Transcript:
speaker-0 (00:03.246)
tell you how many times I heard you belong for me to finally start believing that for myself. And so that's the power, I think, of mentorship and the power of just the mentor that kind of building you up as you feel low. And they believe in you even when you don't believe in yourself.
This is Real Cases, a legal podcast presented by the Stetson University College of Law. We'll sit down with Stetson Law faculty and students to examine today's critical cases and debates in environmental, international, elder, and business law, plus the role of social justice in these fields. Join us as we open the case file. Episode 39, Who's in Your Corner? Insights Stetson Law's Mentorship Culture.
I'm Daniel O'Keefe, Master of English Literature from Indiana University. Today we're joined by Professor of Law, Catherine J. Cameron, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs, Latoya Edwards, Assistant Dean for Career and Professional Development, Catherine B. Martin, and Assistant Dean for Academic Success and Bar Prep Services, Stephen A. Maxwell. Thank you all for being here. I'd like to start out by asking each of you to...
Introduce yourselves if you could say a little bit about your background, about what drew you to the law in the first place and how you came to Stetson.
My name is Latoya Edwards. I am the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and the Deputy Title IX Coordinator for Students here at Stetson Law. I have been at Stetson Law for almost three years. my gosh, I started August 2023. I'm super excited and also a little saddened because the students I started with are graduating in May. So I'll be crying a lot over the next few months of this semester.
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I am a licensed attorney and I still practice pro bono immigration work. And that's what drew me to the law in the first place, immigration and family law. I am an immigrant. I immigrated from Jamaica almost 26 years ago. And I remember going through the process. We didn't have an attorney or at least we didn't have an attorney in Jamaica. The people here, my family here had an attorney and
For them, it was easier. For us in Jamaica, it was a little bit more tenuous. And I thought it would have been great if we had somebody on this side as well. So I actually now counsel both sides, the petitioner and the beneficiary in the process to make it easier and a little bit more seamless for the parties as they navigate the immigration system. And I got involved with family law because
for the most part, they're intertwined family law and immigration law. When you have immigrants who are going through the family law process, their first question is, how does this affect my immigration status? And so I figured I may as well know a little bit about it and fell in love with it. So started doing that. I came up here from Miami. So here is in Gulfport, to Stetson. came from Miami.
where we had one of the biggest immigration population, immigrant population in country. So had a ton of experience there. And with all the changes that we go through in immigration law, I am still in high demand.
Dean Martin, would you like to go next?
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My name is Kathy Martin and I've been at Stetson for almost 15 years now. And I came to Stetson after a long career in human resources. I was a human resources executive for big companies and little companies. for me, the theme was always like career and professional development. I think of work.
as more of a lifelong integration of all the things you love. And so the only thing I really ended up liking about Human Resources was the career and professional development part. And I think almost anybody who's worked with me will tell you I would do career development at a bus stop. I would do it on an airplane in a grocery store. I am just fascinated by what drives people and what drives
career achievement, career selection, and that sort of thing. I am not an attorney. My husband is an attorney, and that's kind how I came to be at Stetson. I have an MBA from Stetson University. And my husband graduated from Stetson Law. so I've been involved with the College of Law for a very long time as a volunteer. And when my predecessor decided to retire, they asked me to sit in her seat.
for a little while and I said, sure. Then I never left. I loved it so much and came to be, this is the longest I've ever worked anywhere. And I just, I love it. I love the students. I love my coworkers. It's just a wonderful journey and a wonderful place to be. I'm fascinated by law careers because the profession is constantly changing.
And we are really, really lucky to be in a very robust metro market at a time when there are lots and lots and lots of choices. And it wasn't always that way. And who knows what it will be in the future. But right now, this is just a great job because you get to talk to people about so many opportunities.
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The other side of that is of course professional development and having worked in HR and specifically in talent management compensation and some of the softer sides of that profession. Your own professional development is a self-managed journey and we are really lucky to get the tools and the programs and the kinds of things at Stetson that we can.
deploy with creativity and a certain amount of individuality. Because I think that's really important when you're talking about careers. One size doesn't fit all and it certainly doesn't here. And professional development is similarly what works for one person may not work for another. And that's one of the things I love about this office is that we're able to, we have the resources to be able to work with students individually on both.
their career aspirations and their professional and practice development.
