CCN Students without Offers Forum

[Anonymous User]

I went to NYU. I dont think the fewer complaints are due to joblessness. I just think OCS is pretty damn good. They send weekly emails on job openings, hold panels, have detailed statistics, and (at least for people I know) managed to secure callbacks for people who srtuck out. They also have a system where students who are on hold at a firm can report it, and they'll call the firm to see what's up. Ive been pretty impressed.

I am at U of C, and while I generally think the law school is great, our career services is the complete opposite of this. They seem to think that the ball should be entirely in the student's court, which is fine early in the process, but at this point, I'm sure that there is something more effective to be done than to tell students that 3L OCI will be impossible and that they better start considering other options....

[Anonymous User]

I went to NYU. I dont think the fewer complaints are due to joblessness. I just think OCS is pretty damn good. They send weekly emails on job openings, hold panels, have detailed statistics, and (at least for people I know) managed to secure callbacks for people who srtuck out. They also have a system where students who are on hold at a firm can report it, and they'll call the firm to see what's up. Ive been pretty impressed.

That's seriously amazing. How detailed are the statistics?

[Anonymous User]

I went to NYU. I dont think the fewer complaints are due to joblessness. I just think OCS is pretty damn good. They send weekly emails on job openings, hold panels, have detailed statistics, and (at least for people I know) managed to secure callbacks for people who srtuck out. They also have a system where students who are on hold at a firm can report it, and they'll call the firm to see what's up. Ive been pretty impressed.

Excuse me, I need to draft a letter describing the beautiful environs of Ann Arbor and how comfortable Carolyn Spencer's office is.

[Anonymous User]

NYU student above:
The statistics include:
1) A bifurcated grade chart on firms. They are more guidelines than anything else, though.
2) A list of how many students ended up at each firm.
3) statistics on how many callbacks and offers were given to students in specific grade ranges.

Also, the handbooks are pretty informative. And the dean makes it a point to maintain rapport with firms across the nation-she actually travels to them. And my year, she solicited comments she should take with her to those meetings.

[Anonymous User]

I went to NYU. I dont think the fewer complaints are due to joblessness. I just think OCS is pretty damn good. They send weekly emails on job openings, hold panels, have detailed statistics, and (at least for people I know) managed to secure callbacks for people who srtuck out. They also have a system where students who are on hold at a firm can report it, and they'll call the firm to see what's up. Ive been pretty impressed.

I am at U of C, and while I generally think the law school is great, our career services is the complete opposite of this. They seem to think that the ball should be entirely in the student's court, which is fine early in the process, but at this point, I'm sure that there is something more effective to be done than to tell students that 3L OCI will be impossible and that they better start considering other options....

I think it's entirely the opposite. Early on in the process is the time to dispel any myths, assumptions, disinformation that could lead students down the wrong path during OCI and to tell people what they need to do if they are at risk of striking out. The system is stacked in such a way that not getting a job out of EIP makes it very difficult to find a job at all, so I don't know how much they can do after that.

[Anonymous User]

--LinkRemoved--

Considering the current discussion in this thread, I'm curious to see thoughts on this email.

[Kohinoor]

--LinkRemoved--

Considering the current discussion in this thread, I'm curious to see thoughts on this email.

I mean, 95% of the kids that graduated from my junior high have a job. If you set the bar that low then its pretty easy to impress.

[Anonymous User]

NYU student above:
The statistics include:
1) A bifurcated grade chart on firms. They are more guidelines than anything else, though.
2) A list of how many students ended up at each firm.
3) statistics on how many callbacks and offers were given to students in specific grade ranges.

Also, the handbooks are pretty informative. And the dean makes it a point to maintain rapport with firms across the nation-she actually travels to them. And my year, she solicited comments she should take with her to those meetings.

Just to be clear, the gpa statistics we have are very general, based on 3 grade brackets (roughly top 20%, below that but top half, bottom half). So firms are split into only three groups - those that hire (on average) from each bracket - but we're given no further differentiation within brackets.

Based on TLS, I've had the sense that CLS students have more statistics. And this thread is calling for more, but I don't think that's the answer - too many statistics and students will act like it's a numbers game. It's not.

