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Elle's Law School Diary:
I officially have a summer job. Finally! I feel like a huge weight’s just been lifted off my shoulders, and I now have all this excess time on my hands (not really though, because, let’s face it, you never really have “excess time” in law school). For the past three months, I spent ten hours a week writing cover letters, interviewing, replaying interviews in my head afterwards, stressing that I said something stupid, etc. I like to think that 80% of the time, I’m an optimistic, happy-go-lucky person. The other 20%, though, I stress way more than necessary, and often over things that really don’t matter. I’ll let you guess which side of me was brought out by this whole process.
Everyone says, it doesn’t matter what you do your first summer, as long as it’s law-related. Everyone says it, but no one believes it. I have friends who were insistent that the prestige of the job was really important, and I have others that absolutely wouldn’t take any unpaid work. All I knew was that I wanted to have fun and ended up applying to all sorts of jobs: public interest organizations, firms, in-house positions, research gigs, and corporate/banking positions.
I’m one of those people who dishes out great advice (I think?), but doesn’t think rationally when it comes to themselves. As the weeks went on, I’d get progressively get more stressed about not having a job. I walked out of interviews wanting to scream, “I’m smart, and I want to do free labor for you! Why won’t you hire me?!?” On the other hand, when I sat and thought about it rationally, I knew I’d end up with something or other. And I knew that whatever that job was, I’d work hard and hopefully be able to spin it into something reasonably interesting for OCI (on-campus interviews) in the fall. I resolved that for every rejection that I got, I would send out three more applications.
Luckily, I didn’t have to stick to that plan for long because I was offered two great jobs a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to be working for a nonprofit organization in New York that advocates for First Amendment rights (mostly free exercise) and has had some landmark cases in the area. I’m thrilled to not only have a job that seems exciting, but also be back in New York for the summer.
I can’t help but feel blessed that I go to a school as awesome as Penn because it definitely helped during this whole process. I’m a walking Penn-billboard, so here I go on my rave-about -Penn spiel. First off, we have an awesome career portal where jobs are posted. I would stake out that site and find (literally!) hundreds of great jobs. Secondly, our career planning office is phenomenal. Not only were the advisors incredibly comforting when I’d run in there after being rejected from yet another job, but they also had great tips on applying for more positions. On top of that, Penn gives most of its students grants if they have an unpaid job, which is obviously a huge perk (New York City with $0 in my pocket really wouldn’t have been practical).
One thing that I don’t like about the whole 1L job process is that it feels like a big gamble. Say you get a decent job in February and have two weeks to either accept or decline. On one hand, you feel that you should take it just in case you can’t find something else. But on the other hand, maybe you should hold out for something even better. I have one friend who accepted a job with a judge back in December. Since then, he was offered a job with a firm and a job with the Red Sox. He was so torn as to what to do because, obviously, schools highly discourages you from going back on your commitments. But c’mon, it’s the Red Sox! I don’t like baseball, but even I know how badass that job is.
I have another friend who was, until recently, in the same boat as me (unemployed and stressing about it). Just today she was offered a completely awesome job at LivingSocial. I guess the lesson to be learned is that things have a way of working out, and that there are a lot of other, more important things to be worrying about. Can you say writing competition? More on that later.
Photo by oliviercharavel
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