My first day as a Princetern at the Los Ange­les City Attorney’s office began as I stepped into City Hall, sit­u­ated amidst the bus­tle and excite­ment of down­town L.A. There a fel­low Princetern and I met our host, deputy city attor­ney Mar­cia Gonzales-Kimbrough ‘75. After a brief tour of her office and intro­duc­tion to her col­leagues, we began our three-day expe­ri­ence of the work of a city attorney.

The activ­i­ties of my first day imme­di­ately gave me a clear idea of the nature of Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough’s work. As a city attor­ney, she plays the cru­cial role of pro­vid­ing legal coun­sel for a wide vari­ety of issues and projects in the city of Los Ange­les. I had the priv­i­lege of attend­ing sev­eral meet­ings she had as the gen­eral coun­sel for the L.A. for Kids pro­gram, which pro­cures and dis­trib­utes fund­ing for park and recre­ation projects in the city. Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough dis­cussed var­i­ous aspects of a large num­ber of projects with not only other lawyers, but also land­scape archi­tects, whom we met on the first day to dis­cuss a poten­tial dri­ving range in west Los Ange­les, as well as civil engi­neers from the depart­ment of Pub­lic Works. We also met with the City Admin­is­tra­tive Offi­cers for the pro­gram and mem­bers of the Com­mu­nity Rede­vel­op­ment Agency, which had an incred­i­ble num­ber of projects under­way yet was being dis­solved due to bud­getary con­straints. Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough pro­vided legal advice for these groups, par­tic­u­larly in terms of ensur­ing that all the details of their pro­pos­als for the com­mu­nity projects adhere to the city’s char­tered rules and will be approved by the city coun­cil. She also looks over the legal­ity of the mul­ti­ple con­tracts that are a part of each project.

Though these meet­ings may seem tedious, I def­i­nitely felt that they were an irre­place­able part of the com­mu­nity, and that law, whether it is a bill passed by the coun­cil or an ordi­nance issued by the mayor, is made an inher­ent part of these gov­ern­ment func­tions for the pur­pose of improv­ing the lives of indi­vid­u­als in the com­mu­nity. I was par­tic­u­larly struck by the sig­nif­i­cance of Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough’s work when we drove by some of the very parks and sites for future devel­op­ment that were dis­cussed in the meet­ings. By shad­ow­ing Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough, I gained a com­pre­hen­sive under­stand­ing of the care­ful con­sid­er­a­tions, the com­pro­mises made, and the col­lec­tive efforts of many indi­vid­u­als behind each park, recre­ation cen­ter, or children’s museum. I saw the tes­ta­ment to democ­racy at work through the process of turn­ing a pro­posal into reality.

In addi­tion to attend­ing meet­ings with sev­eral branches of the city gov­ern­ment, Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough also gave us the oppor­tu­nity to attend a con­tin­u­ing legal education

Ananda and Mar­cia Gonzales-Kimbrough

lec­ture given by a Prince­ton grad­u­ate on sev­eral con­tro­ver­sial top­ics, includ­ing the legal­iza­tion of med­ical mar­i­juana and respon­si­bil­ity dis­pute of city side­walk repair. Fur­ther­more, on the last day of the Princetern­ship, we also attended a City Coun­cil meet­ing and observed the pass­ing of bills by the coun­cil mem­bers and com­ments made by com­mu­nity activists on the spe­cific issues of their concern.

Aside from hav­ing the chance to observe the above­men­tioned meet­ings and gov­ern­ment func­tions, meet­ing and hear­ing the sto­ries of Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough her­self, her cowork­ers and other Prince­ton alumni in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia was, in my opin­ion, an extremely ben­e­fi­cial part of this expe­ri­ence. Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough gra­ciously talked to us about her past expe­ri­ences as a law school stu­dent, a pros­e­cu­tor work­ing in crim­i­nal law, and her tran­si­tion to a city attor­ney. She also intro­duced us to her col­leagues, who all kindly told us about their par­tic­u­lar areas of legal exper­tise, and recent Prince­ton grad­u­ates. Gain­ing a glimpse into the work they do and learn­ing about how they made their career choices gave me very help­ful infor­ma­tion with which I may, hope­fully, make my own deci­sions about future aca­d­e­mic and career pur­suits. Of course, this Princetern­ship was also an invalu­able chance to build pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships that you would not gain otherwise.

From this expe­ri­ence, I learned so much about not only the legal field, but also the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of law. I per­son­ally thought that this greatly influ­enced the way I per­ceive the career of a lawyer, which I believe is very mean­ing­ful and extremely mul­ti­fac­eted and inter­est­ing. If I had not observed Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough’s daily work, my aca­d­e­mic or career deci­sions with regard to law would be based on pos­tu­la­tion rather than facts and real expe­ri­ence. Princetern­ships pro­vide a unique and rare oppor­tu­nity to gain insight into a par­tic­u­lar career and allow you to truly immerse your­self in the envi­ron­ment so that you can decide whether this is the right career for you. I am extremely glad that I chose to apply and par­tic­i­pate, and I am very grate­ful to Ms. Gonzales-Kimbrough and Career Ser­vices for gen­er­ously pro­vid­ing me with this opportunity.