This Friday, I’ll be speaking at an undergraduate career conference. In preparation for my panel on Advocating for Justice (legal careers), the organizers sent me some questions to consider. The first was how my educational experience sparked my interest in being an attorney or working in the judiciary and making a difference in this sphere.

I laughed a little when I read the question because, as some of you know, I didn’t even consider going to law school until after I had graduated from college. I started trying to think of experiences I’d had in college that may have led me in this direction, but then I realized that pointing to any particular undergraduate experience would be a contrived answer. I decided it was best to just be honest with these students, because the truth is that many of us don’t have some early moment of clarity or grand plan that leads us to our dream careers. For me and many others I’ve met, we got to where we are largely by chance. More accurately, we made a bunch of small decisions without a big vision. We put one foot in front of the other, unable to see the full path but hoping and trusting we’d eventually end up somewhere good.

My decision to attend law school looked something like this: I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I don’t think it’s what I’m doing now. What can I do instead? I’d like to be intellectually challenged. I’d like to prove to myself and others that I’m smart and can do something hard. I’ve always enjoyed writing, reading, analyzing, and arguing. I like watching crime shows and legal television. What the characters on Law & Order and Boston Legal do looks pretty cool. They seem to make decent money and do important work. Standing up in front of people making arguments seems like it would be fun. There’s a law school in my home town where I happen to be living. I wouldn’t even have to move. The LSAT is being offered in about a month and a half at the college where I work. Maybe I’ll just sign up and see how I do.

Really, that was pretty much how it went. I studied a bit for the LSAT, figured out what score I’d need to achieve get into that law school in my hometown, and happily scored better — well enough to get a decent scholarship. I read Law School Confidential and followed some law school message boards. I wrote my application essay about how art and law aren’t so different because both require creativity, and I said I wanted to pursue family law because I’m adopted and wanted to do adoptions.

I had no idea what I was talking about or what lawyers actually do. When I got to law school, I felt like a fish out of water. I figured out how to play the game and did well on my exams, which led to good internship and employment opportunities. I was pulled along by the advice of career services personnel, professors, lawyers I met, other students, and people on the internet. I interned for a state trial court judge my first summer because it seemed like a good learning opportunity and a relatively impressive thing to have on my resume, and I could get paid for it through a public service grant that my school offered. As I was paying for law school myself, bringing in a little income after not working for nine months was essential.

I went through the on-campus interview process and interviewed with big firms because I could. I had the grades that would get me selected for interviews at those places, and I knew those jobs paid well, and everyone said that was what I should pursue. But at the same time, everyone said the biggest firms would make me work all the time and I would burn out and have no work-life balance, so I avoided those. I didn’t apply to the New York and DC firms, only the ones in central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at those firms — I didn’t even know what the options were, really. I looked at the lists of practice areas on their websites, but I had no real understanding of what those law practices entailed. In my interviews, I talked about education law and litigation because those were the things I knew. I had worked in higher education administration briefly and I had interned for a judge.

I took a summer associate position with a big regional firm in Harrisburg. It touted its combination of sophisticated legal work and a reasonable billable hours requirement. It emphasized work-life balance, collegiality, and a desire to help women succeed within the firm. I got a chance to do projects for a variety of partners and practice groups that summer, and then I was asked to list my top three practice groups in order of preference. I think my first choice was Labor & Employment, my second was Litigation, and I don’t remember what the third was. The firm placed me in the Litigation group and in the sub-practice groups for Education Law, Injunctions, and Fiduciary Litigation. So that’s what I did.

I liked the work that I did for the firm, but I didn’t LOVE it. The idea of working hard to become a partner was not particularly thrilling or motivating for me. At the end of law school, I separated from my first husband, and he was really the only reason I had been living in Pennsylvania. After about a year at the firm, I decided I needed a change. I wanted to go somewhere else, but I was only licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania.

As a student, I’d been encouraged to apply for federal judicial clerkships, but I had been afraid to defer my law firm job offer for a year or two because of the economic uncertainty of the Great Recession (I would have applied in 2009). But as the economy began to stabilize a bit and as I thought about shorter-term opportunities with broad geographic possibilities, I considered clerkships. I’d learned a lot from my state court internships and knew I still had a lot to learn about the federal courts. I also knew a federal clerkship could open doors for me professionally and would be a great thing to have on my resume.

So I applied to federal judges all over the country. I talked to my supervisors at the firm, who were supportive of me taking a year or two to clerk for a federal judge. At the time, we all thought I would return to the firm. That ended up not happening, and I felt bad about it for a while. Now, though, I expect they knew there was a good possibility I might not return, and I had to do what was best for me personally at professionally during a time of great change and growth.

