized that my father's warnings against it were not a reason for me to disregard law as a possible career. After my freshman year of college, I got a job in Philadelphia working as an office assistant at my father's former law firm. I got all the work I needed to done in the first week and proceeded to make friends around the office, distract people, drink a lot of coffee and take 2 hours lunches everyday. The summer ended, and my boredom had determined that law was really out of the question.

Until recently. A year later and a year ago (meaning last summer), I worked with two very dear friends who were taking the LSAT in October and studying during work hours because, like I had found a year before at the law firm, there was nothing better to do. I was very inspired by them, specifically the friend who is now on her way to an amazing law career this fall. Maybe it was them, maybe it was my dad, maybe it was just something in me, but I took a constitutional law class this semester, and after the first class, I had decided for sure this time, to become a lawyer.

A lot of people, since I made and announced this decision, have asked me what I'm going to do with law. What I'm going to study, what I'm going to practice, where I want to go for school. Others have looked dismayed: I'm so gung-ho about human rights and teaching and international politics and lobbying and all that, what will I do with a law degree? What about my writing? Will I just be a sell-out and make lots of money and grow old early from anxiety and work ridiculous hours??

My answer to that is that I hope I won't. My answer is that I want to do it all: I want to be a lawyer and actively practice law, specifically in court, and I want to keep writing freelance work for magazines and newspapers, and I want to always stand up for causes in which I believe and for people whom I believe deserve more than what they are getting.

But I always feel stupid answering those questions in that way. I feel like I'm describing an impossible dream. When I say that and write that, I can feel my eyes growing bigger than my stomach, I can see a little me reaching for something I can never grasp and ending up with nothing instead of with everything.

I'm writing this because today I was inspired. Below is a link to a very very long article, but I suggest that you read the whole thing when you have time. It's written by a lawyer, professor, traveler and of course, a journalist, who before today I didn't know about and at the end of the day, I still don't know much about. But from the little I know, I understand that my dream is difficult and complex and nearly impossible, but nowhere near beyond the realm of possibility.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040830fa_fact1

This woman, Samantha Power, writes in this award-winning article about Darfur, Sudan. She gives what I think is a very fair, well-researched and well-written account of a genocide that seems overwhelmingly abstract to many of us. Read it, enjoy it, think about it, let me know what you think and realize that we can find other people living our own ideals everyday: so there is no excuse why we shouldn't reach for them.

posted by iliza @ 2:48 PM