perspectives

The 1L Summer Internship Search: Four Things to Keep in Mind

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

When I was a 1L, I thought I would secure my summer internship over winter break. However, I quickly realized that was a bit of a pipe dream as I kept applying to opportunities and getting little response. I wasn’t too concerned until February rolled around, when I started to fear it wouldn’t happen for me. I was a hard-working student! I had good grades! What if I never got an internship?!

If you’re at this point in your 1L summer internship search, be sure to remember the following:

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Technology in the Classroom: A Blessing or a Curse?

/ Eddie Godino / Leave a comment

These days, technology is so ingrained in our lives that it’s practically impossible to go without it. While there are those who oppose our collective reliance on phones and computers to go about our daily lives, it’s hard to deny the benefits. Technology has revolutionized many aspects of human life, including our careers, and the legal field is no exception. Gone are the days of spending hours in a library pouring over volumes of case reporters — now, you can simply plug keywords into Westlaw and have access to whatever information you need right away. But if lawyers nowadays are constantly using technology to do their jobs, why is it that some professors institute no-tech policies in the classroom?

Before going any further, I should acknowledge that I’m biased. As a member of Gen Z with a father who works in the tech industry, I grew up using technology for pretty much everything. I rely on the GPS to get everywhere, I watch YouTube videos instead of reading instructions, and the last time I took handwritten notes for class was in middle school. My freshman year of high school was the first year the administration decided to give all the students iPads — a product with great educational potential, but in the hands of teenagers, probably more of a distraction. 

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5 Professor Personalities That Make BC Law Great

/ Reilly Doak / Leave a comment

In honor of BC Law earning a #8 spot on Princeton Review’s 2023 Law School Rankings: Best Professors list, I have attempted to distill the five most common BC Law Professor personality types that make them the best of the best. As a disclaimer, there are undoubtedly fantastic professors who were not mentioned on this list due to my limited experience and response sample size. Additionally, many professors will fit into multiple categories, and other amazing professors are in a category of their own that did not make the list for the sake of brevity.

Without further ado:

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The Law of Everything

/ Thomas R. Blakely / 1 Comment

A consistent theme of my past three years in law school has been the parallel between learning the law, and how both its practice and pretense have seemingly become the epicenter of everything. 

It’s not just what has become something of a national sport of canceling, suing, impeaching, boycotting, censoring, deplatforming, overriding, misinforming, deposing, doxxing, room-reading and of course, vibe-checking—but also the tendency of today’s political and legal intelligentsia to continuously find new things to complicate and extend “the law” into.

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‘The sport of argument:’ Nathaniel DeMelis and a Commitment to Justice

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

Over the 2022 holiday break, the BC Law Impact blog is running a series of some of the most powerful and fascinating admissions essays from first-year students. These personal statements, submitted as part of their admissions applications, tell a variety of compelling stories, but the thread connecting them all is an example of the kind of person who is attracted to a BC Law education: one who is driven to work collaboratively with others, achieve great things and make a real difference in the world.

We want to thank the Office of Admissions, and all of the student essay writers, for agreeing to share their stories with us. For more Admissions tips and other content, check out BC Law’s new TikTok channel.

Be it the penchant for holiday arguments, or the lessons of my late grandfather, my family has consistently shaped my growth and founded my interest in the law. 

In an Italian family that frequently exercises their freedom of speech in the sport of argument, it can be difficult to get a word in edgewise—especially around the holiday dinner table. There exists only a brief window of opportunity to make your point, and make it well, before you will either be refuted or simply shouted down.

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‘Taking pride in one’s own culture:’ Daniel Li’s Path to Law School

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

Over the 2022 holiday break, the BC Law Impact blog is running a series of some of the most powerful and fascinating admissions essays from first-year students. These personal statements, submitted as part of their admissions applications, tell a variety of compelling stories, but the thread connecting them all is an example of the kind of person who is attracted to a BC Law education: one who is driven to work collaboratively with others, achieve great things and make a real difference in the world.

We want to thank the Office of Admissions, and all of the student essay writers, for agreeing to share their stories with us. For more Admissions tips and other content, check out BC Law’s new TikTok channel.

During the first thirteen years of my life, living in Hungary, I cannot count how many times I felt embarrassed for doing something that was only natural to everyone else at school: talking to my mother. The only difference was that my classmates spoke Hungarian, while I spoke Chinese. The difference is minute, but it was significant for me. As my mother picked me up from school and asked how my day was, I chose either to stay silent or occasionally, say “hao,” which means “fine” and is a short and sweet, one-syllable word, just sufficient to answer my mother’s question and to not embarrass myself in front of my Hungarian classmates. But the source of embarrassment did not stem from being different in general—it rather stemmed from being Chinese, as my classmates made countless “harmless” jokes about eating dog meat, or engaged in “well-intentioned” stereotyping about having “almond eyes.”

