Learn how exploring law at IE´s Summer School can inspire your career path

My name is Abena, I am Ghanaian and I attend Ashesi University. I heard about IE Summer School from a friend in my university who had been before and she described it with so much passion and a wistfulness to be back there, I decided that I would try as hard as I could to get that experience. I applied and considering the cost of the program and my own financial constraints, I asked for a scholarship and finally, I got both. I was ecstatic! I arrived in Madrid the day before classes were supposed to start and already the air felt different. Everything was new to me. It was my first time in Spain, Europe and outside Africa. I was eager to fit into this new environment and learn some if not more, of the things I knew my friend had learned.

The first week of IE summer school was a sort of combined track where irrespective of what program each person had chosen, they had to learn certain core courses. Some of what we did during that week included public relations, personal branding, team building and service design. All these sessions helped us with our personal pitches, showed us how to present ourselves to people especially if we want to be taken seriously, how to identify a gap in society and attempt to fix it and essentially how to work in teams. That first week got us prepared for our respective tracks.

In the second week, the world politics track started and it was a very interesting one. I loved the deep analysis of economics in the European Union, the theory of wars and terrorism around the world and how leaving Africa behind in the globalization of the world won’t be a logical thing to do considering the size of her population and the nature of its growth. There was a project management session that I found pretty useful.

Even though I’m currently pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, I wanted to explore law and how it relates to engineering.

I am an engineering student, so when I was being interviewed for IE summer school, my interviewer was surprised that I wanted to do the global law track. My interest in law started when I was younger and I discovered investigative books such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. As I grew older, I started to read Sherlock Holmes and John Grisham and with my love of books came the desire to be in a profession that could set things right and generally make people’s lives better. I liked the fact that justice was served at the end of every bad situation. I admired the relentless efforts of the characters in the books I read to make businesses more transparent and see to it that people got exactly what they bargained for. It might sound corny, but justice and equity in the books I read influenced my decision to include law in whatever career option I chose. As a result, even though I’m currently pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, I wanted to explore law and how it relates to engineering. It was from this curiosity that I heard about engineering law and coincidentally the global law track at IE summer school. At first they did not look related, but I needed to find that connection for myself, which is why I applied for the summer program and came to learn things I was not familiar with.

Justice and equity in the books I read influenced my decision to include law in whatever career option I chose.

Abena Darko at IE´s Summer School

The face of law is changing faster now than it has in years, and there is a great need for law firms to become more technologically savvy. This is why legal engineering is becoming popular. Companies have realized that they need people who can identify gaps in production or service design, and fix those flaws by integrating their technological competence and legal knowledge so that the firm does not lose out in its quest to satisfy customers (Barr, 2016)

The global law track started in the third week of IE summer school. The sessions for that week included international negotiations, relevant technologies for law and financial technology. In the last two days of that week, we learned how to identify problems around us and turn them into businesses. Those two sessions were the most interesting to me because we finally got to apply nearly everything we had learned during the past weeks to that project. In order to create a profitable business, we needed to be able to a need in society, create a viable solution and be able to pitch that to the people who need it in a way that makes them want it. It also included us exploring the legal implications of the solutions we came up with and it made me see that there is a little bit of the law in everything.

We explored the legal implications of the solutions we came up with and it made me see that there is a little bit of the law in everything.

For the moment, I do not see myself exclusively pursuing a career in law. I hope to finish my undergraduate in electrical engineering and take that experience to a law firm and try addressing their problems of integrating into this increasingly technological world. I believe IE Summer School helped me set a definite career path that merges my current major with my childhood dreams of being a lawyer. I may not become the average corporate or criminal lawyer, but I sure will find something in legal engineering.

Reference:

Barr, S. (2016, July 27). The Rise of the Legal Engineer. Retrieved from HighQ