NYU's OCS does do a good job. It is in the rapport they have, the training (including Martindale, which is essentially the spreadsheet called for in this thread), the handbooks we're given (which pretty strongly recommend mailings if you're targeting non-NYC firms, eg), and the outreach to us and firms during OCI season (for example, the Dean personally called me to ask about my anticipated timeline for an open offer I had with a firm that other students were still waiting to hear from), but I don't think their successes (whatever they may be) are because of extra statistics.

At CLS we have almost no statistics. Just a spreadsheet with firm name, # of bids, # screeners received, # callbacks given, callbacks accepted, offers given, and offers accepted. There is no interpretation of this data by OCS. Students draw their own conclusions, for example, the 60-70% figure floated around here is based on adding up the total # of offers accepted in 2009 and dividing them by an estimated number of people who did OCI.

There is also a binder in the OCS office with the number of offers given to people who are Stone Scholars over total offers. Again, the school holds fast to the Stone/non-stone designation, so we don't know if making Stone (top 1/3, GPA 3.41) is a hard and fast line, if a person just below Stone has the same opportunities as someone just above, or if it differs firm to firm and if so, which firms.

Personally, I would like more stats to be released to the students, specifically to allow them to structure their bid lists better. At a meeting last year OCS said something to the effect of "don't try and game the system to get more screening interviews" which is downright hostile to the interests of a median student who needs to hustle to get a job (by hustling, I mean getting her name into enough piles of resumes, at firms where her resume will be looked at, to increase her shot at an offer). But I understand this is more than just a numbers game and there is a point of diminishing returns.

However, there is no evidence that OCS number crunches the stats (in office) in order to give people better advice. This in my view is unacceptable. Here's how I think the data (call backs, offers, and the resumes and transcripts of every student) should be used.

Say you have three firms, each in NY, none you would immediately think of as highly selective. Firm A has a strict grade cutoff- i.e. they mostly call back people above a 3.3., meaning someone sits in a room with a calculator and calculates GPAs. Firm B has a target number- they'll take back 15 students from CLS for callbacks, and below Stone Scholar the distribution is random (i.e. someone .05 below Stone has about the same chance as someone .3 below Stone at getting a callback). Firm C's cbs have a very low correlation with GPA, meaning they care more about fit during the screener. So high grade students should be encouraged to bid on firm A as a safety, and low grade students on firms B and C. If a student sends his or her bidlist to OCS, they should tell that student it is unwise to bid on Firm A unless they have a very good reason for doing so (i.e. connection, firm has a very specific practice area they can't get at most other firms, relevant WE).

Maybe there are markets where 90% of the cbs go to the same 6 or 7 students and 5 of those students have a certain GPA. So a student placing 10 bids into that market, thinking it will be great because she's from there, less CLS students are bidding on that market, and so she will pick up more screening interviews is actually ending up with less of a chance than having 5 screening interviews with firms like B and C above. That student should bid on NY firms and pick up the home market interviews later during add-drop (would reward those students who care enough to sit at the computer frantically scheduling interviews).

Or maybe all this will be a waste of time, in which case it's better to have OCS do this type of analysis and be able to tell students, look, don't spend time trying to over analyze this process, we've done our own analysis and there are no magic trends that will help you.

[Anonymous User]

Different NYU poster here- in my experience, the data we get at NYU isn't that much better than what it sounds like CLS gets. In fact, I might prefer the CLS data. NYU's "data" is basically a list of firms that generally only hire above 3.5 GPAs, and firms that generally only hire above 3.3 GPAs. You can guess which firms are in the 3.5 category, but there's a big difference in hiring criteria between, say, WLRK and any other random firm that typically hires 3.5 students. Also the 3.3/3.5 system only tells median and below median students which firms are out-of-reach (or, almost out-of-reach); it doesn't distinguish between firms that regularly hire 3.2 GPAs and firms that regularly hire <3.0 GPAs.

