While my wonderful wife is exploring Vermont, the dogs and I have been hanging out here in the city. I've been mainly focusing on looking for a summer job for next year. As a law student, a summer job the year prior to graduation makes life a lot easier, typically such jobs lead to offers of permanent employement provided one doesn't cause some major trouble.
The whole process is kind of nutty. Each student gets to make a generic cover letter, an unofficial transcript and a resume. You then literally "bid" on interviews. Each firm has maybe 15 slots to interview people from each school. Hundreds of people bid on these slots, and the firms take the best of those on paper for interviews. Mind you, there are 20 intervies at 20+ law schools. After the interviews they consider those people, and bring in a smaller number (perhaps 50) for secondary interviews with their committee. Following that, they select a handful for summer positions. So summer jobs with the larger firms are neigh impossible to achieve. I applied to 37 different firms on Sunday, so perhaps I'll get an interview. I interviewed with one of them last year, but didn't pass the initial stage.
Thankfully, this is only perhaps the largest 100 or so firms in the country. To find the others, one must simply put the rubber to the road and hunt on your own. There are thousands of law firms in the country, from 1000 lawyer megafirms to solo practitioners working out of their houses. In a weird juxtaposition of the past 1o years, smaller firms are now doing much better than their larger counterparts. It seems in these tight economic times, people are more cynical about paying the huge sums demanded by the megafirms. I can't imagine why. So, tonight I start hunting in earnest for local firms. Ideally, one of them will be looking for someone to work next summer and stay on through the following year.
On a somewhat unrelated note... my former IP professor at Temple, who is an attorney upstairs at Woodcock Washburn recently won the largest intellectual property judgement in history. So congrats to him... wish I could get a job there!
One of the things I love about the city is the view. It's rainy today, but I actually enjoy these sort of days. There is something about this view of the city that projects a strength to me. I guess part of it is that I never imagined myself as ending up anywhere other than suburbia when I was younger. Despite all the beautiful wilderness I have seen, there is something about the city that draws me.
Work is stressful this week, for a number of reasons. There is a huge deadline next week, combined with a lot of office politics this week. Though it sounds like things are sorting themselves out. Odds are I will be continuing as I have been the last couple months. I am not quite sure of the reasons, but my posting record hours couldn't hurt.
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