2L losing complete hope Forum

[nygrrrl]

ITT: The anonymous feature function is abused so much, it makes me wonder just how psychotic TLS posters really are.

[lisjjen]

Dude, you need to meet people. Like, go out and totally abandon all the pride that you feel like you should have and schmooze the shit out of every attorney you can. I was in a similar boat as you last year (somewhat above median at t-14, 2 callbacks but no offers from 2L OCI) and, since the fall of my 2L year, I have gotten only one interview (which turned into my 2L summer job) despite sending out hundreds of applications for both 2L and postgraduation employment. Outside of OCI, just about the only way you get interviews is to be well-connected. Start working on that ASAP.

+1000

Soggy Keanu obviously has more law school experience because I'm a 0L and he's a 2L, but every big break I've ever gotten has come from "schmoozing the shit" out of people. Oh. And then working my ass off afterwards.

[lisjjen]

In the First Half of This Thread: The anonymous feature function is abused so much, it makes me wonder just how psychotic TLS posters really are.

Nobody is abusing the anonymous posting. Especially that Lisjjen. He's super smart, I bet he's like a rock star or hand model or something.

[lisjjen]

In the First Half of This Thread: The anonymous feature function is abused so much, it makes me wonder just how psychotic TLS posters really are.

Nobody is abusing the anonymous posting. Especially that Lisjjen. He's super smart, I bet he's like a rock star or hand model or something.

Funny, but knock it off.

That lasted an extraordinarily short length of time.

[lisjjen]

That lasted an extraordinarily short length of time.

--ImageRemoved--

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[JazzOne]

Exactly my thoughts....never believed I would be in this position after hitting on most of my goals...

This is the scary part. I would not have been surprised or disappointed if my grades had sucked. But once I earned solid grades for a year, made law review, and padded my resume with a couple extras, I figured I was gold. I was very surprised at how hard I had to scramble for a job.

[dood]

to OP:

why dont you seriously drop out? im not saying this to be mean, but here's my basic train of thought as to why i would have dropped out had i ended up in ur position:

1. as a 2L with no firm job, i basically have maybe 5-10% chance of getting one as a 3L.
2. i have sunk 2 years and $120K into this - but how is it logical to spend another year and another $60K for a 5-10% chance? if u step back from the situation, ignore what everybody else is doing, how does this make any logical sense at all? i dont understand how "leaving law school will just put [you] in a worse position" because paying $120K for a worthless degree is better than paying $180K for a worthless degree.
3. what is the next step? here are some things i considered: TFA, army OCS, NYC teaching fellows, getting back into working as an engineer and pursuing MBA later, take a leave of absence and work as a patent agent then returning to law school after couple years, bartending (actually decent money), fedex or UPS driver ($50K starting), electrian apprenticeship (union electrician make $100K+).

u need to be realistic and reassess ur life goals and plans. dont think of dropping out as failure, think of it as cutting ur losses. like in sun tzu says in the art of war: losing 2/3 of ur troops is better than losing all of ur troops.

good luck brah.

[rundoxierun]

Exactly my thoughts....never believed I would be in this position after hitting on most of my goals...

This is the scary part. I would not have been surprised or disappointed if my grades had sucked. But once I earned solid grades for a year, made law review, and padded my resume with a couple extras, I figured I was gold. I was very surprised at how hard I had to scramble for a job.

Should've hedged your bets and been born "diverse".

[prezidentv8]

Exactly my thoughts....never believed I would be in this position after hitting on most of my goals...

This is the scary part. I would not have been surprised or disappointed if my grades had sucked. But once I earned solid grades for a year, made law review, and padded my resume with a couple extras, I figured I was gold. I was very surprised at how hard I had to scramble for a job.

Should've hedged your bets and been born "diverse".

[rundoxierun]

Should've hedged your bets and been born "diverse".

Haha.. its cool man. I meant it in the playful prodding way.. not the seething hatred way.

