How to Panic Productively
Georgia Cam receiving award. © ??? Used without permission.
This is an interview conducted by Serena Olatona.
Dear Younger Self,
Today, I had a conversation with Georgia Cam and thought about you. If you haven’t already crossed paths with her, I look forward to the day that you do. My conversation with her gave me cause to positively panic. I think that’s what they call excitement.
Knowing you the way I do, I know that you are aware that your challenges, uncertainties, and questions are not unique, and that other people have felt the same way and have survived. In fact, they have been rather successful. ‘Good for them,’ you might say, and then you will notice how some of the trees are already losing their leaves. The realisation that Autumn is startling. Now that exam season is approaching, it is clear that time has flown and yet, there were moments when it staggered lazily, daring at times to grind to a halt. Fortunately, you are not the grand exception, this advice is useful to you too.
So, stop. Remember to positively panic. You see, Georgia said that you’ll never have that quintessential perfect week where — all of a sudden — you’ve caught up on all your content and the schedule that you set out is perfectly executed. The week will never come where you are filled with one hundred percent of the energy required to do everything, your mood is fantastic, your brows perfect and your study-sleep-social schedule worth filing a patent for. No matter how much you aspire to it, next week will not be the perfect week. It’s not realistic. But while you cannot strive for perfection, you can still strive to do your absolute best.
While it is optimistic to use the weekend as catch-up time to complete your weekly to-do list, Georgia calls it a trap. She reminds herself that failing to schedule breaks and time off unfairly punishes yourself for being human.
Quite frankly, one day, law school will end and you’ll have a job; it’s not sustainable to burn yourself out so early on. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You probably still don’t know what you’ll do when you grow up. Don’t worry. I made sure Georgia covered all of our bases.
Let’s say you do become a lawyer. Law firms are competitive. When there are 400 other applicants vying for the same role, you need to stand out. Identify the area you want to work in and contact employers that you can flatter and impress — whether that be a judge, barrister, or professor. You can meet people at all the events run by MULS or at competitions, but also, don’t be afraid to cold-email, especially if you can turn up the charm and show that there are some mutual interests.
For instance, Georgia completed her PACE unit at the Land and Environment Court. Studying the matters of lawyers that frequented the court, she was able to introduce herself to those who impressed her by expressing specifically and genuinely how much she admired their previous submissions. Having established a connection, she was able to express an interest to work with them, if ever the opportunity were to arise and where it did, her connection helped her stand out.
When you do get a job, you might feel that positive panic swiftly transform into genuine panic when you realise that you have no idea what you’re doing and you’re in a space where everyone can see and hear you (apparently some junior lawyers call it a fish bowl). It’s uncomfortable to face the truth that you know very little, but that discomfort is worth embracing. In a junior role, everyone knows that you’re learning. They were once in your position too.
In a perfect world, your workplace is one where you are comfortable admitting to the gaps in your skillset, but that can still prove to be difficult. As a research assistant for a barrister, Georgia was provided with an environment where she felt comfortable to learn, grow and fail. If you don’t have a similar environment, you must show initiative. If the answer can be found without going to your superior, always opt for that. Instead of leaning on others to provide you with all the answers, demonstrate some initiative in finding the answer yourself, and then approach those few years older than you with small asks. Suppose your job requires you to write an affidavit (and you don’t even know what one looks like), ask if someone in the position above you can send you an example from a previous matter that you can use as a model. You’ve got this!
Or maybe you’ll realise that being a lawyer is not for you. While you may face pressure internally or from your family, law is not for everyone and in leaving private practice, you’ll find yourself in good company. Still, how do you grapple with the idea that you’ve spent half a decade getting a law degree to not use it? (Is now a good time to remind you to positively panic?)
One in three lawyers report experiencing moderate to extremely severe symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, at some point in their career. [1] Georgia decided to leave her job at a law firm once she realised that her firm required considerably long hours of unpaid overtime and had a toxic culture.
So, what next? Well, Georgia says having a law degree makes you one of the most employable people in your generation. You can go into government, or work for a corporation or NGO, or you can represent a celebrity and negotiate all of their partnerships and contracts (except Hugh Jackman, I’ve got dibs). I got Georgia to give me a checklist of the questions we should be asking ourselves when we’re making critical decisions about our future employment.
What are your values; what inspires you; and what gets you out of bed in the morning?
When people ask about her work, Georgia is actually just talking about her keen interests because they are one and the same. She gets paid to do what she fundamentally believes in and is inspired and motivated by. It might be cliché, but it’s apparently true; if you find a job you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.
