With competition for pupillages and training contracts hotter than ever, increasingly straight As aren’t enough. In addition to academic excellence, recruiters want Olympic gold medals, world debating championships and hard evidence of childhoods spent volunteering in law centres.

In contrast with the spectacular feats achieved by some of the depressingly brilliant people I encountered at Bar school, my list of extra-curricular activities is embarrassingly C-list. I played second team football at school. I performed moderately in a couple of mooting competitions. I once wrote a mildly threatening letter to a landlord on behalf of a down-trodden tenant.

Which means I’m left desperately scrabbling around to come up with something exciting to do that will prevent my CV from getting binned in the first sift.

On finishing Bar school my first thought was to try and line up an internship at a glamorous international human rights court, sure to catch the eye of a jaded pupillage committee shivering in a damp Temple basement. Googling "international court", the first hit was the UN War Crimes Tribunal in Sierra Leone. Exotic and dangerous. Plus they offered student placements. Perfect, if only the positions weren’t unpaid.

After forking out over £10,000 on the BVC plus the same or more on living expenses, I needed to earn money, or at the very least not haemorrhage any more of it. Breezing off on a six month jaunt at such a time is the kind of behaviour that, at best, will prevent you from ever being issued with a Switch card again. At worst, you’ll return to find your parents in a debtors’ prison, bitterly etching doomsday murals depicting the moment you persuaded them to put their names down as guarantors on those loan forms. And unlike my charming co-paralegal Jonathan, who’s just jetted off all expenses paid to The Hague for six months at the International Criminal Court courtesy of Gray’s Inn, I couldn’t persuade Middle Temple to fork out any cash on my behalf. So I decided to put internships on hold for a while.

Drowning my sorrows over Jonathan’s success one night in the pub, I turned my thoughts to doing a part-time LLM. But the prospect of two years of studying the philosophy behind evidential procedure filled me with dread. Desperate for ideas, I even considered a London-based New York Bar preparation course – something an increasing number of pupillage-less BVC graduates seem to be doing – but what’s the point of becoming licensed in the US when there’s no prospect of ever being allowed to stay there for more than 90 days unless you pay someone thousands of dollars to marry you? So, in the end, I settled on sticking it out as a paralegal with the aim of buying a doctorate online after I’d saved a bit of cash.

That was a joke by the way. Of course, I’m hoping that writing for Times Online will help. That is, if chambers haven’t blacklisted me as a loose canon liable to expose their secrets to the outside world. But what I really need to do is demonstrate my commitment to the law. Which is why I’m going to give the Free Representation Unit a go. Real-life tribunal experience while simultaneously assisting those failed by the justice system: CV-boosting dynamite! I wish I’d thought of it earlier.

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