New Kid on the Hallway

My teaching flashback for the day...

(courtesy of I Can Has Cheezburger, of course!)

Today I resemble this LOLCAT more than I look at it.

Now back to the grind...

The semester progresses. As does my obsession with all things employment-related

While I am taking Employment Law (and like it a lot), the employment referred to in this post title is my own.

CURRENT: I figured out today that I'm completely behind on my hours for this semester's externship. It's not a problem for my workplace--they're flexible--but it is a problem for my law school. So I have to up my hours for the next five weeks. On the one hand, kind of a bummer, since outlining and all that crazy exam prep is looming. On the other hand, I'd probably sleep in and not accomplish much on those days anyway, because I'm like that sometimes. And I like the work just fine, and I have my own happy little cubicle, so it's all good.

(As an aside, is it just me who thinks it feels kind of wrong to say "going in to work" when I'm talking about an externship? Since they're not really my employers and they're certainly not paying me, except in credit, which I get to pay for in the first place? But "going to my externship" sounds awkward and dorky. Anyway.)

It was kind of a relief to figure out my hours, actually, because I had been feeling like it was taking me FOREVER to finish writing the brief I'd been assigned, but I'd been doing few enough hours a week that if I had been working full time, I'd have finished the thing in a week, which is totally reasonable. So I'm not nearly as slow as I'd worried I was!

FUTURE: I have the chance to intern for a federal judge next semester. (Assuming that I can manage the number of hours zie wants.) Which is very, very cool, and makes me happy. For one thing, the judge's chambers are GORGEOUS. Holy cow, the feds have it good. I was with a state court last summer and while I really enjoyed it and the people were wonderful, the facilities left something to be desired. (It's not just me who thinks so--next spring the court is moving and the state's tearing down the building and constructing a new one, because this building is so sucky.) It was kind of like the difference between a nice well-fed Shetland pony, and a thoroughbred racehorse. Sadly, I feel way more at home with the Shetland pony, and the thoroughbred intimidates the hell out of me. But it will be very good experience, so I'll get over it.

The slightly awkward thing is that I have an interview with another federal judge on Friday... and if I had to choose between the two right now, I'd pick the one I've been offered. But you know, the Friday judge might turn out to be AMAZING, or offer different experiences or something, so I might as well show up and find out what their deal is.

EVEN MORE FUTURE: I had the phone interview for the spiffy non-local job. The people were totally cool. I so, so, SO want to work there. Of course, they were very flattering about my application, which is always an effective way to make me want your job. You think I'm smart????? I luuuuuuuuurve you!! Ahem. Where was I? Honestly, it was a little weird because they mentioned a number of times how "impressive" my resume was and asked me twice where else I had applied, what else I wanted to do next summer, and where their position ranked in my choices. They said they knew I had many options. And I wanted to say, Dudes, do you know what YEAR it is? NO ONE has many options! Well, the top ten in my class probably do, but the rest of us are struggling. It's certainly not like I'm so impressive that the local firms have been falling all over themselves to hire me. (Granted, I'm not the typical big firm candidate, and I think with big firms, that counts against me, whereas other employers see that as a plus. But that's a whole other conversation.) 

The other thing that's funny is that I assumed I was only competitive against the happy Ivy candidates because my school offers a specialty (that I am semi-pursuing) in one area that this job involves. I assumed it had to be my interest in that specialty, because I have no background in any of the other areas the job involves (I think those areas are fascinating as all heck, but everyone and his brother at my school is pursuing jobs in these fields, and they all have tons of background and demonstrated experience in the area, and I feel like I'd be behind even before I started, if that makes any sense.) But they seemed to think that I was comparable to the happy Ivy candidates in general. Which made me feel good. Baffled, but good.

So cross your fingers for me.

And I STILL haven't heard yay or nay from my one outstanding  firm callback. So who the hell knows what's going on with them.

And that's the employment update. It's really funny how much time you spend in a professional program trying to get a job. The academic job market is ridiculous and stressful and whatnot, but proportional to the length of time you spend on a Ph.D., I think it's a shorter process than the continual negotiation of internships/externships/clerkships/associateships etc. you deal with in law school, let alone getting the job after you graduate. Actually, I have a post in the works comparing these things further, but this post is way long enough as it is, and I have to read for class. Thanks for bearing with me this long!

All the stupid little things that go into determining whether you like a class or not

You know, it's funny: I always leave campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays feeling like crap, whereas I leave on Mondays and Wednesdays feeling pretty good.

