Justice Consuelo Marie Callahan, Circuit Judge, United States Courts of Appeal [30:25-35:25]

empowered where I felt that I could make more of a difference and I don't think that looking back that's not true but I think that also that was my perception and I wanted to make a decent living to have that independence that we go back to what my mother talked about to give me choices and I wanted to I did want to make a difference I did want to affect people's lives and I would say that I saw a lot being a lawyer as combining all of that and I'd also recognized in myself at this point that I didn't particularly like taking orders and you know I'd like to be in charge more and that being a lawyer seemed to offer the opportunity to have a fairly autonomous existence and a fairly in charge type of existence and I was seeing myself more where some people feel that the burden of the responsibilities is so weighing on them that they would rather be in a position where they have someone else making those decisions and they carry them out I saw myself more as liking to be out front making the decision and I was willing to sort of the no gut snow glory you have more opportunity to do what will make a difference but also you can fall flat in your face and I was I was comfortable with taking those chances you know it sounds like as you described your high school years and Stanford that you knew yourself pretty well and you were wise to to discern what made you happy and what your goals were into focus and it seems to have served you well to know yourself in choosing a career or planning your future so you graduated from Stanford within major in English yes and you applied to law school yes and tell us about law school well it's I thought about it looking back I really didn't I wanted to stay in California for the most part and I find that kind of a little unusual I had lived overseas when I was at Stanford they have a lot of overseas programs so I had been a broad for two quarters and I went to England and because my language was Spanish and at that time they didn't have a campus in Spain so it was fall back on the English language and to go there and I really enjoyed that and I think that that really opened my eyes but I still wasn't prepared to move that far away from my family and that far away from my roots so I I felt very attached to California now I a little bit regret thinking oh I should have gone I should have gone somewhere else and I should have gone and lived in another part of the country but that's it still worked out okay but so that's that was part of the reason that I ended up here and at the time that I was going to law school there were only there were less than ten women in my law school class so it was a very different it was a very different type of environment that what I see because with law students now and so we even actually had one of my professors which is something you would never get away with now he's have what he'd call ladies day he'd just come in and say it's ladies day and he'd only call on the women that day and so you you just didn't know whether to you know run out of the classroom at that particular time and I know that he you would never get anywhere with doing that at this particular I think exactly but there weren't enough of us at that time and we were a little bit intimidated and I actually I would say I did not like law school and that people find surprising because I love the law I've loved being a lawyer I love being an appellate judge and you know and I love the study of the law of the development I don't know I hated law school and it I think at the time maybe I was young and then suddenly it was fairly adversarial and I think at the time George really was sort of a boot boot camp mentality and at that time they were establishing themselves and they did have a fairly high attrition rate and one of the things that I would say was a defining experience for me in law school that there were a lot of scare tactics going on and a lot of pressure in terms of people felt that they might not pass and I had always been a successful student up until that point in time and I found my confidence a little bit shaken and and I really felt prey to some of the scare tactics that went on and then when the first you're ended and I had done fine in law school and I realized that I realized that I had allowed myself to be psyched out I told myself I will never allow someone to do this to me again I've always been a good student I know what I