# Untitled

- Author: Emmanuel Wanyama
- Published: 2021-01-22

- Tags: Employment, Hope, Law, Law School
- Canonical URL: https://emmanuel.bisonconsults.com/55

We've all watched one of those law series where the ivy-league law student goes off to some multinational corporation or Top-tier law firm and conquers the world by winning landmark cases while juggling this with their bougie social life riddled with fast cars, beautiful partners, and to say the least a pent-house or apartment in some upper-class suburbia with a breathtakingly lush environment.

This has always been the narrative that plays out when I think of my life after the gruesome experience which is the study of law, but to say the least, this is contrary to what I expect for myself and my elaborately enlightened learned fellows.

You see, in Uganda, few make it to these 'top-tier' law firms and a lot of disparity comes along with the stringent, occasionally shrewd human resource management, which leaves a lot of these fully qualified lawyers unemployed quite literally akin to fish out of water for lack of a better analogy.

Things don't always play out like our favorite binge-worthy series, the real world is quite dystopian and the acceptance of this is something I'm yet to wrap my head around. God knows the hustle I went through just to get an internship placement.

The properly ironed dapper clothing I clad and the quite meticulously typed application form I carried with me was never enough to get me past the receptionist. This, coupled with the effects of COVID-19 which has occasioned downsizing and reduction of spending with the effect of the frustration of employment contracts has kept us, the fervent and ambitious soon-to-be graduates questioning our fate. Fate has always been a divisive phenomenon for me since we quite literally hold our fate in our hands and determine what posterity holds.

We are left to work tirelessly for a degree which is a prerequisite for employment but with the tingling thought at the back of our minds reminding us we aren't going to make it, we aren't going to get employed, and sadly aren't going to get past the receptionist.

Garnering the will to move forward despite my impending doom is something I've learned to work with, the feeling that the odds have been stacked up against me but still had to wake up and face the world is quite literally the story of my life. The realization that even when I made a plan, the universe had something else lined up and in the grand scheme of things, I will be successful even without knowledge of how this pens out. 

An eccentric individual like Steve Jobs felt the same way, like the rest of us, he didn't know what was to become of his life, but the skills he acquired did turn out useful in the grand scheme of things. His Caligraphy lessons taken on in college are the reason for the flawless Mac OS characters (fonts) aesthetics, he paid attention to detail and did it well. Years later he had an epiphany,  he realized that he _'could only line up the dots looking backward and not forward.'_

So to piggy-bank off Steve Jobs' experience, I too believe we need not know how and when the skills we are acquiring are going to pay off, but we've got to work fervently with the belief that all things will fall in place. Regardless of all the reasons to be pessimistic I choose to be optimistic about the future and **_Romans 8:28_** plays a big part in this narrative.

So the next time I'm reminded of the elaborate statistics evidencing the high unemployment rate of youth in Uganda. I will still type out a meticulous application letter and pray that that, coupled with the skills I've garnered can get me past the receptionist.