Thank you. Dean Maxwell.
Sure, yeah, I'm Steve Maxwell. I've been at Stetson. I'm the newest member on this podcast episode. I've been here about a year and a half, and it truly has been a phenomenal experience. I went to law school having been an eight-year career teacher in the public school system. so I was able to go through and see how...
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legal education was done, how that was different from secondary education. And then I went through bar prep. I was very lucky to go through a really top-notch bar program at my law school. And then I got out into practice, was doing wills and trusts, and that was during the Great Recession. So the money wasn't really there. It was a very tough market at that point. Not a lot of business. And so I got a phone call from my alma mater law school.
that there was an academic success director position open. And they hired me there and I did that for five years. I was academic success director. And then I got a call from another law school recruiting me because they needed a new bar prep program. They didn't have one. Imagine that, that was wild. So they hired me to create their bar prep program. So I went there and did that for a few years.
Most recently, I came from the University of Miami School of Law. was running their bar prep and academic success department. But I'm so excited to be back to the beach and love Gulfport. Love that just about everybody here who runs a department is a superstar and super passionate about what they do. And so it's a huge honor to me to be on this panel today talking to your listeners.
Professor Cameron.
So I have been a lawyer for 25 years and I've been at Stetson for 20 of those years. So I was only out in practice actually in looking back a very small amount of my career.
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But I spent that time working on behalf of reporters and their First Amendment rights. And then I worked for the court system for a little bit. And that was my focus in school as well. I had been a journalism undergrad and as part of that curriculum, we were required to take a media law course and I just fell in love with the topic and then wanted to go to law school. So that's kind of how I came into the law and then what I practiced.
And then because of my writing background, I transitioned into teaching writing and then later media law here at Stetson.
What drew you so quickly into teaching specifically?
Well, I guess I always felt like I kind of had a knack for understanding students and, sometimes students will ask you a question and they're not really good at even formulating their question. And I always felt like I had a pretty good knack for hearing the question, but really understanding where they were confused beneath that question and then addressing that. And that started from when I was really young. I used to...
tutor kids when I was in middle and high school and when I got into undergrad and then later in law school, I was a teaching assistant. So I always kind of had that, that knack. you know, once I went out into practice, I started thinking, man, it would really be fun to try to jazz people up about the topics that I'm interested in. Like I was jazzed up when I was in school. And so that's what kind of drew me back into teaching.
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What do you feel like mentoring means in general and specifically within the context of Stetson? How do you think about that?
You know, I think mentorship is kind of, it means a lot, but I think the primary thing is a motivation of the wellbeing of the person you're mentoring. I think that's the fundamental base to it. And that can mean a lot of different actions taken in that direction, innumerable, but it starts with a genuine interest in the wellbeing of others. You know, for me, it was,
You know, eye-opening to go to high school kids' houses. This was a small town. It was a rural community of Bartow, Florida. If anybody out there is from Bartow, big shout out to you guys. I love you all. Very small town feel, very Southern town. Showing up at a kid's house when the kid was absent for a few days just to see what was going on. Introduced myself to mom and dad.
And you're like, oh, wow, this kid lives in circumstances that are so different from what I grew up in. And so that sort of infused this empathy in me for, gosh, I have no idea what my students are going through, what they deal with on a day-to-day basis. And so it really lit that fire of care and concern for the student's well-being because I relatively privileged, very, very well-off.
And so that was a fire that was lit and that became like an interest in the wellbeing of others generally. And as you acquire skills, you get your law degree and you go out and you advocate for people, you're thinking of the wellbeing of the person. So that's just sort of where I would start the discussion and I'll kick it off to somebody else.
