When I walked into my last Critical Perspectives class of the semester this past Monday, written on the board was the question: ‘Why did you go to law school?’ This question was nothing new – law students get asked by family, friends, and most law school applications ask why you want to go to law school – but in class that day, it felt like a very personal one.

Sunday night I was working on my cover letter, as one does on their Sunday evening. As I was writing, I was thinking about all of the experiences and skills I had that might separate me from the hundreds of cover letters that 1Ls across the country will be sending to summer employers. My entire professional life flashed before my eyes: school nights picking up trash after college basketball games, a few summers lifeguarding and babysitting, and that one cashier job at Home Depot. But I landed on my experience last year working for a mass tort litigation firm, where I was a paralegal on the Boy Scouts of America sexual abuse class action case. That role absolutely changed my life in more than a professional sense, and gave me my answer to the question on the board that morning in Critical Perspectives.

At the firm I worked at, I managed clients’ files and corresponded with a lot of the clients over phone and email. A vast majority of our clients were men who were involved with scouting between the 1960s-1990s, and they were from all over the country. I had conversations with clients from places ranging from urban centers like Los Angeles and Miami to ones in middle-of-nowhere North Dakota or Alaska. All of them were survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The conversations I had with many of them were deeply personal and always eye-opening – the conversations that made me simultaneously feel grateful to be living my life and guilty that I didn’t know of all the awful things that could happen to good people. An entire demographic of people who lived their lives being quiet and feeling ashamed for what happened to them as children finally were given the opportunity to share their stories and earn some form of justice. It was very difficult to separate my emotions from this kind of legal work, but it was both rewarding and grounding to place into perspective what I could do with a law degree.

Many of the clients I spoke to also came from underrepresented socioeconomic backgrounds. They were confused about the process of submitting their records, if they had any, and signing affidavit forms. They had no idea what statutes of limitations governed their claims, or that the law could have protected them from what they experienced in the first place. I often had to ask the attorneys I worked with questions about the processes we were guiding our clients through, and sometimes it felt like I was learning just as much as they were. It was during these moments I realized just how much privilege I had to be surrounded by such intelligent attorneys, and how privileged I was to be attending law school and getting a similar education for myself. I thought about how incredible it is that we all live in the same country and are governed by the same laws, but only some of us know how to understand them more than others simply because of the cards we were dealt throughout our lives.

Before law school, I always thought I’d go to school to get a big law job and see what happens from there. While getting a big law job is still a goal of mine, my experience working at the firm last year helped me come to the realization that along the road in what I hope to be a long legal career, I would love to use my legal education to share the law with others who may not have the same privileges I do in accessing it through an amazing network of brilliant current and future lawyers. So – when Professor Farbman asked us “why did you go to law school” – I had my answer.

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Alexandra Staller is a 1L student at BC Law. Contact her at stallera@bc.edu.