I just realized it's because on TTh, my last class of the day throws up a number of roadblocks on the path to feeling good about myself:

1. It goes till 5:45, and my internal clock slows down something terrible between about 4 and 7-8 p.m. I'm sleepy, I don't want to put any effort into anything, I just don't care; I want to go home and eat and sleep. (I don't get home till 6:30-ish, either.) On MW, I get out of class early enough to avoid the killer sleepies.
       
2. It's a biggish class, at least for how the professor runs it. He's probably one of the most Socratic profs I have, so there are people on call each day and he calls on them and grills them. (You sign up for the three days you'll be on call ahead of time.) Annoyingly, my three days have passed, and he only called on me on one of them (because there are enough people on call every day that he didn't need to get to me). Which would be fine except he does (in theory) grade on class participation (except the class is big enough that I suspect, speaking from personal experience, that this means a few people will get excellent grades and a few people will get terrible grades, and the rest of us will all mush around in the middle). Anyway, more importantly, if you're not on call, there aren't a ton of opportunities to speak up, which is what keeps me interested in a subject.
   
   Granted, I have another class that's around 80 people (this one is around 50) and I like it just fine, but this second prof speaks generally to the 80 people, he doesn't grill you socratically, and my problem is I don't find listening to a prof's conversation with one student very engaging or compelling. Of course, I may just like second prof better. But I really think there's a difference between listening to a prof have a conversation with one student, and listening to a prof talk to an entire class, in which he may well call on different individuals at any given time.
     
   So my point is, I don't feel engaged or involved in the class, and so at the end of it, I come away feeling dumb, and as if I've just wasted 75 minutes. (It's the flip side of how I used to walk out of class on days I'd spent the whole time lecturing, and feel like a failure as a teacher since I was the only one who talked the whole time. Now, I feel like a failure as a student because I haven't contributed anything.)
       
3. It's a required class, which means that many many people in my year have taken it, to get it out of the way. It has by far the highest concentration of 2Ls of any of my classes this semester. So on the one hand, I know who more of the people are in the class than in some of my other classes. On the other hand, that means I feel much more surrounded by cliques I'm not part of than in my other classes, too; in my other classes, no one clique has enough critical mass really to affect the social atmosphere of the class. I often walk out of this class feeling like I have no friends and no one wants to talk to me because they're all too busy chattering away to everyone else.
   
   (Doesn't that sound pathetic and self-pitying? Writing this, I realize that it's partly because 1) the people I do consider friends mostly aren't in this class, and 2) those in the class that I consider friends have other, closer friends who are in the class as well. And I'm sure there's quite a lot of me being anti-social that's going on here. But still, it means I come away from the class feeling unhappy.)
      
4. It probably doesn't help that I have a really sucky seat (end of the row where the seats are in horseshoe formation, so I only ever really get to see the prof in profile, and there's only one person next to me to talk to).

It's just funny if you compare this to the seminar I have on Wednesday afternoons (dubbed by one student as "Seminar in Gays and Abortion"), which has 8 students in it, so we all get to sit around in a circle and shoot the shit about things like what's wrong with Scalia's jurisprudence, I get to talk and therefore stay involved in the conversation, the prof is talking with all of us at once (not very hard with 8 of us), one of my actual friends is in the class, I like all the others, and it's too small/mixed to be dominated by any one law school clique. (I mean, it's not even big enough to be its own clique.) And, of course, it's also taught by second professor, who I like better.

Although I'll grant that first professor told one of the better law school stories I've heard. A student's cellphone rang, with a goofy ringtone, and we all laughed. First prof laughed too, didn't get mad, and told us the following story:

"So, I was representing the plaintiff in a tort suit, and I had this expert witness I had to put on the stand, so we could get the damages up as high as possible. I needed his testimony, but he was TERRIBLE on the stand. He was a little wizened old guy, a real mole man, and I knew the jury was going to hate him, just HATE him. But I had to use him because I needed his testimony.

"So I've got moleman up on the stand, and he's just as awful as I thought he was going to be, and I'm dying inside; the jury hates him, we're not going to get our damages, this jury's going to award $1, he's killing me!

"But then his cellphone rang. And it was his twelve-year-old daughter's pink cellphone, playing a Britney Spears pop song. And you know what happened? The jury laughed, just like you did. The moleman fumbles the phone out of his pocket--'I'm so sorry, I thought it was turned off! I don't even know how to use this thing, it's my daughter's phone!'--and the jury now knew that he had a daughter and she liked pink and Britney Spears, and it totally humanized him. 

