Delegation Attends Salzburg Cutler Program
A delegation of five Yale Law School students attended the Salzburg Cutler Law Fellows Program in Washington, D.C., on February 18–20, 2016. Y. Michael Chung ’17, Arthur Lau ’17, Iulia Padeanu ’17, Yusuf Saei ’18, and Lisa Wang ’17 participated in workshops where they presented their ideas and engaged in critical dialogue with international legal practitioners and academics. Professor Muneer Ahmad was their faculty mentor as well as one of ten faculty members drawn from the participating law schools. A range of topics were covered, including the fields of international human rights and humanitarian law; national security; international courts; rule of law; and international finance, monetary, and trade law. Some of this year’s professionals included William Burke-White, John Bellinger III, Mary DeRosa, Mark Wu, and Juan Mendez.
The Salzburg Cutler Program supports students in their international legal careers: providing advice on how to determine career goals, manage career trajectories, identify jobs, and expand professional networks. Salzburg Cutler Fellows automatically become members of the Salzburg Global Fellowship and its international network.
Iulia Padenau and Yusuf Saei give their description of the experience of preparing for and attending the conference:
Paper writing is similar to going on a diet or trying to learn a new skill. It’s the kind of goal that requires long-term (perhaps daily) effort and for which you are most likely to see the payout or benefit far into the future. The gradual, incremental steps are important, but not quite as satisfying as the final finished product. As students, and more broadly as humans, we are famously bad at pursuing long-term objectives diligently and consistently. For this reason, it is often important to create a “don’t give up” goal or incentive structure. During law school, and especially during law school at Yale, paper writing often falls into this type of long-term effort. We can have great ideas and generate interest in them, but when it comes to sitting down day in and day out, the million other responsibilities and commitments we have pull us constantly away from our writing task.
One way to commit to not giving up on your paper idea is to sign up for the Salzburg Cutler Global Seminar next year. We were selected as Yale Fellows and participated in the program in February of this year. Iulia took this opportunity to further develop a paper topic she had started writing about in her International Criminal Law Course. Yusuf had to come up with a paper idea in a relatively short time. The knowledge that he would have to present the paper to his peers (from YLS and other law school) and experts in the field was a fantastic way to make it impossible for us to backslide on the paper’s execution. In addition to the topic, the seminar also requested the submission of an executive summary. The challenge for Iulia was to pare down a longer paper to its core and really focus on its most important pieces. For Yusuf, the executive summary was a helpful mechanism to keep the paper on track—and a mechanism he likely would not have imposed on his own.
Traditional goal-making philosophy says you should tell very few people about your goals, since even your friends can get jealous, or insecure on your behalf. If that’s truly the case, we might need to be better friends to each other! The other Yale students we met at this seminar, along with the top international law professors interested in helping us develop our paper ideas, are new friends that expect us not to give up. That is one of the best reasons to attend, and to get excited about, the Salzburg Cutler Seminar. Not only does it push you to not give up, but it also provides you with a strong support group, made up of peers and experts, truly invested in you and your writing.”
Students interested in the Salzburg Cutler Law Fellows Program for 2017 should write to Mindy Jane Roseman, Director, International Programs.
