Post
by Anonymous User » Sun Oct 26, 2014 12:33 am
Echoing the previous post, I can tell you that you shouldn't take this personally.
TLS doesn't know shit when it comes to WHY people strike out. Besides grades, many here assume "you must have a shitty personality". I know many people at my school (T14) who don't have offers yet. Most of them are charming, charismatic, and articulate, and in the end, it's just a crapshoot. Sure, there are some people who are completely awkward... but striking out can happen to ANYONE.
I think the baseline assumption here is: if you have decent grades at a T14, unless you get unlucky, you'll snag an offer. I say that's false.
Rather, the baseline is an average candidate will not get an offer until they hit a home run in an interview ("home run" meaning they have an interview where everything goes RIGHT). This means that within that 30 minute time frame, they have to make a great connection with the interviewer, for all 4-5 interviews, and not say anything that will ding them. That mean it requires more than the interviewer to say "he/she was alright". He/she must LIKE you enough to go to bat for you. And that's a hard thing to do, especially with 4 people in a row. Even if the applicant somehow manages that, most of the time, they're still competing with anywhere from 5-20 other people for 1 or 2 spots. Hence, even if everything goes right, the firm has to like you more than the other candidates.
You never know how far you got in the process. I know someone who struck out and when they asked career services, career services made a call to some of the firms he/she interviewed at. Turned out, he/she was the final pool of candidates for a good number of his/her callbacks, but just never was able to lock in the offer.
It happens. Everything is on a "curve", since you're competing with everyone else. The problem here is, the curve is all or nothing and you don't know how close you came.