As part of the LAWS summer mentorship program for high school students, Central Technical School student Kimberely Rhoden is spending a month working at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She wrote the following report after her first two weeks working with the Faculty's Communications office. For the rest of the month, Kim will be spending a week at each of the Faculty's Career Services and Admissions offices.
Kimberely Rhoden, centre, with Assistant Dean of External Relations Jane Kidner, left, and LAWS Director Alexis Archbold, right. |
Hi, I'm Kimberely Rhoden, a Law Student at Central Technical School. I'm going to grade 12 in the fall, so hopefully it will be my last year.
The Director of the Law Program is Alexis Archbold, who organized the program for my school. I joined the Law Program at Central Tech because I wanted to learn more about the law and justice system. This program has helped me out in three ways: to become more open with others and to communicate better, to help me with job opportunities, and to focus on what I want in life, rather than letting acquaintances be in my way.
The Law Program made me realize that there is more than just life; it's what inside of life, like becoming more open with others and communicating, because the programs that they offer require you to stand up and speak. In my classes we do things like: group projects, mock trials, and debating, so we can communicate better in life.
The Law Program also helped me with great job opportunities like working at U of T Law School for a month just to gain experience. For my first 2 weeks I was working in the External Relations office with Jane Kidner, Laura Rosen Cohen and Dylan Reid. They gave me lots of work to do while having fun. They gave me a few big projects like putting new newspapers that were related to law school on the bulletin board, looking through web sites trying to find if there were any broken links on any page, and lots of photocopying of articles. They also gave me a huge project which took days, where I had to go inside Flavelle House and Falconer Hall to take everyone's picture for the staff directory on the schools website. Doing this helped me meet everyone and helped me with my communicating skills. The staff were wonderful; they were so nice to me. They also showed me how to work a digital camera, which was very easy to use, and the photocopying machine.
In my third week I'll be working for the Career Services office with Maxine, Shannon and Lianne. In my fourth and last week I'll be working for the Admissions office with Jiffin and the whole crew.
The Law Program helped me to focus on what I want in life because my mind was all over the place. I was thinking about all the negative things that have come my way, instead of focusing on what is important to me. Since grade 9, people have been calling me names that would always bother me and I would never focus in school. Then the Law Program came along and helped me focus on my school work. The Law Course at my school is very hard to learn and remember, so it keeps my mind off of the things that bothered me the most in life. Learning the law is a lot of work but it is worth it at the end.
I thank the Law Program and everyone at the U of T Law School for making my experience fun and exciting.
Thank you, Alexis Archbold, for making my experiences happen.
Kimberely Rhoden
