Law school.

Divorce and suicide factory. Gateway to where I want to be in 5 minutes or 5 years. A chance to do good. An open door. A long, painful slog.

A place to close your mind to the world and study. $300,000 in loans I will spend 10 years paying off.

A chance to shine, to be among crazily-geeky policy wonks and fellow intellectuals. An elitist club for preppy frat boys only looking to make 100k after 3L.

A terrifyingly hierarchical, obsessively graded 3 years.

A place to get joyously lost in the law, to delve into my core beliefs about justice, to find my true intellectual home.

—

Every time I talk to law students, I swing between these beliefs like an overly enthusiastic metronome. So many lawyers I hear about hate their careers, and are fundamentally unhappy with the work they do. Of the lawyers I know, including my awesome uncle Pete, most of them are doing good and tangibly helping people. They are roughly as happy as my friends who are working in Computer Science, and tend to get the chance to act on their core beliefs more often than your average programmer.

When I think of the days I watched lawyers at Human Rights USA call up clients, help them prepare to fight to stay in the United States I can see myself doing that for years at a time. When we casually discussed the relationship between the UN Convention on Human Rights with US law, that was fun then and can only get more fun the more I know about it.

When I watched the lawyers at Human Rights USA struggle to influence and huge, and sometimes intractable legal system, I could see myself burning out on it. When my fellow interns, all of whom were law students, talked about the predatory, aggressive law student and lawyers, constantly looking for a 1-up in the fight to make Law Review or Partner, I could see a community of people I never want to associate.

The daily work of a lawyer involves a pile of paperwork (bleh), research (fun!), stilted writing (ugg) suffused with ethical arguments (yay!).

—

I keep on hoping my choice for a career will seem simple and clear. I went to a panel yesterday, which I helped put on, where current law school applicants talked about their experiences. So many of them saw this as their obvious career choice.

But as I keep growing and exploring, I know that I can foment justice in a socially conscious start-up, getting grants for a non-profit, writing for a magazine, working in the international giving department of a major tech company, working for the United States State Department, teaching as a Professor–or yes, being a lawyer.

I know I can find work I love and that fits my passions, with or without law school. The question I am face with, which anyone who is introspective and applying to law school is faced with is: is this the best use of my talents?

Given the people I know I like to work with, the kind of work I like to do, and the impact I want to make in this world, is law the only place I can find my true home? No. The best place?

That’s a question I am still working on.

Inspirational Quote:

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

–Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear.

In a recent class discussion, I called out a classmate for pontificating on women’s issues from a position of privilege. He was arguing that women are never discouraged from studying Computer Science because he had never seen it happen.

To me, privilege is about not thinking about how other people (people without my privilege) see the world. After that class, I started trying to think about what kinds of privilege I have that I am not conscious of (I am pretty conscious of my “white privilege” and “heterosexual privilege“). I tried to think about times every day when I inconvenience people unnecessarily because I assume they are like me in this privilege.

My biggest privilege? Height.

This is not an uncommon privilege, and it is one with measurable benefits: Tall people make $789 more per inch per year, and are 90% more likely to ascend to the CEO chairs of Fortune 500 Companies, according to Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book.” says blogger and entrepreneur Penelope Trunk.

My housemates probably suffer more than anyone else because of this privilege, every time I put at the good tupperware on the top shelf, or the garbage bags on the top right of our deep pantry, or the brown sugar on top of the flour, right at my eye height but signifigantly above the heads of most of my housemates. I work on my bike, assuming they can use it–then remember it is the wrong size. I offer to lend them dresses–but realize formal gowns for my 5′8″ frame will not work for my 5′0″ friend.

The weirdest place when I caught myself exercising this privilege was when we were recently decorating our dining-room with Firefly posters. I wanted to hang them so the focus of the poster was at my eye-height, which is approximately an inch higher than my co-hanger’s heads. We had to negotiate their height so no one would feel hunched or dwarfed over breakfast (low posters feel like low ceilings to me, and high posters make everyone feel like children in our own home).

I feel a responsibility to examine my positions of privilege, because then I will understand how other people enact their privilege, and what I can do about it. For an awesome examination of male privilege, check out Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “If I Were a Man”.

Inspirational Quote:

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1858

I reviewed close to 30 resumes and applications for a program of which I am a member (I’m keeping details obscured for the privacy of the applicants). I am currently sitting, waiting for my next interviewee to show up.

In reading those resumes, I have developed a list of 10 things I will be doing differently for my resume.

