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Rebecca Sparks ’24

JD Student

Hometown
Springfield, Massachusetts

Undergraduate Institution
Simmons University

Undergraduate Major(s)
History and Political Science

Year of Undergraduate Graduation
2019

Area(s) of Legal Interest
Public Interest, Immigration

In terms of support and resources, what do you recommend to prospective students considering Northeastern Law?
Current students are the best resource to help prospective students determine if Northeastern Law is right for them. I’ve heard on my tours that the most meaningful information I can provide is my own firsthand experience here. It’s extra helpful if a prospective student can speak with a student who shares your substantive area of legal interest.

What extracurricular activities have you been involved with at Northeastern?
I’ve been involved with the Women’s Law Caucus and the Jewish Law Students Association. In addition to being a student ambassador and tour guide, I’ve also been a Contracts teaching assistant twice, a student attorney with the Immigrant Justice Clinic and the Domestic Violence Clinic, and a senior editor on the Law Review!

What is your favorite aspect of Northeastern Law’s co-op program?
The co-op program empowered me to grow my practical legal skills in a learning environment. It’s given me the opportunity to learn the ins and out of several different areas of humanitarian and family-based immigration law, and work on advocacy. It’s also a great reminder of why I wanted to go to law school in the first place. I’ll never forget the look of relief on the face of my client seeking asylum when we won her case in Immigration Court!

Rebecca’s Journal

As someone who never even met a lawyer until my junior year of undergrad, feeling intimidated and inexperienced was something I knew all too well at the start of law school. The legal field felt confusing and nearly unreachable, with systems and secrets everyone else seemed to already know.

Next to many of my classmates who came from legal backgrounds, I feared my law school life would be a never-ending game of catchup. My real experience at Northeastern Law has been anything but, thanks to our cooperative learning approach.I came without any substantive experience in any of the core first-year doctrinal. But soon, the subjects demystified. The professors broke down complicated topics into easily understandable concepts, while actively working to build relationships and rapport with us. And when my property professor broke down copyright interests in Grumpy Cat’s image for us during our section on intellectual property after a classmate’s question, I knew I could ask questions – for clarification or out of curiosity – and be met with eager earnestness from leaders of their field.

Thanks to our grading structure, which uses qualitative assessments rather than class rankings and negative curves, I also felt more free to work with my classmates and admit when I did not know an answer. We were never competing against each other, so asking each other questions, sharing study resources and working through tricky concepts together felt natural.

Even so, those old feelings of imposter syndrome crept back up when it was time to go on my first co-op: every Northeastern Law student completes three full-time legal internship (co-ops) before graduation. My placement was at Justice Bridge Legal Center, an attorney incubator matching clients in need to “low bono” legal services. I would also be focusing on immigration and landlord-tenant housing law, two areas I had nearly no experience in.

Working on real cases was intimidating, but the structure of the co-op system allowed me to learn what day-to-day lawyering actually looks like while being supported through an educational lens. By meeting with clients, preparing their immigration petitions and housing demand letters and more, a future career as a lawyer seemed more attainable by the day.

My time at Justice Bridge served me well in my other two co-ops at Greater Boston Legal Services’ Immigration Unit and the Rian Immigrant Center, as well in the Immigrant Justice Clinic and Domestic Violence Clinic at Northeastern Law. Through these experiences, I not only advanced my hard skills of legal research, writing and interviewing, but also grew more confident in my own abilities. And by being confident in my skills and what I did know, I became increasingly more comfortable in identifying knowledge gaps and working independently to fill them, before confirming my understanding with a supervising attorney.

Now, just a few months away from graduation, I have learned to be content with what I do not know while simultaneously working to learn more. The idea of graduating – and with it, moving away from Boston for my first post-grad job – is scary, to be sure. My practice as an Immigrant Justice Fellow at New York’s Safe Passage Project, representing unaccompanied noncitizen kids, will bring with it many unknowns and questions as I navigate the convoluted immigration law field. But with my co-ops and in-class experiences, I know I have the skills I need to find answers and be an effective advocate for kids.