The Winter Auction
As I mentioned in my introduction, I plan to use this Blog to both highlight some of the great opportunities that I have been able to take advantage of during my law school career as well as fill in you on some of the current events and my experience in this final semester. As I am sure you know or will soon find out—getting through the first year of law school isn’t easy and with the limited amount of time you have each week it can be pretty tough to do everything, including: keeping up with the reading and writing assignments, maintaining contact with your fiends and family, getting to the gym, and managing to find time to participate in the many opportunities offered outside of the classroom. While it can be tough to make decisions about what to take part in and what to pass up on, there are a few opportunities that I urge you to seriously consider taking advantage of during the course of your first year.
The law school’s annual Winter Auction, which is coming up on February 23, is one of several awesome opportunities (I will tell you about a couple others in the next entry) that you should get involved in during your first year.
What is the Winter Auction?
The Winter Auction is an annual event sponsored by the Association for Public Interest Law (APIL) and the Student Bar Association (SBA). The goal of the auction is to raise money to provide first year students with summer stipends to pursue summer internships in public interest related fields. For the past several years RWU has hosted the auction on a Friday night on the second floor of the law school. This year the event is going be held at Jackie’s Galaxy, a Pan-Asian restaurant located about a mile from the law school. For $5 you get a ticket for admission as well as free drinks and the opportunity to hear live music, which is a really great deal. Most of the students and faculty attend the event, so it’s a nice opportunity to pull your head out of your books and meet some of your classmates and professors.
What gets Auctioned off ?
The way it works is that students solicit gift certificates from local businesses, such as restaurants, salons, shops, etc. The faculty and administration also offer unique prizes that will be auctioned off. And just to give you an idea of the types of prizes that are donated by the staff I will name a few that were auctioned off last year including: the Dean’s parking spot (the best spot on campus, it’s about 10 ft from the door of the law school), dinner and drinks with a number of different professors (some at professors houses and others at restaurants in Newport, Bristol, and Providence) tickets to attend a poetry slam with a Criminal Procedure professor, a half day sailing trip and lunch with one of the legal writing professors, and tickets for four students to tour a brewery and have dinner with a Criminal law professor—just to name a few. Students usually form groups (since most of the prizes/dinners/events come with tickets for 4-6) and pool their money together to bid on the different prizes.
How to get a summer stipend?
The money raised from the auction is pooled to provide stipends for students to pursue unpaid public interest internships after their first year. The school then sets up an application process whereby interested students are required to write an essay explaining why they want the opportunity to work for a particular public interest organization and what they hope to accomplish over the course of the summer. Some of the most common internships that students participate in include interning with a judge, the Attorney Generals Office, the Public Defenders Office, and a variety of non-profit legal organizations.
If you volunteer your time at the auction you are not guaranteed to get a stipend, but I believe that if you do volunteer a few hours, you will be much more likely to get a summer stipend. I volunteered to help out at the auction first year, and I got a summer stipend. It was a really great opportunity. I was able to spend three days each week during my 1L summer working at the Rhode Island Department of the Attorney General. The rest of the week I worked as a research assistant to my Civil Procedure professor. It was an awesome opportunity and I would not have been able to have such a great experience had I not been awarded the stipend to help finance my summer.
As you will soon come to learn, it is almost impossible to find a paid summer internship as a first year law student, as most of the paid opportunities are reserved for second year students. Thus I strongly urge you to consider not only attending the auction but also volunteering so you can put yourself in the best position to get one of these stipends. Trust me you don’t want to have to spend your first summer doing something non-legal just so you have the money to pay your rent.
