New Kid on the Hallway

Some unresolved anxiety?

After the first week of class, my schedule SHOULD be settled. I've attended each class twice; we're well into the material. Also, I finally got my internship plans worked out, and I start tomorrow.

But last night (actually, early this morning) I dreamed that to fulfill my science requirement (yes, IN LAW SCHOOL), I had registered for a physics class. I already had missed the first day, and in my dream, I hadn't had time to do the reading for the second day. So I was dithering about whether or not I could go to the second class meeting, not having done the reading and all, and if I missed the second day, shouldn't I really drop the class? But then how would I fulfill my science requirement??

It was quite a relief to wake up and realize that no, THERE IS NO SCIENCE REQUIREMENT IN LAW SCHOOL. (Knew there was a reason why I liked it!)*

On a happier note, I also dreamed that my aunt gave me and NLLDH a beautiful apartment in London to live in. (Yes, while I'm in law school. A bit worse of a commute than I have now, but it made sense in the dream!)

   

*Which is not intended to knock science - I wish I did know more about it. But since the last time I took physics was sophomore year of college, and even then it was "Physics for Poets," I don't think it would be wise for my future career to rely on it in any way!

Most amusing interview moment

So, my resume (2 pp.) states that I have X number of publications/presentations, and then I have a (2 pp.) addendum that lists the actual details (it's my way of cheating and pretending that I'm not distributing a 4-page resume. See, it's an addendum! You can throw it away if you want!).

I've had a number of interviews by now, using this resume, and all the interviewers have been able to figure out exactly what this meant.

Last week, I had one interviewer who was initially baffled that I hadn't included the authors' names for each publication. Zie couldn't seem to grasp that the reason was because the author was the same for each: ME. I had to state that I'd written everything on the list at least 3 times.

I know that resumes are different from c.v.s and maybe zie was just confused by the convention, but come on - everyone else who's read my resume has figured this out. (Why would I list publications and presentations on my resume if I hadn't written them?) I just think this person couldn't quite grasp that I would actually have written all that stuff. (Hmm, maybe I don't look that old after all??)

Weekend!

My week finally ended today about 3:30, in that I finally had no pressing appointments, no places to go and people to see and spiels to perform about how much I want to work for [fill in employer's name here]. (It's not that I had SO MANY interviews that it was overwhelming, they were just spread out over the entire week so they took up a lot of mental space.)

My brother-in-law and niece are coming into town this weekend, so that will be cool. I had grand plans of cleaning up this place so we can bring them in without shame. 

I have some stuff to fill out and then put in the mailbox (like financial aid forms, eek).

I was determined to stop at the grocery store, since our apartment is truly void of food.

And I wanted to take advantage of the gorgeous day and free time and get outside to get some exercise.

But I got home and was sucked into the gravitational pull of the sofa. And here I am, 2 1/2 hours later, and I HAVE NOT MOVED. I think my brain turned off. It certainly hasn't provided any exciting ideas about dinner.

The upside is that only going to classes next week will feel like a relief. Probably.

I cannot WAIT to see this show now

Okay, so there's a commercial at the beginning - sorry, I can't do anything about that - but I just saw this commercial and now I am DYING to see this show. This was hysterical! (At least, to this former prof it was.) Enjoy!

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

Gender and sports

Have you seen the current debate about Caster Semenya? CBS has a brief article here, and Jezebel has something a bit more in-depth and interesting here. In short, Semenya is a South African track athlete who is currently undergoing testing to determine whether she is, in fact, a woman, and whether, therefore, she is legitimately competing in women's sports.

NLLDH and I watched the world track and field championships (held in Berlin) the other night, and we saw her utterly blow away the field en route to winning the 800-meter race. She won by 2.45 seconds, which is a huge lead in such a race. She was truly impressive.

And as much as I hate to admit it, I couldn't help but look at her and think, Wow, she looks like a man.

The CBS article points out that officials do not suspect her of cheating by having had a sex change; I don't think anyone is suggesting that Semenya is a man who has consciously decided to pass as a woman. Instead, they're concerned that she has a "medical condition."

It's hard, given Semenya's appearance (and some of the statements in the Jezebel piece), not to look at her and wonder if she is perhaps intersex. But if she is - what then? There are "concerns" about her competing as a woman if she isn't "fully" female - whatever that means.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with the idea of declaring someone "fully" female or "fully" male. It raises too many echoes of past systems of categorizing someone by race, wherein if a person had even "one drop" of African blood, s/he was held to be black. It sounds like if Semenya has "one drop" of male genes (chromosomes/hormones/whatever), that will be enough to deem her male, or at least, not female, regardless of how she identifies herself.