[prezidentv8]

Should've hedged your bets and been born "diverse".

Haha.. its cool man. I meant it in the playful prodding way.. not the seething hatred way.

Hah, I gotcha, but these threads tend to devolve quickly...

[Aqualibrium]

Exactly my thoughts....never believed I would be in this position after hitting on most of my goals...

This is the scary part. I would not have been surprised or disappointed if my grades had sucked. But once I earned solid grades for a year, made law review, and padded my resume with a couple extras, I figured I was gold. I was very surprised at how hard I had to scramble for a job.

Should've hedged your bets and been born "diverse".

Not sure if you know this, but...blah whatever.

[lisjjen]

to OP:

why dont you seriously drop out? im not saying this to be mean, but here's my basic train of thought as to why i would have dropped out had i ended up in ur position:

.

DON'T LISTEN TO HIPNOBEAR!

It's only a useless degree at the 120k price tag. It's slightly less useful than normal at 180k. The only difference is, you can work as a public defender or something (eventually) at the 180k and make in the 50k/yr range at the very least. Plus if you decide to later go into business, you'll have that behind you. On the other hand, at 120k price tag, you're back to squirting brown stuff in a taco at Taco Bell (plus if I quit anything, ever at 2/3rds completion, it would haunt me for the rest of my life.)

[lisjjen]

Hah, I gotcha, but these threads tend to devolve quickly...

That they do.

btw, is your avatar Lucario?

[Anonymous User]

This is the CCN transfer from the last page.

Dood perfectly summarized my thoughts from earlier this semester. What I would say to people like Dood though is that if you do drop out halfway through law school, it's going to look REALLY bad. People don't normally drop out after finishing several semesters, and every employer is going to see that and assign a red flag to your application for the rest of your life. They'll think "hey, [CCN] is a great law school, and its graduates all do great things/make tons of money. Clearly this applicant is lazy/blew the opportunity of a lifetime, and if he/she was like that back then, how do I know that he/she won’t be like that now?” On the other hand if you do graduate, employers will see that on your resume and at least assume that you’re better at reading, writing, and analyzing things than the majority of the general population (and you won’t have to come across as a complete tool in the process like those people who list that they’re in Mensa). That said, whether these considerations are worth the outrageous price tag of finishing the JD is a close call.

To echo what someone else said, I think that these schools just have no idea what to do with people like us. They’re obsessed with prestige/coming across as producing only stellar graduates and see jobless 2Ls/3Ls that weren’t at the absolute bottom of the class as a temporary oddity. Rather than learn how to fix the problem, I think that they just figure that hiring will vastly improve in 2 or 3 years and would prefer to just sweep us under the rug and pretend like we don’t exist.

Lastly, there seems to be a lot of hostility in threads like this to the naysayers, but I think that this hostility is misplaced. I got on a plane after my last exam this semester, and the person that I sat next to asked me what I do. I said that I was a law student. The person then asked me where I go to school, and I said [CCN]. The person looked genuinely shocked and asked me if I plan on running for Congress or doing some equally ridiculous stuff one day. I said that by this point I’d really be happy to just find a job, and the person then looked even more shocked than before. Most people out there really have no idea just how bad the legal market has gotten. They still have this idea that going to a brand name law school is a golden ticket to fame, riches, and success. They then pass this idea onto everyone they meet, and eventually people like the Georgetown admit earlier in this thread think that it’s outlandish that people at high ranking law schools can’t find jobs.

[prezidentv8]

Hah, I gotcha, but these threads tend to devolve quickly...

That they do.

btw, is your avatar Lucario?

That would be Lobo the Seawolf.

[lisjjen]

Hah, I gotcha, but these threads tend to devolve quickly...

That they do.

btw, is your avatar Lucario?

That would be Lobo the Seawolf.

Wow. I was way off.

[dood]

This is the CCN transfer from the last page.

