It is in career services BEST interest for pre-oci to go away, especially at t13s. One of the main attractions for students at t13 is that OCI is pure lottery, unlike at other schools. That means a 2.8 student could still get an interview at Arnold and Porter DC, even if their GPA restriction is a 3.7 (just making up a hypo). At non-t13s, AP gets to pre-select their candidates, so they can decide to only interview the top 10 gpas in the class. Pre-OCI is now being used as a tool by firms to get the their classes partially (and in more and more cases completely filled) before OCI instead of going through the lottery of what students they might get and whether they are a good fit for the firm.Anonymous User wrote:So don't listen to career services? I believe in the TLS hivemind, but they keep telling me pre-OCI is only for the best candidates and NYC firms/don't mail firms coming to OCI because they might ding you before you get to interview...sparkytrainer wrote:For the record, almost every market is moving to pre-oci. It may not be at the same level of DC, but I know multiple people over the past 2-3 years that got Chicago offers pre-oci. It is in your best interest to mass mail and do as much pre-oci as possible for EACH market because firms are really figuring out how beneficial this whole thing is for them.Anonymous User wrote:For the record, Chicago firms do not really do pre-OCI, correct?
Speaking from personal experience: I was a median t13 student trying to snag DC. If I didn't hustle my ass off, network, and mass mail each firm in DC a few years ago, I would have struck out without pre-oci. Further, a significant chunk of my class's top 25% kids who wanted DC completely struck out. Yet myself and 3 other friends all got biglaw in DC with median/slightly under median grades because we hustled, networked, and got pre-oci opportunities. With pre-oci, I had 3 offers in July. Once OCI came around, I got exactly 0 offers from it. My career services office was pissed as they explicitly told me to wait to OCI. Guess what? If I had listened, I wouldn't have gotten biglaw. That is the honest truth.
More and more firms are seeing the trend and moving this way especially outside of DC. I know of a firm that got some bad press last fall because they cancelled their OCI interviews for a bunch of offices because they had completely filled up their classes with pre-oci kids. This is the new trend. Don't wait and be a sucker. Plus, the vast majority of firms won't ding you pre-oci. If they aren't sold on you yet, most will say we look forward to meeting you at OCI. I think out of the hundreds of firms I networked/mass mailed summers ago, I probably got 2-3 rejections before OCI.
As far as alums you have already spoken to, if they haven't asked for a resume, chances are they aren't going to push it if you sent it. The goal with networking is to talk about their practice and their firm. Learn something. Take notes. They are useful come OCI if necessary. What happened to me and my friends who all did this was if an associate or partner liked you, they would ask for your resume or ask if you were interested in working there as a summer. I wouldn't push my own resume directly. You can ask each person about the summer program and questions concerning it, and hopefully they get the hint. But I had plenty of conversations that didn't gel with the other person and didn't get my resume pushed.
My goal when networking and what I suggest now is you think about a 10% rule. You conceivably want 10% of your networking calls/coffee meetings to end up with a resume push and possible interview. Now after talking to a bunch of people, it seems a median t13 student who is articulate and interesting gets about a 5-10% rate of conversation to interview during pre-oci (completely scientific I know). So that means you need to be having a lot of these calls/emails/coffees. Especially given about 50% of the initial networking email wont result in a response.
I looked at my calendar from a few years ago and I had something like 60 calls or coffees with associates and partners in June (remember that doesn't count the initial emails). From those 60 or so networking opportunities, I received 6 interviews/callbacks in both DC and a secondary market, and it resulted in 3 offers in July.