Myself, I support the right of an individual to declare for hirself what hir gender identity is. So I was surprised at my own initial resistance to Semenya's success - like it's "not fair" for her to compete if she has some kind of genetic issue (which, indeed, she may not at all). Which made me realize how much athletic competition reinscribes gender divisions, even at the same time that it purports to provide an equal playing field and to allow women to showcase strength, agility, determination, courage, and competitive spirit - things not always traditionally held to be feminine. Maybe the problem with Semenya is that she goes beyond what women are supposed to be able to do? Women athletes are great, as long as they don't actually challenge what men can do? Women athletes who surpass their peers have, after all, often been accused of being overly masculine and unfeminine (Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova come to mind for me, but that's because I've followed tennis since I was a kid - I'm sure you can come up with other examples from other sports.) Is the controversy over Semenya just an extension of this discomfort with women's achievements?

As someone of conventionally unambiguous gender, I present no social problem. People don't have to worry about how to treat me or where to place me in the categories in their heads. But I have had students who got beat up and arrested for using the "wrong" bathroom, where the bathroom they chose didn't match up with the labels people around them wanted to place upon them. Semenya appears to unsettle people in a similar way - which is not, I should add, intended to act as if she is therefore the problem. Her case just made me realize how many ways there are to bump up against and be limited by the gender labels that we place on certain bodies.

What's your reaction to the controversy over Semenya's success? Do you think she should retain her world medal? Is it "unfair" for someone who identifies as a woman but who has some "male" physiology to compete against women of conventional physiology? And if so, what should Semenya do - compete with men, despite being a woman? Be barred from competing at all because she can't play within society's gender rules?

Interview season (attack of the footnotes!)

So, I've been burbling about this on Twitter, and I've kind of talked about it here, but fall interviewing season begins next week. This information will be redundant for some of you, but the deal is, each fall, law schools bring^[1] employers on campus to interview second-year students (2Ls). These employers are usually the big firms that pay the big bucks (or semi-big bucks), and if your interview goes well enough, they'll offer you a job for the following summer. If you do well in that job, what traditionally follows is that you get an offer for permanent employment after graduation.^[2] Which means that, in essence, you get a chance at a job based on your performance in your first year of law school, and you may have a post-graduation job lined up before you even start your third year, which I find all kinds of weird.^[3]

Anyhoo, the interview schedules for the first week of interviewing have finally been worked out and we got them this afternoon (even though originally they were going to be done Monday), and I do have some interviews (plus an interview for a fall internship), so that's all kinds of exciting.

The thing is, though, OCI (on-campus interviewing) is a weird and tense thing. First, most students do NOT get jobs through OCI, mostly because a lot of employers just don't hire that way (especially government/non-profits/less-big firms), but partly because firms will interview 8 or 9 people and hire 2. Second, there's a perception that OCI is only for the tippity-top of the class.^[4] Now, I know that I got interviews with places that stated that they "prefer" candidates in the top X% of the class, where X = a number outside of which I fall, although I also have to admit that my rank was pretty close, so I can't say that the perception is wrong.^[5] Add the fact that the jobs acquired through OCI are generally those that pay the most, as well as the fact that you know EXACTLY who your competition is,^[6] and it's kind of anxious and nasty-making. Basically, it's like having the AHA (non-historians, fill in your national academic hiring conference here) move into your school for a bit.

And with all this, I'm not even sure what I want to get out of the process anyway.

See, I don't think that I want to work in a big law firm after graduation. (I know I've said this here before.) Granted, I can't say that for sure, never having worked in one, but it doesn't sound like my kind of thing, partly because of the hours (doesn't that sound lazy??), but mostly because I'm not at all interested in the business-side of running a law firm, nor do I want to have to drum up clients, and I have the sense that these are things that you need to do to make partner. In terms of work-life balance, a small firm might work, although the economic stuff is probably even more important when there aren't very many of you.

That said, though, working at a firm (depending on the firm) could provide GREAT hands-on, practical experience. Even a summer's worth would be useful, let alone a few years. My understanding is also that many government/non-profit employers don't like to hire students straight out of law school because they don't have the time or money to train them for practice, so you need a few years' experience before you can get these positions anyway. So these are good reasons to try out working at a firm.

