What I've been doing wrong.

And what you probably do wrong sometimes too.

After receiving around 15 rejection from law firms I had to face the question: what the hell are you doing wrong, Kat? And so I did, and I even tried to find some answers to this baffling question. The answer didn't come as a result of a long logical process, but rather as a result of a moment of revelation which happened to me a few days ago.

Starting with a logical route, however, since I'm a logically thinking person liking logical processes with clearly defined steps, I thought that maybe the explanation to this string of failures is in the fact that I've sent an excessive number of applications and maybe didn't make any of them good enough? (well, they clearly weren't good enough given the rejections, but maybe a more specific reason can be found). You know, it happens to everyone, that you don't really answer the question, or you make terrible typos or just waffle a lot about nothing specific. This could be the reason, but I had two months to complete all these applications and I actually made an effort to make them tailored for particular law firms, I've done my research and everything, so I rejected this explanation, especially that I've actually managed to get two interviews (but here my adventure with these places finished).

The moment of revelation came one morning when I realised what the reason of my failures was. It's not that I'm not a lawyer material. I just don't really care about business, but I do care about people a lot. So aiming for strictly commercial firms makes no sense whatsoever! And the recruiters know I have no passion for multimillion transactions. But, on the other hand, I absolutely loved working in immigration law, because there I saw real people with problems I could actually very directly address. Working for charities, churches or other institutions acting for public good would be perfect

I've realised that if, by some unfortunate conjunction of stars, I ended up in a commercial firm, I would be really unhappy. I would probably bloody good at whatever area of law I would specialise in, I would not enjoy it.

So the search continues. In the attempt to make this world a little bit better place, I'm joining Teach First Insight Programme in June. I'm so looking forward to it, it really feels like my kind of thing. The future looks so much clearer now that I know what I've been doing wrong.