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I have a little bit of a different view of it, maybe. I look at it a little bit differently. I think that a good mentor or a mentoring program or mentoring actually is, it authorizes the other person, the person that you're mentoring to be in the conversation. The objective is a sense of belonging, even if it's only belonging in the place where
you can ask questions and get meaningful help. It's saying, we are on the same path. You may be very different from me, but I can help you feel like you belong where you want to be. And that's usually my objective. There is no question too silly. There is no wrong way to do a thing. There is just learning to fit yourself into
what you want and where you want to go. And I'm talking about doing it in this setting. I mean, there are mentors everywhere. Our staffing model in the career and professional development office is more mentoring than coaching because these are adult learners. They're well on their way to a professional practice and they're learning to be advocates and they're learning that in the classroom. The best mentors
that I had in my own career are people who changed my life and who made it better for having said, am I try doing it this way? Have you ever thought about that impact? But never ever were directive or made me feel like I didn't belong in that conversation with somebody that I really admired and respected. And that's probably the thing I took away and put into my own
definition of mentoring.
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So I like both actually, and I draw a bit from both. think mentorship actually, like Dean Maxwell said, does deal with empathy. You need to have empathy for that person because you need to understand where that person is coming from, where they are at that moment, and where they're trying to get to have a truly beneficial mentorship relationship.
And so I, one of the first things I look for in a mentee or one of the first things I ask when a student or someone approaches me for me to be their mentor is what do you want from me? Right? What are you expecting? Where are you? How can I help you where you are? Can you share some of where you've been so that I can have a whole picture view of what I can do to help you achieve where you want to go?
Law is kind of interesting because unlike other professional degrees, like for instance, medicine, where you have sort of a built in mentorship path after school, right? You have residency and that sort of thing. Law just kind of throws you in the mix. You graduate from law school and you can go out on your own if you want and hang out your own shingle and practice. Some of the bigger firms have mentorship type.
scenarios where you work for an attorney for a while and you're just sitting in the office kind of watching them for a while and then you start drafting things slowly and then you slowly get in the court room but you're always at the arm of your supervising attorney until they feel like they can take the training wheels off. But a lot of lawyers go to small firms or like I said out on their own and they're just thrown into the mix. And so in law school we've tried more and more to build mentorship.
programs and some of that is through the curriculum like with our externship and internship programs where we had these official programs that you can sign up for and then you work under attorneys or judges and kind of get to see what they do in a low stress environment, know, where your job's not on the line or anything like that. But, you know, mentorship can even be more informal and Stetson has lots of programs where we try to
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get students in touch with alums that are out in practice so they can start building a relationship there. But even within the school, have programs where, and they're a bit more informal, where we try to have students interact with each other and with professors to try to get some mentorship there as well. And some of it's curricular. Some of it is,
learning about the law, learning about how to actually practice the law. then some of it is just personal. mean, a lot of it is learning how to deal with losing. know, a lot of law is losing. Every event in the courtroom, you know, one out of two parties loses. So a lot of it is learning how to deal with losing and learning how to deal with people, how you counsel people that are in crisis, how you help them through that. so
A lot of mentorship is learning those personal skills that you don't always think of when you're thinking about going out into the practice of law.
How early do students begin engaging with mentors at Stetson? And could you talk a little bit about how that support evolves as they move through their three years in law school?
Stetson has originated a formal system of mentoring. And we call it the Inns of Stetson. As you may know, or your listeners may know, Inns of Court is a part of the profession where like-minded people get together and they mentor younger entrants into the profession.
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So about two years ago, Stetson originated something called the Inns of Stetson. And now when they come into law school on the very first day, instead of being part of an enormous group of students in a section of 100 or 80 or whatever the number of incoming students is for that year, they are placed with a smaller group called the Inn.
which is led by a bencher who is a faculty member with tenure and experience and a group of readers who are experienced mentors and the students then become a part of that small group. And the purpose of it is for them to meet
informally or formally that the students participate in what is called a table. And there's a couple of readers per table and adventure per number of tables. It's sort of organized a little bit mathematically, but it's random selection. So there's no selection process at the student level. And it's been three years now. I think we're going into our
third year, it'll be fourth year pretty soon. And the purpose of it is to make sure that students have a sense of belonging. And the activities include just getting a cup of coffee with your assigned reader, meeting with the venture who also does some academic advising. And orientation is built around
those structures. So the content is aimed in the direction of professional identity formation, acclamation to the rules of the campus, which are much like the rules of the profession. And the students are exposed to the kinds of things that they should be thinking about in addition to just coursework from day one. And they are assigned a mentor.
