Posts Tagged ‘1L summer’

So it’s official: I accepted the job offer and now I have to start withdrawing my applications from other places. It’s a pretty big relief to have my summer employment situation squared away. Without getting too far into the details, I’ll just say it’s a government position, it’s in New York City, and it’s unpaid. I’ll be living off my tax refund and Columbia’s guaranteed summer funding for public interest work. In order to qualify for the latter, I have accrue five volunteer hours helping the Public Interest Law Foundation with their two major events this spring: the PILF Auction and Deans’ Cup. The auction is this Thursday and I signed up to help out. Hopefully I can knock out all five hours so that I can just be a spectator at Deans’ Cup (our annual basketball game against NYU Law).

Now that the summer job thing is out of the way, I can put all my energies toward keeping up with my reading. Unfortunately, I just discovered this little show called Jersey Shore. Now, part of me feels that I should get up-in-arms about this affront to New Jersey and Italian-Americans just like my fellow Jersey countrymen, but it’s undeniable: Jersey Shore is just good TV. I’m about halfway through season one.

This weekend was supposed to be just like last weekend and I was supposed to be totally dominated by my brief. To a large extent that was true, but I did manage to see Shutter Island with James, my non-law school friend and neighbor. I usually hate movies like that but I thought Shutter Island was pretty well done. Anybody else see it? I think the trick to being cool with handing over $12.50 to see a movie is to lower your expectations to the floor before going in. You’re guaranteed to enjoy it. Unless it’s so bad that no amount of lowered expectations can save it (see: Vanilla Sky, Memento, Clerks II).

Anyway, the second draft of the brief is due tomorrow. I’ve finished the bulk of the changes I needed to make, but I need to edit it down big time. It’s just way too long. I have to cut at least two pages. But I’m so sick of looking at the damn thing.

So I just found out today that there are admitted students events going on at CLS this week? If any admits are reading this and have any questions about the school, feel free to leave them in the comments. I’m probably not the best person to dispense advice since I don’t think I’m having the typical 1L experience…but I also don’t hate law school as much as other 1Ls seem to so maybe I am an appropriate person to deal with the as-yet untainted 0Ls…

High school was far from the high point in my life. I was shy and didn’t have much self-confidence. I made mostly A’s without trying very hard, didn’t drink or really do anything very bad. In college, the CHI ceramic hair straightener was invented and suddenly it was a whole new world for me. Needless to say, I was not all that thrilled to hear from 2Ls that law school is exactly like high school. But they were right!

• Lockers. In high school they were a necessity. Mine was a veritable jungle of loose papers, pens, Post-Its, hair ties, spare gym clothes, and other crap. My locker today is bare except for a pen and a flyer for some event by the Center for Chinese Legal Studies. Theoretically, it’s a very handy thing, my locker. But since I prefer to leave the law school building the second class ends, I really have no use for it. I can count the number of times I spent any significant amount of time at the law school outside of class hours on one hand.
• Crowded hallways. My junior year, a wing of the high school had to be shut down while they cleaned out the asbestos in the walls. (Yeah, Jersey public schools!) As a result, they put us on a split schedule with the upperclassmen arriving at 6AM (as opposed to our normal 7:15AM) and checking out at 12PM. Then the underclassmen came in and had their classes till 6PM. This lasted about a month. Our high school was so overpopulated that the infrastructure couldn’t handle us. Similarly, in law school, practically everyone is on the same schedule and all the classes are held in this one building. When class ends and people pour into the hallways it’s always impossible to move for a minute or two while people mill about.
• Gossip. I guess gossip will exist whenever people are thrown together in any context, be it school or work or whatever. I’m not really plugged into the whole law school gossip scene; I never know what’s going on. Occasionally I’ll hear interesting things, but on the whole, law school gossip is a whole lot nerdier than high school gossip: who’s working where, who got what grades, who’s stalking what professor’s reading groups…that kind of thing.
• Back pain. One year the problem got so widespread at my high school that the administration sent a note home with “helpful tips” on how to reduce back pain. Their favorite suggestion was the rolly backpack. And just like in high school, wheeling one of those things around the law school is not an option. So on Wednesdays, the day I have four classes, I trot back and forth the ten blocks to my apartment to switch out books thus ensuring that I am as inefficient with my time as humanly possible.
• Pizza. Maybe your high school wasn’t like this, but mine always smelled like pizza, whether they were serving it that day or not. The smell just always kind of hung in the air. Similarly, Columbia reeks of pizza all the damn time. You walk in the front doors and you’re immediately assaulted by the thick cheesy aroma because this or that organization is hosting a lunch and no one goes to anything during their lunch hour unless there is free food (this aspect is a lot more like college than high school). Crafty organizations advertise their events with the alluring “non-pizza lunch” descriptor. It doesn’t matter what it is, but if it isn’t pizza, it’s sure to draw a crowd.

