Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice Nancy Rice spoke to a group of high school and college-aged girls Thursday at the first Women Rocking the Rockies conference.

“I am trying to figure out who you are, because I am used to giving speeches to groups of lawyers, and I don’t think that’s you,” she said. “Is that right? So if you’re not a bunch of lawyers, who are you?”The Colorado Petroleum Council, the regional chapter of the American Petroleum Institute, sponsored the event, part of the organization’s Women in Power initiative. It’s intended to draw more women into Colorado’s oil and gas industry. More than 250 high school juniors and seniors and college students attended the event at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

“Some of you at least are interested in the sciences, but not all of you and, therefore, what I have to say about my career path might be of some interest to you,” Rice told the women. “Are all of those correct assumptions on my part so far?”

Rice began by relating her life story, interspersing it with advice she had learned along the way.

“I am definitely not a scientist, but rather a judge,” she said. “And the interesting thing about my job and having become the kind of judge that I am is that I still have to kind of do science, I still have to kind of do math, I still have to kind of do, or at least understand, technology. I have to understand all the kind of STEM sort of things that you guys are talking about.”

Rice told the audience she moved around a lot as a child because her father was climbing a career ladder. Sometimes the move occurred during the middle of the school year, she said, and she would have missed portions of the curriculum, so had to learn some things on her own.

“But I kind of scurried around and figured some of the other things that would work for me, particularly some of the things that I was very good at,” she said. Rice said she was always good at reading and writing. “And I still believe that: If you can read and you can write, you kind of have the keys to anything you might possibly need to do.”

She asked the students if they ever had to write anything other than text messages before turning more serious and pointing out that, no matter what their field, they’ve got to be able to write.

“I would suggest that you learn and that you focus and that you take classes where you have to write papers, where you have to do some kind of writing,” she said. “Because that’s probably going to be the skill that benefits you the most.”

Rice said she got most of her writing skills while attending Cheyenne Central High School before going east to college, where she attended Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

“My career has been entirely being a lawyer and then being a judge,” she said. “And what I like most about being a judge is the fact that I get to do more or less what I think is right. I get to decide the decisions the way I think they ought to come out. When you’re a lawyer you have to take one side or the other side and argue that side as vigorously as you possibly can and do so in good faith. But you do have to take a side. And I’ve always enjoyed not necessarily having to take a side.”

She said one of the other good things about being an appellate court judge is getting to work with other people, making decisions collaboratively.

“So that’s another thing I learned about myself,” she said. “I like to read, that works well for being a judge. I like to write, that works well for being a judge. And I like to work with other people to come up with kinds of solutions.”

She said she also learned that it was really important for her to feel that she was making a difference and had a commitment to a greater cause – in her case, having a good court system.

“So I kind of, without knowing it – I didn’t know any of these things when I was in high school, I didn’t know any of these things when I was your age – locked in, if you will, the perfect position for myself,” she said. “Which is a job where I got to read, a job where I got to write, a job where I go to work with others and job where I got to sort of dedicate myself to this higher calling if you will.”

She talked about working as a public defender shortly after law school, a position she didn’t enjoy and that bored her. At the time she thought she had stalled her career and made a mistake. So she quit and took a completely different job.

“The other job was much more to my liking, and I excelled at it, whereas I was just a very average public defender,” she said.

But when it came time for Rice to work toward becoming an appellate court judge, she was able to go back to that experience as an appellate public defender and sell that as her appellate experience.

“I always thought that was a wasted or lost two years of my life, but it wasn’t – it was a useful two years of my life,” she said. “So I guess my advice to you all is, whatever your experience is, whatever happens, even if it’s not that great, even if it doesn’t seem to be on this beautifully linear path toward whatever your goal is: It’s probably going to work out, at the very least it will make you a more interesting person. Figure out who you are, what it is you want to do, but then don’t get too uptight about it.”

Rice ended her keynote by answering questions from the audience about everything from overcoming obstacles to dealing with the stress of repeatedly hearing about violent cases.

-rachel@coloradostatesman.com