(Which, of course, I don't even know that I'll be able to do - I just have INTERVIEWS, no one's offered me anything yet!)

And if nothing else, going through the interviews will be good experience.

It's just funny, because I still find myself reacting to these interviews based on my experience with academic interviews. I find myself grateful to have ANY, and pretty ecstatic to have multiples. But I don't know if that's because it's a decent accomplishment in the legal context, or just because it would have been a decent accomplishment at the AHA.

I'm also amused because "fit" still seems to be playing a part here, because the firms that are interviewing me are largely the ONLY firms that interested me much to begin with. I applied to a whole bunch of places (because that is the current advice, IN THIS ECONOMY, blah blah blah), but many just read as Generic Big Firm to me. I tried to find something specific to talk about in each cover letter, but really, the letters were kind of interchangeable because the firms felt interchangeable. But those few that looked distinctive and interesting? Found me interesting too. Which I think is so odd because really, my cover letters weren't all that different from place to place. But I guess what happened is that the kinds of places that would look more interesting to someone like me, look that way because they'd be more interested in people like me to begin with. If that makes any sense.

So anyway. That's my encyclopedic tome on interview season. Now, if you'll pardon me, I'll go obsess for a while over what to wear and what to say...

   

^[1] "Bring" makes it sound, I think, like schools have way more power than they actually do... recently a firm decided to cancel its interviews after scheduling interviews, and the school (Fordham) banned the firm from interviewing on campus for 5 years (or 7. I forget). From what I can tell, people aren't sure whether that actually hurts the firm, or just the students who'd like to interview with it.

^[2] I say "traditionally" because the big law firm model is NOT recession-friendly, and a lot of big firms have ended up deferring their offers to summer hires, i.e., making those who are graduating in 2010 a offer for a job that starts in 2011. That's if a firm makes any offers at all. A lot of firms just aren't hiring anyone for next summer. Fun times.

^[3]Although, really, not too much weirder than the drawn-out hiring process for academic jobs, I guess.

^[4]I think this varies somewhat by school. If you go to a tippity-top-ranked school, probably everyone in your class who wants an OCI job can get one; the word is that everyone at Harvard could walk out of school into a Big Law job if they want. The lower-ranked your school, the higher-ranked you have to be in your class to get the attention of a big firm through OCI. And region also plays a role; if you're at a regional school (i.e. anything not ranked in the top-14, or maybe top-20), regional firms will look lower down the class ranking than big national firms will. If I were trying to get a job at Wachtell out of my school - well, it wouldn't happen! But the only way I'd have a shot would probably be to be ranked number one in my class.

^[5] I was going to say, this is where having a life/career before law school probably helped me - but then, that previous career may have hurt me with the employers who didn't choose me for an interview (she's old! she's weird!), so who knows?

^[6]Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration; there's another law school in town whose students are also competing for these jobs, plus, doubtless, plenty of people who did go to top-14/top-20 schools but want to practice here and so apply for summer positions here. I don't know who they are, but I DO know all the people who go to school with me. Joy.

Sunday night ramblings

Two more weeks till classes start... two weeks from tonight I'll be trying to go to bed early, which I probably won't manage, and I'll be sleeping badly knowing that again I have to get up to an alarm and BE somewhere by a specific time. (It's amazing how quickly I get out of the habit of getting up to an alarm, even though I've only been done with work for a week!)

Thankfully, my schedule will be a bit nicer this semester than last year: on MW I don't have class until 1 p.m., TTh my first class is at 10:45, and on F, I don't have classes at all. Sadly, I currently go till 5:40 on TTh and 6:40 on W, which means I won't be home till relatively late (especially a bummer since I prefer working out in the late afternoon/early evening). I guess it balances out the later starts.

Of course, that's assuming I keep all my classes. I'm taking a slightly heavy load, and I did put in an application for an internship I couldn't resist (haven't heard anything back yet, but I think they were taking applications until the 31st). If I get the internship, I should drop my MW class, because it would free up the most time in my schedule, and would probably make my life the most manageable (it's 3 credits, there's a final). But the thing is, the class just sounds so INTERESTING. I'd rather drop the 2-credit, 1x/week on Wednesday night class I'm taking, but it won't free up that much time, it's only 2 credits, and it already doesn't have a final exam, so dropping it probably wouldn't really make my life that much easier. (Everything else either fulfills a requirement or isn't going to be offered again while I'm still in school or is in a subject that I went to law school specifically to study, so those are my only two real options for dropping.)

