depends on which market you focus on. Maybe for people who focused on NYC, but for those who focused on other markets last year, it was rougher.disco_barred wrote:No time to read thread now, but chiming in with my usual "all I have heard is that the more market focused a candidate was, the better they did at OCI" - i.e. it is the opposite of fatal to focus on one market.
re: ties in Northern California -- San Francisco is a beautiful city, but there are certain sacrifices people make from other parts of the country to live there. First it has very high CoL, but if someone's family is somewhere in the Midwest or East Coast, it's a minimum plane ride to head out and visit them. My understanding is that there is a particular worry here that new graduates will want to experience living out here for a couple years and then leave. That issue isn't so severe for NYC firms that are massively leveraged and used to high rates of associate turnover, which isn't the case in the Bay Area market.
As for the perceived "unfairness" of the need for local connections... if someone goes through the effort of doing a 1L internship in the Bay Area, coupled with some other plausible story, that seems generally enough for this market (at least to the people I talked to), and I believe that is the case for Texas as well. You should have some sense of what you're getting into, and that's what firms are really looking for. (Also, spending your 1L internship in a remote market can be essential for learning about it and developing connections, even if you're doing PI or government.)