[Anonymous User]

I'm pretty annoyed at OCS as well. I think (and I might be wrong) that a big part of this is that they still don't like admitting that a large number of us are in a bad situation. It makes them look bad and the school look bad. So they sugarcoat everything, with Shizer-flavored, 98% sweet sugar.

And because they're doing this they're failing to address REALITY. And in failing to address reality, they're not taking aggressive enough steps to make sure that we go into this process with all of the information that we need and that we may not have even known we needed to ask for in the first place.

I don't think this is about students being lazy, I think this is about a bad economy + a failure to become more efficient and calculated in the face of this economy. I can't speak for other schools, but I think the attitude among the administration at CLS is if we don't talk about it, then it's not really happening.

The economy isn't their fault but the way they respond to it is.

And I wonder of they are in a position to communicate with firms and get some rough #'s, because they acted like hiring would be back up, and I scarcely believe that they have absolutely no way of gaining some real information on this. I think they just don't want to.

[Anonymous User]

Different NYU poster here.....Also the 3.3/3.5 system only tells median and below median students which firms are mostly out-of-reach; it doesn't distinguish between firms that regularly hire 3.2 GPAs and firms that regularly hire <3.0 GPAs.

Quoted for MF truth. NYU calls all firms that don't require above 3.3 "non grade-determinative," while these firms certainly do discern between a 3.2 and a 3.0. I DO think NYU's OCS is better than most, but they certainly could give us more detailed information on which firms are realistic or not for kids with a sub 3.3, which is half the class.

[Anonymous User]

This is a ridiculously whiny thread. I really don't see what sort of data you want OCS to provide beyond what they do (which, by the way, seems to be exactly like NYUs, except with two grade buckets instead of three). From it you can calculate screener-->CB rates and CB-->offer rates for every firm, and figure out how many offers went to the top third. If 90% of a firm's offers went to stone scholars and you're not one, you probably shouldn't bid on them unless you are a URM. If it's 50%, maybe you should bid, but still consider them a reach.

Almost all my friends (across grade ranges) managed to put together appropriate bid lists based on this data. I'm not trying to say that people are unemployed through their own fault, but blaming it on OCS because they ask you to draw conclusions from data and talk to people instead of drawing up individualized reports for everyone is kind of ridiculous.

Say you have three firms, each in NY, none you would immediately think of as highly selective. Firm A has a strict grade cutoff- i.e. they mostly call back people above a 3.3., meaning someone sits in a room with a calculator and calculates GPAs. Firm B has a target number- they'll take back 15 students from CLS for callbacks, and below Stone Scholar the distribution is random (i.e. someone .05 below Stone has about the same chance as someone .3 below Stone at getting a callback). Firm C's cbs have a very low correlation with GPA, meaning they care more about fit during the screener. So high grade students should be encouraged to bid on firm A as a safety, and low grade students on firms B and C. If a student sends his or her bidlist to OCS, they should tell that student it is unwise to bid on Firm A unless they have a very good reason for doing so (i.e. connection, firm has a very specific practice area they can't get at most other firms, relevant WE).

OCS will effectively tell you this in a qualitative way if you ask them, at least for the big New York firms they're familiar with and where they have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions. For instance I was warned that S&C and GDC take grades very seriously, versus other firms that care more about fit, or place a lot of emphasis on work experience.

[Kohinoor]

Different NYU poster here.....Also the 3.3/3.5 system only tells median and below median students which firms are mostly out-of-reach; it doesn't distinguish between firms that regularly hire 3.2 GPAs and firms that regularly hire <3.0 GPAs.

Quoted for MF truth. NYU calls all firms that don't require above 3.3 "non grade-determinative," while these firms certainly do discern between a 3.2 and a 3.0. I DO think NYU's OCS is better than most, but they certainly could give us more detailed information on which firms are realistic or not for kids with a sub 3.3, which is half the class.

UVA does provide exact numbers for each firm. Would be nice to see median, Lowest Taken, Highest taken, etc. by firm (Yes, your school absolutely has this data)

[JazzOne]

--LinkRemoved--

Considering the current discussion in this thread, I'm curious to see thoughts on this email.