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from day one. Now the mentors themselves, which we call readers on the campus, are part of a group that Latoya, Dean Edwards, excuse me, mentors, and they are also ambassadors that are a Stetson Law tradition. At one point, Stetson won a Gambrella Award just for the mentoring program and has now won a Gambrella Award
for the ends of Stetson as well. And that's an award given by the ABA, or accrediting body, for excellence in professional development. I think everybody on this conversation, Dean Maxwell, Dean Edwards, and I are extremely proud of Stetson using the concept of mentoring as the core of the program such that we start on, well, actually,
My department starts before somebody enters law school with a stream of welcoming and acclimatization communications. But certainly on day one, the students know that they belong here and they have a mentor that they can go to.
Absolutely. to add to Dean Martin, yes, our mentorship program, our Inns of Stetson and our ambassador program, they are top notch and second to none. But we also have the informal mentoring and that sometimes starts before students even apply to Stetson. So we have the ambassadors who are also readers. They do the tours, the prospective students tours.
on campus and so we encourage them to build rapport with the students or the prospective students as they are showing them around campus. Ask questions, answer all the questions and then leave your email with the person so that they can continue that. We also do that at our open houses. I can't tell you how many mentees I have who are not Stetson students.
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Right because they come in and they're like Dean Edwards What do I need to do to get here and so you find that? Mentorship has to start earlier. So that's me, you know when I said earlier you got to connect with where they have been right? So I'm like, okay, where have you been? What have you been doing? How's your essay? Let me look at it. Thankfully I'm not a part of the admissions decisions so I don't feel like there is some kind of confidentiality or anything any
anything that I am stepping any lines that I'm crossing. So I asked student, I asked potential students, Hank, if you're comfortable, send me your admissions essay. Let me read it through. Okay, you're still in college. These are the classes you probably should look into taking if you have the time. You need to boost your GPA. You need to ensure that you are going with an LSAT prep course or something because you're lacking your LSAT scores are a little low, we want them higher. So
I meet with students, potential students, sometimes two years out. My youngest one, she's a junior right now in college. So she has another year and a half to go before she gets to law school. But we start early because Stetson here, Stetson is probably the most magical place on earth. I know they say it's Disney, but it's really Stetson. Stetson is so unique. Everyone is just so amazing.
And I like to tell people kindness is really our jam. So when students come in or potential students or their families come in, we give them the time of day. We're not rushing. We are in this moment with you because you're going to come and be a part of this Stetson tradition. And our green runs super deep. So even after students leave, even after alums graduated, move on to bigger and better, we still pull them back to come in.
mentor some of the students who going here, who are currently here, and we do that through our student organizations especially. So we have about 60 active student orgs on campus and every student org has a mentorship component. Whether it's formal or informal, they must have it. It's a requirement from my office so that they either bring alums back, alums who were part of the org,
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or they bring attorneys who are practicing in the area. So let's say it's business law. They bring an attorney who's practicing business law. They meet with the students. The students get to ask them questions and help them to kind of prepare their minds for practice after they're done with the bar. So Dean Maxwell would probably crucify me if I had them thinking about post-bar stuff without even studying for the bar. But yeah.
Stetson's tradition of mentoring runs deep. It's not just formal, it's also informal and everyone here at Stetson has invested interest in ensuring our students succeed.
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Yeah, Dean Edwards, you started to get into this a little bit with your answer just now. But could you all talk a little bit about how mentoring looks different at different stages? So how does the focus shift for the kinds of mentoring that students receive in their 1L year versus 2L versus 3L?
In the 1L year, you find that everyone, for the most part, needs the same thing. They want to know what law school is. They want to know how to brief the case. They want to know what to expect from a certain professor. How do you outline what to look for for final exams? So first semester, first year, pretty much same level. Second year is when students start picking, they start picking their own classes. And so mentorship for that looks a little different. They're asking the questions about
what they want, what they feel they want to do. And so you find they start engaging with OCPD more, or at least we hope they start engaging with the Martin's department more to find out what their employment trajectory looks like. What are they passionate about? And then we start focusing mentorship on that. And in those times, we still have the readers, the mentors are still available, but they're not as rigid. They're not expecting you to meet with them once a month.