"And they awarded us every penny."

So, yeah, funny stories. But still not my favorite class. Maybe if I keep in mind all these stupid little factors contributing to my dislike, I can get over it (or at least enjoy a little serenity now).

Random bullets of law school

• I have survived writing my moot court brief (in a couple of weeks we do oral arguments, then we find out who goes on to the next round, where we do the oral argument bit all over again. I have no expectation of getting very far in the competition, but I wanted some more oral argument experience). Finishing the brief entailed heading to Kinko's at 3:30 am with my partner, where we encountered a very disgruntled employee whose boss had ditched him, who'd been there for 12 hours, and who, when finding out we were law students, told us at least three times that he had a degree in wildlife biology and look what he was stuck doing. He gave us a big discount, though, so he's welcome to grumble all he likes. And I really hope that's the last time I end up driving home from campus at 4 am.
     
• Still waiting to hear from one callback. I suspect they're waiting to hear from whomever they made an offer to before they cut me loose. On the up side, they haven't rejected me yet. On the down side, I suspect it's just a matter of time.
      
• I have a phone interview for a nifty job for next summer, in a Big Important City nowhere near where I live now. It would be logistically kind of a pain, but otherwise a really spectacular opportunity. Anyway, the employer sent out the e-mail about upcoming interviews and cc:ed all the candidates, rather than bcc:ing. So now I know that I am competing against students from Georgetown, Stanford, Columbia, Northwestern, Yale, Duke, Berkeley, Virginia, Harvard, and NYU (and a few others). In fact, if you put the schools represented in order of the US News & World Report rankings, mine would be about third from the bottom. (And it's not that my school is bad - it's just all the others are REALLY good.) I mean, I guess if I made it to this stage in the interview, they've decided my qualifications stand up to everyone else's, but still, it's a wee bit intimidating!
  
  (Thank you to those of you who already reassured me about this on Twitter, though - I especially liked the tweet that said: "Their response to that: I have an interview for a summer job vs someone with a PhD." Ha! True, although the Ph.D. doesn't feel like a very big deal to me by now!)
     
• I like almost all of my classes this semester quite a lot (the exception is, of course, the one that's required). I just wish I had more time to spend on them. In fact, I wish I had more time to spend on EVERYTHING. Including writing interesting blog posts. In lieu of the latter, you get this one!
    
• Oh, I know what I was going to say: law school gurus out there, what are your best tips for rocking the oral argument?

Eating one's words: another observation on the change from prof to student

So, you know how profs hate hate HATE it when a student says, "I couldn't write your paper/study for your test/go to your class because I was doing my work for my other class?" Because it's all disrespectful in 1) implying that your class is much less important than their other class, and 2) assuming that you'll agree that yes, your class is less important the their other class, and it's really okay that they didn't do the work for you, because after all, they were doing something IMPORTANT?

I've reached that point in the semester where, overwhelmed by all the stuff I stupidly thought I could handle getting done, I find myself REALLY wanting to tell profs, "I can't get the work done for your class because I have to do to the work for X!"

I mean, I'd never actually say that (seeing that I know how well it goes over), and if I ever had to say something related to the whole issue, I'd couch it as, "I wasn't able to do the work for your class because I overcommitted myself and didn't manage my time and this week." But that's really just a nicer way of saying that, at least right now, yes, I think X is more important.

And it's funny how when you're feeling totally stressed and overwhelmed, it seems totally natural to tell your profs that. I'm not a slacker! I'm working hard! I'm just working hard on other stuff, not yours! And it's overwhelming and I'm swamped and tell me it's going to be okay!! It's funny how intensely self-centered being swamped and overwhelmed makes you feel, where it seems completely natural that you could say something like this to a professor and actually expect them to comfort/reassure you.

Of course, profs get swamped and overwhelmed, all the time. But there is something about being at the (greater) mercy of others (who grade you), and struggling through something for the first time, where you're still learning how to do everything you're being asked to do, that creates a feeling of helplessness and self-absorption -- the kind that makes you think that telling your prof that you didn't do their work because you had other work you had to do first is really a reasonable thing to do.

I'm not planning on saying such a thing to any of my profs, but I feel a kinship with past students who've said such things to me, and a drop of guilt about my lack of charity with them.