Date: May 17th, 2010
As much as I love this project, it don't pay the bills. Now that school is over for the year, it was time to get myself a job. I few months back I found one at Legal Services of South Central Michigan in Lansing. What I didn't realize is that I would hit the ground running on the first day.
There's very little to tell about my new experience today, except that I was incredibly nervous about it. Putting together a letter to send to a real, living, breathing human being whose life will be impacted by it is very different than writing a brief about excessive ATM fees for a law school class. I had an almost overwhelming sense that not getting this right would matter.
At the end of the day, that feeling was a silly one, since my letter was double-checked and signed by the attorney I'm working with over the summer before it was sent out anyway. For me, though, the point remains that it felt so much more real than it did in school. When I was growing up, my mother used to tell me that she hated math until she started learning about the mathematics of money. Then it made sense to use this formula or that calculation because doing them right changed something real and material instead of just numbers on a page.
That's how I started feeling pretty much immediately at this job. At the end of the day, my one little letter may not matter all that much, but there was something almost surreal to me to think about what was going to happen to that letter. At some point in the near future, someone, a client, would open that envelope and hold that specific piece of paper in their hands. Its no Supreme Court brief, by any means, but it was a big step towards really, truly, having the career I want.
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