Thursday, August 22, 2013

Intern blues.

Here is a post from a while ago:

Today is the beginning of my 6th week at my internship and it’s started off pretty badly. I’m interning at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and I thought it would be a great place to intern because I am thinking about law school and wanted to get a little insight into law in the non-profit sector. Of course, as a third year undergrad with no prior knowledge of law, the only things that I could do for my internship were distinctly non-law related, alas I found a way in which to satisfy improving my current skill set as well as gaining knowledge in a field that I knew very little about.

As the Development and Communications intern I write grant proposals and letters of inquiry, help maintain the donor database, and write success stories of the interesting cases that get closed by the Legal Aid attorneys. It is important work, of course, and it is right up my alley, as an ex-avid writer and Anthropology student, doing tons of writing and tedious work in databases is my forte. In return for my work, I get to attend the events that the Summer Associates attend: meet and greets with local judges and influential attorneys, meetings with big law firms in Cleveland, court hearings and seminars.

Today was supposed to be the first of these law education happenings; we were going to the Court of Appeals to hear oral arguments and I was super excited for it. In the mock trials that I’d seen I’d only ever seen regular court cases, never appeals and I’d also never been in a real court before—double score! I made sure I was up early, I wore some of my new business digs and had breakfast, I was preparing for success and super excited to get to experience court for the first time. But of course, nothing can go as planned and in typical Monday fashion I missed my train.

Really, my train was early and I missed it by mere minutes and ended up having to wait for the next train that effectively caused me to be too late to go. Not only did I not get to go to court, I was at a loss for work, we were supposed to be at the Court House from 9AM-12PM, essentially leaving me with 3 hours to kill before I was actually supposed to start working.

Of course I was bummed, I really wanted to go to court and I also didn’t want to be stuck in the office with nothing to do for 3 hours. But so goes life, hopefully the next time I won’t underestimate the time and will actually be able to go. Le sigh.

No comments:

Post a Comment