Criteria for Evaluating Law School

Law school.

Divorce and suicide factory. Gateway to where I want to be in 5 minutes or 5 years. A chance to do good. An open door. A long, painful slog.

A place to close your mind to the world and study. $300,000 in loans I will spend 10 years paying off.

A chance to shine, to be among crazily-geeky policy wonks and fellow intellectuals. An elitist club for preppy frat boys only looking to make 100k after 3L.

A terrifyingly hierarchical, obsessively graded 3 years.

A place to get joyously lost in the law, to delve into my core beliefs about justice, to find my true intellectual home.

—

Every time I talk to law students, I swing between these beliefs like an overly enthusiastic metronome. So many lawyers I hear about hate their careers, and are fundamentally unhappy with the work they do. Of the lawyers I know, including my awesome uncle Pete, most of them are doing good and tangibly helping people. They are roughly as happy as my friends who are working in Computer Science, and tend to get the chance to act on their core beliefs more often than your average programmer.

When I think of the days I watched lawyers at Human Rights USA call up clients, help them prepare to fight to stay in the United States I can see myself doing that for years at a time. When we casually discussed the relationship between the UN Convention on Human Rights with US law, that was fun then and can only get more fun the more I know about it.

When I watched the lawyers at Human Rights USA struggle to influence and huge, and sometimes intractable legal system, I could see myself burning out on it. When my fellow interns, all of whom were law students, talked about the predatory, aggressive law student and lawyers, constantly looking for a 1-up in the fight to make Law Review or Partner, I could see a community of people I never want to associate.

The daily work of a lawyer involves a pile of paperwork (bleh), research (fun!), stilted writing (ugg) suffused with ethical arguments (yay!).

—

I keep on hoping my choice for a career will seem simple and clear. I went to a panel yesterday, which I helped put on, where current law school applicants talked about their experiences. So many of them saw this as their obvious career choice.

But as I keep growing and exploring, I know that I can foment justice in a socially conscious start-up, getting grants for a non-profit, writing for a magazine, working in the international giving department of a major tech company, working for the United States State Department, teaching as a Professor–or yes, being a lawyer.

I know I can find work I love and that fits my passions, with or without law school. The question I am face with, which anyone who is introspective and applying to law school is faced with is: is this the best use of my talents?

Given the people I know I like to work with, the kind of work I like to do, and the impact I want to make in this world, is law the only place I can find my true home? No. The best place?

That’s a question I am still working on.

Inspirational Quote:

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

–Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear.

Identifying Positions of Privilege

In a recent class discussion, I called out a classmate for pontificating on women’s issues from a position of privilege. He was arguing that women are never discouraged from studying Computer Science because he had never seen it happen.

To me, privilege is about not thinking about how other people (people without my privilege) see the world. After that class, I started trying to think about what kinds of privilege I have that I am not conscious of (I am pretty conscious of my “white privilege” and “heterosexual privilege“). I tried to think about times every day when I inconvenience people unnecessarily because I assume they are like me in this privilege.

My biggest privilege? Height.

This is not an uncommon privilege, and it is one with measurable benefits: Tall people make $789 more per inch per year, and are 90% more likely to ascend to the CEO chairs of Fortune 500 Companies, according to Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book.” says blogger and entrepreneur Penelope Trunk.

My housemates probably suffer more than anyone else because of this privilege, every time I put at the good tupperware on the top shelf, or the garbage bags on the top right of our deep pantry, or the brown sugar on top of the flour, right at my eye height but signifigantly above the heads of most of my housemates. I work on my bike, assuming they can use it–then remember it is the wrong size. I offer to lend them dresses–but realize formal gowns for my 5′8″ frame will not work for my 5′0″ friend.

The weirdest place when I caught myself exercising this privilege was when we were recently decorating our dining-room with Firefly posters. I wanted to hang them so the focus of the poster was at my eye-height, which is approximately an inch higher than my co-hanger’s heads. We had to negotiate their height so no one would feel hunched or dwarfed over breakfast (low posters feel like low ceilings to me, and high posters make everyone feel like children in our own home).

I feel a responsibility to examine my positions of privilege, because then I will understand how other people enact their privilege, and what I can do about it. For an awesome examination of male privilege, check out Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “If I Were a Man”.

