Why Everyone Should Go To Law School | Jana Al-Akhras | TEDxNewAlbany

hi everyone I am tasked with the challenge of convincing you all to go to law school now I understand in order to convince you of that I have to tell you why I went to law school I am a first-generation American my parents are immigrants my dad is a engineer my mom is a pharmacist and what that means is I had a couple options in life I could have been a doctor I could have been a lawyer I could have been an engineer or I could have been a disappointment so knowing that I had no math or science abilities I chose the legal route but in all seriousness when you realize that this country's laws were not made for people who look like you then you realize the value of advocacy and the a value of especially for me being a visibly Muslim woman which that means wearing a hijab and being a visibly Muslim woman in a very monolithic space now that's a challenge and experience within itself and it's something that you have to be able to understand as you walk through those law school doors that you're going to come to some unique challenges that only you can experience and that only you can talk about now of course law schools not all it's cracked up to be there are some challenges that go on for with it for example it's a super outdated system it hasn't been updated since the time of Socrates for example it is extremely expensive you are going to be saddled with more debt than you know what to do with it is absolutely one of the most emotionally physically trying experiences that I ever went through in my life and you obviously have a healthy you have a healthy challenge within yourself when you start to realize that you're not as smart as you thought you were you know my sister says something funny about how all Explorer 'test kids in their class go to law school and then they're surrounded by all the other smartest kids in their class and then they realize they're not that smart and coming to terms with your own mediocrity is such a challenge within itself let me tell you that for sure but the hardest thing for me about going to law school was trying to figure who I was and realizing that other people were trying to tell me who I was at the exact same time now that's a really really tough thing to do especially because law school doesn't you know take you on a track you get to choose your courses after your first year you get to cultivate your educational experience and figure out what suits you best and I remember at one point I told one of my professors that I was interested in going in house that means you know being a representative for a company or that I was interested in doing transactional law and I was interested in these types of things and he told me point blank but the best thing you'd be at good at is immigration and I had a career counselor at one point tell me that I should utilize my skillset and work for the FBI and I remember thinking to myself very firmly like what is it about me who's only one year into law school has taken no core classes outside and nothing outside of core classes that expresses to other people that this is the course that I'm interested in and I realized pretty quickly it was the fact of my visible representation of who I was when I walked into these spaces I'm a visibly Muslim woman I'm an Arab American I speak a second language and people just assume that that skillset was the only space that I could be beneficial but of course law schools not all bad I'm trying to convince you aren't I for me and what I found most valuable about law schools that taught me how to think it taught me to be intellectual critical thinker it taught me to analyze things from different sides it taught me to just overall be smarter and while I was trying to figure out how to be smarter into all these types of things I realized that the hardest thing to do kept coming back to the initial reason that I went which was representation I was trying to so hard to figure out who I was because I needed to make sure I tapped into that thing that was gonna actually impact my community in a positive way that's a really hard thing to figure out when you're surrounded by people who seem to know what they're doing let me let you in on a little secret most people who go to law school have a parent who's in law school or who went to law school or you have an uncle or you have someone within your media community who has done that type of thing but I didn't have that again let's go backwards I was supposed to be an engineer after supposed to be something you know that made sense within the framework I had a community there that made sense but I didn't do that I had to forge my own path for lack of a better word so you're going through this process you're trying to figure it out and do you know how hard it is to figure out who you are when you're so busy trying to prove what you're not it's a very very tough thing to do I worked so hard and I advocate so much for authenticity the process of authenticity figuring out who you are what authenticity means to me is being the same person in multiple spaces and not having to compromise your identity to piece a piece other people there should be a common thread of your personality that goes through to different parts of your fate your being while you're in different spaces of course not everyone's the same at home as they are at work or they are at their rec team of course there's some variances but the idea is that you should be comfortable with the individual you are as you navigate these spaces but what's the alternative if you don't practice authenticity then you're performing identity it's performative right and what's performance it's exhausting if it's not who you are it's an extremely exhausting endeavor and the reason that performative identity is so dangerous is because marginalized communities are consistently expected to perform their identities for those outside in order for them to be more comfortable with our identities for the professor who told me that I had to do something like immigration law it's because within his frame of reference that's what made the most sense for the career counselor who told me that I should go to work for the FBI it's because it made the most sense for them not because it was me following my passion and being impactful individual in those spaces so you have authenticity which we're all striving towards right and you have performative identity which is what a lot of