<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Name a recent story about the press, national security, and the First Amendment, and Nabiha Syed has probably been in the middle of it. At 28, Syed has already published a book, founded a legal clinic, worked for The New York Times as a First Amendment fellow, started an educational platform about drones, and written for a variety of publications, including Slate and SCOTUSblog. She has a day job, too, at the renowned media law firm Levine Sullivan Koch &amp;amp;amp; Schulz. Syed talked to Cosmopolitan.com about jumping into your passions headfirst, learning to accept criticism, and channeling Type A tendencies into lamb bacon.  I grew up in Orange County, California, where I went to Troy High School, a magnet school for math and computer science. I&amp;#039;m so grateful for that \u2014 for being exposed to math and science at such a young age. The question of &amp;quot;Why aren&amp;#039;t young girls in STEM?&amp;quot; was not a conversation that happened at my high school \u2014 you were just there. It gave me a fluency and familiarity with technology that serves my work today. I left California for Baltimore to go to Johns Hopkins University. I took classes in anything and everything that appealed to me: economics, food science, chemistry, anthropology, and religion. Hopkins encourages curiosity, so it was a good place to cultivate an ethos of chasing what I found interesting. During my second year, I was talking to my dad \u2014 who is always encouraging my adventures \u2014 and he asked me if I had heard of microfinance. I hadn&amp;#039;t. It didn&amp;#039;t make sense to me at first: A bank would loan small amounts of money to clusters of five rural women, with no collateral for the loan, so each of the women could start their own businesses. The logic was that the social dynamic between the five women would ensure that each repaid some part of the loan every two weeks. It turns out that my dad had read about Grameen Bank in Bangladesh \u2014 this was a year before it won the Nobel Peace \u2014 and thought that since I cared about economics, development, and women&amp;#039;s rights, this might be of interest to me. It was.  I spent hours researching everything I could about Grameen. While I was Googling my heart out, a friend mentioned that Johns Hopkins offered travel grants for student research projects. The deadline was the next day. I slapped together a one-page document and submitted it, and I got the grant to go to Bangladesh to study Grameen Bank. I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve ever done anything better for myself than that. I showed up in Bangladesh, where I didn&amp;#039;t speak the language and, honestly, had never really thought I would visit. But I totally immersed myself in it. That&amp;#039;s how I function: An idea grabs me, and it is all I want to think about. Going to Bangladesh was the first time I went \u2014 literally \u2014 with that impulse. The long narrative of my career is that I just jump into things with both feet. I&amp;#039;m not particularly scared of asking people to help me out. In the moment, I&amp;#039;m just so curious \u2014 I will ask anyone anything and seek out information anywhere.   My research involved traveling to different villages, interviewing women and loan officers on the types of businesses women started. I asked them about how they chose their businesses, what their obstacles were, and how they felt about the program. I also had the opportunity to travel to Pakistan to study a spin-off of this microfinance program, to see how it translated in another cultural context. All the while, I was drafting a paper about it to fulfill the requirements of the Hopkins research grant. In doing so, I was actively getting input from different experts and professors in the area. I got an opportunity to pitch my observations to the Oxford University Press, who thought it would be ideal for an academic book, particularly given the recent attention to microfinance. I had since returned to school but decided to write the book even though I was enrolled in a full class load. It was too much to juggle, and unsurprisingly, my grades dipped as I was writing. I&amp;#039;ve learned my lesson since then: Now I work hard to balance what captivates me with everyday responsibilities. I spend a lot of effort carefully structuring my time. The book came out while I was in law school at Yale. I had gone to law school right after graduating college to examine the legal dimensions of international development but soon realized that that wasn&amp;#039;t a particularly well-defined area to study. My first year was difficult: I couldn&amp;#039;t figure out what I wanted to immerse myself in, and I felt rudderless. I stumbled upon the Yale Law School Information Society Project (ISP), a center that looks at new technologies, law, and society. I felt like I had found an intellectual home at law school. One of the talks hosted by the ISP shaped the rest of my career. Lucy Dalglish, then the head of the Reporter&amp;#039;s Committee for the Freedom of the Press, came to talk to us about sealed courtroom dockets. She explained how this practice made it difficult to follow a case or know what had happened at the courthouse. Newspapers used to move to unseal those dockets, but financial pressures meant that there were fewer resources to do that. Some of my classmates and I were troubled by this revelation. We realized that academic institutions had the resources, time, and free labor in the form of students to step into the void, so we started a media law clinic for journalists to get legal support for their investigative work. This became my all-consuming project for law school. We did the legal work under the supervision of a professor and a network of media lawyers, including ones I now work with. We did trainings on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which gives citizens the right to request government records, litigated FOIA lawsuits on behalf of journalists seeking information for their investigative journalism, and unsealed court records. Three years later, the clinic is up to amazing things like fighting for access to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court decisions. It makes me so proud \u2014 I love the feeling of building something that seems like it will last, whether it&amp;#039;s a piece of writing or an institution. It&amp;#039;s also nice to walk away from it knowing it can survive on its own. I like when life feels episodic that way. While building the clinic, I focused as much of my coursework as I could on the First Amendment, transparency, corruption, and Internet law. While researching those areas, I came across what seemed like a scrappy journalistic upstart called WikiLeaks \u2014 this was late 2008. I knew I wanted to write about it, but I also knew I didn&amp;#039;t have the time. A few of my mentors encouraged me to apply for the Marshall Scholarship after graduating law school to explore and write about online transparency and freedom of information. The timing was lucky, given that &amp;quot;Cablegate,&amp;quot; or the leak of U.S. diplomatic cables by Wikileaks, unfolded in what felt like minutes after I had my passport stamped at Heathrow.  