What Textbooks Don't Teach: A Summer at GLSP
By Fiona Selders, 2026 SHECP Intern with Georgia Legal Services Program in Savannah
When I chose to spend the summer of 2026 as a volunteer intern at the Georgia Legal Services Program (GLSP) in Savannah, I did not know that I was stepping into an organization with real reach. GLSP offers free legal services to low-income residents in Georgia. 154 out of the 159 counties include attorneys from GLSP. There are 10 regional offices that provide free legal services in family law, housing, access to public benefits, eviction prevention, farmworkers’ rights, and access to education. I was hoping to learn what it means to be an attorney and to have a deeper, more human-level understanding of poverty than I could get from a textbook. I learned far more than I expected, including things I do not think many lawyers encounter until they are well-established in their career.
My internship started with the basics of how legal aid offices typically run. I learned to operate Legal Server, the case management system that is built specifically for nonprofit legal aid agencies. This picks up the mechanics of client intake and document tracking. From that point, I moved into observing client meetings, which consisted of serving as a witness and signing legal documents related to estate planning. This is where my real education started, because I learned to distinguish between and assist in drafting a power of attorney (POA), financial power of attorney (FPOA), an advance directive for healthcare (ADHC), transfer on death and trust documents, and wills. I also gained exposure to dating violence protective orders, to see firsthand how legal tools can help in moments of crisis.
The work I am the most proud of came from my time with the pro bono unit, where I contributed the most throughout the internship. My central project was a research assignment on the rural justice gap, with a specific focus on Georgia’s disabled population. The goal was to help the unit understand and present the scope of this problem to identify what could be done to close it. I was informed to pull recent census data from a public tracking website and used Python and Excel to analyze it. I produced fourteen charts and graphs, each validating why the disparities looked the way they did across the state of Georgia. This was the first time I had used data analysis skills in service of something with immediate, tangible stakes for real people rather than for a grade. Moving forward from the project, I handled a stream of demanding, detailed, and heavy assignments. One of the hardest and biggest tasks was an attorney lookup task, covering over 1100 attorneys across the state, verifying whether each was still active within their county. I completed it, along with several other Excel-based projects within a day or two, and received strong feedback on the accuracy and speed of my work.
Some of the most meaningful moments of the summer happened outside the office entirely; at outreach events and client home visits. I helped staff with an event at the Savannah public library, aiding attendees with general estate planning documents and walking people through the process of obtaining a birth certificate if they did not already have one. At Union Mission, I helped distribute information about the full range of resources GLSP offers to low-income individuals. And at a senior center for roughly an hour out, I took part in an outreach session focused on elder abuse awareness and estate planning resources for older adults.
Looking back now, this internship gave me something I do not think I could have gotten anywhere else. A flat surface ground view of how legal infrastructure either reaches people or fails to, and why the gap matters so much for Georgia’s most vulnerable residents. I came in wanting to understand poverty better, and I leave with a much clearer sense of how legal access, or the lack of it, shapes that experience every day.
Fiona Selders is a Data Science major at Millsaps College, class of '27. During her 2026 SHECP Internship, she worked with Georgia Legal Services Program's Savannah office. Each summer, SHECP interns are placed with nonprofit and government agencies that work on the front lines of poverty and serve as co-educators to students.