In other news, by this time Friday I’ll know what I’m doing this summer. Actually, I already know what I’m doing in terms of the work, but location is still sort of up for grabs. Well, not really. I’ll be in New York of course. But Friday I have a deadline to accept an offer. The only reason I’m waiting is that I still haven’t heard from another organization that I would also really like to work for. The jobs are the same so it doesn’t really make a difference though. But it’s exactly the kind of work I came to law school to do so I’m pretty excited about that. I can’t wait to be working again.

From the dawn of time man has sought to extinguish creatures large and small. Whether it be for food, clothing, or just the thrill of the hunt, the human race has attained its position of supremacy in the animal kingdom on the basis of its intelligence, guile, and opposable thumbs. But there are some feats of hunting that even we are no match for: I speak specifically of hunting mice in New York City.

You’ve followed my travails so I don’t have to tell you that I’ve tried everything. You’ll believe me when I tell you this is my very last resort. While I may have come up short in this epic battle for control of Studio Soleil, there is one creature that historically has never failed.

Meet my latest weapon, Six.

I spent a few hours on Thursday down at NYU Law (which is beautiful, by the way, and makes CLS look like a toaster) for their Public Interest Fair (we don’t have our own, but they let New York-area students leech off of theirs). I had an interview at 11AM and then I wanted to sit around picking the brain of one of the ADA’s who had a table there. The interview went well, I was very on. But I have approximately zero desire to work at the organization in question. I only gave their website a cursory glance before firing off an application. The night before the interview (and well past the deadline to cancel) I actually dug through their website and learned about their mission. Turns out I didn’t actually agree with a lot of their principles. But I figured interview practice never hurts. I left the fair around 3PM and headed up to my old neighborhood on the upper east side.

I got her from the ASPCA on 92nd Street. The people there are wonderful. I could not have asked for a better adoption experience. I went into the reception area and was greeted by a young, blond woman with a cheerful disposition and she helped me get my initial paperwork in order. Following that, an almost-elderly woman who volunteered as an adoption intake assistant (AIS) came to introduce me to some cats. She asked what I was looking for in a cat and I told her I wanted one that was no younger than ten. Incredulously, she asked, “Ten years old?” I nodded and she replied, “Why??” I told her that I felt sorry for older cats because no one seemed to want them and I didn’t mind so why not?

From that moment on I was paraded around the building like a war hero just returning home from battle. My AIS would stop every orange-shirted person she saw to tell them that THIS young lady wanted a cat that was ten years old and isn’t that special?

So then she brought me through the glass doors and sat me down to introduce me to Paulette. She was a very sweet lap cat. I don’t know what about me struck the AIS as someone who wanted a lap cat, but I wasn’t feeling any connection. And she was getting black hair all over my clothes. And she was only seven. So I asked to see some more cats. I met a giant fur ball named Brandy and caught a quick glimpse of my future. After I determined that I didn’t have a spare eight hours per day to spend vacuuming, my AIS led me upstairs and I saw a few more nice-looking cats in their glass habitats. No one really struck my fancy in the first room so we proceeded on to the second room where my congregation of AISes had grown to three. As they were definitely up there in years, I suspect they were particularly moved by my strict no youngins requirement.