But it wasn&amp;#039;t so easy. I was wild-eyed with enthusiasm about my topic and wanted to get going immediately. One of my advisers could not understand why I wanted to write about WikiLeaks \u2014 she said it didn&amp;#039;t sound interesting to her at all. It was the first time someone flat-out said, &amp;quot;No, your excitement won&amp;#039;t take you all the way \u2014 you have to convince me why I should care about this topic.&amp;quot; At first I moped, then I thought about leaving Oxford, and then I decided to grow up and log my library time researching, reading, analyzing exactly why WikiLeaks and other similar online spin-offs were historically and analytically significant. This made me much more meticulous and deliberate in my thinking, because I had to convince my adviser that my ideas were worthwhile. It was an important lesson: Not everyone is going to immediately jump up and down with excitement every time you have the start of a good idea. It takes a lot of time to sit down and say, &amp;quot;What is it about this that you don&amp;#039;t like or don&amp;#039;t find interesting? Can I try to solve that?&amp;quot; Eventually I ended up getting a different adviser, but honestly the pushback I received was helpful in the end \u2014 not because it changed my opinion, but because it made me think more deeply about my ideas. Now, whenever I have new ideas, I go to my brain trust \u2014 a group of friends who are skeptical, brilliant, and creative \u2014 and ask them to rip my idea apart. Oxford was a big turning point in that way: It made me value and actively invite criticism. Sometimes you will have to agree to disagree, but I think it is always worth it to grapple with contrary perspectives. Between writing about WikiLeaks and my experience with the media clinic, I knew I wanted to work in media law, and especially with investigative journalism or transparency-oriented projects. I applied for a job as a First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. That job was a dream job in every way. I focused on FOIA litigation, which referenced a lot of the skills I had developed in the media clinic. Most meaningfully for me, I was able to work on a FOIA lawsuit requesting the Office of Legal Counsel&amp;#039;s legal analysis of the targeted killing drone program, which the Times recently won in front of the Second Circuit. I also worked on a FOIA case asking for the legal analysis of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the government can use to obtain a broad array of citizens&amp;#039; records, like telephone records, and spent a lot of time thinking about the surveillance issues that occupy headlines today.  I am currently an associate at a media law firm, where I work with brilliant colleagues on a broad swath of media law issues, like privacy, defamation, and, yes, government transparency and FOIA. The angle I&amp;#039;m most captivated by lately is the legal issues relating to newsgathering technology, like data scraping, drones, sensors, and encryption \u2014 really thinking about how technology can help us learn more about the world around us and what the downfalls of that can be. Of course, it can be frustrating sometimes \u2014 so often it feels like the law is slow to keep up with technological developments that are so fast. Law isn&amp;#039;t often thought of as a creative field, but in this area, I think you have to be creative. It keeps me interested because I clearly like chasing the things that are new, but also figuring out how they fit with the old. Practicing law in an emerging field demands that you do that \u2014 and I&amp;#039;ve learned that they call it &amp;quot;the practice of law&amp;quot; for a reason, because you really cannot get good at this stuff unless you put in a lot of time to practice. The learning curve is steep, and I definitely have days where I am reminded of just how steep it is. It&amp;#039;s hard, not just for me, but I think for a lot of my friends, to be patient in our careers. We&amp;#039;re all investing in careers or in projects that will not just take one year or two years or four years to pay off. We may have ideas that will take five or 10 years to pull off properly. That&amp;#039;s OK. Whether it&amp;#039;s a book project or building an organization or just figuring out what it is that you want to commit your life to, it&amp;#039;s OK for that process to take a lifetime \u2014 which is difficult if you are, like me, by nature a little impatient. Besides being Oprah, which I consider my dream job, if I wasn&amp;#039;t doing what I&amp;#039;m doing, I would want to be a chef. I love playing with food. For example, I don&amp;#039;t eat pork and I had a day where I felt very excluded from charcuterie boards, which are pork-tastic. I decided, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s it! I am making my own lamb bacon!&amp;quot; I marched over to the butcher and got lamb belly, I bought nitrate (thanks, Amazon Prime), I bought juniper berries, and let that sit in my fridge for days. I had a lamb-bacon party, and I finally understood why the bacon craze happened \u2014 it&amp;#039;s delicious! It&amp;#039;s a pretty consistent personality trait \u2014 throwing myself into things \u2014 but it&amp;#039;s easier with food than it is with your career.  My advice to other women is to be curious and run with your ideas, even (or especially!) if it is terrifying. Push the little voice that says, &amp;quot;What if you&amp;#039;re wrong?&amp;quot; out of your mind. Yes, you might waste a lot of time working on something or have to deal with four pounds of aging lamb belly in your fridge, but it is almost always worth it to try. You&amp;#039;ll always learn something. Let other people be that little voice \u2014 invite the skepticism from others \u2014 but don&amp;#039;t let it seep into your own psyche. It&amp;#039;s too devastating to doubt yourself all the time. I think it&amp;#039;s common among young women to listen to that voice that says, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t jump. It&amp;#039;s too scary, it&amp;#039;s too unstable.&amp;quot; It probably is scary and unstable, but think about jumping anyway. You will probably mess up fantastically at some point. That&amp;#039;s OK. You will then bounce back and do something else. If the fear is really crippling, make sure you don&amp;#039;t do it alone. Make sure you have some people buy in with you every step of the way \u2014 a best friend or a mentor or a professor, someone. At least one other voice. Then swallow the fear and just do it.  RELATED: Get That Life: How I Became a Professional Cheese Eater Get That Life: How I Founded Jezebel and Became a New York Times Columnist Get That Life: How I Used Social Media to Become a World-Famous Yoga Instructor Follow Jill on Twitter. Photo credit: Elizabeth Griffin for Cosmopolitan.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/advice/a7064/get-that-life-nabiha-syed/?src=rss>