Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI? Forum

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spanktheduck

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by spanktheduck » Wed Sep 09, 2009 3:05 pm

OperaSoprano wrote:
rayiner wrote:LOL sitting at CSO intro session. I love the maintenance of calm pretense.

CSO dude looks a bit strained lol.
They let you do CSO stuff already? We have to wait for November.

I'm hoping I'll be able to handle this with grace... Knowing what I am up against helps.

My question is this, though. Are the people without callbacks always those at the bottom of the class? Are there deal breakers even for those with decent grades, or does GPA usually trump background and/or interviewing ability? I know I won't be part of the callback model, but I'm worried about my resume and what employers will think of my fashion industry experience. I don't think the top of job I want would be prohibitively hard to get (for a median student at my school) in a normal economy, but all bets are off now.
Generally, GPA trumps background and interviewing ability. While, I guess background could matter, most law students don't have that impressive of a background (IE: Great work experience, Rhodes Scholar, etc...). Interview ability is generally moot. Very few people are very good at it, and even then some firms still won't go below a GPA cutoff. In past years (at T-14, idk about Fordham) it was generally only those with bad GPA, or who interviewed horribly, that did not have callbacks. Now, unless the student is top 10% w/ LR or a minority, there is a much higher chance of them not getting a callback for less clear reasons than bad GPA and bad interviewer.

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OperaSoprano

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by OperaSoprano » Wed Sep 09, 2009 3:17 pm

---why--- wrote:
OperaSoprano wrote:
rayiner wrote:LOL sitting at CSO intro session. I love the maintenance of calm pretense.

CSO dude looks a bit strained lol.
They let you do CSO stuff already? We have to wait for November.

I'm hoping I'll be able to handle this with grace... Knowing what I am up against helps.

My question is this, though. Are the people without callbacks always those at the bottom of the class? Are there deal breakers even for those with decent grades, or does GPA usually trump background and/or interviewing ability? I know I won't be part of the callback model, but I'm worried about my resume and what employers will think of my fashion industry experience. I don't think the top of job I want would be prohibitively hard to get (for a median student at my school) in a normal economy, but all bets are off now.
Grades mean more than the LSAT does in admissions. I'll let you know how the public interest search goes. I just got rejected from Proskauer and only had one other callback.
Good luck with your search. Are you considering both PI and biglaw? Do people do that? I was under the impression that the two camps were pretty divided.

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OperaSoprano

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by OperaSoprano » Wed Sep 09, 2009 3:22 pm

spanktheduck wrote:
OperaSoprano wrote:
rayiner wrote:LOL sitting at CSO intro session. I love the maintenance of calm pretense.

CSO dude looks a bit strained lol.
They let you do CSO stuff already? We have to wait for November.

I'm hoping I'll be able to handle this with grace... Knowing what I am up against helps.

My question is this, though. Are the people without callbacks always those at the bottom of the class? Are there deal breakers even for those with decent grades, or does GPA usually trump background and/or interviewing ability? I know I won't be part of the callback model, but I'm worried about my resume and what employers will think of my fashion industry experience. I don't think the top of job I want would be prohibitively hard to get (for a median student at my school) in a normal economy, but all bets are off now.
Generally, GPA trumps background and interviewing ability. While, I guess background could matter, most law students don't have that impressive of a background (IE: Great work experience, Rhodes Scholar, etc...). Interview ability is generally moot. Very few people are very good at it, and even then some firms still won't go below a GPA cutoff. In past years (at T-14, idk about Fordham) it was generally only those with bad GPA, or who interviewed horribly, that did not have callbacks. Now, unless the student is top 10% w/ LR or a minority, there is a much higher chance of them not getting a callback for less clear reasons than bad GPA and bad interviewer.
In most years, top third to top 40% could get biglaw here. We got up to 43.7% during the high water mark of hiring. Now it seems my friends on Law Review are doing fine, but people who would have gotten offers two years ago won't get them now. I hope things stabilize. This absolutely floods the market for government jobs, or so I keep hearing. That's something I am considering, though Fordham's LRAP only covers nonprofits.

I usually have wonderful luck with interviews, though I personally think I suck balls at interviewing. I'm glad it won't matter much anyway. I'll just have to pray my GPA is decent.

Thank you for your advice.

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by Anonymous User » Wed Sep 09, 2009 3:33 pm

spanktheduck wrote:
Generally, GPA trumps background and interviewing ability. While, I guess background could matter, most law students don't have that impressive of a background (IE: Great work experience, Rhodes Scholar, etc...). Interview ability is generally moot. Very few people are very good at it, and even then some firms still won't go below a GPA cutoff. In past years (at T-14, idk about Fordham) it was generally only those with bad GPA, or who interviewed horribly, that did not have callbacks. Now, unless the student is top 10% w/ LR or a minority, there is a much higher chance of them not getting a callback for less clear reasons than bad GPA and bad interviewer.
Re interviewing ability, I'm going to throw out there that there seem to be a TON of people at my T10 who cannot interview, and it's not even the awkward people (god fucking help them, they must be abominable). At the start of OCI we'd do post-mortems and people who are otherwise outgoing and articulate were telling me, "Oh, I don't really have an answer for why I want to do transactional," or they'd tell me that their stock question to ask about a firm is "Tell me about your firm's culture" (which, for those of you who haven't gone through this process, is a widely despised question). Maybe they got their shit together later on in the process . . . but jesus H.

So while it's true that there are very few gifted interviewers -- those who can make conversation w/o resorting to prepared answers -- it seems to me that some people really don't even have good basic stock answers down pat, or that they don't even KNOW what good answers would be. This isn't some innate skill or talent, this is shit that you can find out in Interviewing 101 on the internet.

