This draft is good at helping to identify the issues to write about. If you want to do criminal defense, help people, and disconnect at the end of the work day, the most important route to improvement in the essay is to look at the tensions among those objectives, in order to begin thinking strategically about what you intend and how you intend to make it happen.

The people criminal defense counsel help are criminals. In no segment of the practice do the innocent comprise a sufficient client base to pay the rent, and in agencies of public defense clients are assigned, not chosen. There are indeed ways to make a longer-term difference in the system, even as defense counsel, but the work from day to day is about helping people to minimize the punishment they suffer for inflicting harm on others. This is good and important work, if we are to have a just society at all, regardless of the identity and moral status of the immediate client. But how one disconnects from the doing of that work at the end of the day, in which "disconnection" and "dissociation" are close synonyms, is important to think about and understand.

I'm glad you are considering doing this work. I'm glad you know how to gain some exposure to its realities while in law school. I think it is important that your reflections on it—even at this earliest, speculative stage—embrace the issues it raises head on, not through either "gladness at opportunity" or a continual struggle with individual self-doubt. These are also valid feelings, to be sure, but they get in the way of the slightly deeper introspection, nearer to the bone, where you can do some very powerful self-scrutiny at this point.

Reflections after a year in law school

-- By ElizabethHayden - 26 Apr 2018

The kind of lawyer I want to be

I want to be the kind of lawyer who cares about their work, helps people solve their problems, and goes home at the end of the day and completely disconnects. I need to care about what I’m doing or I won’t want to get up in the morning and I won’t want to go the extra mile when I see opportunities to do so. No matter how interesting the work is, I’ll always feel like I’ve sold 8+ hours of each day to someone else, grinding away until my time is my own again. Being a law student living on borrowed money after supporting myself for a few years has been hard, and I’m excited to get back to that point again. Being at Columbia while having no money and watching your classmates move forward on the path to big law is difficult, but after spending a year in law school I’m more confident than ever that I want to devote my work time to helping individuals and not to generating as much money as possible.

What does it even mean to help people?

Helping people can mean a lot of things, not all of which I personally agree are good. You can do a lot of things that make it look and feel like you’re doing good without actually moving forward. I want to be in a position where I can help a lot of people and make some kind of impact that lasts beyond my own career, but I also want to make sure I can see results from the work that I do, and I want to make sure I’m focusing my efforts in the best places.

In law school I’ve seen so many different ways that lawyers and law students are making a difference for individuals, and I want to be involved in some of those projects as a 2L and 3L. It’s been inspiring to see how many different ways there are for me to get involved, though I’ll admit, it’s also been a bit intimidating. There’s always a feeling that there’s someone else who could do a better job than me, who has some special skill that I don’t have. The biggest hurdle for me in jumping in to start helping has been the feeling that I’m not the best candidate for any job. I think that the best thing I can do is push past that fear so that I can try to build up my skills and experience throughout law school.

Why I still want to continue here

After a year at Columbia, I feel even more confident that I can find a more fulfilling job with a law degree than I had before I came here. I’m also more aware than ever of the temptations that I need to avoid to make sure I don’t end up in a situation that is going to make me miserable.

This past year has been a harder year than I could have ever expected. However it’s been exciting to see all of the opportunities that are available to me here at Columbia. I will admit to you that I want to “go home” and it’s hard to be somewhere where you feel out of place. But I know that dropping out of law school and getting on a flight to go back to a place where I feel comfortable is only going to feel good for a little while.

My future path in law school

The most important thing I want to get out of law school is experience doing things with the law. I enjoy learning about the law and I’m excited to have a chance to study the things I’m interested in more in-depth. However the real reason I’m here is to get a feel for what it’s like to be a lawyer and specifically what it’s like to provide legal services to people who need them. My hope is that working with clients in different contexts will help me figure out what kind of clients I enjoy working with and what work environments I thrive in.

This summer I’m going to be working at a public defender’s office. I tried to pick an office where I would be able to do as many different types of work as possible as a 1L, so that I can really see what the job would be like rather than spending all of my time just improving my research and writing skills. I want to use this opportunity not just to learn about public defense work, but also to meet attorneys doing the work that I aspire to do so that I can see where they get fulfillment from the work and what challenges they face.

Next year I’m going to participate in the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem community defense externship, where I’ll have the chance to take on an actual case and I’ll be able to see how a more holistic approach to public defense works in practice. It will be incredibly valuable for me to get a chance to learn from an attorney in a one-on-one setting and get a feel for the process in a more direct way.

For the rest of my time I want to maximize the externship and clinic opportunities available to me, and I want to take classes that are going to help prepare me to work in criminal defense and as a trial advocate. I also want to get involved with some of the pro bono opportunities available so that I can learn about other types of legal services and gain more experiencing working with clients in other settings. I also want to get more involved in the public interest community at Columbia so that I can connect with people here who care about the same things that matter to me.

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