This morning I received a familiar message: the message of rejection. They say it gets better each time but admittedly it still feels like a kick to the chest. This morning’s rejection is one of numerous at this point, however each time I tell myself I will not give up. I aim to keep this promise, I know what I got myself into when I aimed for such aspirational goals; it comes with the territory, wanting to be amongst some of the brightest legal minds and being trained by world-leading lawyers doesn’t come easily, I have to work and be prepared to deal with disappointment. My continued goal of wanting to be a trainee solicitor at one of these firms despite the constant rejection tells me it’s something I do wish to do as a person can only take so much when they don’t truly want something.

I understand how my position may hold me back: not being at Oxbridge or any other Russell group university may contribute to my struggle to gain a training contract or it may just be that my applications have just not been good enough. I’m going to believe the latter, it’s no use feeling bitter and believing that something out of your control is what is holding you back. Why should I allow my university or background to hold me back from applying to top firms? For now, I don’t know what the issue with my applications is, that’s the difficult thing with the rejections as they don’t tell you what was wrong, this causes you to think maybe everything was wrong. If we were able to get feedback we would more efficiently improve our next round of applications. I do understand that due to the number of applications firms receive it would be practically impossible to provide individual feedback to each candidate. It would be nice though if they had preset categories they can send that give you a broad idea of why they didn’t choose you to move forward with the application; such as grades or experience etc.

Moving forward, I will continue to apply to firms as commercial law is certainly the career I want to go into and I will not allow rejection to divert me from this path. It does matter how long it takes, I will eventually make it and when I do the success will be even more satisfying as I will know how hard I worked to get to that position. In the next couple of weeks, I will be reviewing my strategies and preparing myself for the next application cycle. My main drive is knowing that anything worth having requires sacrifice. Sometimes things happen that at the time feel terrible but it may be the thing that propels you to something even better.