-: It's very important to take care of the things
that are right in front of you.
You wanna grab ahold of those things,
you wanna do well with that
and so much of what happens in your future
is determined by how you handle the things
that are in your present.
Your score on the LSAT
and your grades from undergraduate school
will determine what law schools may be available to you.
Those grades may determine what scholarships,
fellowships, what monies are available to you.
All of those things will influence where you land
in life and I mean positively, negatively,
but they all influence where you land
and so much of where you land
is based on what you're doing along the way.
What I always try to do is I try to do a good job
with the work that I was doing.
I came out of Syracuse and my first job
was at Legal Aid, Legal Services.
So, I don't think anybody says now,
if you wanna be a Federal Court of Appeals judge,
you wanna start at Legal Aid when you get out,
making $15,000 a year.
That's where you wanna start
and then that's a great pathway to the bench.
But it turned out to be not a bad pathway
to the bench and my point
is just that I think you take care
of the things that are in front of you,
enjoy the moment.
I want people who care about mankind,
who have some kind of a conscious
about what happens to other people,
who recognize that like I said earlier
that these are real-world problems
that we deal with in these cases
and that they affect real people.
And so, that's kind of the X factor I think
that I'm looking for
and sometimes you can see evidence of that
on a resume, sometimes a resume
is just padded with a bunch of volunteer work
where people said I need to do some volunteer work
so I can put it on my resume.
And other people did volunteer work
because they cared about the cause
or they cared about the people
and that's why they were involved in the volunteer work,
so I'm looking for the ones who cared about a case
or who cared about people.