I met a pretty white cat named Spot that they all seemed to adore although I could not for the life of me figure out why. He wasn’t friendly and when he was let out of his cabinet, he strutted around picking fights with all the other cabinetted cats. After Spot was put away, they showed me Shelley, who I had remembered from the ASPCA website. She was adorable. When they let her out, she came right to me and let me pick her up. I stood there holding her for a long while and knew she would be the one I would take home. She was apparently an ASPCA-worker favorite and everyone was especially nice to me when they found out I was taking her. At thirteen years old, she was the oldest cat I saw and probably the oldest one they had. She had her problems as old cats tend to have (a controlled-by-medication case of hypothyroidism), but she was small and perfect and I had to have her.

I brought her home, re-named her Six (not after the Blossom character), and she immediately went about inspecting everything. When bedtime came, I was surprised that she was still spry enough to make the leap from the floor to my bed. It being her first night and all, I allowed this transgression, but when I awoke in the middle of the night to her sitting on my chest I had a paranoid moment when I thought she was trying to kill me. This morning I put her little cat bed the ASPCA gave me on top of my bed and placed her in it. Ever since then whenever she jumps up onto my bed, she walks straight into her own and plops right down.

As I sit here alternating between writing this post and researching my issue for my moot court brief, she’s sitting under my chair quietly and calmly in a matter befitting someone of her years. As a Very Serious Law Student I’m happy with what a low-maintenance companion she’s turning out to be.

I have not applied to a single job yet. And why not? My resume isn’t done. And why not? Because the career counselor told me I need an Interests section. And apparently I have no interests. We can’t be generic so reading, traveling, and cooking are out. Only one of those is true anyway. She said we should have one physical interest, one intellectual, and one something else that I can’t remember. I have no physical interests. Yeah I run. But on a treadmill and not because I like to but because if I don’t I’ll get fat. So I have “team trivia contests” and “theatre” so far but I need one more. Putting “Kate Christensen novels” would be less generic than “reading” but is that too out there? What do you think? This is way harder than it should be.

Even though Google tells me that there is no consensus about the Interests section, the career counselor said they’re a must for private sector jobs. Not that I’m going to get one of those anyway. But I need to cast a wide net.

On that note! I went to an AG presentation by a CLS faculty member who was the AG of Maine for 10 years and he said we should apply everywhere. Like all over the country. Even if we have no connections to, say, Helena, Montana, we should apply there anyway. Well that’s all well and good, but I can’t afford flights out to Topeka and Omaha and El Paso to interview for these jobs. If money were no object, I’d interview all over the country and take a job anywhere. LA would be nice. Or Austin. Or Chicago. But I guess that isn’t the point. Trading one major city for another is probably not what he had in mind. Not that it matters anyway. The last thing I want to worry about is the logistics of leaving New York for the summer. While my lease allows subletting (in accordance with the New York real property law which, thanks to my second memo, I’m extremely familiar with), I can’t imagine leaving my stuff with a stranger.

So whether I like it or not, I’m confined to the tri-state area. Luckily, I definitely won’t be jobless this summer. If all else fails, I can leverage family connections to get something public interesty in Jersey. Still, like anyone, I want to have options. And I really need to get on it. One kid in my class was rumored to have applied for 40 jobs by December 2. I hope that’s a filthy lie spread to incite fear in the rest of us.

INTERESTS: Monty (my dog), Netflix on-demand, Facebook, singing in the shower, hunting mice, Starbucks, hanging out in airports, Battlestar Galactica, strawberry daiquiris, collecting interesting magnets, Friends, lecturing people about the importance of sunscreen, Wawa, politically incorrect Halloween costumes, peanut M&Ms, Independence Day (the movie and holiday), Tetris.

I wonder how far that would get me in the job search. Probably very far actually…I’ll send you all postcards from Des Moines.