What Energizes You?
Learn How You Like Spending Your Day
As I wrote about earlier this week, at this point in the summer you are slowly reaching the point of conscious incompetence. That can be a challenge. But it also presents an opportunity. You’ve had a few experiences (or maybe more than a few) where you've been able to work on projects, meet with lawyers, and maybe even see what real lawyers at your firm or organization do everyday.
Now its time to learn from those early experiences as they are are crucial data points that can help you answer the question: what do I want to do when I become a REAL lawyer?
To be clear, you don't have all of the data you need yet (and you won’t for some time) but you should remember that you are now squarely in the data collection phase of your summer. And the data you should be acquiring is not just about what practice area(s) you are interested in (litigation, transactional, regulatory, etc) but also, and perhaps even more importantly, what you want to spend your days doing. What energizes you:
Working with people? Standing up in Court? Facilitating deals? Drafting memos in a quiet office? Something else entirely?
To quote Ted Lasso, this is your chance to "try it on and see how it fits."
If you’ve already found an activity or activities that energize you, that is great! Go find more of it to confirm. Don't love what you are doing? Try to get some new experiences. And also look at what more senior people on the team are doing. That way you can start figuring out if the problem is that you are at the bottom of the responsibility pyramid or if the problem is actually the job you'd be doing ten years from now. If its the latter, you can start pivoting now!
Remember the best thing you can learn from this summer is the job you want to get after graduation. The second best thing you can learn is that you never want to do what you are doing this summer again. Both are valuable conclusions—just make sure you are collecting the right data to figure it out.
Keep standing out,
Jonah