I mean, 95% of the kids that graduated from my junior high have a job. If you set the bar that low then its pretty easy to impress.

If the 2010 graduating class of your junior high has employment stats like that, it is indeed impressive (ITE).

[Anonymous User]

Different NYU poster here.....Also the 3.3/3.5 system only tells median and below median students which firms are mostly out-of-reach; it doesn't distinguish between firms that regularly hire 3.2 GPAs and firms that regularly hire <3.0 GPAs.

Quoted for MF truth. NYU calls all firms that don't require above 3.3 "non grade-determinative," while these firms certainly do discern between a 3.2 and a 3.0. I DO think NYU's OCS is better than most, but they certainly could give us more detailed information on which firms are realistic or not for kids with a sub 3.3, which is half the class.

UVA does provide exact numbers for each firm. Would be nice to see median, Lowest Taken, Highest taken, etc. by firm (Yes, your school absolutely has this data)

Yep. It would even be an improvement to have data like CLS, showing how many callbacks a firm gave, how many offers it gave, how many CLS students accepted, etc. NYU's OCS doesn't give this to us (or at least wouldn't give it to me pre-EIW). All we get is "People with 3.3-3.5 GPA averaged X callbacks last year."

[Anonymous User]

Different NYU poster here.....Also the 3.3/3.5 system only tells median and below median students which firms are mostly out-of-reach; it doesn't distinguish between firms that regularly hire 3.2 GPAs and firms that regularly hire <3.0 GPAs.

Quoted for MF truth. NYU calls all firms that don't require above 3.3 "non grade-determinative," while these firms certainly do discern between a 3.2 and a 3.0. I DO think NYU's OCS is better than most, but they certainly could give us more detailed information on which firms are realistic or not for kids with a sub 3.3, which is half the class.

UVA does provide exact numbers for each firm. Would be nice to see median, Lowest Taken, Highest taken, etc. by firm (Yes, your school absolutely has this data)

I'm not really sure this is much better. At some level, given the very small sample sizes, you're going to get a lot of false precision. If there were <5 accepted offers (which at CLS is the case for 90% of firms), the median doesn't really tell anything since it can be so easily skewed and variable from year to year. Similarly, I feel like the lowest GPA could be misleading. People might see that they took a 3.0 and conclude that they're within range, when really they have no shot (i.e., that person was a URM, had a personal connection, patent, etc).

[Anonymous User]

This is a ridiculously whiny thread. I really don't see what sort of data you want OCS to provide beyond what they do (which, by the way, seems to be exactly like NYUs, except with two grade buckets instead of three). From it you can calculate screener-->CB rates and CB-->offer rates for every firm, and figure out how many offers went to the top third. If 90% of a firm's offers went to stone scholars, you probably shouldn't bid on them unless you are a URM. If it's 50%, maybe you should bid, but still consider them a reach.

Almost all my friends (across grade ranges) managed to put together appropriate bid lists based on this data. I'm not trying to say that people are unemployed through their own fault, but blaming it on OCS because they ask you to draw conclusions from data and talk to people instead of drawing up individualized reports for everyone is kind of ridiculous.

Say you have three firms, each in NY, none you would immediately think of as highly selective. Firm A has a strict grade cutoff- i.e. they mostly call back people above a 3.3., meaning someone sits in a room with a calculator and calculates GPAs. Firm B has a target number- they'll take back 15 students from CLS for callbacks, and below Stone Scholar the distribution is random (i.e. someone .05 below Stone has about the same chance as someone .3 below Stone at getting a callback). Firm C's cbs have a very low correlation with GPA, meaning they care more about fit during the screener. So high grade students should be encouraged to bid on firm A as a safety, and low grade students on firms B and C. If a student sends his or her bidlist to OCS, they should tell that student it is unwise to bid on Firm A unless they have a very good reason for doing so (i.e. connection, firm has a very specific practice area they can't get at most other firms, relevant WE).

OCS will effectively tell you this in a qualitative way if you ask them, at least for the big New York firms they're familiar with and where they have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions. For instance I was warned that S&C and GDC take grades very seriously, versus other firms that care more about fit, or place a lot of emphasis on work experience.

