In Chapter 2 of 9 of her 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, Julia Green reflects on her Georgetown Law School experience. While there, Green remembers sharing an uncertainty toward career and purpose with her classmates and peers. Hiring companies present lucrative opportunities and students, unfamiliar about goals with career planning, accepting them not seeing alternative opportunities, especially given student loan obligations. Green highlights the benefit attending law school immediately upon college graduation, namely having a law degree by age 25. She also highlights the recruiting dichotomy between corporate law and public interest law and the necessary initiative required to push beyond the corporate recruiting marketing and promotion and into exploring public interest opportunities. View more Near Peer career video insights like this at http://www.captureyourflag.com. Transcript: Erik Michielsen: Did you find a lot of your friends in law school were confused, not certain where the next step lay? Julia Green: Absolutely. Most of my friends were straight out of college. A couple had taken a couple years off, but no more than maybe two years. I graduated law school in 2000, the economy was booming, and money was it. That`s all we talked about. What`s the job we are going to get where we will make money. We went to a good law school at a good time and it was impossible to not get a job where you were going to make money. That`s all we talked about. We all acknowledged we were confused. No one even knew what making money meant… how you actually earned it. The answers for all of us were we will take these jobs basically from the sky and make money and will avoid the decision yet again of what we were going to do in the real world. Erik Michielsen: Do you feel in retrospect it would have been nice to take a couple years to work before going to law school or did you feel it didn’t matter? Julia Green: Maybe it would have helped me decide what I ultimately want to do sooner. I didn`t make that decision until way down, way after law school. Maybe if I was in the real world, meeting people who were working, talking about things that they were doing, and they were passionate about, I would have gone to law school with a mission. And then I would have maybe looked through the course catalog a little differently. Instead of looking for ``entertainment and the law`` because is sounded cool I would have said this is a subject that would help me in job I would ultimately find. There is something great about getting out of law school at 25 years old, 24 in some cases. I think I had the luxury at 25 getting out of law school to still take my time to figure out what do I want to do in the practice of law. Which in law school I never really asked myself that question, what do I want to do with this skill, this degree that is costing me a fortune? What do I want to do with it? I remember, now that I think back to law school, the couple brave souls that went to the public interest office down in the bowels of Georgetown. I never even saw it. You have to go through some hall, look for it, and ask questions. What else can I do other than go to the shiny firm? There were two offices, the public interest office in the bowels of the school, and the shiny recruiting office that is easy to find, always perfect temperature, always a tray of fruit to welcome you. At that age, with that lack of experience, I did what the masses were doing, like a robot. You have those opportunities but you have to work for them to see what else you can do in the law.

• published: 16 Nov 2009
• views: 2533