DO SOMETHING USEFUL, NOT ONLY SOMETHING IMPRESSIVE

There’s a certain odd culture I’ve come to notice around law students. It seems that we spend our five years of university preparing for our job interview. What this means is that it seems to me that law students tend to engage in activities which they feel will look good on their CV. So our primary motivation when going for competitions, applying for internships, organizing conferences, or things of the sort, is not so much learning as it is to have that particular record registered on your CV so as to make it impressive. Permit me to call this the “Optimize for CV” mindset.

While it is certainly beneficial to have an impressive CV, I feel that there is a certain drawback to this kind of mindset; we spend five years preparing ourselves to get a good job, and not preparing to be good on our jobs. Forget the wordplay and the “aspire to perspire” vibes in the previous sentence for a moment and listen. I’m not a lawyer but even I can tell that there’s a difference. There seems to be so much buzz amongst we law students about securing a job in a “good law firm”, but little to no buzz about being a good lawyer. While the two are not mutually exclusive, I’m not certain that they’re mutually inclusive either. In my opinion, it’s a much wiser approach to optimize for the latter, but why do so many people optimize for the former?

STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
For starters, I’d say that the system takes a major part of the blame. Upon gaining admission and starting legal studies, law students quickly realize something; legal practice in Nigeria is not as prestigious and comfortable as it sounds. For the most part, it’s a big struggle; there are very few good firms compared to the thousands of graduates the law school pours out each year. This leads to poor remuneration and degrading treatment of young lawyers. And since nobody wants to suffer, this leads to thousands of law students doing whatever they can to have an impressive CV, hopefully guaranteeing them a place in a good law firm and an above average salary. Thanks Nigeria, I’m so happy to be here.

Another factor responsible is Peer pressure, and by peer pressure, I mean every law student’s friendly neighborhood bully; LinkedIn. No one wants to be seen as the student who isn’t “achieving something”, and using social media sites like LinkedIn strengthen that fear. So law students are thrown into a frenzy of joining clubs, sending applications and whatever they can so as to have something impressive to put on LinkedIn. For the average law student, nothing is more mortifying than having an empty LinkedIn resume.
Let me make one thing clear at this point; an impressive CV is without argument something every law student should have. The problem isn’t with the CV or receiving accolades, it’s with the mindset. Spending five years with most of your activities tailored towards “looking” like an excellent student sounds like an awfully troubling way to live. For one, every time one of your peers gets a remarkable achievement, alarms go off in your head, reminding you that you’re not as impressive and you’re being left behind. Another problem is that it causes students to not work on things that they find interesting. I believe that university is a time for exploration. Young people are advised to try their hands at a lot of things while they’re still young, to find out what works and what doesn’t; what strikes your interest and what bores you.

The “optimize for CV” mindset pushes students to mostly engage in activities which they think will improve the looks of their CV. Perhaps, a better approach would be for law students to focus on how to be better lawyers, by testing their hands on different things, both within and outside law, and then gaining mastery over those they find interesting. You may end up doing less, but you’ll become more. By optimizing to be a better lawyer, an impressive CV becomes a natural outcome. In short, by doing what’s useful, and not only what’s impressive, you avoid building a resume that puts style over substance.
So what’s useful, and what’s impressive?

SOMETHING IMPRESSIVE
The problem with defining this is that the distinction between the two of them isn’t always very clear. Impressive things can be useful and useful things can be impressive. The first way to know is that impressive things are usually well, impressive. On first glance, they have an air of glamour to them. The second is that impressive things are usually done because everyone else is doing them. Ironic, because when everyone does the same thing, it ordinarily should lose its appeal and make others stay away from it. However, these things have a reverse effect; because everyone is doing it, pressure to not feel left out pushes whoever’s left to do it as well.

The best example of this for law students is Internships. Internships are really impressive. I mean who wouldn’t want to intern in Aluko, or Banwo, or KPMG. These things make your CV and LinkedIn profile shine. Secondly, the average law student(myself included), interns for the first time, not because they want to learn, but because all their mates have interned and they don’t want to feel left out. A smaller fraction do it because they’ve been advised that internships help your CV look impressive and increase your chances of getting a good job (still trying to impress). If there is any fraction of law students who intern only because they genuinely want to learn, it would be less than one percent in my estimation.