us are forced into and then we try to solve these problems because I truly believe part of the problem is that they hadn't seen a lot of people who look like me now we try to solve these problems with what diversity right diversity is great but you know what's problematic about diversity is inclusion and a lot of those things don't come hand-in-hand and let me explain to you the difference between diversity and inclusion now follow along with me imagine you have a coloring book right it's empty there's no one's color on it before it's fresh it's yours do you remember when you had a Crayola crayon pack with like 12 colors in it and I remember the day that my mom came home with a 72 Crayola pack coloring package there were 72 there's a sharpener in the back even it was crazy there were colors like chartreuse in there I'd never heard of chartreuse I had no idea what a chartreuse was what is that and so you have all these colors within the 72 expansion pack and you're excited and you start coloring and all of a sudden you have a skin tone that matches you because mine it's not exactly peach but it's kind of beige but it's a little bit olive but we don't really know so we start mixing colors and we're thrilled and that's diversity you got it at 72 color expansion pack but inclusion means that you are the artist who created the coloring book inclusion means that the surroundings that the people that the features they start to look like you they start to look like your environment that means when you walk into the pages of this coloring book and you look around it looks familiar so you don't have to worry about only having a color that fits your shade we worry so much about diversity we don't think about inclusion and the issue with not thinking about inclusion is that what happened to me when I was in law school I was my to forgive me I'm gonna use the word 2l which means I was my second year of law school and I had a 1l walk-in and she was wearing a fuchsia and I I lost all sense no idea I was so excited I ran up there I was like oh my god I be my friend how are you what's going on she looked at me like I was crazy I was wetting throw old books at her I was like I will give you anything you want here are the spoils become my friend all these types of things why was I willing to do that I was willing to do that because I was so starved of the idea of inclusivity that I was so excited I saw one other person who probably had no frame of reference did not want to be my friend mind you trust me she did not want be my friend but I was so excited about that and the reason I was so excited about that because I had been essentially taught that just seeing someone who looked like me was enough and it wasn't because inclusivity means that you're expanding the doorway that you walked in so enough people can walk in with you hand in hand and not be cramped that's why inclusivity does inclusivity allows for the people who are these representatives of their social economic group of their gender orientation of their sexual orientation of their race of all of these things it allows those people to be authentic because the weight of representing their entire faith or their entire race or their entire culture or their entire sexual orientation is not squarely on them anymore what that girl who walked in proved too did for me was I said finally someone else can do something and now it's not just a Muslim girl who did it there's two Muslim girls there's three Muslim girls maybe there's four Muslim girls and maybe someone can start to realize that people are dynamic and that we don't have to fit the molds of what you expect of us you see it's very difficult to balance the expectations that your community has of you and then the expectations of what others have of you and realize you're trying to figure out who you are and you're too young to do that in a space that there's too many conflicting things and you end up becoming a contrarian you end up becoming a fifteen-year-old rebel all over again when you're supposed to be an adult and it's just because you don't want to be defined by who other people think you are that's not a comfortable space to be and it's not a safe space to the end so why am I telling you all of this essentially I'm challenging you and I hope at this point you're realizing I don't want you to go to law school like if you want to go to law school find me afterwards we'll exchange emails we'll talk about it but law school is not for everybody but I want you to fill in the blank about what your law school is I want you to go to the space with enough people that don't look like you and expand that doorway and push for inclusivity and make sure that you're creating an environment that when people walk in it they feel as though it's possible that more people who look like them in Belize like them and think like them can be in the space because we don't exist to be in a monolith it doesn't make much sense and so the most dangerous thing in my opinion is that a lot of us end up living our lives in cruise control you end up being a passenger to your entire life and that's fine like if that's what you want to do but the reason that's so dangerous if there are so many exits that you can take there are so many people that you can impact and you will should not be boxed in by your identities I talk a lot about being an era of American Muslim woman I talk a lot about that but I don't feel boxed in by my identity but I recognize that my community deserves a seat at the table they deserve a seat at the table because it's not just about me we are so much bigger than ourselves every single person in here is so much bigger than themselves and I guarantee you you are standing on the shoulders of giants and the people who have pushed to make sure that you can be here so I'm hoping you identify your identities and I'm hoping that you work towards your own authenticity and I'm hoping that the parts of your identity that you realize you have been performing for people other than yourself are something that you start to discard piece by piece by piece by piece and it's a hard process but you deserve to be impactful and your community deserves to be impacted I hope you go to law school thanks you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 209,666

Rating: 4.8365788 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Discrimination, Education, Identity, Law

Id: xwqivojxXME

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019