I ended up getting a clerkship offer from my current boss, for a one-year term. After about two years at the law firm, I packed up all my belongings and moved to far southwest Virginia. I loved clerking. It provided a much-needed break from the stress of billable hours and the contentiousness and weight of litigation during an emotionally challenging time in my life. More importantly, it was an amazing learning experience. I came to understand federal procedure in a way I never had in law school. I worked on a huge variety of cases and learned about esoteric laws affecting nearly all aspects of society. I gained an intimate knowledge of the community in which I was living from the disputes that were being played out in court. I enjoyed being in the position of a detached neutral and focusing on reaching the right answer, on doing justice. I wished that the job could last longer than a year, because I found it really rewarding and enjoyable.

At the end of my clerkship year, I decided to stay in the area for a little longer and went to work for a local firm. It was the big player in town as law firms go, but it was about a quarter of the size of my first firm. I had some reservations about it — the billable hours expectation was higher, the pay was lower, and I wasn’t sure that the client base was ideal for me — but I felt I had few options in the geographical area. I had begun dating someone, and my gut was telling me that the time was not right for me to move again. My boss had been a partner in this firm before becoming a judge, and he had filled me in on the people there and spoke highly of his experiences. So I decided to give it a shot. I figured if it wasn’t the place for me, I could always go somewhere else in the future. By then, I had learned that lawyers move around a lot, frequently switching not only firms but sectors and practice areas.

I ultimately spent two years at that firm, working under great mentors and gaining valuable experience. I often worked longer hours than I might have liked, but I had no children and my boyfriend was working long hours too, and it was manageable. It wasn’t what I wanted forever, but I made it work in the short term, and the firm was good to me. I’m glad I had the experience of working there.

Thankfully, the thing I’d wished for during my clerkship ended up becoming a reality. The judge for whom I had clerked offered me a long-term position and gave me the chance to come back and work for him again. When I initially moved down here to clerk, I had no idea that a permanent position would be a possibility. I didn’t clerk with the intention of making it a long-term gig. The opportunity just presented itself, and I gladly took it. I think that’s often how things go. We can’t predict which opportunities will be available to us. If we try to plan things too carefully, we risk missing out on the unexpected great options that will appear in our lives.

Four years later, I’m still in the same role. This is the longest time I’ve spent in one job. I don’t plan to be a law clerk forever. Sometimes I miss the action of litigating and the dynamic nature of private practice. There are times when I feel the call of new challenges. But staying in one role for a while has allowed me to continually improve on what I do and to apply what I’ve learned in past cases to new ones. I’ve become more efficient and, I like to think, more wise. My current role is also a better fit than the law firm for my current phase of life. With a young child, it’s nice to have regular working hours and to know I can be free most evenings and weekends. That may not always be important to me, but it’s something I value in this season of life.

This description of my career journey has ended up being longer than I intended, and I thank you for reading this far. My reason for walking through it all is to convey that where I am now is not at all where I expected to be as an undergraduate, and that’s okay. Some people have a clear calling from a young age, but many people don’t. Some of us just take one step at a time, pausing to reassess periodically to make sure we’re happy with our general direction.

I know now where I want to go next. I have a vision for my career and life in the future. But that vision wasn’t formed in college or law school. It developed from years of experiences, conversations with many mentors, frequent self-assessment and reflection, and ongoing research. For a long time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Eventually, it came to me.

I want to establish my own law practice. I want the autonomy to market myself as I see fit, to take the cases I want to take, to control my own schedule. I want to be involved in all aspects of a case from start to finish, crafting the strategy and navigating the twists and turns. I want to be the one in charge, the architect of the case and of the firm as a whole. I want to represent individual clients facing injustices that have a real impact on their lives and on society at large. I want to put all of my skills and experience to work to empower people who have been made to feel powerless.

This was never my goal in law school. I would have been terrified to open my own firm ten years ago. I would have been clueless and inexperienced and probably would have committed malpractice. I wouldn’t have had the clarity and drive necessary to make such an entrepreneurial venture successful. I’ve been actively planning and preparing for my future firm for more than a year now, and while the actual launch of the practice is still several years off, I am committed to this goal and know that it is the right decision for me. I could not possibly have predicted that when I was a student.

I don’t mean to suggest that undergraduates or those just starting out in their careers should throw caution to the wind, forego all planning, and make decisions on a whim hoping they’ll end up with a good result. By all means, take the time to research and plan. Talk to people who do what you think you might like to do. Meet as many people as you can and ask them lots of questions about their life’s work. Be more careful and deliberate than I was. But also trust the process. Check in with your spirit frequently, and let your intuition guide you. Don’t be afraid to change course. It’s okay to take the first step or two even if you can’t see the rest of the path. You’ll find your way as you go. And you might end up somewhere that’s better than anything you could have imagined.

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