Dood perfectly summarized my thoughts from earlier this semester. What I would say to people like Dood though is that if you do drop out halfway through law school, it's going to look REALLY bad. People don't normally drop out after finishing several semesters, and every employer is going to see that and assign a red flag to your application for the rest of your life.

i beg to differ for 3 reasons:

1. looking bad should be the least of your worries.
2. many jobless JD holders are weeded out from entry level work b/c they are "overqualified" (im too lazy to find the link, but there was an article on ATL a couple months ago).
3. depending on the job i was applying to, i would either leave law school off my resume or make it very clear that "after experiencing law school for 2 semesters, i realized that XYZ was more in line with my interests . . . "

but TBF, i respect ur POV b/c every situation is different. i can quote sun tzu and tell you to cut your losses, yet i realize there are plenty of cases where shear brute force has prevailed (too lazy to find post but there are some stories of bros who hustled like crazy and got back in big law). just want people to realize that quiting law school can be a viable (and in some cases better) path. but either way, i really feel for ya and hope shit works out.

[HarlandBassett]

Most secondary markets are worse than NYC. At CLS, one of the easiest ways to strike out was to bid on a secondary market with median grades. NYC is a hiring bonanza compared to places like Boston/Philly/LA/SF/Chicago/DC.

That's why you don't rely solely on OCI, and you don't waist your bids on firms in those markets. It's too late for you now, but for the future students that might read this, start mailing targeted apps to firms (especially ones in secondary markets) in July. Be smart and be conservative with your OCI bids.

What exactly are these bids?

I have a friend at Dartmouth Tuck (b-school) who said that Tuck gives 1000 points to bid on OCIs if the employers dont select your resume from the CDO resume pile. It seems counterintuitive that these student bid on interviews @ firms that didnt want to look at their resume in the first place.

[Anonymous User]

I am pretty sure both the first and second posts in this thread were by Scott Bullock, the Seton Hall/NYC troll. The OP was way too poorly written to be a legit NYU student and the 2nd included "lemmings" which appears in about 2/3 of Bullock posts.

lol

[prezidentv8]

Hah, I gotcha, but these threads tend to devolve quickly...

That they do.

btw, is your avatar Lucario?

That would be Lobo the Seawolf.

Wow. I was way off.

It's a helluva mascot.

[Anonymous User]

Most secondary markets are worse than NYC. At CLS, one of the easiest ways to strike out was to bid on a secondary market with median grades. NYC is a hiring bonanza compared to places like Boston/Philly/LA/SF/Chicago/DC.

That's why you don't rely solely on OCI, and you don't waist your bids on firms in those markets. It's too late for you now, but for the future students that might read this, start mailing targeted apps to firms (especially ones in secondary markets) in July. Be smart and be conservative with your OCI bids.

What exactly are these bids?

I have a friend at Dartmouth Tuck (b-school) who said that Tuck gives 1000 points to bid on OCIs if the employers dont select your resume from the CDO resume pile. It seems counterintuitive that these student bid on interviews @ firms that didnt want to look at their resume in the first place.

CCN are straight up lottery schools, meaning the firms have to interview everyone who bids on them and receives an interview through the online lottery. There is no prescreening and the firms don't post grade cutoffs. The OCS does not provide much in the way of guidance as to what the grade cutoffs are, so people have to make judgment calls based on their preconceptions and the information they pick up from alternative sources like online forums, practicing attorneys, students who have been through the process, rankings, etc. I (the poster in the original quote above) bid on a secondary market and got shut out. I simply did not know how selective that market would be, made a judgment call to bid there instead of NYC, and got burned. It is bound to happen to a certain number of people when you are working with limited information.

[Black-Blue]

All the unemployed T6 ppl need to grow some balls and get out there in the shitlaw trenches to prove that you are indeed superior to the TTT graduates. Otherwise, you aren't much better than a TTTer.

