internship reflections + "no choice"

hello, friends,

today is the penultimate day of my internship and i'm pretty much done with everything i have to do: tomorrow is just for me and the other two people left there to give feedback and to do an interview with one of the employees because the worksheet my school's careers advisor gave me requires me to do so and i am, frankly, scared of her. overall, i can say that i really enjoyed it and particularly memorable stuff that happened during it were:

• when we had to introduce ourselves, i stated that i am interested in late 20th century history and the lawyer that we were introducing ourselves to asked me to specify, so i said that i'm mainly interested in the troubles in northern ireland, to which he was very surprised and replied that he expected me to be interested in the cold war. i am still really confused as to why he thought that, though i told my best friend and they told me that, probably, he assumed that because i'm russian.
• on our second day of the internship, we went to visit the municipal court, partly due to the firm wanting to confront any potential dreams of becoming litigation lawyers any of us could have had with the painful reality of the fact that the courts here are really, really  badly organised (frankly, i expected worse, but we all did since this happened the previous day) and partly due to the fact that a friend of one of the litigation lawyers in the firm was supposed to have a hearing that day, but it ended up postponed because the client was not in the country. we did end up having a look around the criminal department for whatever reason and went into one of the serious crime courtrooms (the lawyer (who, funnily enough, was also absent for half the internship because he went to england to see black sabbath's last concert) that drove us back to the firms told us that one of the reasons he thinks the courts are so disorganised here is because cypriot culture and, specifically, respect for such places just does not align with having well-functioning courts and i could deinitely see that with the amount of football graffiti i saw on the benches in that room) and did watch a bunch of criminal cases get postponed. though, the most eventful part of the visit was one of these postponements where the defendant actually had to come into court and the police decided to sit him on the bench right in front of us. when we came back, one of the lawyers told us that, whenever they send their interns to court, something extreme always happens and i can definitely vouch for that now.
• the debate we were meant to have at the end of the internship was yesterday and, as much as i expected to feel this since i've literally never debated before, that felt really embarrassing. the debate topic was "should ai be used in legal work?" and i was, thankfully, on the against side (as nuanced i feel any view on this topic would be: like, i think that generative ai should generally be avoided in legal work now because of its environmental impacts, the fact that trainees and interns still need work and the fact that it's fed on stolen writing and feeding it on people and businesses' personal data feels really iffy, but i have nothing against integrating non-generative systems for menial tasks such as filing if there will ever be a time when these aren't massively expensive and usage of them will create a disparity between law firms) and my primary arguments were on the environmental impact of generative ai. as many good statistics as i had on that and as impressed as the lawyer watching us was with the fact that i could phrase an argument with only the numbers from my research in front of me, the argument this led to dragged on for very long and, when it came to other arguments being proposed by the opposing side, my argument was milked by the others as a "but what about the environment?" card to the point where the lawyer had to tell us to stop using it. i did end up winning the five-euro prize for most convincing argument, though, and am currently debating on what i should spend it on and was asked by the other two people in my team to join model un at my school next year (though that was mostly because i also helped them do a lot of the research).
• and, today, everyone in the firm was either taking the bar exams they didn't pass, at a meeting or at a seminar so we just chatted between ourselves for three hours (which went surprisingly well, even though one of the other people told us that, for this specific internship, the careers advisor assembled, in their opinion, the most random group in existence, one of the people in which is friends with the two neo-nazis from my politics and history classes (i really can't say i've ever said "i don't want to talk about that" this many times in a single day of my life, though, if you're constantly being bombarded with questions like "who's your favourite terrorist?", that's more than reasonable)). then we all went to eat at a restaurant together (after listening to sabrina carpenter songs at a very loud, though not full, volume while we searched for a parking place), for which the lawyers paid for, which, i hope, my mum is happy about (initially, the careers advisor wanted to send me to a forex company because, when i was to pick what internship i was going to do, i asked my mum to pick every field i could potentially find myself in and she was really upset when i rejected it (i know that everything i can do as a career will advance capitalism, but, since i have a choice, i'd rather choose not to do it directly) with because, since these companies have large incomes and, therefore, get to invest a lot in their workplaces, i might have missed another opportunity to get free food).
  

aside from that, i finished the second part of "no logo" yesterday as well! it dealt primarily with the branding of public space (very horrifying if it's your local park, library or town square and especially if you want to protest) (i really, really like how klein also brings in the internet into this topic (though, her discussion of it is in the chapter about corporate censorship) because the same stuff applies to a lot of websites and social media! though, i don't really like the specific example of the irish heritage chatroom on aim that she uses since shutting off a chatroom to stop arguments between people from going on any longer (specifically arguments over the topic of northern ireland, which i avoid (except with other republicans) for the reason that they get heated very quickly and tend to drag on for very long (i feel this is worse on the internet, though my best friend's dad, who worked at a hotel in the 90s, saw british tourists literally beating each other up over northern ireland, so i might have to take my words back), which serves more as a waste of my precious time which i'm sacrificing to whatever unionist i'm arguing with rather than anything meaningful) i feel is, in most situations, reasonable and, if the argument is particularly important, it can continue elsewhere: however, i excuse klein for not considering this since the book was written in 1999), corporate mergers and synergy (which tie into most of the book, since, for example, the formation of media conglomerates may lead all of the media a person consumes to belong to a specific company and allows the company to, essentially, advertise itself through itself and the reason quite a few mergers happened in the 1990s was because companies wanted to get another five or ten years of tax-free work with a contractor in a free trade zone) and corporate censorship (my, perhaps, favourite example from this chapter was the time when robbie fowler, then a player for liverpool fc (of which i am technically a supporter by proxy, since the pub i go to for pub quizzes is a liverpool fc supporters' club) played a match in a shirt that said "support the 500 dockers sacked since september", referring to a then-ongoing strike of liverpool dockers against the company that managed the liverpool port. uefa had to fine fowler for this because the club's uniform contractor, adidas, disagreed with him showing this message. it doesn't end there, though: the letters "ck" in "dockers" on the shirt were styled to be the calvin klein logo, which led calvin klein to press intellectual propertry violation charges against fowler (companies tend to do that a lot, since it's an easy way out of getting criticised, because most labour-related legal action requires the company to prove that the accusations made against them are false), which led the story to not be reported in the news as well). there really isn't as much i can say as i could about the first part, but that's partly because this part is shorter than it and it builds on ideas i've already encountered. either way, time for me to read about the impact of our increasingly brand-based economy on labour rights around the world and what people did against corporations in the 90s!

have a good evening and, as always, here's a song from my other favourite band, since we had r.e.m. last time.