Student Life

Don’t Scroll Past This Article: LinkedIn and Law Students

/ Christopher Tan / Leave a comment

The feeling is unmistakable. An endless scroll through a LinkedIn carnival of contrived self-promotion and corporate-speak. Each post teeters on the brink of parody. “Thrilled to announce.” “Congrats mate!” “Excited for what’s coming!” You can picture the unseen scorecards flashing behind computer screens: applause, confetti, sympathy. And there you are, shrinking into the shadows, your own achievements contorted into trivialities.

For law students, this pressure is not just an unwelcome intrusion; it often feels imperative. If networking is our currency, LinkedIn is our trading floor. But is it a necessary evil, or just some Kantian illusion that we’ve convinced ourselves is indispensable to our profession?

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Does a “Not Real Job” On a Resume Mean Anything? Yes, and Here’s Why.

/ Catherine Beveridge / Leave a comment

The fall feels like the time of year everyone works on their resumes. Along with the changing New England leaves and pumpkin spice lattes, current and prospective law students all partake in a seasonal refresh after a busy summer. 

It was before one of these seasonal resume workshops I heard a common talking point. 

“Oh I’ve never had a real job.” 

“Is it bad that I have no political work on my resume?” 

“I was stuck working retail during the pandemic.”

This is an anxiety that many, if not all, law students have encountered at some point. Maybe it was during our application process, or maybe it’s manifesting now. We fear our experiences are not relevant to this field. Our skills from assisting with college orientation to dishwashing are not applicable to being an attorney. 

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Past Experience Pays Off: How A Podcasting Career Prepared Me For 1L

/ Ian Hurley / Leave a comment

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

A little more than four years ago, I found myself in the producer’s chair, attempting to put together my first podcast for Wondery Media. The episode centered around a mystery story, one that remains unsolved. It was no unsolved murder or whodunit yarn, but instead a tale about what happened to a 7-foot 900 lbs bronze statue of Joe Paterno, the disgraced former-head football coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions. The statue disappeared in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal that rocked the State College community back in 2011 and led to Paterno’s firing; a previously unbelievable outcome for a coach who at that time led the NCAA in career victories. The whereabouts of the statue remain unknown, and while that mystery remained, what became clear to me as I bumbled my way through putting that story together was just how little I knew about what an adequate producer does every day. 

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From Opera to Law: Meet Sara Womble

/ Sangeeta Kishore / 8 Comments

There are numerous roads to law school, and no one-size fits all path to a successful legal career. Follow along with our new series highlighting BC Law students and how they got here! 

Our first entry is a Q&A with Sara Womble, a 2L from Winston Salem, NC. After receiving a Bachelors in English and Music Performance from Duke and Master’s in Voice Performance from BU, Sara was an opera singer before coming to BC.

What did you do before coming to law school?

I spent the decade prior to coming to law school as an opera singer. It was the privilege of a lifetime to sing many roles dear to my heart, particularly in Mozart operas, and to make music and theater with the best colleagues, fellow artists, and lifelong friends imaginable. More recently, in addition to my performing career, I’ve served as an executive at Opera Neo in San Diego, a company whose mission I believe in passionately – namely, creating innovative interpretations of classic operas, keeping these gorgeous works vibrant and alive for today’s audiences. I will cherish all these experiences for the rest of my life, and I carry them with me every day.

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It Takes a Village: Why Mentorship is So Important

/ Haley Cole / Leave a comment

Today, law students are primarily sculpted in classrooms, with the chances for out-of-class experience strewn throughout summer work, school clinics, and externships. But becoming a lawyer in the U.S. was originally premised on the experience of apprenticing. Direct observation, hands-on work, with a touch of baptism-by-fire-shaped lawyers. On a broader level, apprenticing was premised on mentorship. Though law students must endure the modern right of passage that is the dreaded 1L year spent in structured doctrinals, mentorship has remained a mainstay of a legal education. 

“Networking” is a daunting word for most in the professional world and known all too well by those in the legal field. Law students understand early on that building a network is a crucial part of forming their careers. But mentorship is just as important as – and in fact both encompasses the nature of and is an expansion of – networking. As a remnant of early legal education, having mentors from the moment you start law school until your last day of retirement at that fancy law firm you started is vital to success in the legal field. Having a network is important, but having people in your corner to guide the ship that is your career journey is what makes your network rich.

