College Experiences That Helped an Attorney at Fisher Phillips Succeed

The thing about college for me, and there's undergrad, grad school, then law school. I also did an executive development program about navigating the professional world. It was a year-long fellowship.

There were different phases of school for me, including the police academy. I want to take you to my time as an undergraduate student at UC Davis.

I didn't know I wanted to be a lawyer, or even what I wanted to do. I didn't even know if I deserved to be at UC Davis. I was a student-athlete, broke my leg snowboarding, and football ended quickly. I was kind of in crisis mode.

I found myself on academic probation and facing disqualification. When I spoke with a counselor about why I wasn't doing well, I had all these excuses. Tears were flowing as I offered them.

The counselor put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Ryan, maybe a school like UC Davis isn't for somebody like you. Maybe you should drop out and go to a less academically competitive institution." My tears quickly dried up, and I didn't get below a B after that.

It wasn't because I wanted to be a lawyer or do anything specific. I just wanted to prove that lady wrong. I was competitive. In retrospect, I realized that what she said was exactly how I thought about myself; she just put it into words.

When she put it out there, I was able to deal with it. What set me up for success, not necessarily for my specific career, but for success in general, was realizing that the excuses I had as an undergraduate student for my inability to academically perform were tools of incompetence. They built monuments in nothingness.

Those who specialize in excuses are seldom good at anything. They were tools of incompetence that I was using. I needed to put those tools down and use other tools.

Those other tools were the ones that said, "I have an issue. Let me work the problem. Let me figure out how to get through it and pass it." It made me stronger.