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‘Empowering young women to use their voice:’ Ellie Burger and Creating Change

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

Over the 2022 holiday break, the BC Law Impact blog is running a series of some of the most powerful and fascinating admissions essays from first-year students. These personal statements, submitted as part of their admissions applications, tell a variety of compelling stories, but the thread connecting them all is an example of the kind of person who is attracted to a BC Law education: one who is driven to work collaboratively with others, achieve great things and make a real difference in the world.

We want to thank the Office of Admissions, and all of the student essay writers, for agreeing to share their stories with us. For more Admissions tips and other content, check out BC Law’s new TikTok channel.

Halfway through our cruise on the Potomac River, myself and the other Prudential Spirit of Community Award recipients were told to elaborate further on what convened us there that day. We had all been selected for making meaningful contributions to our communities through volunteer service. While I was eager to share details on the organization I had founded and hear from the other participants about theirs, I was hesitant. I could not help but think that there was a ceiling of sorts, a limit to the impact that any one individual, especially an adolescent, could have on such serious matters.

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‘A calling by God:’ Jason O’Dwyer and the Catholic Mission

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

Over the 2022 holiday break, the BC Law Impact blog is running a series of some of the most powerful and fascinating admissions essays from first-year students. These personal statements, submitted as part of their admissions applications, tell a variety of compelling stories, but the thread connecting them all is an example of the kind of person who is attracted to a BC Law education: one who is driven to work collaboratively with others, achieve great things and make a real difference in the world.

We want to thank the Office of Admissions, and all of the student essay writers, for agreeing to share their stories with us. For more Admissions tips and other content, check out BC Law’s new TikTok channel.

When I was a senior in high school, I realized the truth of God’s existence, and after a long period of contemplation, I began my process of conversion to the Catholic Church. This conversion has been my greatest challenge to overcome, my greatest trial, though this has been a spiritual trial rather than a physical or mental one. Much like Soren Kierkegaard laid out in his body of work, my process of fully accepting the truth of Christianity and becoming a Christian involved the laborious process of adopting the obligations that the Christian worldview puts on a believer. Going from the ethical phase of my life to a truly religious sense required a shift in my entire perspective on the most fundamental level. To accomplish this, I needed to abdicate my selfish desires for worldly things, learn to love God with my whole being, and take up a new self-image as a child of God. This process of becoming a Christian not only led me to Boston College, but also led me to my desire to learn the legal practice in the first place, so that I could fulfill my vocation and use all my faculties to be a man for others in the truest sense.

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‘A matter of life and death:’ Avika Shana Dhillon and Advocating for Others

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / 1 Comment

Over the 2022 holiday break, the BC Law Impact blog is running a series of some of the most powerful and fascinating admissions essays from first-year students. These personal statements, submitted as part of their admissions applications, tell a variety of compelling stories, but the thread connecting them all is an example of the kind of person who is attracted to a BC Law education: one who is driven to work collaboratively with others, achieve great things and make a real difference in the world.

We want to thank the Office of Admissions, and all of the student essay writers, for agreeing to share their stories with us. For more Admissions tips and other content, check out BC Law’s new TikTok channel.

Music on hold is torture. Dial-up internet mixed with semi-smooth jazz and alien static, continuing in tightening circles that constrict the listener as a boa constrictor annihilates a deer. As a chronically ill person, hours on hold with my future in peril has made me maintain perspective on what I need to accomplish before time runs out. I need to ensure quality of care from my provider, while not burning out before my cell phone battery does. Am I going to law school because waiting for a medical insurance representative to speak with me enrages me? Not exactly. I am going because the fear that accompanies the entire process of receiving healthcare represents a problem I want to alleviate, and that will best be accomplished by attending law school.

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‘Advocacy in the face of adversity’: Deja Bryant’s drive toward the law

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

Over the 2022 holiday break, the BC Law Impact blog is running a series of some of the most powerful and fascinating admissions essays from first-year students. These personal statements, submitted as part of their admissions applications, tell a variety of compelling stories, but the thread connecting them all is the kind of person who is attracted to a BC Law education: one who is driven to work collaboratively with others, achieve great things and make a real difference in the world.

We want to thank the Office of Admissions, and all of the student essay writers, for agreeing to share their stories with us. For more Admissions tips and other content, check out BC Law’s new TikTok channel.

I have felt immense pressure to tell a story about one particular instance in my life that sparked my calling to become a lawyer; a unique, personal, extraordinary occurrence intimately intertwined with justice that would make it clear to you, the reader, as to why I want to become an attorney. However, the truth is that there have been a multitude of occurrences in my life that contribute to my “why” for becoming an attorney. I would like to speak to three times in my life in which my desire for a profession in law and advocacy was completely lucid: as a young girl taking care of and living with my aunt battling HIV/AIDS, as the Howard University “voter registration girl,” and my time as a seventh grade teacher.

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