What Kind of Person Do You Want to Be?—Reflections from the 2020 Winter Internship

When applying for the JRF internship, I kept wondering whether my personality traits were suited for it. Although the winter internship lasted only a month, I am grateful for the opportunity. It was at JRF that I realized the most important thing when doing something is asking yourself, 'What kind of person do you want to be?' For me, this experience was exceptionally precious.

In fact, when I first started the internship, I didn't immediately realize how different this place is from school. In daily work, there are no prescribed learning methods or schedules. Later on, I came to understand that learning from every single task is an important lesson in an internship. Fortunately, the attorneys were always willing to give me opportunities to think, and my fellow interns were very happy to give me time to express myself during discussions. It’s not that I learned some specific concrete skill; rather, the significance of the internship for me was that it helped me find a direction. Through the work, I learned how to study in the future to bridge the gap with legal practice, and in what direction I should continue to refine myself to become a warm-hearted legal professional.

Although the internship content in the Legal Policy Department did not involve direct contact with actual cases like the Case Action Department did—ranging from initially revising scripts and organizing campus mock trial toolkit materials, to later taking on legal research, and finally summarizing the conclusions of the National White-Collar Judicial Reform Conference and discussing the talking points for meetings with the President and the Premier—it all highlighted the important value of communication, discussion, and teamwork within the organization. When facing the same set of facts, various different voices are inevitable, which was precisely my original intention in applying for an internship at JRF. Because the truth is often intricate and complex and cannot satisfy everyone, how easy it is to arbitrarily criticize following public opinion, yet how difficult it is to uphold an impartial and objective stance to clarify the facts and truth. I believe that only by continuously accumulating one's knowledge and experience, and spending a long time traversing between practice and theory, will I perhaps be able to get closer to the truth of the matter.

Among more than a dozen script revisions, I initially thought the biggest challenge would be issues of legal application. Later, when discussing cases, I discovered that expressing ideas is actually no easy task. At first, whenever I finished revising a script, I would start worrying about the next discussion session. Fortunately, the attorneys and my fellow interns were always enthusiastic and willing to give me the opportunity to participate in discussions, patiently waiting as I slowly expressed my thoughts. Through multiple discussions, I gradually trained myself to make psychological breakthroughs and improved my organizational logic and analytical skills. Although there is still room for improvement, these opportunities at least helped me find the direction to enhance my own abilities. Even though revising these scripts seemed like trivial and relatively repetitive work, in the process I found my shortcomings, created value for this work, and ultimately internalized it into my own personality traits, allowing this growth to feed back into myself.

As an advocacy-oriented non-governmental organization, one of JRF's primary missions is to promote reform. One of the tasks during the final week of the internship was to draft talking points for JRF's meeting with the President and the Premier. In the process of negotiating the arguments within the talking points, aside from understanding the urgency of judicial reform and realizing that it is not merely an internal affair of legal professionals, but rather a reform requiring nationwide participation, I also had the opportunity to actually participate in reform actions and experience firsthand where the predicaments of reform lie. I believe this is a training ground for critical thinking that is difficult to encounter in internships at other institutions. Through this contact with discussions related to the National White-Collar Judicial Reform Conference and understanding current systemic flaws in practice, even if I may not necessarily work in a related field in the future, I can still convey what I have seen and heard at JRF to more people, so that these current judicial problems receive broader attention and oversight, promoting effective and continuous judicial reform to enhance public trust in the judiciary.
    
So many months after finishing the internship, I still ask myself, 'What kind of person do you want to be?' Before applying for the internship, professors and the department chair at school asked me why I wanted to intern at JRF. At the time, I said I hoped that through this internship, I could see the impact of law on people, and accordingly reflect on what actions I should take to make the world I live in closer to the ideal rule of law society. In the future, I also hope to share my internship experience at JRF with others, allowing more people to notice that the judiciary needs more visibility and oversight.

Learning cannot rely solely on theory. Even while I am still a student, I have no reason to limit my perspective. Only by trying to engage with practical work can one continuously accumulate one's knowledge and experience. Because I wanted to encounter actual people suffering grievances due to the law that cannot be seen in textbooks, and because I wanted to listen to the valuable insights of legal predecessors fighting on the front lines of judicial advocacy, feel the human warmth of legal professionals, and emulate outstanding legal seniors, I came to intern at JRF. The value I learned here is that when you know what kind of person you want to be, you become willing to put effort into that vision. You don't need to be exceptionally distinguished to start taking action; what matters is taking that first step to have the opportunity to create influence. Influence comes in all sizes and matters whether applied to oneself or the broader society; as long as it is active and positive, it deserves to be affirmed.