Again, no you can't, and no they don't. I'm not talking about super-selective firms here. Everyone with half a brain knows not to apply to S&C or GDC at median. I'm talking about the V30-100 and non-NYC markets, the firms people don't consider selective (right now every firm is selective). For firms A, B, and C in that example, substitute any three firms in the V60 or V90. And if the analysis doesn't reveal any trends, then people can stop whining.

And nobody is asking for a personalized plan. If I send a bidlist to OCS, though, and I'm a median student applying to DC/CA thinking that my ties to DC or CA will help me out, I'd expect them to tell me I should look in NYC, and when I ask why, they should able to point to analysis they've done that refutes my reasonable assumption that ties will give me a boost in my home market.

[Anonymous User]

This is a ridiculously whiny thread. I really don't see what sort of data you want OCS to provide beyond what they do (which, by the way, seems to be exactly like NYUs, except with two grade buckets instead of three). From it you can calculate screener-->CB rates and CB-->offer rates for every firm, and figure out how many offers went to the top third. If 90% of a firm's offers went to stone scholars and you're not one, you probably shouldn't bid on them unless you are a URM. If it's 50%, maybe you should bid, but still consider them a reach.

OCS will effectively tell you this in a qualitative way if you ask them, at least for the big New York firms they're familiar with and where they have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions. For instance I was warned that S&C and GDC take grades very seriously, versus other firms that care more about fit, or place a lot of emphasis on work experience.

The CLS spreadsheet with that info only exists as a hard copy. It was transcribed, amazingly, by students who wanted totally altruistically to help out friends who didn't spend their summer in New York City, and of course that means we all violated OCS rules by distributing it to people who otherwise would have been bidding blind.

Also, OCS absolutely did not tell people California would be a bloodbath. I'm not sure whether to blame them -- they probably kept hearing from NYC firms that hiring would be up (admittedly true) and ignored or didn't care about what was going on elsewhere.

My big problem is with the faculty and administration, not OCS. They're the ones who refuse to allow a GPA to exist "officially" and pretend that grades "don't matter" and "you'll all get the jobs you want."

[Anonymous User]

Different NYU poster here.....Also the 3.3/3.5 system only tells median and below median students which firms are mostly out-of-reach; it doesn't distinguish between firms that regularly hire 3.2 GPAs and firms that regularly hire <3.0 GPAs.

Quoted for MF truth. NYU calls all firms that don't require above 3.3 "non grade-determinative," while these firms certainly do discern between a 3.2 and a 3.0. I DO think NYU's OCS is better than most, but they certainly could give us more detailed information on which firms are realistic or not for kids with a sub 3.3, which is half the class.

UVA does provide exact numbers for each firm. Would be nice to see median, Lowest Taken, Highest taken, etc. by firm (Yes, your school absolutely has this data)

I'm not really sure this is much better. At some level, given the very small sample sizes, you're going to get a lot of false precision. If there were <5 accepted offers (which at CLS is the case for 90% of firms), the median doesn't really tell anything since it can be so easily skewed and variable from year to year. Similarly, I feel like the lowest GPA could be misleading. People might see that they took a 3.0 and conclude that they're within range, when really they have no shot (i.e., that person was a URM, had a personal connection, patent, etc).

So you want to have less information rather than more? You'd be very happy at Columbia.

I would think the best strategy would be to collect as much information as possible and, with a healthy dose of skepticism, discount the value of the information for the reasons you listed above. It may not be perfect after scrutinizing the data for possible diversity hires, etc., but it's better than nothing--especially if you learn to appreciate exactly what it tells you.

UVA provides lowest, median, and highest. It also provides the total number offered, so you can surmise whether a single outlier is bringing the median down just a little bit. It also provides multi-year data, so you can see how firms have changed their hiring practices from before to after the recession.

[ToTransferOrNot]

Wow, and you folks are complaining about YOUR OCS?

We are provided nothing as far as grades->hiring at Chicago. If you ask OCS, they basically pull the "oh, grades don't matter as much as how you interview" schleck, unless you're asking about Wachtell.

