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Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 6:45 pm
by adammac17
Just curious, I've seen them listed as participating at various schools OCI but i couldnt find any range needed. I imagine this would be one of the most competitive govt jobs but does anyone have any specifics?

tia

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 6:52 pm
by 3ThrowAway99
It sounds like you may have already seen this, and it's not much info, but I did notice on NALP site that they interview at Stanford. Maybe if you do a search by school (or by CIA- Office of....) you can find out info on NALP--at least where they give OCI interviews. Don't know what cut-offs would be though.

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 8:36 pm
by Aston2412
I don't think it's as super selective as BigLaw or, say, DoJ. That's not to say it isn't super competitive, but I imagine they might consider more than pure grades. They only had a 3.0 GPA listed on Symplicity. Take that with a grain of salt of course.

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 11:44 pm
by JusticeJackson
.........

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 9:22 am
by gfunk01
In terms of selectiveness, it is not easy to get. They generally only hire 5 people in the entire country for a summer, and as you can imagine they get tons of applications. Should realize that federal level govt jobs can be more selective than big law, especially since many agencies prefer to not hire straight out and summer classes tend to be quite small. Also, pretty sure they do extensive background checking, so that can eliminate people as well (more than just drugs). Grades are not going to be their biggest thing, but one pattern I have noticed is that they do seem to strongly prefer people w/ military background. Every interviewer I met had either come from the military or from within the organization. In terms of work, it is somewhat the equivalent of being a corporate in house counsel since take care of a lot of their contracting and litigation work. What seems to be significantly different is that the job includes a lot of working with the USAO on cases that the CIA is involved in, primarily dealing with what information can be made available, and some of the due diligence concerns legality of actions like predator drone strikes. Hope this helped.

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 3:36 pm
by adammac17
gfunk01 wrote:In terms of selectiveness, it is not easy to get. They generally only hire 5 people in the entire country for a summer, and as you can imagine they get tons of applications. Should realize that federal level govt jobs can be more selective than big law, especially since many agencies prefer to not hire straight out and summer classes tend to be quite small. Also, pretty sure they do extensive background checking, so that can eliminate people as well (more than just drugs). Grades are not going to be their biggest thing, but one pattern I have noticed is that they do seem to strongly prefer people w/ military background. Every interviewer I met had either come from the military or from within the organization. In terms of work, it is somewhat the equivalent of being a corporate in house counsel since take care of a lot of their contracting and litigation work. What seems to be significantly different is that the job includes a lot of working with the USAO on cases that the CIA is involved in, primarily dealing with what information can be made available, and some of the due diligence concerns legality of actions like predator drone strikes. Hope this helped.
Thank you for the insightful post. Is this anecdotal or first hand knowledge?

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 7:23 pm
by Anonymous User
Pre-selected for an interview around median of a T20, but have a friend at same school with same grades who applied at the same fair and didn't receive an alt or pre-select; unclear what in our apps made us different from one another.

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 10:56 pm
by adammac17
[/quote]
Anonymous User wrote:Pre-selected for an interview around median of a T20, but have a friend at same school with same grades who applied at the same fair and didn't receive an alt or pre-select; unclear what in our apps made us different from one another.
any more elaboration? you can pm if you want-this would be my ideal job. im going to a T25 in the fall and i see they are coming to our oci. thx

Re: Grades/School needed for CIA-Office of General Counsel

Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 2:44 pm
by gfunk01
Mix, since I did interview and talk w/ them at OCI. Would love this job too.