veiled4allah

lessons learned

I've been posting up a storm at my Kucinich blog today. It looks like I was right that FirstEnergy Corporation is at the center of the blackout scandal. I'm now starting to see stories in the mainstream media pulling together the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant scandal, the pollution violations, and the other evidence of a long history of cutting corners and outright malfeasance that I posted about last Friday (I like to tell myself that I scooped the media on this, but who am I kidding? I'm just a C-list blogger at best). Kucinich is getting a lot of media coverage that's quite separate from the regular campaign coverage as people realize he's got the goods on FirstEnergy, and that means plenty of updates for me to post over at Muslims For Kucinich. On the personal front, I'll be going in to NWIRP tomorrow morning to learn more about the volunteer position they've offered me. It took a little longer than expected to set it up since the legal director had to be in court on short notice late last week and wasn't able to get back to me until today. I expect that as free help, I'll end up doing my share of clerical tasks. But I hope that I'll be able to gain knowledge about immigration law and get some substantive legal experience. Most importantly, I hope to make contacts who may know of paid employment in the field. If I can get a job out of this, I'll gladly file papers, lol! I've been thinking about when I graduated from college eight years ago. People gave me lots of good advice, but of course I was 22 and was sure I knew better than them. This time I'm doing it right, building up a solid resume step by step, networking, and most of all being pro-active. I was very shy when I was younger and very hesitant of putting myself forward to people I didn't know. I never would have gotten either my internship position or this volunteer position back then, because I wouldn't have gone out there and made those opportunities for myself. I didn't think I could, so I wouldn't bother to try. I guess that some people have it all figured out from early on and others, like me, take a bit longer to get it together, lol.

excellent!

Al-hamdulillah! The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project has agreed to take me on as a volunteer paralegal! This is a great opportunity for me to gain experience in the immigration law field, which is where I want to work, and to make professional contacts, inshallah. NWIRP provides legal representation to immigrants who face deportation, are seeking asylum, or wish to leave an abusive marriage or are in some other crisis situation and who can't afford to retain an attorney. They should be calling me tomorrow, inshallah, to let me know the details. :invasion:

it is done

Al-hamdulillah, I completed my paralegal internship today. I think that having the internship was one of the best parts of the paralegal program. I learned a lot, made professional contacts, gained experience, and had fun. What more can you ask? Summer quarter ends this Friday. Now that the internship is over, I have a couple of days to study for my finals. Then it really is done. That's the end of the quarter, and the end of the paralegal program for me. I'm graduating! In just a few more days, the paralegal certificate will be mine, inshallah. :blob: :blob: :blob: :blob: :blob:

a good review, a good opportunity, and a good deal

Today, my faculty advisor visited my internship site in order to meet with my supervisor and with me to get our evaluations of each other and of the internship program. Happily, I got a very good evaluation by my supervisor, al-hamdulillah :) The advisor also told me of a volunteer opportunity that he learned about, with the Northwest Immigration Rights Project. There is not likely to be an employment opportunity with NWIRP for the same reason there's no employment opportunity for me with the Northwest Women's Law Center: lack of funds. However, if I'm not employed and therefore not bringing in any money anyway, I might as well do something useful with my time, inshallah. Plus, it may be a good way to make contact with immigration attorneys who are looking to hire a paralegal. Immigration law is one of my particular interests as a field to work in; it's an area where Muslims need a lot of help. So this sounds like a good opportunity, inshallah. I also picked up some free books today. One of my supervisor's friends runs a bookstore and they receive advance and promotional copies of books that they can't sell and have to give away. So the friend brought three boxes of books by the Law Center. I picked up three books for my mom and four for myself. The other volunteers were just as excited as I was about the opportunity to get free books. It's my kind of place ;)