1. Change your objective to fit the job! It is quite difficult to remain neutral on (much less become supportive of) an applicants application which stated their objective was to “Gain an Internship in the Financial Sector”. Real people have to read your resumes, make it as easy as possible.
2. Delete “Operating Systems” if all you know is OSX and Vista. I simply do not care. Now, if you run your own home-brewed Linux distro, or even Open Solaris or Red Hat, that tells me something about you. For any job I am going to be applying for, saying I can use the world’s two most popular operating systems should be as irrelevant as saying I speak English clearly. It should be a given.
3. Delete “Relevant Coursework” if it isn’t relevant
4. Make skimming easy. Give me clear headings with short bullets. Keep the font around 12–reading resume after resume is hard on the eyes, and you want to make it easy to like you for a position.
5. Delete “Software” if it isn’t relevant, which it absolutely is not if you are applying for a travel grant. The presence of this section was my litmus-test for determining whether an applicant had bothered to customize her resume for the application. Also, even if you are applying for an internship where the software is relevant, unless you know something more than Microsoft Word and Excel, do not tell me. I don’t care.
6. Don’t say “references availible upon request”. Of course they are.
7. Give me space for notes on your resume. Say I am reading your resume, and I see you worked at Stanford Libraries when you were an undergrad there. I want to write a note to myself–”See if she knows Rachel”–but can’t, because you filled every availible inch of your resume with text. Too bad for you.
8. Keep your fonts simple. Times New Roman in bold, underlined and italics, with 1-3 sizes of font for different headers is fine. Unless you are a confident graphic designer, and sometimes even then, you show more class with simplicity than with decorative typesetting.
9. Use numbers. “Quadrupled the number of client stories on website”, “Managed portfolio of over $100,000 in assets”, “Built social media presence which brought in over $1000 in 3 days, 3 months after internship completed”. These are much more powerful than banal paragraphs about your impact on ROI or contribution to a project. Give me numbers.
10. Include locations of past jobs. Perhaps this is not necessary for all applications, but this is a small way of advertising your network. If you’ve worked in Washington DC, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Pittsburgh PA, your interviewer may know someone in those cities and feel connected to you.

Summary of 10 tiny tips to improve your resume:

Optimize for the job in front of you. Make it scannable. Advertise your network.

Keep up hope!

Inspirational Quote:

“Robert H. Schuller – “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”

For the past few days, I have been interviewing candidates for a program I am in with a grant associated with it. In those few days, I have learned more about effective interviewing than in all my interviews combined. Here is what I’ve learned:

1. Be prepared with: 1) a 10 second pitch which you are passionate about, 2) a clear narrative about why you want the job/to join the program for which you are applying, 3) 1-3 really insightful questions about the organization/position
2. When interviewing, exude confidence and passion–there is nothing more boring in a day of interviews than someone who looks tired, uncommitted or uninterested (if you are an introvert, like me, try to see the interview as a chance to spread information and learn. It is an exchange, a teaching and a learning moment).
3. Address the questions you are asked seriously, and give solid details and examples. Bland does not sell, neither do generalities. The only candidates who have knocked me off my feet have given me insight into the problems my group works on.

Final tip: tact is always appreciated! No matter how unbiased you interview team is, pointing out a major issues with the organization’s strategy is best done politely. We’re only people, and hurting our feelings cannot help your candidacy.

Inspirational Quote:

“Second, probably the single greatest personal intellectual epiphany I’ve had since leaving academia is that the real world actually has interesting problems: not just problems that you ought to deal with because life as we know it could get pretty screwed up if we don’t, but problems that are actually intellectually engaging, make use of the cognitive muscles you developed in academia, force you to develop new abilities, and expose you to interesting questions you would never have discovered otherwise. The assumption that academia is where people grapple with interesting questions, and the business world is where stupid things happen, is just wrong.”–Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

On Tuesday I was sitting in one of my classes and, having used up my self-allotted number of theory fights for that class period, I was bored. Instead of doing my todo list (which has gotten much shorter than last time I posted about it), I wrote haiku all over the professor’s handouts.

This is not to imply that I wasn’t paying attention–I continued to contribute throughout the class, but as soon as the professor had answered my point and moved on in his lecture, I started working on my haikus again. Sometimes, on high energy-low outlet days, I try to find creative outlets rather than get frustrated in class.

Here are my 3 best:

Rushing faster, wheels
thrumming, stuck leaf slip-slapping
quick—brake! Goddamn squirrel.

Procrastinating:
Hoping I’ll work faster if
I’m running scared

Study or read for
pleasure? I must study, but–
Cryptonomicon.

And here are 3 I am still working on:

My teacher’s kid is
sick. “in-shallah.” My dress is
pretty. “in-shallah.”

My hips settle on
the hard practice-room stool. I
plunk a note–joy reigns.

Sugar, milk, butter
& eggs. Mix by hand then add
dry ingredients

Inspirational Quotes:

“I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”–Nathaniel Hawthorne

A few weeks ago, friends and family caught sight of an article in Carnegie Mellon Today about yours truly’s trip to the Presidential Inauguration last January and authorship of a photo used on the cover of the magazine of the Special Libraries Association. Because Carnegie Mellon Today does not post their old issues until the end of the month, I couldn’t link to that article until now. I’m famous! Yay!