[Anonymous User]

I’m a CCN transfer that struck out at OCI. To be fair, the majority of transfers at my school did manage to snag something during OCI, but I’d still say that a solid ¼ or so came out of it with nothing. In hindsight, I wish I had just bid entirely on NYC as that appears to have been the easiest market to crack this year, but I wanted to move back home after law school (I’ll throw it out there that I still grew up in one of the biggest legal markets in the country). I’m not really sure what else I could have done differently in order to improve my chances of finding a job (had significantly above average grades at a top 10 undergrad, my old law school was a top 50 school where I graded right around the top of my class, and without outing myself, I think that it would be safe to say that my previous work experience was pretty legit). Also, I’ll throw it out there that although I wouldn’t put myself in the top 5% of people in terms of interviewing ability, I don’t think that I’m particularly awkward, my dating history wouldn’t make sense if I were below average in looks, and you can be sure that I dressed stylishly for OCI.

I completely agree with the poster that started this thread. It sucks pretty hard to be in this kind of position. A lot of the clerkships and good government jobs aren’t any easier to land than BigLaw, and I’m having trouble finding ANYTHING by this point. After spending the entire last semester debating about dropping out, I ultimately decided to stick it out and to finish the degree, though I feel like there’s probably a pretty decent chance that I won’t end up practicing as an attorney after graduating now. I guess that I could probably get a public defender or legal aid job, but at the risk of sounding like a complete jerk, I didn’t exactly take on an enormous amount in debt and transfer to CCN to do that.

You grow up spending your whole life constantly hearing about how education is the golden pathway to success. You succeed in following that path to an extent that I think it would be safe to say not many people in this country will. You see endless baby boomers thriving as lawyers who never would have been able to get their foot in the door were they applying to their first job today. And yet you can’t even find a job that will make paying back your student loans a reality. I think that the law school dream is getting pretty close to being dead. I’m not exactly sure what else I’d be doing were I not in law school right now, but I’m worried that I’m ultimately going to look back on the decision to go to law school (or at least the decision to transfer) as being the worst decision that I ever made in my life.


P.S. because I KNOW someone will bring this up. Last year all but 1 or 2 transfers at my school landed BigLaw, so don’t say that it was unrealistic to transfer to CCN this year expecting NLJ 250 or a good clerkship/government position… Transfers this year really had no way of knowing.

anecdotal but I know somone who graduated from Cornell LS and couldnt find a job. He went to work at his parent's tax firm for a year and then matriculated into NYU tax LLM program. He works at Big4 now (but he told me his student loan debt was crushing)

[HarlandBassett]

Most secondary markets are worse than NYC. At CLS, one of the easiest ways to strike out was to bid on a secondary market with median grades. NYC is a hiring bonanza compared to places like Boston/Philly/LA/SF/Chicago/DC.

That's why you don't rely solely on OCI, and you don't waist your bids on firms in those markets. It's too late for you now, but for the future students that might read this, start mailing targeted apps to firms (especially ones in secondary markets) in July. Be smart and be conservative with your OCI bids.

What exactly are these bids?

I have a friend at Dartmouth Tuck (b-school) who said that Tuck gives 1000 points to bid on OCIs if the employers dont select your resume from the CDO resume pile. It seems counterintuitive that these student bid on interviews @ firms that didnt want to look at their resume in the first place.

CCN are straight up lottery schools, meaning the firms have to interview everyone who bids on them and receives an interview through the online lottery. There is no prescreening and the firms don't post grade cutoffs. The OCS does not provide much in the way of guidance as to what the grade cutoffs are, so people have to make judgment calls based on their preconceptions and the information they pick up from alternative sources like online forums, practicing attorneys, students who have been through the process, rankings, etc. I (the poster in the original quote above) bid on a secondary market and got shut out. I simply did not know how selective that market would be, made a judgment call to bid there instead of NYC, and got burned. It is bound to happen to a certain number of people when you are working with limited information.

Why does CCN all choose the lottery system? Why not just interview the most qualified ones? I'd be pissed if I were top 10% with relevant WE and didnt get a specific firm I wanted due to unluckiness from the lottery system.