the job-seeker's lament

It seems strange, but summer quarter is almost half over. That means that I've got to move into high gear on searching for a full-time job so that I can get employed after I graduate. Now I remember why I like being a student so much! From everything I've heard, the legal job market here is pretty flat. Other paralegal students have been having trouble even getting unpaid internships, much less full-time salaried positions. Those that have completed the program and managed to find employment are often taking a lower-level position such as file clerk and hoping to move up into a paralegal position when one becomes open. I was looking for a job in the high tech field when the high tech economy first went into a nose-dive a couple of years ago. It was not fun. I sent out hundreds of resumes and went on around forty interviews. Almost every single time they would tell me that they got 500 or 1000 applicants for the same position. Just when it looked like things were getting better, another big dot.com would go under and leave a couple hundred more people looking for the same jobs I was trying to get. That was definitely not one of the happier periods in my life! Hopefully my new job search won't be that bad, inshallah. There aren't a lot of positions out there at the moment that I'm qualified for; many of them want five or more years paralegal experience. It's the old conundrum. You can't get a job without experience, and you can't get experience without a job. My mom likes to joke about how companies want a person with ten years of experience and an advanced degree, who is willing to work for $15,000 a year. Besides the paralegal positions that I'm looking at, I've also applied for a position in a major law firm's law library. I'm one of those people who thinks that spending all day doing legal research is a fun occupation and if I can get paid for it, even better. Inshallah khayr.

it's all in a day's work, I guess

I was answering phones at the Law Center helpline again today. One of the calls was really weird. This guy claimed that he came from Canada to Seattle to find an attorney who could help him with his alleged "multi-million dollar case". He thought that a U.S. attorney could help him with a case in a Canadian court because of NAFTA and he kept insisting on this even after I tried to explain that most likely a Seattle attorney would neither know Canadian law nor be licensed to practice in Canada. He said he was living in a hostel but he didn't know the address of the place and he was calling from a pay phone so he couldn't give me a phone number. I don't know whether he really believed his story or if he was playing some kind of elaborate prank. :crazy:

working the helpline

Today was my first day answering phones for the Law Center's helpline. Since it was my first day, I didn't have to deal with live phone calls coming in but got to learn the ropes by returning calls to those who had left messages. Mostly I had to leave messages too, since a lot of people were out at work, but I did complete two phone calls. The first was a woman who was looking for information about how child support is calculated based on family income. I was able to direct her to the right place. The second was a woman who was fired from her job after complaining about sexual harassment. I gave her some contact information and referrals so she can pursue her case if she wants, but it's very difficult to prove employment discrimination so I don't have my hopes up for her. It was a great learning experience to work the phones, al-hamdulillah.

a new learning experience

Today I had my orientation and training for the Law Center's helpline. I'll be manning the phones (womanning the phones? personning the phones?) on Wednesday afternoons, inshallah. The main benefit I hope to gain from it is improving my client communication skills, but I think that I'll also pick up quite a bit of substantive knowledge of Washington law, especially family law. I wasn't able to take a family law class as part of my paralegal program, unfortunately.

new adventures of the niqabi intern

Today was my first day at my internship with the Northwest Women's Law Center. Al-hamdulillah, it went very well. Everybody I met was very friendly and helpful. It appears that the entire staff and volunteers at this time are women. I'll be able to offer salat in the office of one of the staff attorneys while she's taking her lunch break. I'll be working on three major projects. The first is to spend 3 1/2 hours a week answering phones at their self-help line. This involves taking calls from women who need legal help and telling them what the law is in regard to their situation and giving them referrals to attorneys or agencies that may be able to help them, or sending them information so they can represent themselves if they can't afford a lawyer. The second project is to bring the referral agency database up to date. This will involve contacting the agencies and attorneys to see if they still wish to be listed and then entering the new information in the database. The third project is the most substantive. The help line volunteers work from notebooks that explain the law. A lot of this information hasn't been updated in awhile. I get to pick one section, research the current law, and write up a memo that explains it in layman's terms so that it can be read out or sent to the women that call the helpline. I will probably be doing something related to employment discrimination, inshallah. Tomorrow, I'll be accompanying my supervisor to two meetings, one about access to justice and using non-lawyers in legal service agencies, and the other of a new non-profit organization that provides Court Appointed Special Advocates to children whose parents have been found unfit. Inshallah, it'll be a chance to learn something and meet some people.

still looking for an internship

I'm still trying to line up a paralegal internship for this summer. Of the three organizations that I originally contacted, one I haven't heard back from at all, one I haven't heard anything from since I sent in my resume, and the third I'm still trying to arrange a meeting with. I've also sent enquiries to four other sites. One I haven't heard back from yet and two are in the mail, but the fourth looks promising. It's the Northwest Women's Law Center. Among other things, they run a helpline to provide legal advice and referrals to women and they're always looking for volunteers and interns. Two lawyers from the law center came to talk to my Civil Rights Law class today so I brought along a cover letter and a copy of my resume and approached them after class to ask them to give it to the appropriate person. They promised to do so. Inshallah, this one will come through!