Inspirational Quote:

Robert Cialdini: Taking on too much

Over the stretch of my professional years, I’d say my most nagging error has involved an inability to gauge correctly the point at which the next possible undertaking – or even golden opportunity – should be firmly rejected. Whenever I’ve allowed one-too-many responsibilities onto my plate, everything – including the new item – has suffered from the overcrowding. With that threshold crossed, I’ve no longer had the time or patience to plan, think, or toil hard enough to be proud of the resultant work. If I had a single piece of advice for young researchers, it would be to create and follow a rule for avoiding this state of affairs. The rule could involve something objective (e.g., never exceeding a specific quota of research involvements) or subjective (e.g., avoiding the feeling of rushing to, from, and through all of one’s commitments). The key is to apply the rule ruthlessly. Anything less would be another form of error.

Dr Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, is the most widely cited expert on influence and persuasion alive today. His most recent book is Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Persuasive.

I believe in the power of prayer. I pray to regain my internal balance, and I find that it helps me regulate my complex and occasionally consternating internal life.

I also believe in the power of prayer, perhaps even (dare I say so California a word), the power of energy to heal. I believe when a group of people concentrate their love and attention on someone, that love aids that person in living their life well and fully.

Recently, a man with whom I have shared every birthday since 7th grade, became dangerously injured in a long-boarding accident. He is in a medically-induced coma, fighting an infection as we speak. However God is spelled in your faith, or even if you have no faith but great power of mind, I ask you to pray for him.

I rarely ask anything of my readers, and so you know this is a case I care deeply about. With his mother’s permission, I ask each of you to pray for Damian.

If you need a structured vision, below is one his mother created:

Do the visualizations/prayers/white-light-sendings every morning and every night. It helps me to know that you are out there, pulling with Damian. It helps me to know you’re out there every day, pulling quietly along with him, keeping him company. Tell other folks who might want to pull for him, too. Spread his information around! HBGB’s, church groups, covens, Intention Circles, whomever! Spread the activity to more good-energy people! Pull it all in for Damian!

For a moment as you read this, please imagine him whole and safe and free of his hospital bed and all it comes with. See him himself, fully-functioning and whole. See him well.

Damian and I have been friends since middle school, and he is one of the few people I expect to be friends with for the rest of my life. He is in my prayers daily, and I ask that he be in yours, if only for this moment.

Inspirational Quote:

[describing Peninsula, where Damian and I spent our formative years]

“Peninsula is unstructured in the same way that a medieval village is unstructured, which is to say it has a minimum of formal regulation but a ton of custom, and its residents are guided by an awareness that they have to get along because they’re going to be living together for a long time.”–Dr
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, current Peninsula parent

I tend to get a certain question–”Opera? How does that fit?”–a lot, particularly when marketing myself to potential employers. I usually explain that singing opera gives me a unique opportunity to get comfortable performing, engage with texts in half a dozen languages, and teaches me about effective management (because if there has ever been an unmanageable group, it is opera singers). But those answers all leave out the most important reason why my opera training helps me be a more effective advocate for human rights: because opera is about human rights.

I’ll use the opera I am in (go here to see the webcast). Dialogues of the Carmelites by Poulenc is about the lives of the nuns who were massacred in 1794 in France near the end of the revolution. More to the point, it is about human rights in a time of revolution.

1. Religious persecution

   In the opera, the Carmelites were a reflective order. As the Mother Superior says: “we are nothing but a house of prayer”. However, because they are perceived by agents of the revolution (a cadre of soldiers in this case) to be representatives of the Pope, they are treated as traitors and publicly stripped )in the final scene of Act 2 (in our version, the soldiers also attempt to steal the sacramental cup). The anti-Catholic actions of the soldiers are put into context by the captain of the guard who tells Mother Marie “In the church at home, I served two years as Sacristan. Our noble priest, I loved him like a brother–but I’ve no choice but to howl with all the wolves”. Whether motivated by fear of the mob or hatred of the church, the soldiers are engaging in religious oppression.

2. State-sponsored violence

   The soldiers are also agents of state-sponsored violence. As representatives of the revolution, they feel empowered to harass and humiliate the nuns. When the nuns are imprisoned, the jailer (also a representative of the revolution) taunts them and accuses them of being in “correspondence with our enemies”, when they were really imprisoned for having mass illegally. Even more tellingly, as the nuns are herded into a government office where they must sign their names to receive “the benefits of liberty” (access to food and housing?), a soldier tells them they will continue to be “under the watchful eye of the law”–as he says this in our production, he leers at Sister Constance (a novice) and stalks her as she rushes to sign her name. The opera shows the evils of power without accountability and how it can become state-sponsored violence.

