MENTOR
A GUIDED START TO
A CAREER IN LAW
By BRANT SKOGRAND ’04 MBC
helps provide the Mentor Externship Programwith feedback and ways to continually improve.
of the programwith Rush in 2019. “It prepares the students not only for the profession itself in terms of working with clients or being in court, but also personally for the profession.” “The School of Law doesn’t forget that its student body is first and foremost made of people, and it does an excellent job fostering an environment of personal growth as we learn the law,” said Kevin Green , a rising 2L who serves on the Mentor Externship Advisory Committee and
of Professional Development AdamBrown ’06 J.D. , who also has volunteered as a mentor and taught a Mentor Externship course. “The fact that the program had this connection and there was a guarantee that I would be able to see a real lawyer doing real legal work was huge and is still to this day a positive influence on my career.” Each year, more than 500 lawyers and judges are matched with students in the J.D. and international LL.M. in U.S. Law programs. Many are returning mentors who have participated in the program year after year. In fact, the program has a high retention rate of mentors at about 90% and in 2021, 64 individuals reached the milestone of having mentored students for 15 or more years. In total, more than 2,000 mentors have participated in the program since it began. The School of Law provides structure to mentors and students, including timelines and a list of more than 600 different types of fieldwork activities. Rush said that this structure, which helps mentors know what is
For law students, mentoring experiences can be critical to
immediate and long-term success as an attorney, especially if they do not have preexisting connections to the people in the legal field. “I’m a first-generation lawyer, a first- generation law student, and I had no idea what to expect [in law school],” said Cousineau, Waldhauser & Kieselbach shareholder and Director
Uyen Campbell (left) and Judith Rush
Kevin Green
Summer 2021 Page 25
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