Nicole (Germany)
What is your ultimate career goal?
I try not to be set on one specific goal because I believe flexibility is very important. I could imagine working in consulting but if I could choose, I would do my PhD and follow the academic path of research and teaching. As long as the job is interesting and related to my background of criminology and international business, I am open-minded.
What is your motivation to pursue that goal?
The main motivation to get into research and teaching is to leave an impact. I am convinced that education is shaping future generations and passing on knowledge is an important contribution.
What formal or factual requirements are necessary for you to pursue your goal?
To follow the academic path I mostly need good grades. Also, it won’t hurt to get research and teaching experience. I think my diverse background gives me a good foundation for a PhD and helps me to think outside the box. I am really interested in public-private-partnerships and prisons, which I will also focus on in my master’s thesis. Writing my thesis on that topic, furthering my knowledge, will help me to pursue a PhD in that area later on. I feel like finding your niche is really important.
What would have been your alternative to studying law?
I would surely have done something creative, probably interior design.
Irene (Greece)
What is your ultimate career goal?
Right now I would like to work as a public prosecutor. But I will try to make the most out of my LLM here in Maastricht and the options it has to offer. Maybe I could also work for the police or I will still change my mind completely this year. As a last resort I would work as a defence attorney. This is a last resort because I definitely want to work with criminal law, but there are already a lot of defence attorneys in Greece and they are heavily overworked and underpaid. Ultimately it would be my dream to not only work in Greece but in a different country as well, maybe Germany.
What is your motivation to pursue that goal?
The public prosecutor plays a important role in the Greek justice system. I would be part of the court and my duty would be to search for the truth. I like the active role in investigation and the responsibility in starting the indictment process. This objectivity suits me better because of my moral standards and values that would not allow me to defend offenders of heinous crimes as for example rape or murder. Also, I would be worried about being in the public attention in big criminal cases if I were on the defendant’s side.
What formal or factual requirements are necessary for you to pursue your goal?
To be a prosecutor in Greece you must first practice as a lawyer for two years. To become a lawyer, we need to finish law school, which takes four years. After our bachelor’s we can start our eighteen months internship that is needed for registering for the bar exam. The internships can be done in law firms, in legal departments of banks or bigger companies as well as in courts and in the prosecution (although for public internships the positions are assigned at random). Trainees mostly do research and run errands in court. As it is in all internships, not all tasks are equally enjoyable. One of the tasks actually is to wait in the court to save the spot of the hearing if the lawyer is late and another is to try to charm the court secretaries into giving out the information needed. After the internship you directly sit the bar exam without a specific period of studying. This is why I was grateful for my employer to give me two weeks off before the exam.
I am still waiting for my bar exam results currently but after that I will have to work for two years and then sit exams to register for judge school. This institution offers specific education for civil judges, criminal judges and also one for prosecutors. After completing this, I would be appointed to be a prosecutor. The appointment could happen anywhere in the country, which is one of the reasons why I would like to work outside of Greece.
What would have been your alternative to studying law?
I would have probably tried to become a ballerina. But I started at a later age and it was no longer possible to do it professionally.
Sarah (Switzerland)
What is your ultimate career goal?
I am sure I would like to be a judge. I am not absolutely certain in which field and at what instance exactly though. Working first instance at the district court in Zurich would be interesting or at the commercial court in Zurich because corporate law is my jam.
What is your motivation to pursue that goal?
I am motivated to become a judge because the job is diverse since you get a multitude of different cases to deal with. Myself I am not a person for arguments, so being the judging party suits me perfectly. Also, being a judge is a field where I can use my affinity for legal technicalities and I am looking forward to be part of further developing and interpreting the law through my work.
What formal or factual requirements are necessary for you to pursue your goal?
To become a judge in Switzerland you have to complete an internship of one year. Then you move on to working as a court’s clerk. The court’s clerks are then set up for election in the order of who has been working at the court for the longest. In Switzerland, positions for judges are correlated to parties and therefore it enhances your chances of getting elected if you are part of one. However, nowadays it can be enough to declare a certain proximity to a party. Judges are then elected by popular vote.
