For the second part of my Integrative experience, I’ve decided to try to find a law internship. Is this my final decision? No, I still have time to change my mind or take a service learning class for example. Unfortunately, I am unable to go abroad due to various reasons, like parental opinion, and lack of time to do honors requirements due to being a transfer student. This does not mean I want to work in a law firm, but work in an environment that is related to the fields I have interest in, such as immigration or family law. I want to gain exposure and knowledge before applying to law school. I hope to meet new people and form new connections. For this blog post, I’d like to talk about my process so far of finding the right internship for me.

The process is not easy, but I wouldn’t say too difficult either. First, I started out by going to the typical internship websites like internships.com and the like. However, I soon found out that this method would not be the best due to a couple reasons. Most internships were located in bigger cities that I had no chance of commuting to like Boston, Worcester, and a few in Springfield, which isn’t a stretch, but I didn’t want to spend time worrying about transportation. Also, the few internships that were legal related were mostly for students in law school already. As a result, I went to Google and searched law firms in towns like Amherst, Northampton, and Holyoke. After researching many websites, I picked the ones that interested me the most and created a list of who to contact. You can either email or call. Calling may be more direct and efficient, but I chose to email them instead of calling (because that makes me anxious) and it is still an effective method of communication!

Because I’d be sending a cold email for a non-existent internship position, I also had to look up how to write a cold email for an internship. The best and most common advice I came upon was: be direct and short, but also eye-catching so that the reader who is probably busy, will actually open and read your email. You don’t want your email brushed off as spam and put in the trash. But you should still some of your qualifications in the email and why you want to work with them. For example, one of the things I never failed to say somewhere is that I am trilingual, (English, Spanish, and Korean). Like my professor always likes to remind me, having foreign languages up your belt makes you a more attractive choice. While I did receive replies that weren’t rejections, they were more along the lines of we’re busy right now, but let’s talk later, so it’s also important to keep contact. Even though I do feel like I will be missing out as most of my fellow classmates are leaving abroad, I know that whatever option I choose, I will still be gaining experience and learning new things.