This afternoon, I met with several of the Immigration Law Clinic students to finalize their work and discuss their learning and performance for the year.

A couple of students touched on a theme that encouraged me: The clinical experience is not like an internship. In no other educational setting, they recognized, can you replicate the challenge and pressure that comes with having true responsibility for a client’s case.

We’ve worked especially hard in the past couple of years to structure the clinic so that students really have the opportunity to take ownership of their cases — from client communications to case mapping to oral advocacy. The students know that we’ll step in before they do anything they shouldn’t, but we’ll hang back and let them struggle through it as long as time permits (and we’ve worked hard to work in enough time for that process to happen).

Accepting and owning the responsibility for a case is a critical part of the job of being a lawyer. It’s the reason many lawyers make good money and become community leaders. Because once you’ve learned to handle pressure, then and only then can you make diamonds.