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Reflection Essays

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Reflection Essays

Overview
Format and Confidentiality
Submission of Essays
Deadlines
Requirements by Placement and Section

Overview

Most clinical students are required to document their clinical experience by producing three reflective essays. To see if your clinical placement or course section requires reflection essays, please see "Requirements By Placements and Course Sections" area.

While the essays are shared with your course instructor, they are not shared with your placement supervisor, unless they are the same person. Reflection essays are not graded. These essays provide an excellent mechanism for you to:

• Reflect on your clinical experience and how you feel about the work you are doing, and chronicle your initiation into real world law practice.


• Gain an awareness of, and learn how to better self-evaluate, your strengths and weaknesses as a learner and as a lawyer.


• Enhance and clarify your thought processes about legal, tactical and ethical issues and professional dilemmas.


• Relay information to and encourage dialogue with the course instructor and the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs.

NOTE: Independent and Continuing clinicals do not require Reflection Essays. Independent Clinical students are to submit weekly emails to their Faculty Sponsor and cc Liz Solar (esolar@law.harvard.edu) of the Clinical office (see Independent Clinical guidelines). Continuing clinical students do not have Reflection Essay or weekly email requirements.

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Format and Confidentiality

The first essay should describe goals and expectations for the clinical experience, including how those goals will be met. During the first two weeks of the semester, students are required to meet with and discuss goals/expectations with their supervisor. In subsequent essays, students may discuss if and how those goals and expectations were or were not met.

Essays should be 1-3 pages long and must include the following information:

• Student name
• Date of submission
• Installment number (i.e. Essay #3)
• Name of placement and course

Students must observe restrictions mandated by confidentiality and privilege when describing their work. Please delete all client names and identifying information, and note concerns about client confidentiality on a cover sheet.

Possible Essay Topics:
The following is not an exhaustive list of topics. Rather, it is intended to help identify issues that may be valuable for reflection and exploration. Feel free to write about anything you feel is important. Refer to this list as a guide; and above all, be candid. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Liz Solar at esolar@law.harvard.edu or at (617) 495-3765.

• Self-Evaluation: What are your goals for this clinical experience? What are your perceptions of your talents and areas of development? Do you have any anxieties or fears? How do you feel about your performance? How do you think your supervisor and other lawyers at the agency perceive you?


• Supervision: Evaluate your supervisor as a professional role model. Reflect on the quality of supervision, and the talents, strengths and weaknesses of your supervisor (both as a lawyer and a supervisor).


• Ethical Issues: Describe ethical issues you have encountered, the strategies for their resolution, and the eventual outcome. You can write from personal experience or observation.


• Decision-Making: Describe your feelings about making a decision where there is no “right answer.” Write about a situation in which you or a lawyer at your placement made a judgment call where there was no right answer, or where a decision was made with less data than desirable. How did you, and/or the lawyer feel about that?


• Diversity Issues: What is the demographic makeup of your organization? How do gender, race, sexual orientation, and national origin affect people’s roles at the agency? What is the demographic makeup of the agency’s clients? Do issues of gender, race, sexual orientation and national origin manifest themselves in your relationships with clients? In the clients’ relationship with the courts or agency?


• Balancing Personal and Professional Life/Goals: What challenges do you believe you will encounter balancing your personal and professional life upon graduation? Do the attorneys at your agency achieve a good balance? If so, how? What have you learned from this experience that will influence your future plans?


• Institutional Mission: Is the institutional mission of the agency useful, important and reflective of the agency? Why or why not? How do your personal values and professional goals relate to the agency?

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Submission of Essays

Reflection essays should be submitted to Liz Solar via email to esolar@law.harvard.edu. Government Lawyer students should submit Reflection Essays to their intern coordinator (not to Liz Solar): USAO students to Ted Merritt, Attorney General students to Susanne Reardon.

Liz Solar will review your essays and may provide comments and feedback to you as necessary via e-mail. Copies will be forwarded to your course instructor for his or her review.

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Fall 2007 Deadlines

1st Essay: October 5, 2007
2nd Essay: November 9, 2007
3rd Essay: December 5, 2007

Spring 2008 Deadlines

1st Essay: February 22, 2008
2nd Essay: March 21, 2008
3rd Essay: April 25, 2008

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Requirements

By Clinical Placement:

• Externships: Students at non-Harvard affiliated placements are required to submit reflection essays, unless noted differently under the specific course section.
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society: Essays required.
• Criminal Justice Institute: Not required
• WilmerHale Legal Services Center (LSC): Not required.
• Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC): Essays required (details provided by Professor Anker).
• Human Rights Program (HRP): Not required

By Clinical Course:

* Reflection essays are required if a student is at an externship placement instead of the normal in-house clinic placement

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