Weekly Blog #9

Throughout this last week, I have made a deep effort to set up more informational interviews with professionals, before the deadline on November 17th requiring me to have at least five interviews completed. This week I have conducted close to fifteen cold calls to different human rights attorneys on my contact list. However, I have concluded that the reasoning behind my difficulty in confirming interviews lies in two major hindrances. First of all, the human rights law profession is unique in that there are not many people in the Dallas/Fort Worth area that practice it. Therefore my options are highly limited to begin with. Second of all, human rights attorneys have extremely busy schedules. Even though they will eventually get around to replying, it is understandable for them to not place a very high level of importance on answering emails or phone calls from high school students.

Despite the difficulties I have encountered, I have been able to set up two more interviews with professional human rights attorneys, and am looking into confirming two additional interviews in the near future. This week I have had the pleasure to conduct an interview with Mr. Bill Holston, the executive director of the Human Rights Initiative North Texas. From the interview I gained a substantial amount of information and knowledge from his past experiences, as well as advice that will help guide me in pursuing my desired career path. The piece of advice that stuck out most to me, was when he mentioned that it was still possible for me to litigate human rights cases and, participate in international human rights law as pro-bono work, while studying a different kind of law in college. I will definitely take this piece of advice into consideration when I begin to look into applying for law schools in the future.

I also have another interview confirmed for next Wednesday, November 4th at 4:00pm with Mr. Paul Zoltan, owner of the Law Office of Paul S. Zoltan. I hope to gain more insight into the human rights field with this next interview. Overall, I hope to obtain a deeper understanding of human rights law as a whole, as well as a mentor who is willing to guide me throughout the rest of my learning process this year.