Even if nothing comes of the internship, I'm wondering if I should drop a class. I'm not very good at gauging how much work this courseload will be, because in both my undergrad and grad programs, every course counted the same and everyone took the same number of courses each semester (4 in college, I can't remember if it was 3 or 4 in grad school). Eh. We'll just have to see how it goes (with one eye firmly on the add-drop deadline).

Anyway. I'm looking forward to everything starting up again, just because I do REALLY BADLY without a routine. For instance, I went walk-running for the first time today since my horrific wipeout, two weeks ago last Wednesday (and it was more walking than running this time, although I think partly that was because I'd eaten crap all day so had little decent fuel in my body). That's partly because it was at least 10 days before my left knee stopped being too sore even to think about running (the scrape still hasn't finished healing, and it itches like a bitch), so I had to lay off for a while. But then when it started feeling better, I was done with work, and having nothing to do, I kept thinking, I don't have to go running NOW - I have plenty of time. I'll go later. Such thinking is the kiss of death; I never go later. Conversely, when I get off work at 5 or 6, and I know I want to eat dinner sometime well before 10 pm (I have the eating habits of a midwesterner, not a European), and I know that I don't like working out much later than 7:30 pm? Well, I know that if I want to run, I have to do it when I get home or I won't do it at all. So I suck it up and do it.

(Am not sure exactly how this will play out during the semester, but that's something else, we'll have to see how it goes.)

Okay, maybe I'll go answer the e-mails that I've been ignoring since finishing my job, since, after all, I have plenty of time; I can answer them later.

Lessons learned

• Two small pieces of chocolate cake are not good fuel for intense apartment cleaning.
     
• There is little that is more annoying than completely rearranging the living room furniture and realizing it worked better the way it was originally.
    
• Unless it is breaking your thumbnail about as short as it can go.
      
• If you are going to engage in large scale furniture moving, you might want to a) put your husband's three pairs of shoes somewhere else and b) remove the fluorescent light bulb from the side table that you're carrying around the room. Because you know? Those things break when they fall off the table because you trip over a shoe. Who knew!
      
• On the upside, one way to resolve the problem of the too-big side table that doesn't actually fit beside any of our furniture and so was floating in space by itself disrupting the flow of the room is to stick it in the corner and put the oak file cabinet that was in the corner where the side table was. (The file cabinet is much less obtrusive.)
     
• On the downside again, moving an oak file cabinet just might scratch the hardwood floor. Crap. Don't tell NLLDH.
      
• Ohmigod the Snuggy now comes in ANIMAL PRINTS. Just what you always needed!
      
• When you have no real convenient places to stow crap, said crap collects on every flat surface. I think I need get a bunch of these kinds of things to stow under the coffee table and on the odd bookshelf space I have open.
     
• Dirty cat footprints are amazingly Swiffer-resistant.    

But I have managed to vacuum the bedroom, mop the living room floor (though I may go back over a few little cat footprints...), wash the sofa cushion covers, and clear up at least SOME junk. Am going to head back to it, as soon as I regain some energy...

RBOC: Shopping edition

• I often think that it's a good idea to go shopping by oneself. This was confirmed today when, within 15 minutes of arriving at the mall, I witnessed one toddler meltdown (a little boy was screaming at the top of his lungs that he HAD to take his shoes off, which mom wouldn't allow. I felt bad - he was clearly miserable, in that "no one understands me!!!!" way of little kids. I remember feeling like that) and one intergenerational spat (adult daughter to elderly-ish mom: "If you tell me one more time all the things you want...!").
      
• It's not that I like to shop by myself because I want to avoid enduring such moments. I just want to avoid inflicting such moments on others.
      
• I didn't really NEED anything, but it's been a while since I spent the day traipsing round malls trying on everything that looks remotely interesting and coming home mostly empty-handed, dehydrated, with low blood sugar. (Especially since one of the places I went was an outdoor mall and it's pretty hot and dry here.) As awful as that experience sounds, I find it soothing every now and then.
     
