Everyone has a story behind a dream, and my dream starts with a shredding machine.
It was back in the summer of 2007. I've always wanted to be lawyer. If a reason need be provided, there was none. After all, everyone at the age of 17 want to be something without knowing why, perhaps due to lack of knowledge of the world or perhaps of oneself. I was no exception; I just simply wanted to be a lawyer, and that was that.
My father once sat me down and asked me why I wanted to be a lawyer, a question to which I had no answer to but wanted to know myself as well. It was then that I decided to find the reason that I wanted to be a lawyer, or not to be if that turned out to be the case. With that question and a need to answer at hand, I found myself at the reception desk of a law firm in the local. Kim&Woo, LLC. it was called.
Being young is gold because when you are too young to know the world, you lack knowledge to even comprehend fear. I needed neither a script nor preparation; I just simply marched in and stated, not asked, that I would like an internship. In retrospection, their rejection should not have been so surprising, but at the time, I was in awe. No, they said, I was not qualified for an internship as a high school student. I rejected their rejection, and thrice more, I went. "Let me serve you coffee, let me make you copies, or let me even just sit there and watch you work." With every knocking on a closed door, it opened, but little did I know that I was knocking on a door bigger than my vision then held.
The lawyers knew not what to do with me, and I felt it. I knew they looked at me like a clueless child, not knowing what to do with it, unsure how to handle it. They eventually decided it would be worth their time for me to serve as their shredder. So there I sat, from 9 to 6, feeding a hungry machine.
You'd be surprised of the lengths human emotions can take you. Sitting in the corner of a busy lawyer office, on a mundane, black plastic chair, I was battling a shredding machine in jealousy. Each paper that I slipped through its thin slit, I wanted to digest the words, the content, the diction as it so easily did. I wanted to know what this thing was that I was feeding and to store in my knowledge before it destroyed to strips before my eyes. I read, but I was not reading; it was written in English, but it was not English. The frustration tore me to pieces together with the paper, and as the shredding machine overflew, fat and full with paper dotted with black ink, a growing hunger gnawed inside me. And it was then that I felt my genuine desire to want to know so badly that I needed to know it.
As days went by, I felt at home there: the serious atmosphere tossed with intermittent jokes; the freshly brewed coffee aroma that never found its way to escape; the mountains of paper plastered with sticky notes and flimsy plastic tabs that served as great oversized coffee mug saucers; the shelves stocked with books so thick it makes you wonder if someone even had the courage to open them.
That summer was a pivotal turn in my journey, a spark that pushed me running full-speed, high-power to stand where I am today. But chasing dream wasn't always easy; my perfectly organized plans fell through when my family was abruptly notified to leave the United States due to legal complications. Having had no intentions of living in Korea, I had absolutely no Korean value in me and knew no Korean language. Nevertheless, circumstances demanded that I learn to understand, absorb, and live a new life in a new world. I doubted time and time again if law school is truly my calling, and my given situation seemed to always point no. In moments of doubt, however, I was always reminded of the hunger for knowledge that I felt with a shredder before me and my craving returned in multiple folds.
It feels unreal to be here. It is a moment for me to recognize that I have kept true to my dreams and that I have fought my way through in times of uphill battles to finally give myself a chance to be and to do what I have been waiting to do for years. I remember Mr. Kim suggested half-jokingly (or perhaps he really meant it) that I not go to law school for all its rough rides, but the years have told me that better an oops than a what-if. I have chosen to take a run on the wild side, and for that, Mr. Kim, I cannot thank you enough.
I have never changed; I am here, as I always have been, now as a 24 year old but with that same heart of a 17 year old, knocking on the same door I had at the reception desk at Kim&Woo, too young to accept failure, too naďve to fear rejection, and too hungry to know.
It was back in the summer of 2007. I've always wanted to be lawyer. If a reason need be provided, there was none. After all, everyone at the age of 17 want to be something without knowing why, perhaps due to lack of knowledge of the world or perhaps of oneself. I was no exception; I just simply wanted to be a lawyer, and that was that.
My father once sat me down and asked me why I wanted to be a lawyer, a question to which I had no answer to but wanted to know myself as well. It was then that I decided to find the reason that I wanted to be a lawyer, or not to be if that turned out to be the case. With that question and a need to answer at hand, I found myself at the reception desk of a law firm in the local. Kim&Woo, LLC. it was called.
Being young is gold because when you are too young to know the world, you lack knowledge to even comprehend fear. I needed neither a script nor preparation; I just simply marched in and stated, not asked, that I would like an internship. In retrospection, their rejection should not have been so surprising, but at the time, I was in awe. No, they said, I was not qualified for an internship as a high school student. I rejected their rejection, and thrice more, I went. "Let me serve you coffee, let me make you copies, or let me even just sit there and watch you work." With every knocking on a closed door, it opened, but little did I know that I was knocking on a door bigger than my vision then held.
The lawyers knew not what to do with me, and I felt it. I knew they looked at me like a clueless child, not knowing what to do with it, unsure how to handle it. They eventually decided it would be worth their time for me to serve as their shredder. So there I sat, from 9 to 6, feeding a hungry machine.
You'd be surprised of the lengths human emotions can take you. Sitting in the corner of a busy lawyer office, on a mundane, black plastic chair, I was battling a shredding machine in jealousy. Each paper that I slipped through its thin slit, I wanted to digest the words, the content, the diction as it so easily did. I wanted to know what this thing was that I was feeding and to store in my knowledge before it destroyed to strips before my eyes. I read, but I was not reading; it was written in English, but it was not English. The frustration tore me to pieces together with the paper, and as the shredding machine overflew, fat and full with paper dotted with black ink, a growing hunger gnawed inside me. And it was then that I felt my genuine desire to want to know so badly that I needed to know it.
As days went by, I felt at home there: the serious atmosphere tossed with intermittent jokes; the freshly brewed coffee aroma that never found its way to escape; the mountains of paper plastered with sticky notes and flimsy plastic tabs that served as great oversized coffee mug saucers; the shelves stocked with books so thick it makes you wonder if someone even had the courage to open them.
That summer was a pivotal turn in my journey, a spark that pushed me running full-speed, high-power to stand where I am today. But chasing dream wasn't always easy; my perfectly organized plans fell through when my family was abruptly notified to leave the United States due to legal complications. Having had no intentions of living in Korea, I had absolutely no Korean value in me and knew no Korean language. Nevertheless, circumstances demanded that I learn to understand, absorb, and live a new life in a new world. I doubted time and time again if law school is truly my calling, and my given situation seemed to always point no. In moments of doubt, however, I was always reminded of the hunger for knowledge that I felt with a shredder before me and my craving returned in multiple folds.
It feels unreal to be here. It is a moment for me to recognize that I have kept true to my dreams and that I have fought my way through in times of uphill battles to finally give myself a chance to be and to do what I have been waiting to do for years. I remember Mr. Kim suggested half-jokingly (or perhaps he really meant it) that I not go to law school for all its rough rides, but the years have told me that better an oops than a what-if. I have chosen to take a run on the wild side, and for that, Mr. Kim, I cannot thank you enough.
I have never changed; I am here, as I always have been, now as a 24 year old but with that same heart of a 17 year old, knocking on the same door I had at the reception desk at Kim&Woo, too young to accept failure, too naďve to fear rejection, and too hungry to know.