ETA: So there's no question, I made this anon because I'm afraid some people will remember having had this conversation with me.

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OperaSoprano

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by OperaSoprano » Wed Sep 09, 2009 3:52 pm

Anonymous User wrote:
spanktheduck wrote:
Generally, GPA trumps background and interviewing ability. While, I guess background could matter, most law students don't have that impressive of a background (IE: Great work experience, Rhodes Scholar, etc...). Interview ability is generally moot. Very few people are very good at it, and even then some firms still won't go below a GPA cutoff. In past years (at T-14, idk about Fordham) it was generally only those with bad GPA, or who interviewed horribly, that did not have callbacks. Now, unless the student is top 10% w/ LR or a minority, there is a much higher chance of them not getting a callback for less clear reasons than bad GPA and bad interviewer.
Re interviewing ability, I'm going to throw out there that there seem to be a TON of people at my T10 who cannot interview, and it's not even the awkward people (god fucking help them, they must be abominable). At the start of OCI we'd do post-mortems and people who are otherwise outgoing and articulate were telling me, "Oh, I don't really have an answer for why I want to do transactional," or they'd tell me that their stock question to ask about a firm is "Tell me about your firm's culture" (which, for those of you who haven't gone through this process, is a widely despised question). Maybe they got their shit together later on in the process . . . but jesus H.

So while it's true that there are very few gifted interviewers -- those who can make conversation w/o resorting to prepared answers -- it seems to me that some people really don't even have good basic stock answers down pat, or that they don't even KNOW what good answers would be. This isn't some innate skill or talent, this is shit that you can find out in Interviewing 101 on the internet.

ETA: So there's no question, I made this anon because I'm afraid some people will remember having had this conversation with me.
:D at this. In past interviews, I've been guilty of attempting to steer the conversation (in a charming, non threatening way), but I have a feeling this is a bad idea for legal interviews. I know I'll have to tone down my natural exuberance. Now is probably the time to start working on it, lol. I freaking wish I was a gifted interviewer.

Good luck to those who are currently doing callbacks.

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by Anonymous User » Wed Sep 09, 2009 3:52 pm

Yes. Well, one still pending.

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by Anonymous User » Wed Sep 09, 2009 6:10 pm

if there were any rhyme or reason to where i got callbacks, i could help out. but there has been NONE

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observationalist

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Re: Any other T14-ers strike out at OCI?

Post by observationalist » Wed Sep 09, 2009 6:52 pm

ggocat wrote:I'm a 3L at a lower ranked school, so I'll chime in on the "ignorance" argument. Students at my school were perfectly knowledgeable about law firm hiring practices. If they didnt know before school started, or if they didn't make friends with some 2Ls during the first two months, then career services explained the general ins and outs of legal hiring in early November of the 1L year (pursuant to NALP guidelines).

Ignorance is not the reason you don't see tier 3/4 students complaining about striking out at OCI. The "expectations" reasoning seems much more plausible (as suggested by another poster and the WSJ blog post). All the firms provide grade cutoffs, so most students are very knowledgeable about what grades they have to get to even have a shot at an interview, let alone an offer.
Just because students are knowledgeable about hiring practices once they're in school doesn't mean that they knew what it was like before they started. It's plausible that people at lower ranked schools are more likely to be less informed about the realities of the job market before they start law school, but I don't think it's attributable to lower intelligence. Schools do a remarkable job at displaying their job prospects in ways that will make most law schools look like a good deal, even at full tuition. Law schools are supposed to advocate on their own behalf to recruit top talent, and most of them have decided that it's best to release only the information required by ABA guidelines and to display it in a manner that will lead most applicants to say to themselves, "If I go here I bet I can get high enough grades to get a good job that will justify the debt I'm taking on." Once people matriculate and are informed of the realities, they may continue assuming they can hit whatever gpa cutoff because of their prior successes in life. Once many of them fail to hit that increasingly high (to non-existent at some schools) gpa cutoff for large private firms, it's logical to go ahead and say that many of them must be disheartened about it. Since these disheartened students will end up becoming disheartened lawyers, I think you can make a good argument that continuously misleading law school applicants is having an overall negative impact on the legal profession.

We're currently exploring the reasons why this has worked for so long... one hypothesis is that the general public assumes law schools are credible institutions that would not mislead prospective students about what the legal market is like. So, for example, if a reputable law school in the T50 reports a $105K median salary for all graduates who both reported information and are in private practice, I think it's reasonable to assume most people who take them up on that offer (not the ones who decidced to go elsewhere) may not have correctly determined that perhaps only 15-20% of the class entered into private practice AND reported salary information to the school, and that the median is only relevant for the top quintile of the class. Increased media coverage and website traffic is hopefully making more people skeptical about how law schools portray their information, but most people do not have access to enough employment information to make accurate risk assessments of taking out loans and going off to law school. I don't want to attribute malicious intent to law schools that cloak their employment information in such a manner -- if anything it seems to be a market norm at this point, and schools could potentially hurt their recruiting efforts if competitor schools continued to engage in normal practice -- but that is where things stand right now.

Incoming Vanderbilt and Duke students should know what the job prospects are like, but for all other schools people are operating on limited information. Both schools publish full employment lists of where each graduate ends up, and they also now publish lists on where each 2L works during the summer. Our goal is to get all the law schools (both T14 and nonT14) to start releasing current lists so we can see how they're all faring during the market retraction. In the meantime, g'luck to those in the midst of all this mess.

[shameless transparency trolling/broken recordspinning for those who remember who I am].

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