Must... find... job....

I haven't mentioned that the past three weeks have been spent interviewing for my summer job, and, just to pile on the pressure, THE NEXT TEN YEARS OF MY LIFE!!!! See, the place you work after your second year of law school is most likely the place you will go after you graduate. Most firms don't even interview third year students, because they want 2nd years to spend a summer with them so they can make them permanent offers and retain them forever and ever amen. Everyone is well aware of this, so the summer job hunt at Harvard is a giant production. That starts before you leave for the summer at the end of your 1L year. Firms PAY MONEY to come to Harvard and have 20 min initial interviews with students in Sept. If they like them and have room for them, they ask them back to their offices for callback interviews, a four-hour interviewing extravaganza. Callbacks are nice. They fly you out to their office, put you up in a nice hotel, and reimburse all of your expenses. Usually they take you to lunch or dinner (or both) while you are in town.

To accomodate this process, Harvard cancels school for a week so that we don't miss anything while we are flying all over the country interviewing with the firms we want. It really is a little ridiculous. The office of career services is committed to maintaining their 100% employment upon graduation rate, so they really hype up the second summer and the importance of locking down your future 30 seconds into your second year. Meanwhile, the office of public interest, concerned that everyone will be pushed into firms and not into legal aid or government work, starts a counter-campaign. Their slogans go a little like this:

"Attention 2L's! Do not feel pressured to do OCI (on campus interviewing) and work at a firm this summer. Not everyone is cut out for firm work. Last year, .00000043% of graduating students went into a very fulfilling career in public interest work! And Harvard pays back your $40,958,720,495,872,094,857 dollar loans if you work below the poverty line (which is $50K at Harvard), so don't be sucked into the high-paying, lunch-buying, luxury-hotel-accomodating hype! You have another choice!"

I have one friend who is not interviewing with firms. She has never wanted to work at a firm, so I say good for her. I have always wanted to work at a firm, so I am undaunted by the public interest counter-campaign. Apparently, so are 99% of my classmates.

I have callbacks in two cities, as Patto and I haven't decided where to live after graduation. So for the next two weeks, I will be zipping around Atlanta and Chicago, talking to about 8 firms. I wonder if firms will reimburse my dry cleaning expenses....