School of Law
Faculty of Business and Law
As a general rule, students are required to find their own professional experience placements. However, the School of Law does coordinator a small placement scheme.
Marlene Ebejer coordinators the Deakin Law School Professional Experience program. Deakin Law students are placed at Victoria Legal Aid offices (Geelong, Dandenong and Ringwood).
Contact details:-
Marlene Ebejer
Lecturer
School of Law
Faculty of Business & Law
Geelong
Tel +61 3 522 72410
Email marlene.ebejer@deakin.edu.au
The scheme – how it works
Students commit to work one day per week eg your day is Monday with a VLA office for 12 weeks. At the end of the placement you fill out a report detailing the days and hours you attended, broadly what you did on each day and who supervised you. The report is used to review how the scheme is working and to recommend credits against the 30 days requirement.
There are intakes in February and July each year. Next year it is hoped that places will be available at additional offices including regional legal offices commencing with the February 2008 intake.
To qualify you need to be in the third year or later of your law studies. Applications should be brief and specify:
Which Legal Aid office you are interested in and which days of the week you are available.
You should also provide your academic record and a contact phone number – preferably a mobile - and a very brief outline of what you hope to get out of a work experience opportunity.
Some student impressions and experiences
Some extracts from student reports give some insight into what you might expect if you are take part in the work experience scheme.
“I enjoyed the program thoroughly. The whole team at VLA were extremely nice and helpful and the working environment was great. I found the experience really valuable because it was very hands on and I learnt a lot about the court process and the day to day life of a duty solicitor which really helps me in deciding my career path.”
“Taking part in the work experience program was extremely beneficial for me, as not only was it the first time I had done any such experience, but it also offered a wide variety of tasks and opportunities …… The best thing about this was that it allowed me to see in a practical light, everything I had been learning in the past few years, and made it obvious that law is not just about reading textbooks and taking exams.”
For more information about this program contact Marlene Ebejer