That's where now the mentee has to do more of the work to reach out to the mentor to say, hey, I need to talk with you. Or can you tell me somebody else who is interested in space law, right? So that I can go talk to that person. And so the mentorship, the mentorship program then is more organic. It starts flowing at an organic pace based on
what students are looking for and where they want to end up eventually.
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We have a program coming up in January called Campus to Career. And over the years, Campus to also won a Gambrell Award with Campus to Career. We are bringing in over 100 attorneys throughout the day, not all at the same time necessarily, but the students have worked to identify individuals that they want to meet and spend time with. And we construct this around what we call law practice mentors.
And the law practice mentors are attorneys who will devote their time on that day and maybe beyond that day. Because the other change that happens is after the first semester of law school and going into the second semester, the students want to meet more people than just me and Dean Edwards and Dean Maxwell and a couple of professors. They want to meet people who are really, really doing this in law practice.
and is a little premature for them to be employed until they'll start getting summer jobs and sometimes through their mentors that they will meet at Campus to Career and some of the other events that we have. But we literally term these individuals who will volunteer for Campus to Career as law practice mentors. And we will provide the students who are interested in family law with family lawyers, who are interested in immigration law with immigration lawyers.
And it is for the purpose, the articulated purpose, of mentoring them or sharing information with them. And that happens every year on the last Friday of January and comes shortly after grades and shortly before the second semester of law school really kicks off. So I would also want to add that Dean Maxwell has a really robust program of
assigning mentors for bar preparation. And those folks have a completely different kind of environment, because that comes at the end of law school. It's still a part of the law school process. But Dean Maxwell, do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's a really important part of our culture.
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Absolutely, I'm gonna start at the beginning roughly and move on through. But we will, that's really the crescendo there is bar prep. That's really the reason for my department's existence to get everybody through law school and pass the bar so they can get on with their lives and live the dream that they're thinking come to law school to achieve. So you get here and I can give you an
By the way, I want the listeners to know that I've been at, Stetson is my fourth Florida law school, and hopefully, fingers crossed, it's my final Florida law school. But the reason I share that is because I've been at a lot of Florida law schools, and I can tell you that Stetson is unique in a lot of different ways. And one of those is, is when you first arrive at law school, the Florida Board of Bar Examiners incentivizes early bar application.
And if you get that application in, in your first semester by the deadline, which we'll tell you all about once you get here, you don't have to worry about it. Write anything down. This is a fricking podcast. Enjoy it. But when you get here, we'll guide you through. And you're supposed to apply for the bar early in law school because it takes them a long time to do an investigation to make sure that you have the character and fitness to practice law. it's these applications take maybe seven, eight months to
go through, some people longer, some people shorter, it just depends on when you apply. And that process is very, very detailed. just yesterday, I had a long meeting with a 1L student who's finalizing their bar application, who didn't know how to get certain information on herself. And we are here to mentor you. And sometimes you have to share with us things, you know, to Dean Martin's point about
being a part of the conversation, you know, you have to share part of your life with us so that we can guide you on how to fill out the application. That's kind of a really fun early touch point, at least on my end. It's not as much fun as the student having to dig up their entire lives on paper and sometimes, you know, relive parts of their life that they wish they could forget. But it's part of the character and fitness investigation process. The bar.
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does to ensure that we have high quality attorneys like we do at Stetson in the practice of law. So we have an early touch point where sometimes we really get to know people and the sharing of their lives and filling out their bar application, which is a very lengthy process, but you have mentors available to walk you through that process. that's our earliest component.