• I was sort of semi-looking for a suit. No, I don't NEED a suit. I have two suits. But neither is the PERFECT suit, and I continue to believe, against all empirical evidence, that I can find the PERFECT suit that will be all things for all seasons and, while we're at it, make me look 20 lbs. thinner. The exciting thing was that I found a bunch of stuff that fit me, and actually looked pretty decent. But nothing was different enough from what I already have, or cheap enough, to justify buying a THIRD suit. Still - if some unforeseen suit tragedy occurs (like the dry cleaners mangling all my current dress clothes), I have options, and that in itself is reassuring.
     
• Oh, and I did I mention that I don't have any interviews yet? I don't NOT have any yet, either; I'll find out next week if anyone wants to interview me. So whether I like my suit(s) or not may be moot. But if I focus my anxiety on whether or not my suit is right, I can actually do something to assuage it (go shopping!), whereas I can't do anything at this point to convince people to interview me. So, you know, shopping is really just a healthy coping mechanism!    

Best and worst of first year

It's funny, a lot of the law student blogs I've been reading have been doing posts along the lines of "Advice for new 1Ls starting this fall" (or in the next 2-3 weeks, really). I enjoy reading these (despite being done with 1L) because it's always interesting to see where my experiences match up with those of other students. Since I continue to feel like I'm not a "real" student, it's reassuring when I can see my own experience in what other people write, and strangely enough, it's also reassuring when their experiences are different. (Which I guess means I'm kind of invested in seeing myself as not your "typical" law student?)

Myself, though, when I think about writing an "Advice to OLs/1Ls" post, I can't really think of much to say. Mostly because everyone else has covered what I'd say. And also because there are various debates about how to do well in law school (take notes by hand or on computer? use supplements or not, or which ones, and when? etc.), and I've kind of decided where I stand on the issues for me, but what works for me may not work for everyone. So I kind of think everyone has to work these things out for themselves. My advice boils down to: do the reading, go to class, ask questions, study. Or, in other words: do the work. But I can't really say what the best way for other people to do that is.

I have no advice or insight about the social scene in law school. I'm sure my school has its own tensions, rivalries, jealousies, and dating-other-student drama, but I feel completely outside of that scene. Occasionally my more in-touch classmates pass stuff along to me, which I enjoy hearing about, but it generally sails by me unnoticed. I like to think I still know people through various activities and that I won't end up being that person that no one even realized was in their class, but we'll have to see.

Instead I thought I'd do another law student blog meme: What were the best and worst moments of your first year?

Hmmm. I'm going to make a rule for myself that my answer can't be about grades, because I'm way too caught up in external measures of success as it is. Yes, getting my lowest grade sucked, and yes, getting my highest grades in two of the classes I most enjoyed and which were taught by my favorite profs was pretty awesome. But I can't measure the experience purely by grades.

Worst: I just remember going to talk to my Legal Writing prof sometime in the fall, and coming out of there feeling utterly despondent about my choice to go to law school. I've no idea why, really, because this professor was extremely nice, and really, a very good instructor, and I don't recall hir saying anything particularly negative about me or my work. I think it was that the conversation was so damned awkward, I came out of it feeling completely out of place and stupid and convinced I would never fit in. (I have a tiny suspicion that some of this was the professor genuinely feeling uncomfortable, because I am older than hir, have more advanced degrees, and actually had taught longer than zie had, but I try to suppress that suspicion because really, it's unfair to the professor - who is, as I said, very good - and probably more about me being paranoid about being a non-trad than anything else.)

Best: Being done with exams - both semesters - was a pretty good feeling. When I was in undergrad (and even in grad school), my friends and I all had different schedules with different course requirements and therefore different final exam experiences. I ended up doing a lot of final papers and fewer final exams; my science friends had lots of final exams; that kind of thing. So we weren't all on the same schedule for finishing at all. But all 1Ls have the same exams at the same time. The euphoria that hits the class when EVERYONE is done TOGETHER is pretty neat.

Also, I had a few wonderful conversations with the prof I RAed for which totally made up for the awful awkward conversation with my Legal Writing prof. We just talked like normal people, and it was SO nice to find someone who talked to me like a grown up again. (It didn't hurt that zie loved the work I did for hir and volunteered to do whatever zie could to help me get a job/succeed/etc., but then, this isn't supposed to be about external validation!)

It is funny to me that the two moments I've picked both involved profs, because it probably betrays how much I still feel more like them than like most of my classmates. And I did have great times with my classmates, too - they're cool people. But these moments are what stick out.