3. Judicial corruption

   In the opera, the nuns are sentenced to death and executed without a trial by their peers, essentially murdered by committee. Before that, just before they are stripped, they are informed they have been expelled from their home “in the name of the Republic”–that is, an undemocratically elected group who used the church as a symbol of the opulence and aristocracy they hated (in this case, ignoring the willing poverty in which the nuns lived to cast them as agents of the Pope).

4. Violence against women

   While some of the nuns fight back (yours truly tries to take a soldier out when he starts to strip a friend) the opera is a story of men attacking a women’s community. The most peaceful scenes (1.3 where we are all spinning and sewing, 2.2 where we meet the new Mother Superior) are occupied solely by women. The opera makes the case that women can create their own self-sufficient communities which men (with the exception of the priest, who is allied with the women because he is celibate) see as threatening to their power and feel they must use violence to  destroy (whether by banning them as the soldiers do, or trying to force women to leave them, as Blanche’s brother does).

5. Casualties of progress

   The nuns did represent orthodoxy–as a largely sequestered order, they had an allegiance to the monarchical system which had supported them for hundreds of years. The french revolution, for all of its blood and terror, eventually brought about one of our world’s great democratic nations. But good opera, like all good history, does not lend itself to easy categories like good and bad. For me, the joy of opera is the complexity of the picture is presents. In the end, the women in the convent were restricted by their vows to a life I would never choose as a modern woman. But their life is also not one I would deny to a women who chose it freely. As Madame Lidoine reminds us as the sisters await their sentence in prison: “How could they deprive us of liberty, which we so long ago surrendered of our free will?”

Finally, here is our execution scene from last night, via a bootleg (I’m the one of the far right, who walks to the guillotine holding my sister’s hand):

Inspirational Quote:

“The arts is a life of faith, its pure faith.
People preach about faith, who have no idea what faith is.

But artists know. Artists are the lilies of the field that Jesus preached about in the Sermon of the Mount.

‘Consider the Lilies, don’t worry about what you are going to eat or wear. Consider the lilies. They toil not and spin not, and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

The life of the artist is pure, pure faith.”

September 19, 2009. The News from Lake Wobegone, with Garrison Keillor

One of the things I really like about the Friedman Fellowship is that it allows my to continue my involvement after my summer internship. Right now, I am eating an ice cream cone at Inside Scoop: a student internship fair where students talk to other students about their summer experiences. Two months on, I am just as excited about the work I did at Human Rights USA. I use my knowledge of non-profits several times a week, and am still grappling with the ethical issues which are their bread and butter. And now, I’m a nun! (at least until Saturday, when the show is done).

Inspirational Quote:

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” –Benjamin Franklin

I’m writing from the middle of the internship competition season, part I. Because of long security review periods, I have to apply for federal internships (with the Departments of State or Defense, or the Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service) by Early November 2009. NGOs which work closely with the federal government (or are highly competitive) can also have their summer internship deadlines in November. Part II of internship competition season will start around March and go until April or early May–this is where the smaller, but just as awesome, NGOs will want their applications.

I’ve been keeping my eye open for neat opportunities since this summer, but I’ve really been trolling Idealist (the best place I have found for public interest internships) for a few weeks and here are my top 3 picks (below is a description of how I chose them):

1. Working on the Trafficking in Persons Report for the United States Department of State. This would be my favorite government publication. This has the earliest deadline (November 2nd) but, pending research, it looks like an incredible opportunity.
2. Enhance the online presence (blog, website, forum, Facebook) of the American Islamic Congress. The internship would also involve researching student press, and lots and lots of writing. AIC a group of moderate Muslims who came together after 9/11 to propagate the political views of moderate Muslims. Just like every other group, the tails ends of the bell curve of the American Muslim community dominate our politics discourse–the AIC supports the middle of that curve. From their website, they look like an agile group which actually helps people (see Project Nur, a community of campus advocacy groups AIC supports) where I would get autonomy and have the chance to learn effective advocacy while writing every day. NOTE: AIC has no and promotes no religious views–it represents a religious group’s political views (Less 700 Club, more Episcopal Relief and Development).
3. Writing about the human rights concerns and works of the Advocacy Project, a group which guides citizens left out of the peace conversation in their countries to speak up. They support “peace fellows” who go to countries struggling towards peace and work with advocates there to access tell their narratives, choose good exposition tools, and get funds.

This list will probably shift and flow (and there are tons of amazing internships I haven’t listed here!) but these are my top 3 picks for today.

My non-negotiables:

The organization:

1. Must be deal with transnational issues.
2. It must actually help people, not just do research about them.
3. It must be trying to use new media to spread its message.

The internship:

1. Must involve helping people access information
2. Involve writing (for reports, blogs, press-releases)
3. Must be in the public interest

That’s it for now!

Inspirational Quote:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Dorothy Parker