What would have been your alternative to studying law?
I would have probably studied politics because I am good at forming an opinion through evaluation of arguments and then being committed to it. But I am just more interested in evaluating and further developing already stated law compared to making it in the first place. As for a completely different direction, studying medicine was also an option.
Mariana (Portugal)
What is your ultimate career goal?
I have never been totally sure on what I want to do in the future, but since last year I am sure I want to do something related to criminal law. I am definitely interested in the profession of a prosecutor. Besides this, being a defence lawyer is always a possibility. Or even becoming a judge, but that I would only consider later on in life, when I already have some practical experience.
What is your motivation to pursue that goal?
What motivates me to do this is that I find it very interesting to investigate crimes and to try to find the truth. To me it seems a challenging role to play as well, but if done well it is rewarding at the end, because we will know we did our best to achieve the a just decision based on the maximum of truth possible. I would like to work in criminal law because it seems to be closer to real people and to actually making a difference not only for their lives, but also for society.
What formal or factual requirements are necessary for you to pursue your goal?
In Portugal, to be a prosecutor you have to have a master’s degree and then you can apply for CEJ – centre for judiciary studies. There we have classes for two years and at the same time we are able to see the practice and practice ourselves during the second year.
What would have been your alternative to studying law?
Disregarding the field of law, I would have perhaps studied international relations or diplomacy, since I have always been interested in international affairs. I am interested to get in touch with other cultures and nowadays there are plenty of job opportunities in these fields.
Petra (Austria)
What is your ultimate career goal?
I would like to become a judge. In Austria there is a division between judges of civil and criminal law and those of public law. My first priority would be to work in civil and criminal law, plan b is to become a judge in public law. But overall, I am trying to be open to what will come to me in life. Because even being a judge has disadvantages. You are confronted with a lot of minor and often ridiculous disputes. But on the other hand this will just be the start at first instance and you can work your way up. If I were to become a public judge, the cases would already be more complex because courts are already the second instance in this procedure. And although it is not my first priority, I worked in public law for a year and have to admit that it is not half bad.
What is your motivation to pursue that goal?
I would like to have an impact and to be able to change something through my work. I strongly believe that I can contribute to just rulings. Justice of course is hard to define but I think I can contribute to it by focussing my efforts to finding the material truth of the case. To achieve this, knowledge of the human nature is essential in my opinion. To be able to make my decisions as accurate as possible, I would like to be educated in the psychological aspect of decision making. This is the reason I started the LLM in Forensics, Criminology and Law. I am also aware of the responsibility as a judge and therefore I would like to gather some more life-experience. To work as a judge also seems to be the right approach for a more appropriate work-life balance. To be a judge would allow me to pursue a career in law, which I love, but I can still have time for my family and other important things outside work.
What formal or factual requirements are necessary for you to pursue your goal?
The formal criteria for becoming a judge in Austria are different for civil and criminal compared to public law. For civil and criminal law judges, after graduating you have to start the regular internship at the court for the first year and then there are further steps involved in becoming a judge. For a total of five years there are different written an oral exams, the candidates are assigned to different judges to evaluate them and there are different evaluation meetings with members of higher courts. At the end of those five years, final exams have to be taken. After passing, you have to wait until a position becomes vacant. Until then, you work as a judge’s assistant. All in all it is a long and demanding process but in the end you have a guaranteed position.
For public judges, you need to have practical legal experience of five years. If you fulfil the requirements, you can be appointed as a public law judge after passing the correspondent exam. There are efforts to change this difference between the two fields however. And although I hope they do not change it, I feel it would make sense because the five year education for civil and criminal judges really prepares you for the job. You are visiting the police and prosecutors and this overall perspective is lacking for public judges.
What would have been your alternative to studying law?
It was always my dream to have my own spa hotel with riding stables. I was actually already enrolled at the hotel management school. But having a hotel is a 24/7 job and although law might not be the best alternative to avoid this, I think it is sometimes better to have the dream than to actually pursue it. I was torn between studying psychology or law and with the profession as a judge I believe to have found the ultimate combination.
