Undergrad prestige (or lack thereof) Forum

Frankie55 · Post by **Frankie55** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 7:06 pm

Obviously your law school, grades, law review status, work experience, unique degree/skills, matter a whole lot more.

But I've seen a few people on this forum mention that OCI employers sometimes mentioned to interviewees that they liked the fact that they came from the same prestigious undergraduate college as them. It likely wasn't a deciding factor in hiring, but I'd appreciate hearing stories about how this did or didn't matter in your case. Perusing some of the associate profiles at top firms, it seems a lot of them seemed to come from prestigious undergrads--but is this indicative of something that matters, or just selection bias?

iShotFirst · Post by **iShotFirst** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 8:23 pm

In our school, it helped with 1Ls getting summer firm jobs (before the grades came out, that is the main resume item besides WE that employers had to go off of). But the consensus among the upperclassmen was that in OCI it was just a side item. 1st year performance matters the most, prestigious undergrad maybe a strong soft.

Frankie55 · Post by **Frankie55** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 9:31 pm

Sorry re: re-asking. Search for "undergrad" turned up too many results.

iShotFirst wrote:In our school, it helped with 1Ls getting summer firm jobs (before the grades came out, that is the main resume item besides WE that employers had to go off of). But the consensus among the upperclassmen was that in OCI it was just a side item. 1st year performance matters the most, prestigious undergrad maybe a strong soft.

So they have your fall grades, and are waiting on your spring grades, and then you can manually send each employer your spring grades when they come in, right? Or is most hiring done before they can even see that?

Anonymous User · Post by **Anonymous User** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:09 pm

Anonymous because these facts would out me based on previous posts.

Helped me get a v5 callback from a t2 school. It also gave me something to talk about with many of the people I interviewered with who went to prestigious undergrads and law schools. I think really good grades from a lower ranked school with a prestigious undergrad gives some weight to the legitimacy of your ls grades.

iShotFirst · Post by **iShotFirst** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:11 pm

For 1L, you can apply to firms starting Dec 1st, which is of course well before any grades are out. A few of my classmates (3) received jobs for summer from applying Dec 1 and had interviews over the holiday period. They received the offers in early January, before we got most of our grades. I'm not sure if the jobs were dependent on them submitting good grades when they got them or if they even followed up by sending the grades to employers.

But these three individuals went to top schools and one of them had an engineering background, so it seems to me like that was a big factor in their case where they didn't have any grades. I just figured, how else would they have caught the recruiter's eyes?

For 2L of course the employers can see all of your 1st year grades so undergrad doesn't matter nearly as much, just like your undergrad GPA is fairly meaningless at that point. Even Harvard can't save a 2.5 GPA

MrKappus · Post by **MrKappus** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:12 pm

Helps a little, especially if your interviewer happens to have gone to your elite UG (there are a lot of elite UG grads in biglaw firms). Other than that, doesn't matter, in my experience.

Anonymous User · Post by **Anonymous User** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:17 pm

I went to a T4 directional state undergrad and outperformed my LS grades at OCI - secured multiple V10 offers when some people with my grades were struggling to get anything BigLaw.

I was also never asked about undergrad - never. Unless you went to the same undergrad as the interviewer, you went to HYPS, or did something really special, I don't think it matters at all at OCI.

MrKappus · Post by **MrKappus** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:22 pm

Anonymous User wrote:I went to a T4 directional state undergrad and outperformed my LS grades at OCI - secured multiple V10 offers when some people with my grades were struggling to get anything BigLaw.

I was also never asked about undergrad - never. Unless you went to the same undergrad as the interviewer, you went to HYPS, or did something really special, I don't think it matters at all at OCI.

Pretty much +1. However, as someone's that's hired/fired, I will say that resume-readers make snap judgments when they read resumes and see where the applicant went to UG. Ironically, people who went to non-elite UG's tend to place more (positive) emphasis on elite UG's than those who did.

Frankie55 · Post by **Frankie55** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:38 pm

Do most people get summer jobs in the locale of their school, where they want to work, or wherever they can get them?

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