So What Am I Doing This Year, Anyway?

Short Outline

1. Legal Assistant with Skadden, Arps in New York City
2. Option to Work Abroad with Skadden
3. Law School Applications
4. Thoughts About a Probable Timeline of Education, Work, and Living
5. Further Thoughts on Options for a Year Off
6. Request for Deferment from UC Berkeley School of Law
* 7. The Plan for the Deferment Year
   a. Parents’ New House
   b. Mandarin and Arabic: Substantive Study Experiences
   c. International Travel
8. Unexpected Returns


1. Legal Assistant with Skadden, Arps in New York City

After graduating from Cornell in May 2006, I decided to take a job as a Legal Assistant with the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York City. The experience opened my eyes to the world of practicing law, particularly corporate law. But it also opened my eyes to the possibilities available to those who have earned a J.D. degree, most notably the ability to perform pro bono work, seek work as in-house counsel, be able to pursue international work with issues such as human rights, and notably to use the skills of critical thought, analysis, and argument to make the world a better place.

And so I decided to forge ahead with my plans to attend law school.


2. Option to Work Abroad with Skadden

About a year into my employment with Skadden, I began to think back to some of the goals that I’d had around the time of graduation. Back in early 2006, while I did want to pursue work abroad as soon as possible, discussions with my parents convinced me to stay within the domestic workforce.

By January 2008, I’d already received acceptances to several law schools and was planning visits. My first school visit would have been Georgetown Law, and I knew that one of my attorneys in Skadden’s Antitrust group was a graduate. And so, after dropping off some binders like any other day, I asked him for a couple quick words about Georgetown and what he thought about law practice, as he was a new associate. The conversation headed to what he had done prior to going to Georgetown: he had worked in Paris for a couple of years, including some experience at investment banks abroad.

This single conversation was probably the seed that has grown to lead me to the point where I am now. I soon began to think about what I was doing and questioning whether, by going immediately to law school, I was missing a chance to do … something spectacular, at least from my point of view. Something for me, something that I had wanted to do for as long as I can remember. I thought back to what I wanted to do after school – move abroad and have some fun while in my mid-twenties – and then I thought about how I had been somewhat limited to explore myself personally and socially given the demands of the work at Skadden.

Before continuing, I do want to plainly state that I did greatly enjoy my work. I do, however, think that I was lucky both with the practice group and the attorneys to whom I had been assigned. Because of the luck of the draw, I do not necessarily think that everyone at Skadden ends up having as rewarding a time as I did, and I speak only for myself when I say that I leave Skadden feeling very fulfilled, at least professionally. However, truth be told, work did in some sense consume my life. And I have admitted for quite some time now that that state of affairs is a result of the atmosphere of Skadden’s New York office, combined with my own personality and the way in which I have a tendency to focus fully on my main task, whatever that may be. With so much to focus on at Skadden, I do feel I was constrained in my ability to simply enjoy living in New York City. That was also a main non-academic reason why I chose a law school outside of New York, because (whether warranted or not) I felt that given my personality and tendencies, mixed with the general culture of New York, would have made it somewhat frustrating to study law there.

In any event, thinking back to my somewhat-neglected core interests of languages and travel and exotic new experiences, I had a couple of weeks of distress and mental turmoil. Depression set in to some degree as I also began to think negatively about some personal issues. “Where have I gone off track?” I repeatedly thought to myself. This turned into somewhat of a personal crisis, which in hindsight was probably a necessary but difficult step in the path that followed.

At this point, my first thoughts turned to trying to arrange for a year-long job abroad with a bank or hedge fund or consultancy firm. I FedEx’d some cover letters and resumes to firms in Paris and London, only to receive polite replies that declined hiring me for an entry-level position abroad. I saw that many banking job applications had already expired about a month earlier, particularly for domestic positions, but I knew that I needed to keep my eye on my main goal of international experience.

In the end, I returned my thoughts to Skadden, an international firm with over twenty offices all over the world, and asked my managers what types of opportunities there might be within the Firm. In a contrast to the negative replies from financial firms, Skadden’s reply was that I would most likely be able to move to an office either in Asia or perhaps in Paris, if I switched from litigation to corporate practice. This sounded great to me, and I began to research the Hong Kong, Singapore, and Paris offices.

But after a little bit of time, my mind turned to the possible downsides of staying as a Legal Assistant at Skadden, even if going abroad. I would have chosen to work at the Hong Kong office, and after some correspondence with one of the office’s Legal Assistants it seemed like there was a real risk that my life would continue somewhat as it had been in New York: real possibility of very long hours, daily overtime, weekend work depending on deals, and the like. I initially thought that perhaps I could enroll in a language course and take long weekends to explore parts of Asia, but I was concerned that neither of those plans would come to fruition if the work was anywhere near as demanding as it had been in New York.

And so I eased off the idea of working for a third year with Skadden as a Legal Assistant in an office abroad.