Inspirational Quote:

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1858

10 Tiny Things to Make Your Resume Better (from the perspective of a grant-giver)

I reviewed close to 30 resumes and applications for a program of which I am a member (I’m keeping details obscured for the privacy of the applicants). I am currently sitting, waiting for my next interviewee to show up.

In reading those resumes, I have developed a list of 10 things I will be doing differently for my resume.

1. Change your objective to fit the job! It is quite difficult to remain neutral on (much less become supportive of) an applicants application which stated their objective was to “Gain an Internship in the Financial Sector”. Real people have to read your resumes, make it as easy as possible.
2. Delete “Operating Systems” if all you know is OSX and Vista. I simply do not care. Now, if you run your own home-brewed Linux distro, or even Open Solaris or Red Hat, that tells me something about you. For any job I am going to be applying for, saying I can use the world’s two most popular operating systems should be as irrelevant as saying I speak English clearly. It should be a given.
3. Delete “Relevant Coursework” if it isn’t relevant
4. Make skimming easy. Give me clear headings with short bullets. Keep the font around 12–reading resume after resume is hard on the eyes, and you want to make it easy to like you for a position.
5. Delete “Software” if it isn’t relevant, which it absolutely is not if you are applying for a travel grant. The presence of this section was my litmus-test for determining whether an applicant had bothered to customize her resume for the application. Also, even if you are applying for an internship where the software is relevant, unless you know something more than Microsoft Word and Excel, do not tell me. I don’t care.
6. Don’t say “references availible upon request”. Of course they are.
7. Give me space for notes on your resume. Say I am reading your resume, and I see you worked at Stanford Libraries when you were an undergrad there. I want to write a note to myself–”See if she knows Rachel”–but can’t, because you filled every availible inch of your resume with text. Too bad for you.
8. Keep your fonts simple. Times New Roman in bold, underlined and italics, with 1-3 sizes of font for different headers is fine. Unless you are a confident graphic designer, and sometimes even then, you show more class with simplicity than with decorative typesetting.
9. Use numbers. “Quadrupled the number of client stories on website”, “Managed portfolio of over $100,000 in assets”, “Built social media presence which brought in over $1000 in 3 days, 3 months after internship completed”. These are much more powerful than banal paragraphs about your impact on ROI or contribution to a project. Give me numbers.
10. Include locations of past jobs. Perhaps this is not necessary for all applications, but this is a small way of advertising your network. If you’ve worked in Washington DC, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Pittsburgh PA, your interviewer may know someone in those cities and feel connected to you.

Summary of 10 tiny tips to improve your resume:

Optimize for the job in front of you. Make it scannable. Advertise your network.

Keep up hope!

Inspirational Quote:

“Robert H. Schuller – “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”

3 Tips for Interviewing Effectively

For the past few days, I have been interviewing candidates for a program I am in with a grant associated with it. In those few days, I have learned more about effective interviewing than in all my interviews combined. Here is what I’ve learned:

1. Be prepared with: 1) a 10 second pitch which you are passionate about, 2) a clear narrative about why you want the job/to join the program for which you are applying, 3) 1-3 really insightful questions about the organization/position
2. When interviewing, exude confidence and passion–there is nothing more boring in a day of interviews than someone who looks tired, uncommitted or uninterested (if you are an introvert, like me, try to see the interview as a chance to spread information and learn. It is an exchange, a teaching and a learning moment).
3. Address the questions you are asked seriously, and give solid details and examples. Bland does not sell, neither do generalities. The only candidates who have knocked me off my feet have given me insight into the problems my group works on.

Final tip: tact is always appreciated! No matter how unbiased you interview team is, pointing out a major issues with the organization’s strategy is best done politely. We’re only people, and hurting our feelings cannot help your candidacy.

Inspirational Quote:

“Second, probably the single greatest personal intellectual epiphany I’ve had since leaving academia is that the real world actually has interesting problems: not just problems that you ought to deal with because life as we know it could get pretty screwed up if we don’t, but problems that are actually intellectually engaging, make use of the cognitive muscles you developed in academia, force you to develop new abilities, and expose you to interesting questions you would never have discovered otherwise. The assumption that academia is where people grapple with interesting questions, and the business world is where stupid things happen, is just wrong.”–Alex Soojung-Kim Pang