The third and most important determinant, is that impressive things usually contribute little or nothing to the main objectives of that organization or solve the main problems of that individual. For instance, a school mandating all its students to contribute money to donate to charity at the end of the school year\graduation. Such an initiative is impressive. And because these kinds of initiatives score “social points”, they are not spoken against or discouraged. But if we are being practical, it is not useful as it does not contribute substantially to the main purpose of the school which is educating the students.

For law students, while I cannot say that internships are useless, I’ll say they are useful to a limited degree. If you disagree, then the question to ask yourself is; after 4 or 5 years of university, would there be a substantial difference between a student who has interned or not? I highly doubt that. But if you disagree, then your answer would most likely be that there is a substantial difference as one has “experience”. Apart from the fact that that answer is vague, this experience\exposure that you speak of is often too inadequate for it to be of substantial value.

Saying that an intern is substantially ahead of his peers, is like saying that one is going to be a better parent than his peers because he has learned to babysit. Babysitting is only a drop in the ocean that is parenting. Parents feed, shelter, clothe, protect, teach, pay school fees, and attend to the emotional needs of their children in addition to a thousand other duties. Babysitting experience is not such a substantial advantage in the grand scheme of things. Same thing applies to internship experience. While interns may have been a little more exposed to things that their peers haven’t gotten in the classroom such as basic workplace ethic or skills, and wider knowledge in certain areas of law, this is only a drop in the ocean that is being a lawyer. Interning at Banwo&Ighodalo or KPMG doesn’t put you substantially ahead of your peers, it only puts your CV substantially ahead of theirs. In the long run, internships mostly serve to impress.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not an agenda against internships or anything of the sort. In fact, I strongly advise you to secure any top internships that you can (But on second thought, if a lot of people read this and decide not to apply for internships, then that would mean less competition and increase my chances of securing a prestigious one. So, no pressure guys). Impressiveness is needed. I only want to draw focus to the fact that doing something useful is more important. Of course, at first glance it seems obvious, but when you watch how most law students go about their lives, you realize that in practice, it’s not. The main reason I tackled internships is that it’s both the most impressive and probably the strongest example you could disagree with. However, once you agree, then maybe you can begin to see clearly how a lot of other things that law students engage that are less impressive with even less usefulness.
Now we’ve identified the things that by nature are mostly impressive. They;
1. On first glance have an air of glamour to them.
2. Are done mostly because others are doing it, or others in the past have done it
3. Contribute little or nothing to the main problems of that student/organization(and where they contribute, it’s never substantial)

So what’s useful? Glad you asked

SOMETHING USEFUL
Since we’ve already identified the qualities of impressive things, we can simply arrive at what’s useful by flipping them. So useful things;
1. On first glance, do not usually have an air of glamour to them.
2. Are not done mostly because others are doing it, or others have done it in the past.
3. Contribute substantially or completely solve the main problems of that student/organization.

So what’s the most useful student a law student can do? Well, you start by asking what’s the law student’s biggest problem; ignorance of the law. The only reason we call ourselves “learned” and others “laymen” is because we know the law and they don’t. So the most useful thing a law student can do is read. Not intern, or attend conferences, or becoming executives, but reading. And of course, it seems so obvious. Yet, there seems to be little effort by student governments to push students to read. Of course I understand that studying is every student’s personal responsibility. And that it’s so fundamental no one should have to tell you to do so. But when you think about the fact that in a pandemic, we still need to beg people to do things as important and basic as wearing a mask, and not attending parties, you realize that humans are generally less reliable than we think. How much more something non-life threatening like reading. Plus, if you’re going to organize other events that are not as necessary or impactful, you might as well organize events that will push students to do the most useful thing.

Now to check against the requirements; firstly, there’s nothing really glamorous about sitting on a desk and reading. It’s certainly admirable, but not glamorous. Secondly, reading is not really done because others are doing it. Now I know that a lot of the time, students can read because they see their mates reading and don’t want to look “unserious”. But the truth is that we mostly do it for ourselves. The way you know is that if you were to spend five years in university and noticed that not one of your mates decided to read and they were all failing, would you decide to conform and fail as well? Of course not! You would read at least once. If not to learn, then at least to avoid failing. The third determinant has already been tested on this one and it checks out.