3. Law School Applications

Around the same time in early 2008, I started to look closer at the admissions materials from various schools. In particular, I read as much as I could about the financial aid packages and the loans process for law school. I knew that I had gradually been growing my savings account, by what came to be both the blessing and the curse of working so much at Skadden: while I was earning at an overtime rate at work, I was not out spending my earnings by going out all the time in New York. Back to the student loans, it looked like the most sensible option, were I to enter law school in the fall of 2008, would have been to pay off as much of the first year’s tuition as I could with my savings so as to avoid paying much more in accrued interest after graduation. Indeed, all the financial aid packages assumed this to be the case, and it disheartened me greatly to think about those savings completely dissipating without really having enjoyed them.


4. Thoughts About a Probable Timeline of Education, Work, and Living

Perhaps around March or April 2008, when I was thinking about my core interests and also thinking about the imminent dissipation of my savings, my friends started to ask me for how long I would be away from New York after leaving for school. This signaled the beginning of my thoughts on a realistic timeline for the coming years. By this point I had chosen Berkeley as the law school I would most likely attend, and so I thought about the three years I would spend in California as a law student. During the summers, I would hope to first work abroad for specialized legal projects involving human rights, and then work at a law firm as a summer associate. During the shorter breaks and holidays I would most likely return to spend time with my parents in upstate New York, leaving limited time to spend with friends, in New York and elsewhere. Soon after graduating and taking the bar exam, I would most likely choose to continue living in the San Francisco area and work with a Bay Area law firm. The reason for this, related to my main reason for choosing Berkeley over another school to study law, was that my target law practice would involve a mix of high-technology Silicon Valley companies, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs in science and technology. I would expect to work at least three years in the Bay Area, for the two main reasons of gaining necessary experience and also significantly paying down my loans. With a tight financial situation, I would also have limited time to take substantive breaks from work and pursue my core interests full-time.

My thoughts also turned to my parents, who have been building a house in upstate New York since July 2006. By early 2008 I knew of the types of problems that they were encountering – mainly some very troubling contractor issues, such as poor workmanship and inability to bring tasks to completion on schedule. The consistently poor quality of contractors in the Southern Tier and northern Pennsylvania left me anxious to help my parents with building the house as much as I could so that they could move into the new house and begin to enjoy it and its beautiful surroundings as soon as possible.


5. Further Thoughts on Options for a Year Off

And so I thought more about my options after completing my two years at Skadden. Very helpful to me was focusing on the precise, and somewhat subtle, reasons why continuing with Skadden for another year would have been inadequate for me personally: inability to focus on language study, unclear and possibly limited opportunity for international travel, and a tight timeframe between work and school where I would have been unable to help my parents with their house.

In taking a Mandarin course at NYU in the spring of 2007, I had found that for whatever reason I do simply enjoy studying foreign languages. I found both the Chinese spoken language and the characters fascinating, but I always felt constrained in my ability to really gain an in-depth knowledge of the language. For example, I often came across characters with multiple parts that usually had some interesting history. Discovering this history usually involved looking up the characters on a Chinese-language-learning website such as http://www.zhongwen.com, where one has the opportunity to “regress” into the character’s history by looking closer at its parts. Unfortunately I felt as though I did not have enough time to both master new vocabulary but also pursue these auxiliary avenues of interest, because of the demands of my work as a legal assistant. I often thought to myself how great it would be to have an opportunity to study a language full-time, and further how much better it would be to do so within a country where the target language is used.

And so I did a little math, thought about my savings and my two-year bonus, considered that I would have plenty of opportunity to work overtime until my resignation date in July 2008, and decided that it would be best to request a year of deferment from law school and put together a plan where I could truly pursue some of these core interests of mine.

In particular, the idea of deepening my knowledge of Mandarin while spending time in Asia was very appealing. I had also never been to a country where Arabic is spoken. With both the Iraq war and rapid Middle East development, Arabic appealed to me as a language that I could simply enjoy studying while also opening new professional opportunities for the future. Notwithstanding the professional aspects, I also had the thought that any international traveling that I would do would be greatly enhanced if I had the opportunity to study both Mandarin and Arabic before traveling in a region where each language is used widely.

And so my plan slowly started to materialize: I would spend eight to ten weeks at a time studying Mandarin and then later Arabic, and after familiarizing myself with the language to an elementary level of spoken and written proficiency, I would travel in the region where knowledge of those languages was widespread.

It seemed that with this plan, I had really solved all of the issues that had constrained me previously. I could build in the time to assist my parents with their house. I could then devote my full attention for significant periods of time to the study of foreign languages. Finally I could travel wherever I wanted, with the added bonus of better appreciating foreign cultures through direct communication and participation.

And of course, I am very grateful that the two years I spent at Skadden in several ways went a long way to bring this plan both through conception and to fruition.


