25 Weeks

December 7, 2021

Last week, I had my first mentor meeting. What was initially set to last fifteen minutes ended up stretching to an hour, but I enjoyed every second of it. At first, I just wanted to call to answer any questions he might have and send over the ISM Handbook, but then the conversation naturally progressed. He told me about some of the pro-bono cases that he has been working on which took a significant amount of time. The first case involved insurance fraud to the tune of $16 million and the second case was a drug related offense. Through our discussion of these cases I learned a lot about the judicial process. In particular, I became aware of the process for determining sentences for federal crimes. Essentially, once a guilty verdict is decided, the prosecution refers to a point system generated by the United States Probation Office. The points are then accumulated and an appropriate sentence is handed down; this where my mentor gets involved. When the sentence is too harsh, that is when the defense files objections in order to get the time reduced. Because any prior experience I've had with trial law is limited to television shows (like Suits, which is a show that my mentor and I both enjoy watching), it was interesting to hear how court works in real life.

Apart from the conversations I had with my mentor, Mr. Pirtle walked us through a very interesting activity in class. He laid out several stones on the table and told us that each stone represented the final weekends in the school year. For seniors, these stones represented the final weeks of our high school career. Mr. Pirtle encouraged us to make the most of the time we had left; this exercise made me a little nostalgic of the last three and a half years I've spent at Heritage. From freshman year to now, I've fundamentally changed into a whole different person.