wanted: a career

It’s always nice to know that the career center is looking out for us. It’s the summer, so you figured they’d slow things down, but not at this school. In fact, there are two recent developments that you should be aware of:

1. Registration for OCI has started! Surely, you might think, now that you’re a 3L, OCI would finally have something to offer. After all, a summer job is important, but a real job is REALLY REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT, right? I mean it’s not like we’re coming back to be 4Ls. So sure enough, there are exactly two firms interviewing 3Ls. Two. I thought I might have made a mistake since we got a new computer OCI system so I e-mailed them to make sure and they confirmed that there are exactly two employers looking for 3Ls. Two. Great.

2. At the career center, there’s a woman who helps people looking for clerkships. She seems very dedicated to this and sends out these lengthy messages that contain excruciating detail about how to use the unbelievably complicated computer system that apparently is used by federal judges around the country to find clerks. Nothing about this system can be blamed on the career center at this school. (So, for instance, don't blame her that the system wants you to write cover letters directly on the system -- not on Word -- because if you upload what you wrote on Word to the system, the formatting will screw everything up. Yeah, that makes sense, because only about 99.98 percent of law students write everything on Word. Brilliant). But … but one of the best parts about this system is that if you get a letter of reference from someone other than a professor, it has to be scanned and uploaded as a .pdf document. Not a problem, right? Just tell me where to find the scanner. Oh, that’s right, the career center’s scanner is broken and according to the woman there, they have no idea when or whether it will get fixed. Yeah, that makes sense. Admittedly, this isn’t a big deal but I love how they place one obstacle after another in your way. As if getting a clerkship from this school isn’t enough of an obstacle…