that runs concurrently with another component, which is Essentials of Law School Success. We run workshops with, our entire department is involved in these. And we actually teach those skills that Dean Edwards was talking about, how to read and brief a case, how to outline, how to approach a multiple choice question, how to approach a big fact pattern on a final essay exam. You know, it's a totally different kind of testing in law school that you're
you're unaccustomed to an undergraduate or even graduate programs. So we have that programming and through that we really get to know our students. And then this is all sort of building up to that final semester where a lot of, by the way, a unique aspect of our first year program is that Stetson actually pays your bar application fee if you meet the early application deadline and
The bar examiners discount the fee $400, but Stetson actually pays the $100 discounted rate. So you pay nothing your first year. Stetson, as far as I know, is the only law school in Florida that does that. And I have interacted with a lot of Florida law schools. So it's a very unique part of what we do. We not just guide you, but we'll actually pay your fee for you that first year, which is very helpful for a lot of students. And then toward the tail end of law school,
We do muster the entire law school campus. Bar prep is an entire village effort. It is not just academic success in bar prep. We do have a great team here, top-notch team to support students as they prepare for the bar exam, but we actually recruit faculty. We have about 30 faculty who volunteer to
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coach and mentor our graduates during the bar prep process, and that is unique. We also call alumni who took the bar, you know, a year ago, two years ago, and ask them to come back and mentor current bar takers. This is mind you, you graduate law school, you get your JD, and now you have to sit for a very intense bar exam.
a few months after you graduate. And so a lot of law schools just send you on your way. You've got your JD and you're done. But we assemble faculty, staff, alumni, anybody who's been through bar prep and done it themselves is eligible to be a bar coach. So we usually have about 30 faculty and we assign
bar takers to faculty, staff, and alumni mentors who are trained to guide you. Your bar prep nowadays, you I did bar prep back in the days where we would turn in our essays on hieroglyphic symbols in the caves and we would ship those symbols off and send it to the bar examiners and they would grade them. Now it's mostly online. So.
That can be a very solitary process for students and they can get kind of like, you know, I'm just logging in, I'm pulling up my laptop and I'm watching a screen all day, every day for, you know, months at a time. And it can feel very much an individual solitary effort. And that's where we have our army of volunteers to guide and meet with you every week during bar prep.
to talk about your process, where you are, how are you doing, do you need to step it up, do you need to try something different. And if those coaches have a question related to something really, really sort of nuanced, they reach out to me or my team and get guidance on how to mentor in with respect to bar passage, because all of this is building toward your licensure so that you can.
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Get out of Stetson and get on with your career and have your family and your life as the way you want it. But that is a huge group effort.
from the standpoint of career and professional development, I'd like to ask a little bit about how all of the hands-on clinical and experiential education opportunities that Stetson offers through law clinics, through internships, what role that plays in the mentoring process and how that helps to bring in mentors from the outside in the way you were talking about Dean Martin and how it also
embeds Stetson students in sort of the broader legal community in the Tampa Bay area.
It's a really important program. It's a really important fit. Students who get involved in internships and clinical education are starting on a path to the profession in a very guided way. Those are faculty members who influence the selection of the field supervisors.
They are owned by faculty. Those internships and clinics are owned by faculty, and they are supported by clinical education, meaning there are two professors and a third field supervisor, a third party, the field supervisor, who all act as mentors to surround the student who takes the externship. We call them externships here.
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But I know what you mean. it's like an accelerant in terms of the student's ability to actually begin to be guided through an actual practice. And they are there on a regular schedule. So it's day in and day out of trying different aspects of the job itself or the ultimate kinds of
advocacy that they'll be exposed to, and they are graded and given an enormous amount of feedback. getting a regular summer job or part-time school year job after 1L similarly will expose a student to work that will lead to the kind of work that they may or may not want to do. The clinical or the
the externship experience is a deeper and at the same time more elevated experience because of the guidance of faculty and the careful selection of the sites for that and the guidance given by the mentors who run the Department of Clinical Education.
Students that work with judges in their chambers. have students that work for the public defenders office and the state attorney's office. We have students that work as in with in house counsel attorneys, you know it at businesses like Outback Steakhouse and those sorts of things that have like local hubs. And so we set up those programs so that the students go and they hang out and they watch the attorneys and the judges do their thing. But then they also.
get opportunities to actually practice their skills. So for instance, the students that work with the state attorneys and public defender's office often write motions, they often argue motions in court. And of course the supervising attorneys are watching them very closely and making sure they're doing the right thing, but it gives the students a chance to get some practical experience. So they have that before they go out and apply for jobs. They can say, hey, I've actually...