6. Request for Deferment from UC Berkeley School of Law

While some schools – Columbia Law School in particular comes to mind – have very liberal deferment policies, it seemed like UC Berkeley required a more concrete plan when requesting deferment. I was initially worried since when I was requesting deferment I did not know precise details about what I would be doing, although I had a very good idea of my motivations. Perhaps this showed through, or perhaps my general ideas were precise enough. In any case, the Law School admissions office granted my deferment request.


7. The Plan for the Deferment Year

As intimated above, in a nutshell my plan for the deferment year is to (a) help my parents build their new home; (b) study Mandarin and Arabic full-time; and (c) travel.


a. Parents’ New House

From early August through mid-September, I was able to help my parents with their house. While I wish I could have stayed longer in upstate New York to have helped and done more, I think that this part of my plan worked out rather successfully. In particular:

We were able to complete significant landscaping work, starting from scratch in early August and seeing a fledgling lawn grow by mid-September. I hear that it’s even been recently mowed. The plot of land where the house is being built, though mostly flat, was still in need of a significant amount of work. We wanted to shape the land so that water would consistently flow away from and around the house and not form large puddles. We also wanted to extend the yard and decrease the slope of the land nearer the house by using dirt from another part of the plot. To do this, we rented a bulldozer for about two weeks and bulldozed away.

[Picture of me operating the bulldozer.]


We also completed a significant portion of the wood framing and molding work. This involved a great deal of time and labor in steel-wooling and sanding; filling nail holes with putty; re-staining parts of the molding that had previously been done improperly by the contractor; and applying a final coat of varnish to all of the woodwork as necessary. By the time I left, we had managed to complete the inside of my bedroom, the office, and the guestroom. Nearing completion were my sister’s bedroom and the hallways. I also managed to stain the staircase leading into the attic mostly on my own, from the sanding phase to pre-treatment conditioning, staining, sealing, re-sanding, and applying two coats of varnish.

On the day before my flight to Shanghai, we also managed to move the computer desk and computer with accessories into the office of the new house.


b. Mandarin and Arabic: Substantive Study Experiences

From mid-September to mid-November, I will be living in Shanghai and studying Mandarin full-time. One of the weeks, there will be no classes due to the National Day holiday, so I am left with seven weeks of full-time language work.

From early March to early May 2009, I plan to study Arabic in Cairo full-time for ten weeks.


c. International Travel

Following my time in Shanghai, in mid-November I will travel to Seoul, then tour Japan with a group, and finally I will spend a week in Taiwan before returning to the United States for my birthday and Christmas.

I will return to Asia at the end of December. Between the New Year and early March, I will be taking an organized tour of Southeast Asia and also of Indonesia – from Jakarta to Bali – before flying to the Middle East. Between the tours I will have time to explore Malaysia and Singapore. From Bali I will fly to the United Arab Emirates to visit Abu Dhabi and Dubai for about a week, and I am particularly excited to see the Burj Dubai skyscraper currently under construction.

Following the study experience in Cairo, I hope to travel within the Middle East, take a tour in Morocco, explore Brazil and Ecuador, and finally do an organized tour from Peru, through Bolivia, and into Argentina with some time in the Amazon and at Machu Picchu.

At the very end of July I will return to the United States to prepare for the mid-August move to Berkeley.


8. Unexpected Returns

Beyond the excitement of seeing these plans start to come to life, I have also been pleasantly surprised by some unexpected returns of this year-long experience.

Being free to devote as much or as little time per day as I need to language study, I have found it very liberating and enlightening to be able to spend time reading and researching topics such as politics, economics, science and technology, social issues, and other areas. Of particular interest have been the November Presidential election and also the unfolding of the financial crisis around the globe.

I am also happy to finally join the blogging world. Not only is it a great way to keep a type of journal throughout this experience, but I have finally found a suitable outlet for my own opinions on issues that are important to me that where I can now have an informed opinion following the ability to read and research the news.

More than just keeping a personal blog, a larger unexpected profit of this deferment year is that I am able to contribute to the organized and accessible collection of human knowledge. With a blog that is searchable by Google, not only can others find a journal of someone’s travels but perhaps they will also hit upon information that is useful to them. For instance, before I left the U.S., I was able to find information about the new Vietnamese Consulate in Shanghai by reading discussion boards of expats in Shanghai. I took that information and put a point indicating the approximate consulate location on Google Maps which anyone can find by doing a simple search of Google Maps. After going to the consulate for a visa, I updated that Google Map point with a more precise, experience-based description of the consulate location, and I also added a photo so that future visitors can have that helpful reference. More generally, I am very happy to think that, once I have done the legwork in finding something – be it a physical place or perhaps a new argument or thought – then others have an opportunity to take that discovery for their own use without having to duplicate work already done.

- - -

Thank you for reading through, and be sure to leave any questions, tips, or any other reactions as Comments.