[Anonymous User]

Wow, and you folks are complaining about YOUR OCS?

We are provided nothing as far as grades->hiring at Chicago. If you ask OCS, they basically pull the "oh, grades don't matter as much as how you interview" schleck, unless you're asking about Wachtell.

I wonder how many UVA students who complain actually took advantage of the available information. OCS told us they have the information. They said it was available to us to review if we came in to the office to see it. They even offered to provide it over the phone if we called. They just didn't hand it out to us. I'm sure a lot of students didn't bother, and now they're angry because they don't have jobs yet.

It's not like OCS was very protective of the grade info. They didn't want to publish it, but I took notes on all the firms I was interested in, and no one tried to stop me. It was very accessible to all UVA students.

Edit: Not to sound rash. It's perfectly reasonable to complain or be upset with not having a job. Recently, though, it's been hard for any UVA student to blame OCS for his or her job search difficulties. OCS has been hustling for everyone over the past year or two.

[Anonymous User]

Just to be clear, the gpa statistics we have are very general, based on 3 grade brackets (roughly top 20%, below that but top half, bottom half). So firms are split into only three groups - those that hire (on average) from each bracket - but we're given no further differentiation within brackets.

And, to be sure, they are just guidelines. I received offers from firms who, by that chart, were supposed to be out of my reach.

NYU could definitely have better statistics, and I never argued that it was the statistics that set them apart. It's the whole package.

[Anonymous User]

So you want to have less information rather than more? You'd be very happy at Columbia.

I would think the best strategy would be to collect as much information as possible and, with a healthy dose of skepticism, discount the value of the information for the reasons you listed above. It may not be perfect after scrutinizing the data for possible diversity hires, etc., but it's better than nothing--especially if you learn to appreciate exactly what it tells you.

UVA provides lowest, median, and highest. It also provides the total number offered, so you can surmise whether a single outlier is bringing the median down just a little bit. It also provides multi-year data, so you can see how firms have changed their hiring practices from before to after the recession.

I am at Columbia.

I don't think I'd ever advocate providing less data, more I wanted to make the point that people seem to think if they had more data they would have been able to bid siginificantly better, which I don't think is the case.

Columbia's data, while not perfect and not as good as UVA's (it seems), allows you to make pretty decent judgments, at least about the firms that tend to take more than a few Columbia students year in and year out. That said, the overaggressiveness with which some people bid was crazy. It confounds me that more than half the class bid on GDC and Cleary last year despite the fact that the data clearly shows they almost never take someone who is not Stone. And this year it was very surprising to see who was interviewing at S&C, Wachtell, Cravath, etc.

I guess my point is there's a general tendency to see the stats, see that a firm took two non-stones, and think "that could be me," when really the way to think about it is that 2 non-stones out of the 100 who screened got offers.

[rayiner]

Just to be clear, the gpa statistics we have are very general, based on 3 grade brackets (roughly top 20%, below that but top half, bottom half). So firms are split into only three groups - those that hire (on average) from each bracket - but we're given no further differentiation within brackets.

And, to be sure, they are just guidelines. I received offers from firms who, by that chart, were supposed to be out of my reach.

NYU could definitely have better statistics, and I never argued that it was the statistics that set them apart. It's the whole package.

This is really the best way to do things. Here at NU we have precise min/median/max, but I think because of the relatively small sample size it's not particularly useful (false precision as someone mentioned above).

The point of providing grade data is to give people an idea of what firms to bid on. People at the top 40% and the top 30% mark should largely be aiming at the same firms --- it makes a lot of sense to put them into the same bucket.

As the guy mentioned above, people bid terribly. Having easier to follow data is probably a net win for NYU relative to detailed but less easy to follow data.

[Anonymous User]

And this year it was very surprising to see who was interviewing at S&C, Wachtell, Cravath, etc.

You can't really count on this perception as implying aggressiveness. Because of people being too risk-averse, not many people bid these firms highly. What resulted was that if you bid these firms at the bottom, you probably got them.

This is exactly what happened to me. I had the Vault 5 from bids 45-50. Got interviews at all of them.