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Why I’m Okay with Being a ‘Non-Traditional Student’

/ Michael Deere / Leave a comment

I’ve never quite belonged in law school. I was told when I started the application process – and many times since – that I’m a ‘non-traditional’ student, which seemed mainly to mean that I was older than everybody else. I didn’t mind; I am older than everybody else. But before law school I never thought of myself as non-traditional. Or old, for that matter. Now it feels like I’m inescapably both, whether I like it or not.

Law school is hard enough without being told you don’t ‘really’ fit in – and that’s ultimately what being ‘non-traditional’ means. You don’t fit in. And in truth, I don’t. For one thing, people call me by my first name here all the time. Outside of a doctor’s office or Starbucks, I haven’t heard my first name this much in twenty years. It was always “Professor Deere,” or “Dr. Deere,” or just…Deere. Which is what I was before all this first-name calling business.

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How Can Line Dancing Help Reframe 1L September? Let Me Explain.

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

By Catherine Beveridge

As a 1L, you might think the torrent of information coming your way will start to slow after orientation. We covered the major bases like the academic success program, experiential learning, the job search, and even heard an inspirational talk with Fr. Jack Butler. However, when classes start, it ramps up even higher. Every club has an introductory meeting, networking events pop up, and the career office promised to leave you alone but here they are with a resume workshop right as you want to go home on a Friday afternoon. 

After another day of classes, introductory meetings and workshops I found myself on my bed, exhausted and staring face-up at the ceiling. That was when I discovered a way to step back. 

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1Ls, We’ve Got This (Don’t We?)

/ Alexandra Staller / Leave a comment

I’ve known I wanted to go to law school since I was in the 4th grade. My teacher decided to throw a mock trial competition, and I was assigned to be one of the attorneys for my client who had his tap shoes stolen from his neighbor. I had an absolute blast winning the case for him, and from then on I knew I wanted to do with my life what I did for that one week in 4th grade. 

That was almost 12 years ago. The other day as I sat in my Civil Procedure class I thought to myself: “I cannot believe I’m here right now.” It had always seemed like law school was just an idea, until it became a goal––and now it’s just what I do every Monday-Friday from 9am-3pm.

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3L is Finally Here: Why This One is so Special

/ kristievhoang / Leave a comment

Thank goodness the library doesn’t issue noise complaints on the first day of school. 

My friends and I — running on the high of eating a grocery store salad in the Yellow Room — skipped to the fourth floor of the library. There, we each took turns accidentally playing Instagram Reels on full volume. Like clockwork, anxious 1L’s flooded the library atrium at 3:00 p.m., muttering reflections about their inaugural lectures and cold calls to new friends. 

There’s nothing like the first day of 3L — or as my friends and I have dubbed it, “senior year.” Novelty accompanies familiarity: freshly-painted Stuart Hall walls and large-scale portraits dot the paths we’ve spent pacing between classes. Somehow, Legal Grounds manages to brew better coffee every year. And even the light streaming through the library’s fourth floor windows cuts different shadows on the books and reports lining the shelves. 

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Two Weddings, a Funeral, and a Naturalization Ceremony

/ Jonathan Bertulis-Fernandes / Leave a comment

Two weddings, a funeral, and a naturalization ceremony. This pretty much sums up my time in law school, in many ways. I lost my dad suddenly at the end of my 1L Spring semester (during finals: really wouldn’t recommend). During my 2L and 3L years I had two weddings: one in the U.S. and one in the U.K., where I grew up and my family still live. (For the sake of clarity: these weddings were to the same person. I’m nothing if not consistent.) And after having lived in the U.S. since 2016, I became a citizen in February of last year.

Of course, my time in law school was marked by a great deal more. But, when I think back to my time at BC Law, these are the progress points—the proverbial highway markers as it were—that map out the last three years for me temporally. These events were the points at which “life” most intruded into law school. Law school is all-consuming in a way I do not think I fully comprehended before I began my 1L year. I had worked for five years before returning to school, including three and a half years in a high-pressure role in New York City. But nothing prepared me for the way that law school threatened to take over and take me away from my sense of self. The death of my father, marrying my wife, cementing my life over in the U.S.: these were the events and the life-is-what-happens-to-you-while-you’re-busy-making-other-plans moments that burst the illusion of the bubble of law school for me. 

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