The easiest thing to say about my first week working with my organization, the Florida Justice Institute, is that it has been, frankly, really nice to have something to do. I find their work incredibly interesting and engaging (which has unfortunately started to make me consider law school and its 300k price tag more seriously…) which thankfully means that long meetings and readings stay enjoyable. Most of what we’ve done this week has been introductory – acquainting ourselves with the cases we’ll be working on, meeting everyone, learning how to do timekeeping, etc. We’ll move beyond the general a bit more next week and get our specific assignments and training on how to do them. Much of my time the past few days was devoted to reading case documents, which we went over in more detail in a very informative meeting on Friday. This was helpful in terms of learning about both the broad legal process and the details of what we’ll be working on, but it was also difficult. Both cases have to do with solitary confinement, which was, at times, emotionally taxing to learn about. It feels silly to call learning about a horrible thing hard, when experiencing it is clearly immeasurably worse, but that doesn’t make it less true. I dealt with this by breaking up the work across hours and days and making sure to give myself breaks when necessary, but I’m sure this is an issue I will continue to encounter over the summer. I also don’t think this is necessarily bad – understanding something emotionally can be just as important as understanding something intellectually. On a more lighthearted note, I’ve really enjoyed the people I’ve met and worked with this week, and look forward to more casual interactions with the office. This had made me a bit more acutely sad that this program was not able to happen in person, but I suppose that is just additional drive to get the most out of this that I can in this format.