What are other examples of useful things? In my opinion, one criminally underrated useful thing is study groups. If you’ve ever been in a study group or had a group discussion, then you’d already understand how powerful it is. The probability of you remembering and understanding whatever concept your group has discussed is a hundred times higher. But very few people have a consistent study group. And while most student societies and associations have academic units, none I know of organize study groups. Most student societies would rather organize conferences and invite the most prestigious personalities to come and speak. These things are useful to a little degree, but are mostly done to impress. It’s more likely to see a law student post on LinkedIn; “it’s with great pleasure that I announce to you that I was part of the organizing team that organized the Powerfully Prestigious Personalities conference 2020. We hosted many powerfully prestigious personalities such as the powerfully prestigious Mr Okirikiri SAN,…” than to see a student post “yesterday was the third weekend of meeting up with my study group. It’s been really interesting and fun learning alongside these guys. Here are some of the things we’ve discussed;…”.

Other useful things include mooting, public speaking, and writing. These things serve to sharpen non-negotiable aspects of a lawyer’s skillset; speaking and writing. All lawyers need to know how to do this. Yet how many students speak? A handful. How many moot? A smaller fraction of that handful. How many write papers and articles? An even smaller fraction of the fraction of that handful.

Other useful things include legal research, and attending chamber meetings. Research for obvious reasons, and chamber meetings because they are meant to teach the procedural aspect of the law which is important. Perhaps the reason why Chambers aren’t taken very seriously(at least in my faculty) is because the chamber executives themselves don’t put sufficient effort into ensuring that the chamber adds real value to members. Probably because they don’t understand how important they are, or are just holding those positions to have something impressive to put on their CVs

THINK LONG TERM
But here’s another interesting thing I realized when writing this. There’s something peculiar about the nature of impressive and useful things when projected into the long-term. Perhaps it can serve as a heuristic for determining what’s useful and what’s not. Let’s call this “the Iteration test”. Here’s the idea; when you take something useful, which at first glance or at the first time isn’t that impressive, and then do it consistently for a long time, that thing begins to look super impressive. While for originally impressive things, it begins to work in reverse. If you take that activity and repeat it for a long time consistently, it begins to look less impressive or even more like a distraction\problem.

For instance, spending 2 hours in the library reading is not that impressive. However, if someone reads 2 hours every day for a year, then apart from the massive impact it has on his grades, it also becomes super impressive. On the other hand, one internship might seem impressive. However, if a student interns 50 times in 5 years, then he would begin to look distracted.

One study group meeting isn’t impressive. But if you held a study group meeting consistently for every weekend before exams, not only would you have built a network of intelligent friends, but you’ll be better prepared for exams. On the other hand, while having a mentor seems impressive, gaining 50 mentors in a year makes it look like you can’t think for yourself.

If a student wrote a hundred articles before graduation, it’d signal good research and writing skills, and look very impressive. However, if someone organized a hundred conferences before graduation, then he’d look like he was in the wrong profession and should probably be an event planner.

As you can probably glean, things that appear impressive up-front, begin to look less impressive in the long term. So here’s a heuristic for better decision making; the next time you have to choose between two courses of action, think long term. Take both of them and mentally iterate them a hundred times, then see which gives the best benefits in the long term. That one is most likely the more useful course of action.

CONCLUSION
If you had doubts while reading this, then that’s okay. I can’t speak in absolutes, but I’m convinced that these ideas are more right than they are wrong. And even if you think that this is not a good heuristic for law students, I’m pretty sure it works even better in other contexts. In how families, businesses, and general human relationships are run, it seems there is too much attention paid to superficial but impressive things. But I am aware of the fact that this is not especially a bad thing. Humans are social animals, and doing other things to influence the way you’re perceived definitely has its uses. Of course your CV should be impressive! How do you expect to get a job?

Being impressive has very practical benefits. But in all of this, I felt the need to remind us of what is more important; to cut down on the impressive, and focus a little more on the useful. Focus on things that actually solve problems, not score social points. I am not pushing to eradicate the impressive entirely, but for balance. 50:50 might be equilibrium, but it’s not balance. Less social:more personal, Less style:more substance, less noise:more signal; perhaps, this is a better type of balance.

Optimize by doing what is useful, not only what is impressive.

Thanks to Captain Levi , Adebanjo Olamilekan, Omotunde Masha, and Eguaoje Joy for reading drafts of this.