I genuinely thought I could figure out the pupillage process by googling my way through it. After two failed cycles with zero first-round offers, I realised I’d been making the same mistakes on repeat without even knowing what they were. The FPBA was the first time someone laid out exactly what chambers are actually looking for, the research matrix alone made me rethink my entire shortlisting strategy. I’m now through to a second-round interview at a set I would never have targeted before. I wish I’d found this before my first cycle.

Coming from Australia with an overseas degree, I felt like the whole system was written for people who’d been in the UK their whole lives. Nobody tells international students which sets are realistically worth applying to, how the Inns work in practice, or how to frame overseas experience. Taz addresses all of this directly and he doesn’t pretend the Bar is a level playing field, but he shows you how to compete within it.

I came to the Bar from a background in medicine and I kept trying to downplay that in my applications because I thought chambers would see it as a distraction. The FPBA module on USP completely changed that thinking. I started leading with my clinical experience for civil and regulatory sets, and it transformed how my application read. I got my first first-round interview offer shortly after redrafting. That shift in mindset made a tangible difference across my pupillage cycle.

I’d done four years of paralegal work before applying for pupillage and assumed that experience alone would carry my applications. It didn’t. My first cycle came back with rejections that gave me nothing to go on, no feedback, no pattern I could see. The Accelerator programme was the first time anyone actually pulled apart my applications line by line and showed me why “relevant experience” on its own doesn’t land unless it’s framed around what a specific set is looking for. I stopped writing the same generic paragraph about my paralegal role and started tailoring it to each chambers’ practice areas. Second cycle, I had three first-round interviews from sets I’d been rejected by outright the year before.

I enrolled in the FPBA before I’d ever submitted a pupillage application and I think that’s why my first cycle went better than I expected. I didn’t have any bad habits to unlearn. I knew how to research chambers properly before I started, I knew what my application needed to say before I drafted it, and I knew what first-round interviews were actually testing before I walked in. Two first-round offers and a second-round in my first cycle. I have no way of knowing what would have happened without FPBA but I do know that I walked into every stage of the process knowing what I was doing.

What I valued most was that Taz doesn’t sell you a dream. He tells you the success rates, he tells you it takes multiple cycles for most people, and he tells you there are no guarantees. Honesty, it was actually refreshing to hear. The FPBA gives you a realistic picture and then gives you the tools to succeed in the pupillage process.

By my third cycle I was starting to wonder if there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I’d been getting shortlisted but never converting at interview. What the FPBA showed me is that I’d been treating every interview the same way, I had no framework, no strategy, just rehearsed answers that went nowhere. The interview modules broke down first and second rounds in a way I’d never seen written anywhere. I came out of my last second-round feeling calm for the first time ever.

The Bar course teaches you to be a barrister. It does absolutely nothing to teach you how to get pupillage. I was juggling lectures, mini-pupillages and drafting applications all at once with no real idea of what ‘good’ looked like. FPBA gave me a structure I could follow even when time was tight, the modules are short enough to fit around studying but substantial enough to actually change how you think. My applications are sharper, my interview answers are framed properly, and for the first time, I feel like I’m competing rather than just participating.