Nobody Had a Blueprint for the Path I Was On
Your Unconventional Path Is Your Greatest Strength
I was the first person in my family to graduate from college. No one in my household could tell me what law school applications were supposed to look like, which firms I should be trying to clerk for, or what the “right” steps were. I figured it out as I went—working full time during the day and attending law school at night, building something with whatever resources and time I had.
I didn’t attend a top-ranked law school. I went to the University of the District of Columbia. While other law students spent their summers clerking at prestigious firms, I spent mine working my full-time job and taking summer law school classes just to stay on track for graduation. When I finally crossed that finish line, I didn’t walk into a law firm—I went to work for the government in a quasi-policy attorney role. By every traditional measure, my path looked wrong.
That message was made very clear to me when I was trying to make the jump to my first in-house position. I had a discovery call with a headhunter who told me directly that because of where I went to school and because my work history didn’t follow the standard law firm trajectory, it would probably be difficult for me to land an in-house role. As a Black woman in a field where both of those things already made me a minority, I had heard versions of that message before—in different rooms, in different ways.
But I didn’t stop.
What I began to understand was that my path wasn’t something to minimize or explain away—it was actually something to lead with. I had discipline that came from working full time while earning my degree. I had government experience that gave me perspective on policy, process, and institutional thinking that candidates coming straight out of law firms genuinely didn’t have. I had grit that was documented in every choice I had made to get here.
I walked into every interview and told my story exactly as it was. No apologies. No shrinking. And it worked. I landed my first in-house role—and then my second.
The traditional path exists for a reason, but it is not the only path. If you are building something from scratch—without a blueprint, without a family roadmap, without the “right” school name on your résumé—that is not a deficit. That is a story. And your story, told with conviction, can open doors that were supposedly never meant for you.
You don’t have to look like everyone else to get where you want to go.
