Being a law student means you’re constantly feeling like you’re missing something, feeling like you have something due in a week or a final looming over the horizon of the semester. And when everything is so chaotic, it’s easy to forget that your legal career will consist of much more than the grade you get on your torts final.

As a 3L looking back on my law school journey, one thing I never knew would be so integral in my career development was mentorship. For 1L me, mentorship was merely a buzzword that was thrown around with no actual instructions on how to cultivate such a relationship. In fact, when you’re a 1L, you don’t really have the luxury to think about anything other than briefing cases for the next day—and therefore, I believed mentorship to be a chore, an extracurricular on top of everything else I had to do. I never anticipated that it would be one of my favorite parts of the legal journey.

Coming into law school with very little guidance, I relied on student organizations and school events to find people who knew what they were doing, hoping they’d have some wisdom to impart. And they did: 2Ls and 3Ls enthusiastically shared tips and tricks on how they survived 1L year, providing incredible resources and moral support by way of dinners and activities. Without organizations like LAHANAS (the umbrella organization that includes our affinity groups at BC Law), the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA), and the Women’s Law Center (WLC), I would have been so much more lost than I was. These organizations not only provided student mentors who guided us throughout law school, but they also set up and connected us to events with practicing attorneys, giving us even more opportunities to meet potential mentors.

I think a reason mentorship always felt so formal to me was because I grew up thinking that there was a strict hierarchy in the legal world; I didn’t know any lawyers coming into law school, and I didn’t want to be a burden to those higher up with stupid questions and my feeble attempts at conversation. But there are no stupid questions, and mentorship truly doesn’t have to be the formal connection that I once thought it to be. I thought mentorship was something that was prescribed and rigid, but it’s important to remember that this is another form of human connection—something we tend to forget when the law is involved. Once you let go of the idea that mentorship has to be a purely transactional relationship in which there must be a constant cycle of one side benefiting from the other, it’s a much easier time. Mentorship actually exists everywhere you go, whether it’s in law school, at a law firm, or a legal organization you volunteer with—people love giving back the help that they once received. Not every mentor will have a formal label affixed to them, but rather their mentorship will manifest in both formal and informal advice and guidance. Likewise, not every mentee is someone who is manually assigned as a mentee—I’d consider anyone you guide along the way to be a mentee that you’ve picked up.

Mentorship gives you an insight into all the things that you don’t see on paper. If your grades are your hard skills you list on your resume, I believe that mentorship offers the soft skills that you can list at the end. For me, mentorship offers valuable insight into the interpersonal aspect of things, such as how an organization is run, how a law firm operates on a personal level, and generally how to navigate the “norms” of the legal field. In fact, an invaluable piece of advice I’ve received from my friend who recently became a partner at her law firm is that you can do all the right things on paper and still wonder why you didn’t advance to where you wanted to be—and oftentimes, it’s because they put too much into their work product alone and not enough into cultivating genuine relationships. The legal field is inherently a relationship-heavy field, and the importance of building a rapport with coworkers—peers, juniors, or seniors—cannot be ignored.

But with all the benefits it brings, it’s important to remember that mentorship is a two-way street. You cannot expect a mentor to continue to reach out enthusiastically if it takes you a week to reply to their emails. Likewise, a busy mentor may not be able to provide the guidance that you specifically need; often, mentees feel bad about bothering their mentors for things they deem to be “unimportant,” but most mentors encourage questions. One thing I’ve noticed is that law students and lawyers both love to give back. We were all clueless fledglings trying to keep our head afloat at one point in our lives, and something about remembering the way we floundered makes us want to make others’ lives a little easier.  

As your career progresses, you will find mentorship in many different shapes and forms. One way I was able to build a great cohort of mentors was to volunteer with my scholarship program, the Don H. Liu Scholars Program. This year, I helped my program with behind-the-scenes secretarial tasks such as social media management, organizing meetings, and coordinating schedules to interview this year’s candidates. In getting more involved with the internal aspects of my program, I learned soft skills such as how to structure corporate-style emails, tricks on how to grab busy attorneys’ attention in these email exchanges, and leading meetings as a younger member. This helped me build confidence in my communication skills; despite being a student, I was given the same respect as people who have been in the game for a long time. I was also able to see brilliant minds at work—the committee consisted of partners, general counsels, and senior counsels at biglaw firms and reputable companies. I observed how they balanced their crazy schedules, and felt a newfound appreciation for attorneys who take time out of their busy days to give back to the community in this manner. The initiative I took to help, in turn, was greatly appreciated—the older members gave me tips on how to finish my 3L year strong, tips on making the bar studying process a little easier, and advice on how to be a good associate once I start this fall. Ultimately, it felt great to be a part of something bigger than myself while also being able to learn a lot. Joining organizations and helping behind the scenes is an amazing way to build rapport and absorb skills as you go.

And that is all to say that in my opinion, the best mentor-mentee relationships develop naturally. Of course not everyone you meet will be someone you vibe with, and some mentor-mentee relationships may not gel as well as others. I’d like to think that I have a strong relationship with my mentors and mentees because we genuinely enjoy spending time with each other. Whether it’s playing mahjong with my APALSA mentees or grabbing a bite to eat with my mentors and catching up, I’m blessed to have met so many different people in my life. Most of my mentorship relationships have developed into genuine friendships, and I am so grateful for that. We are all constantly learning and absorbing qualities from our surroundings and each other, and I think that’s a quite wonderful aspect of law that we often overlook. I’d encourage everyone reading this to think about all those who helped you get to where you are, and all those you’ve been able to help along the way, and take pride in contributing to a wonderful community in your own way!

---

Seung Hye “Shang” Yang is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact her at yangben@bc.edu.