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argued emotion in front of the court. And I have experience with that. I have experience with losing, right? They get that practical experience. And it also gives them an opportunity while they're in law school to see if that's really where they want to land when they get out. Because sometimes we have people who think, I really want to be a state attorney. And then they go and they argue emotion and they think, you know what, my interest is really with the public defender's office. Or maybe my interest isn't in criminal law at all. I thought this is where I want to be, but I really think that
I don't want to be dealing with people's lives. I would rather be dealing with property disputes or that sort of thing. And so it's sort of a double-edged sword there. It gives you experience that you can put on your resume. gives you something you can talk about when you're applying for jobs. But as a student, it also gives you an opportunity to try out what you're thinking about going into and see if that's really going to be a place where you want to be for the rest of your career. So they're great opportunities.
push all my students to go into them if they can. And that's something that you can usually get involved in in your second or your third year here at Stetson. And a lot of times people will do multiple externships and internships to kind of dip their toe into various areas of law. So it's a great thing, especially for students who might not be 100 % sure of where they want to practice. They can go into internships and externships and kind of feel it out in a safe environment.
Dean Edwards, I wanted to ask you a little bit before you were talking about your own experiences as a first-generation law student, I'd ask you to talk a little bit about the impact that you feel like robust mentoring programs have for first-generation students, but also if you could expand on that too to talk a little bit about
non-traditional students of various sorts, perhaps students who are beginning a new career and who are coming to law school after having been out of college for a while, or students who are choosing to go to law school part-time while they're working full-time. So if you could talk a little bit about the role that mentoring plays for those students in particular. I know that's a wide net, but.
speaker-2 (43:54.958)
you
No, absolutely. As you were talking, I was nodding ahead because I was like, yeah, I checked that box. Yes, I checked that box. I went to law school long after graduating from undergrad and my master's program. actually, no, graduated with my undergraduate, went into the job market, started my master's about two years after that, got married, had a baby, went to law school, and then in law school had another baby.
you
speaker-0 (44:24.718)
So first generation everything, right? First generation law student coming from second career or at least coming from first career into second career with a whole family. And though I wasn't working and I put working in quotes, I wasn't getting paid, but my mom had her own restaurant. And so I was like the de facto manager for her restaurant. So I did all the paperwork.
I was also the secretary for my church. So I did all the paperwork for there. So I technically was working throughout law school and then having to ensure that the kids were taken care of and help my husband out with his stuff. So it was a lot. And what mentorship did for me was first to help me manage those expectations. As a, so I had a mentor who was a first gen. I had a mentor who was married with children.
I'm
I had a mentor who came from an immigrant background. I had a mentor who went through a first career first before coming to law school. sometimes you won't find a mentor that covers all the boxes. It's okay to get some other ones. So for my first semester of law school alone, I had about four mentors going into law school. And then gradually I picked up some more. So by the time I finished law school, I had about 13 or 14 mentors.
because as a part of, and I don't believe they do this anymore, but Koziak Law Firm in Miami had this huge mentorship program where they coordinated with the Florida Bar and with other law schools and other voluntary bars around the state to host this. It was at a park. It was free for students and their families to come to. I mean, huge. I'm talking about judges, partners, practicing attorneys, government attorneys, everybody.
speaker-0 (46:21.102)
And when you signed in, they have these stickers. I need a mentor or I need a mentee. And so I went to every person who had a sticker that said, I need a mentor. didn't, sometimes I didn't even ask what they did. I knew they were already practicing. That's where I want to go. Let me get your contact and we'll follow up later. So that's how I got about seven of my 14, my 13 or 14 mentors through the minority mentoring picnic. But
As a first gen, I struggled with imposter syndrome. And you hear that, you kind of hear that a lot in law school, right? I feel like I'm an imposter. I feel like I don't belong. I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. And so I struggled a lot with that because I came from a family where my mom was number 17 of 17 kids, right? And none of were lawyers. None of the cousins, none of the aunties, none of the uncles.
