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My resume is mainly filled with menial jobs. What is the best way to deal with these menial jobs on the resume (think retail, starbucks, etc) going into OCI. My gut instinct is to embellish my duties, but this just seems easy to see through. Will firms care about these menial jobs so long as you have the requisite grades? And how do people like me compete with those people with fancy internships before law school?

dusk2k2 wrote:My resume is mainly filled with menial jobs. What is the best way to deal with these menial jobs on the resume (think retail, starbucks, etc) going into OCI. My gut instinct is to embellish my duties, but this just seems easy to see through. Will firms care about these menial jobs so long as you have the requisite grades? And how do people like me compete with those people with fancy internships before law school?

Leave them off unless you did something relevant/had substantial duties. No one cares about them.

Also, you should be worried about people that worked before law school, not those that did fancy internships.

I wouldn't leave them off. At least not all of them. If you only have your 1L summer gig to list under work experience, it's nice to have a couple of other items on there, even if they are menial. They may not say much as far about your skills and abilities, but they might provide the interviewer with a couple of talking points, if they happened to work at the same places at some point in their life.

That said, if you have no other work experience, make sure that the bulk of your resume is educational and legal. Emphasize everything that you did in law school. Have 6, 7, 8 lines for your 1L summer gig and only 1 or 2 for your "menial" jobs.

Granted, your resume can't compete with those people who had actual jobs or fancy internships, but you don't want to give the impression that you did absolutely nothing until your 1L summer.

Also wondering about this.

I temped for awhile after undergrad. Actually, it wasn't a bad gig; the company liked me and kept me working constantly, including multiple long term assignments. I knew I was going back to school so I didn't take any of the positions I was offered throughout my time temping.

Still, I'm worried that it looks bad, and wondering if it will be a real impediment at OCI.

I would leave them on if you worked full-time or at least substantial hours for a significant period of time and you don't have much other work experience. At least it says "I have held a job and know the meaning of work." Some interviewers might even like it, either because they themselves came from a modest background where they held menial jobs or because they have some kind of bootstraps fantasy. Also you can spin the jobs positively in interviews -- I've seen Starbucks baristas handle a lot of pressure, deal well with difficult "clients" etc.

blsingindisguise wrote:Some interviewers might even like it, either because they themselves came from a modest background where they held menial jobs or because they have some kind of bootstraps fantasy

+1

I spent a decent amount of time of my fed judge internship interview basically just shooting the shit about past menial work that the interviewing clerk and I had in common.

Helmholtz wrote:

blsingindisguise wrote:Some interviewers might even like it, either because they themselves came from a modest background where they held menial jobs or because they have some kind of bootstraps fantasy

+1

I spent a decent amount of time of my fed judge internship interview basically just shooting the shit about past menial work that the interviewing clerk and I had in common.

My best interviews were ones where the interviewer dug into my crappy work experience. Just make sure you can spin a somewhat-interesting story that's relevant to client service, managing workloads, etc. and it won't hurt you.