The Rules of the Game
November 24, 2008
VLS student Ugonma Achebe on the set of ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."
You might not see much of a connection between preparing for a career in law and appearing on a nationally televised game show, but Ugonma Achebe might just change your thinking on that.
As she prepped for her two-day appearance on ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” Ugonma found herself reading through almanacs, year-in-reviews, and other resource guides, absorbing as many facts as she could handle. But in the end, she says, it was all about strategy.
“You can be as prepared as you can be, but if you lack strategy, it’s over. You go home,” says the 25-year-old native of Nigeria, who immigrated to the states with her family at age 8. “It’s really about knowing the rules of the game. Not just glancing at them, but knowing them.”
In the Millionaire game show, the strategy might be a matter of when to use a “lifeline” for help in answering a question. In law, it might be about knowing how to preserve your client’s appellate rights by moving for re-argument, she says.
“Being a lawyer is really about thinking—knowing the rules and thinking. It’s knowing that you often have to take a deep breath, think and strategize.” Working with clients, it means you cannot be quick in answering questions without first making sure that your answer is not only accurate, but applicable to the facts, she says.
Growing up in a mixed community in West Orange, N.J., Ugonma realized at an early age that she wanted to help her neighbors. At 18, she received the Youth of the Year Award from the West Orange Boys and Girls Club for her work supervising children in afterschool activities.
Law school has been everything I had hoped it would be plus more. I’ve delved into areas that I didn’t think I had a knack for. I’ve been enlightened."~ Ugonma Achebe ’10
As a student at Rutgers University, she started the Nigerian Student Association, modeling it as a service organization that would benefit not only Nigerian students but the community as a whole. Members of the cultural awareness organization held clothing drives and collected money to help orphanages in Nigeria and volunteered in soup kitchens in New Jersey.
When she considered law schools, Ugonma was drawn by the VLS motto of “Law for the Community and the World,” and the law school’s commitment to public service.
Following her first year at VLS, she landed an internship with Eviction Intervention Services, a homelessness prevention organization based in midtown Manhattan and staffed by five attorneys. She handled client intake and research, meeting with people who were on the verge of losing their apartments and helping guide them through their legal rights.
The work combined two areas she cares deeply about: social services and the law.
“Client intake was the personal side of it: you saw the desperation and the reason you were doing it,” she says, describing the plight of a mother with five children facing eviction, or an elderly person being forced out of a rent control unit due to gentrification.
“You knew you had to work diligently and expeditiously to get them relief, if not permanent relief, at least temporary.”
Ugonma Achebe said strategy is the key to success on a gameshow and in the legal field.
The internship brought both challenges and benefits.
“It was a large workload, and the work is never done. There was a heavy client intake,” she says. “The benefit was achieving what you set out to do.”
That might mean getting a stay of the eviction order or working to ensure landlords make the necessary repairs on their housing units.
As a second year student, Ugonma says she now finds herself surprisingly fascinated by courses in business and finance, and equally surprised by a newfound interest in environmental law, which was something of a “foreign concept” before she enrolled in a course on public lands management.
“It completely opened my eyes regarding land use and the problems we face if we just throw caution to the wind,” she says. “Law school has been everything I had hoped it would be plus more. I’ve delved into areas that I didn’t think I had a knack for. I’ve been enlightened.”
As for the game show appearance, Ugonma didn’t quite become a millionaire, having come up short on an $8,000 question about the LZR Racer swimsuit in the Beijing Olympics. But she did leave the show with $1,000, and perhaps more valuable, some new insights on the importance of strategy.
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