What is your job/position?
Associate Attorney at Covington & Burling LLP. Having just graduated from the law school at the University of Chicago, I will be starting as a first-year associate at an international law firm in New York City in October of 2023. I will spend the first year at Covington in their general corporate practice group, but my long-term intention is to work in their Tech Transactions group.
Describe the path that took you from your American Studies degree to your current career or life situation.
After graduating from the American Studies program at BYU, I attended the University of Chicago Law School. With a background in the humanities, I entered law school with an initial interest in litigation and academia. However, after taking several corporate and intellectual property law classes, I realized how interesting those fields were to me. I decided to pivot and pursue a career as a transactional lawyer. When non-lawyers imagine what lawyers do, they think of courtrooms and depositions, but that’s not what the majority of the legal profession is like. Rather, lawyers also play key roles in negotiating contracts and advising clients as to their legal rights. These activities play a key role in our legal system, setting the parameters for economic and political agreements that shape the world that we live in.
What are the specific competencies you cultivated as an American Studies student that you now use in your professional life and that set you apart from your colleagues?
As an American Studies undergraduate, I was privileged to pursue an interdisciplinary education. I took courses in history, English, economics, religion, linguistics, and political science. This allowed me to engage in multiple disciplines and strengthen a variety of skills. Law is similarly interdisciplinary; in law school, I took classes on corporate law, intellectual property, religion, law and economics, entertainment law, and a variety of other subjects. In this sense, American Studies provided a great preparation for law school. It also allowed me to see which subjects and industries most interested me. American Studies also provided an opportunity to develop the skills of various disciplines. I was able to strengthen my reading, research, and writing abilities in ways that prepared me well for law school. Lawyers engage in historical research, linguistic analysis, sociological industry, and much more. Thus, the skills I learned as an undergraduate have been extremely useful in my legal education.
What are some of the surprising ways in which your American Studies degree has helped you in your professional or personal life?
Being a generalist in multiple fields is extremely useful as a lawyer. The cases and transactions that a BigLaw lawyer deals with can span across a number of industries and subjects. Thus, the information I learned as an undergraduate is often useful to me in approaching new matters that might be unfamiliar to someone with exposure in only one field.
What do you wish you had known as an American Studies student? What advice would you share with current students?
While at BYU, I often worried a lot about disagreeing with professors and classmates. To take different stances on key issues was frightening to me, and I often sought to write and argue what I thought my audience wanted to hear. While this can sometimes be a useful skill, the open engagement in critical thinking and reasoning is a skill that I didn’t develop as well as I could have. In law school, I was pushed to argue both sides of key topics that helped me to develop stronger ideas and better analytical skills. An echo chamber is a breeding ground for weak ideas. If I could go back, I would push myself to engage in rigorous debate for the benefit of myself and other students in the American Studies program.
*You can contact Josh with questions about his American Studies story at jjd610@gmail.com.