Nobody knew what I was going through. So I already felt like everything was against me to start. And then somehow I got great grades and a decent LSAT score. And now I'm sitting in this seat that I feel wholly unprepared for. And I had days where I would go home and cry. And my poor husband, ex-husband now, but poor husband at the time.
He didn't understand what I was going through. And so I would call a mentor, like, I'm going to drop out. I don't belong. All these other students, they seem to know. I don't understand. what, what, what is this Paul's Groff case? I don't understand. What do you mean? You know, you, you can't do, you can't have like fireworks on a train. I know I don't understand these things. And so I,
What I loved about my mentors, they would allow me to kind of like crash out. Right. So I'd call them and I go, a mile a minute. And then they'll go, are you done? Are you done? Right. Now, what, how, I hear what you're going through. What are we going to do about it? Because you do belong. And sometimes just that reaffirmation, you belong, you belong, you belong. I can't tell you how much, how many times I heard you belong for me to finally start believing that for myself.
speaker-0 (48:41.174)
And so that's the power, I think, of mentorship and the power of just the mentor that kind of building you up as you feel low. And they believe in you even when you don't believe in yourself. Because yes, you know, you can say logically, yes, I made great grades. Yes, I passed the LSAT with flying colors. Yes, I got into a good university or good law school program. Yeah, they gave me a scholarship.
Yeah, I'm in class with people who are number one in all their, whenever schooling they've done, they've been number one. I'm here, but do I belong here? And my mentors were really instrumental in helping me, pushing me, propelling me say, yes, you belong here. Until I finally started believing it myself.
And that's as an open door policy across the board when it comes to professors and students. The law school that I went to had sort of a different culture. You only went to see a professor if you had a question about the curriculum, about what you learned that day or about your exam and how you performed on that. professors weren't really known to be there for any other reason.
And Stetson's culture is completely different. From the day you come in, like I said, they pair you up with a professor with the ins. And so we try to create this culture where students feel comfortable stopping by their professor's office, even if it has nothing to do with that professor's class. And so I have students in particular who, you know, move on to other semesters where they don't have me anymore. And they'll still come back and ask me questions about, you know, applying for jobs or
you know, they start to get interested in my area of law after they've moved on to other professors. And so they'll come back and talk to me about that. And, you know, we're just life situations. You know, they know I've got, you know, kids and dogs. And so they'll have, you know, a with their kids and dogs. And they'll come by and ask me about that. And the professors here across the board have that kind of open door policy. I don't know anyone of my colleagues that
speaker-2 (50:57.74)
you know, says, you know, if you're not in my class, I can't talk to you. I don't know anyone that would do that, you know, and every professor, if they're here on campus and a student comes to the door, they can come in. I don't know anyone that says, I'm sorry, you've got to make an appointment with me. I can't talk to you without an appointment. I know no one that does that. So it's sort of an informal mentoring thing, but I think it makes a really big difference in the culture on campus because students, I hope,
feel much more supported in their academics than the than students that might be at a school where they can only talk to the professors about classwork and nothing else. Because like I said, if you don't happen to know attorneys out in practice, if you don't happen to have attorneys in your family, this may be the only contact you have with an attorney is your professor. And being able to ask, you know, basic questions
of that professor unit questions about the bar, know, things like that that don't have anything to do maybe with the coursework that you're taking is pretty critical, I think, to, you know, developing over the three years that you're here.
I'd like to just.
say a quick word out to your listeners that we're happy you're here, happy you're listening to us today. And if you're considering law school, believe me, Stetson Law is the best choice right now. If you have any more questions or if you feel like you need some more information, we're pretty easy to find. We're stetson.edu slash law or we're on LinkedIn. Dean Martin ensures it. So if you go on LinkedIn, type our names in, we'll pop up and you can reach out to us. We'll be happy to answer.
speaker-0 (52:36.592)
or any questions you may have. And if we don't know the answer, believe me, we'll find the person who does.
then.
Well, thank you so much, everybody. I really appreciate you all being here today. This has been Real Cases. Thank you for listening. Check back for more episodes about an array of legal topics presented by the Stetson University College of Law. Learn more at stetson.edu.
Topics: Real Cases Podcast
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