Internship- Week 2!

As I sat on my metro ride into work I was anxious, yet also excited about what tasks lay ahead of me. I got there early, and decided to settle in before my busy day began. When 9:00 am hit, and I could not find the supervisors I had on the previous days, I decided to introduce myself to Stefanie. She is my third attorney who I will be working with this semester. I walked in, introduced myself and got a warm welcoming from her. She had said how she was waiting to meet me. Stefanie did not waste any time and immediately gave me some tasks to fulfill for the day. Although I was unsure of how I would complete them, I was excited to begin some substantive work. I was assigned to write case summaries for the cases Stefanie was working on. She gave me thick case folders of all the documents compiled throughout each case. It was overwhelming because at first I didn’t know what exactly she was looking for me to find and what some of the terminology was, but with practice I became more familiar. Although I was having trouble deciphering the findings and stipulations aspect of each case, after many questions to Stefanie I learned where to get the correct information. When dealing with each case it was difficult because some of them had many children involved and different dates and important information for each child to be documented. It was if I was finding the needle in the haystack throughout all these pages of paper. But, I became so familiar with the process that I caught a mistake made by the attorneys. They had given me two folders that were not from the same case. Luckily, I realized the information did not match up and Stefanie was very impressed. She also was very supportive and kept reassuring me that it was ok to take my time throughout each case. She kept repeating how lucky she felt to have an intern do this work because it was saving her so much time. It made me feel appreciated and overall she was very patient with me. I hope she continues to be patient as I learn more tasks throughout the office. So far my internship has been really great and I hope it stays that way as I learn more and more!