What industry do you want to work in?
Lawyers can be anything from advisers to advocates to activists. Law touches every industry (even ones pertaining to Hugh Jackman – but remember I called dibs on him first).
Who inspires you in your chosen industry?
This is really important because as per Mimetic theory, we model our desires off of other people. [2] So, find someone who is exactly where you want to be in 5 years. Do a deep dive into their LinkedIn and social media, find out everything you can about how they have progressed through their career and then reverse engineer the career so that you have a model beginning from their days in law school that you can follow.
If Georgia is who you’d like to model, here’s the tea. From a young age, she felt really out of control when it came to politics and decision-making, particularly with the climate crisis. What she wanted was the skillset to advocate effectively and discuss these highly contentious topics. With her main mission in life being to protect the environment, she felt that degrees in law and environmental science were key in achieving her goals.
She is proof that a conflict averse person who hates heated arguments with raised voices can be a successful lawyer. In fact, she believes that a law degree helps you facilitate productive, informed discussions where people feel calm and in control. So she studied at Macquarie University. She reached her fourth year without having any legal experience (she joked that most job opportunities, where you want to gain experience, want you to have experience for that experience). Lectures and tutorials are indispensable in understanding the content, but the skillsets needed to draft an affidavit and manage clients can’t really be facilitated in a conventional classroom. So she dived into all that was on offer at MULS to gain some experience - negotiation competitions, mooting competitions, and networking events. Eventually, she found work in places where other students weren’t necessarily looking - working as a legal research assistant for a barrister and a professor.
After graduating, she went on to work at a legal firm that had a ‘successful’ environment and planning law team. Unfortunately, whilst they were successful at litigation in the Land and Environment Court, they were not successful in fostering a healthy work environment. Six months later, in the midst of the pandemic and what she calls a ‘quarter-life crisis’ but I prefer to call an ‘act of bravery’ she quit her job at the firm. Running through the three aforementioned questions, she realised that her greatest strength and flaw is that she is not motivated to do something unless she truly believes in it. What made working at the firm arduous was that she spent her days finding loopholes in environment and planning legislation to help big property developers clear land without worrying about the endangered species that lived there, and ultimately, that wasn’t why she studied law and environmental science. Relying on her connections with some incredible academics that she got to know well after representing Macquarie University in some mooting competitions, she was able to enter academia as a tutor and marker.
But that’s not all, Georgia has a number of jobs and volunteer roles that she moves between to keep her schedule varied, exciting, and fulfilling. Not only is she a terrific tutor, but she is also the CEO of the Earthly Institute which branches off into the realm of content creation on social media, as well as advocacy and research to help save our beautiful planet. What I found most impressive was that she volunteers her time to conduct research on youth and climate for the United Nations, so watch that space, we might be able to brag that we know an adviser to the UN in five years.
Basically, don’t be afraid to take risks; measured risks of course, they can’t be erratic. Georgia started her own charity in 2022 with the mindset that she had nothing to lose and now in 2024, the Earthly community has grown to over 555,000 individuals on Instagram who are the vehicle for her successful advocacy campaigns — everything from moratoriums on deep sea mining to engaging youth to build sustainable cities in their hometowns. It was her law degree that gave her the confidence to write a charity constitution and complete all of the administrative and legal challenges that were perhaps too daunting to others.
All in all, you will be okay. I mean, I’m coming to you from the future and (just between you and me) it’s a good one. I’m excited.
From,
Your Older Self.
P.S. Please put the coffee down, keep calm and drink matcha (it’s got L-theanine which is apparently good for brain function and cognition). [3] So, even if you don’t like it, grow up, it’s good for you… and you definitely need it.
[1] Suzanne Poynton et al, ‘Assessing The Effectiveness Of Wellbeing Initiatives For Lawyers And Support Staff’ (2018) 41(2) UNSW Law Journal 584, 587 [1].
[2] Scott Garrels, ‘Imitation, Mirror Neurons, and Mimetic Desire: Convergence Between the Mimetic Theory of René Girard and Empirical Research on Imitation’ (2006) 12(13) Michigan State University Press 47, 48.
[3] Anas Anas Sohail et al, ‘Sohail, Anas Anas, et al. "The cognitive-enhancing outcomes of caffeine and L-theanine: a systematic review’ (2021) 13(12) Cureus 1, 8.
This article was originally published under the title ‘A Brief Conversation with Georgia Cam: A Positive Panic about the Future’ in The Brief Edition 2, 2024 — Ceci n’est pas une loi.