Get to Know the CSO: Jill Hwang

A career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Jill Hwang.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in law school, and how did you overcome it?

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Memo Week’s Secret Memo

Memo week came and went with the grace of a Vanderbilt train crash. While all LP students are told at the beginning of the semester what they can expect, memo week still manages to derail our priorities. Nevertheless, if we heed the lessons learned from this short period, we might be able to build healthy habits to avoid future pains.

Memo week tends to bring the first symptoms of stress to the forefront, and its showing is magnificently diverse. 

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4 Ways to Stay in Touch With Your Summer Mentors

While interning at a law firm, nonprofit organization, or government agency last summer, you likely found some professionals who you really clicked with. Maybe they were your direct supervisors, or maybe they were just attorneys with positions or career paths that really spoke to you. Either way, it’s important that you don’t let the busy school season prevent you from maintaining the relationships you cultivated just a few months ago. To make sure you aren’t forgotten by your mentors, follow these four tips.

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Get to Know the CSO: Naomi Bass

A career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Next up is the Associate Director of Career Services, Naomi Bass.

What is your role in the CSO?

Since 2021, I have been an Associate Director in the CSO. My role includes advising JD students about career options and decisions at all stages of their law school experience. Our team collaborates to create and deliver professional development programs, conduct mock interviews, review application materials, and engage with BC Law alumni on a range of programs to support our students on their career journeys.

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Law School: Stepping Stone or End Goal? 

By Alyssa Leston

So you made the decision to go to law school. 

Maybe–like me–you realized it was the last day to sign up for the LSAT for the upcoming application cycle, forcing you to spend a frantic few weeks studying and then researching which school was the right fit. 

Or maybe you’ve known for years that this was your path; months of preparation, tours, and networking brought you to the school you are at now, feeling ready and excited to start achieving your dream.

Or maybe, now that you’re here, you’ve stopped caring about how you got to where you are, because you realized that regardless of the process, you’re not excited to be there after all. 

So, what now?

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Sidebar: A Jesuit Primer on Developing an Inner Life

An intriguing opportunity landed in my inbox on an otherwise unremarkable summer day: an all-expenses paid retreat at BC’s Connors Center in Dover, Massachusetts, one that promised a reprieve from the travails of law school and an introduction to the Jesuit precepts which drive the institution’s educational mission. It sounded interesting, so I took the plunge and signed up.

With an upbringing where religion was largely absent, I came to the event with an open mind and a strong sense of curiosity. Growing up in an environment where many of my peers had relationships with spiritual institutions always left me perplexed at the margins. Whether they complained about the rigidity of their Church’s traditions and scripture or took the Gospel as truth, it always fascinated me how complicated a relationship people can have with God.

Of course, anyone acting with a degree of self awareness is conscious of the arbitrariness of their existence. We are cosmically confined, set in perpetual motion from an unknowable event that long preceded us and placed here by our ancestors, who were caught up in the same predicament. It’s hardly surprising that most of us are left questioning why we are here and how we should conduct our lives.

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Get to Know the CSO: Sarah Bookbinder

A career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. First up is the Assistant Dean of Career Services, Sarah Bookbinder.

What is your role in the CSO?

As Assistant Dean, my main role is to oversee all of the ongoing work we do in the office, including individual advising, program planning, large scale interview programs, outreach to employers and alumni, and pro bono opportunities. I am also the main point of contact between the CSO and other offices in the Law School to make sure we’re coordinating our efforts, and I meet with students when they have ideas or specific needs beyond career advising. In addition to that daily work, I’m keeping a close eye on the market and the evolving goals and concerns of BC students to make sure our programming continues to reflect all of this.

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Conquering the Cold Call

I’ve only been in law school for a few weeks, and I’ve already been confronted with my biggest fear: the cold call. It’s unlikely that I’m alone in this. Like many of us, my initial visions of law school came from that scene in Legally Blonde where Elle was publicly shamed by the professor and kicked out of the classroom, with even the overachieving readers of Aristotle riddled with fear. 

The film’s exaggerations aside, I still felt daunted by the idea of entering a law school class. I won’t deny the panic I felt seeing the dreaded phrase on nearly every syllabus. “Why can’t I just answer when I feel like answering?” I could already picture it in my head: doing all the readings, knowing the cases front to back, and still freezing up the moment I get called on. It seemed like beyond all preparation, my mortification was inevitable. 

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The Duality of 3L

Returning to BC Law after 2L Summer – no matter your internship – takes an adjustment. Over the summer we have been trusted with real legal responsibilities, worked on case teams, represented clients in court, drafted transactional and litigation documents, and previewed the careers waiting for us upon graduation. 

There are two emerging approaches to tackling our 3L year. The first is escaping school work and maximizing experiential opportunities, the second is soaking up every moment of student life. I fall in the first category, my friend Taylor MacDonald falls in the latter, and we will do our best to encapsulate these two approaches.

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What Your Classroom Seat Says About You

There’s nothing quite like the first few days of law school. Everyone shows up to class twenty minutes early to scope out the perfect seat that they’ll occupy for the next three-and-a-half months. I kid you not when I say that I showed up to one class seven minutes early last week, and I was still the last one to arrive before class started.

While this may just seem like law students being more Type A than usual, the stakes of this decision could be legitimately high. Are you going to do well in this class? Or are you going to become way more invested in the online shopping habits of the person in front of you than the ins and outs of civil procedure? It all comes down to the seat you’re going to be sitting in every day and the view it provides you.

Fortunately, you still have a few more days before the opportunity to choose a new seat is over until January. But, the window is closing fast. Here’s the vibe of each possible section at your disposal.

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