I really hate that a whiny post is at the top of the blog, so I'm quickly slapping up some thoughts from my twitter feed.
One conversation was whether one of the women I follow should participate in the write on competition for law review at her lower-ranked law school. She has no big law aspirations. I completely sympathize with her, as I was in the same position at the end of 1L. Except I wasn't conflicted.
I knew I was going to do it.
And it worked out.
My advice: I know you say you don't ever want big firm life, but there are a lot of legal employers who look favorably on it. If you ever want to clerk, for example, which is a great gig if you can get it, journal is essential. Nothing lost but time & sanity during the write on itself.
She decided against it. To each her own, I guess.
Yesterday, I was updating my resume. I re-formatted it and reorganized it so my legal experience is above my education section. While I did reasonably well in law school, the name of the school itself is not likely to open any doors, and I didn't do *so well* in law school that it wouldn't matter. Few people have ever heard of my undergrad institution. My masters in education is useless to legal employers and from a school so long ago and far away as to be irrelevant.
Or, as I put it on twitter: My resume sure looks purty. But its like all dressed up w/ no place to go and wearing obviously cheap shoes (i.e. the education section)
Also, we were discussing the topic of 'class rank on the resume' on twitter. My take: Top 30% for sure on the resume. T-50% probably, unless GPA looks more impressive w/o it. Lower rank, probably not unless requested. Other thoughts?
See, that's interesting, I never put class rank or GPA on a resume, and when I was reading them I always wondered why it featured so prominently on many people's. If there's some other way to signal high academic achievement (award, honor society, etc) I prefer that- but like you said, to each their own.
ReplyDeleteIts funny. There are two major law schools in my geographic area. My GPA at my school puts me in a good (though not omg wow) class standing. That same GPA at the other school would put me very low in the class indeed. My school: magna cum laude. Their: no honors at all. Really. Their grade inflation versus our hard core curve.
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, folks from my school are apt to put class rank, at least the first few years out, just because we look less competitive than we really are.
We have a similar situation with our law school v. the other local law school - our curve is lower than theirs, so if we only put our GPAs and not ranks, we'd look at a disadvantage. (However, the school's raised the curve this year, probably to help people who aren't ranked; my school only ranks the top 1/3 of the class - I think the idea is that who wants/needs to know they're in the bottom 1/4 of the class? - so if you're not ranked, your GPA gets compared to the GPAs at the other school without any sense of where it is in the class and we come out worse.)
ReplyDeleteWe ALWAYS get told to put our class rank and GPA (at least, if you have my class rank and GPA you get told to - and I loved your line about the cheap shoes, because that's kind of my situation; I've got a great resume, and good but not wow grades, from a school where I should probably have omg wow grades to be competitive for some of the stuff I'd like to do. If I had my grades from a T-14 school I'd probably be golden, but alas, that's not the case. But you know, too bad, nothing I can do about it now!). I don't know what the career office tells people to do about their GPA if they're not ranked, but I do think GPA and rank are prominent on people's resumes because schools tell people to put them in.
Reading biglaw profiles of their attorneys always makes me laugh because someone might have graduated 20 years ago but if they were fourth in the class, dammit, that information will be front and center. And I found out one of the people I'm working with this summer is 1st in our class because the firm sent out bios and it was on his resume, so now we all know!
We aren't allowed to put GPA or class rank on our resumes since neither is calculated at my school, so adding law review was nice if you could do it. That said, I had absolutely no interest in it and the work looked so time-consuming and miserable that I was always very glad I didn't do the write-on.
ReplyDeleteNow that said I feel like there are avenues closed off to me because I didn't do law review- appellate clerkships, teaching positions, etc. and I do feel some regret over that. But probably not enough regret to want to do law review...
I changed my resume recently to put Legal Experience at the top and Education under it. I'm not sure if I'm far enough out yet (1 year) to do that though... I was thinking about changing it back. But I definitely also have the cheap shoes problem... ugh.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I totally agree on Law Review. I'm glad I did it, even though it was a ton of work, because it was actually a lot of fun and gave me stuff to do when I would have otherwise been bored out of my mind as a 3L.
I haven't started law school yet, but I've already been debating whether to try for law review. Ultimately it will probably boil down to how much extra stuff I'll feel I can take on at the time. I'll be doing a lot of prioritizing over the next 3 years, and if I'm going to be spending a lot of time on something like law review, it had better be worth it.
ReplyDelete