Blog #24

I chose to do my informal interview with a female law student named Susan that I met during a summer internship the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. She is currently a second year law student at the University Of Virginia School Of Law. She was a mentor for me in many ways especially when explaining the ins and outs of law school.
From her experience, she claims to not have been scrutinized because of her gender to her knowledge when applying for law school although believes there may have been some factors regarding gender representation at the school. She finds her classes to be very fair and that all of the requirements asked of the students to be gender-neutral. Albeit this has been easy, she says she has found some difficulties in the school’s extracurricular activities. She explained that although classes and grades and assignments are important, unmentioned is the extreme desperation for participating in the schools out-of-class organizations. She claims that these are just as important as other factors in her law school career because they understand that law firms look at this participation as equally important.
Her difficulties with the involvement are that she find that many of the group are male-lead. She finds that although academically the school does a wonderful job being gender-neutral, this does not seep into the extracurricular activities.
She also finds that when she forms study groups, she often will find herself joining the more male-dominated groups. Susan stated that although they may be equal, from her personal experience, the male-dominated groups tend to take school in a stride that she would like to incorporate in her school work. She blames this on her personal, bad experience she had on a single occasion and claims that it may possibly be the fact that she prefers to be subject to masculine personalities rather that feminine.