All the jobs I've never had - Trainee solicitor

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To this day I still don't know why, but at the age of eleven I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be a solicitor when I grew up. The fact that I couldn't even spell the word solicitor, let alone know what they actually did, was irrelevant.

Several years later I undertook a four-year law with French degree. My year in France was heaven, but it did little to numb the pain of studying a subject as dry as law. I'm sure there are people out there who relish the thought of sitting through a two-hour lecture about easements, but sadly I am not one of them.

With this in mind, you would have thought that the last thing I would have wanted was to become a lawyer. But come the penultimate year of my degree I found myself scouring the training contract directories along with my fellow students.

Not wanting to reveal my age or anything, but at the time online application forms were very much in their infancy; reserved for cutting-edge IT firms (not old-fashioned law firms). Overwhelmed with a mountain of paper application forms, I decided to apply only to those firms requesting a CV and covering letter.

I cringe when I look back at what I put in my covering letters. For a start I didn't tailor each letter (a big no-no) so the letters were generic to say the least. Also, I said that I was interested in civil liberties. Yes law firms like to think of themselves as right-on and generally doing good, but nine times out of ten that 'good' will be done for some corporate giant.

Such were my levels of pessimism, I decided to spend that summer travelling around the world, rather than waiting for the rejection letters to come flooding in. So while my contemporaries spent their summers photocopying and filing at City law firms, I was swimming in the Great Barrier Reef and drinking cocktails in Manhattan.

Do I regret not making more of an effort with my applications? Not for a second.

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