Third World Dreams by Sela

Third World Dreams by Sela - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

I can only remember my ever seriously wanting to be two professions in my life; a pilot and a lawyer. My memory can be selective but since my memories of wanting to be a pilot are near and few as opposed to those of my wanting to be a lawyer, I am going to a assume six year old me wanted to be a pilot. Growing up in Uganda, my job options were limited, at least the jobs that paid well enough and were considered “successful”. My parents worked hard and sent me to the top privates schools in the country from a young age to give me a fighting chance and I excelled. I have always loved school and learning, even before I understood that my parents pushed me so hard academically so that I could have a fighting chance.

In Uganda there were three main roads to success; medicine, politics, or law. A step down from those roads were paths less traveled by but if lucky or hardworking enough, one could find just as much success. These shorter paths were; engineering, pilot, professor, business, banking, nursing, and the arts(singing, dancing, acting). My father pushed medicine for so long that even years after moving to the U.S. I tried to convince myself I had an interest in becoming a doctor. In a country that is riddled with corruption and a “president” who is only a step down from a dictator, a career in politics required family and tribal connections that needed to have been cultivated while I was still in the womb. As for law, it was a step down from politics in that connections were important but intelligence was of more value.

It seems absurd for a six year old to have picked up on all of these social cues, and if I’m being honest I don’t know if I really did, but for whatever reason I latched onto the idea of being a pilot. I didn’t necessarily LOVE the idea, never mind the fact that I had not even been on a plane at this point in my life. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I stopped wanting to be a pilot but I can remember why. Math. I have always been good enough at math to make it into the advanced classes, but not great enough to excel in them to the level at which I do in other subjects. Not to mention the fact that I dislike (bordering on hate) most math classes and find myself stressed out by a class that was not necessary for me to take. Most of the options I mentioned are STEM professions which meant a lot of math so when I finally came to terms with my disdain for learning advanced math, I was left with law and the arts. Although I would like it to be otherwise, I have no artistic talents to speak of so with that option out of the question I was left with law.

I have wanted to be a lawyer for as long as I can remember seriously considering a profession. Of course when I was younger it was based solely on pictures of my mother in her “lawyer suits” when she practiced law in Uganda but by high school I knew I wanted my journey to make the world better as a whole and law plays a large part in that. By the time I got to university, relations in the Middle East had somehow become worse and I realized this is the area in which I could make the largest impact. Thankfully I had started taking Arabic my first semester out of curiosity and it fit perfectly into my plan when I changed my major to International Security and Conflict Resolution with a minor in Islamic & Arabic Studies my second semester.

My goal is to become a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East to foster better relations and hopefully facilitate more peace. Although I am sure of what I want to do career-wise, all experiences are learning experiences and I have collected experiences from different arenas. The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I landed a position as a summer assistant at Castanea Partners, a private equity firm in Massachusetts, my home state. They were so impressed that they invited me to return the next summer as well. This experience allowed me to land an internship in the Fidelity Investments headquarters as an administrative intern the summer of my senior year. Even though these internships did not directly correlate to law, the skills and connections I made are priceless. This summer, I was asked to return as an intern with Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, one of the largest law firm in the Boston area after an internship last summer. I spoke to lawyers about their experiences in law school and what made them decide that this was the path they wanted to take.