Tease

Dear symplicity,

You get my heart all excited when I see that I can sign up for open interviews. I see the push-button. I click it. You then say that no interviews are available for this schedule. Why do you even have this button for some firms when there are no available spots?

You are such a tease.

Sincerly,
me

Public Service Announcement

To all UCLA 2L/3Ls,

Interview schedules are already available on symplicity. I know we were told that schedules would not be available until Tuesday 8/28, but they lied. Let the fun begin.

Swanky

Dear big law firms,

There's about a dozen of you hosting swanky receptions for us 2Ls in the upcoming weeks at swanky locations like the W hotel on campus. But perhaps it would be a better use of your recruiting money to host these events before bidding was due. Since bidding was already due, these receptions will simply be an opportunity for 2Ls to get free alcohol and not care which firm is providing the alcohol. I doubt that you care about the effectiveness of your recruitment budgets, but FYI.

Me

On Bidding

Bidding for OCIP was due on Thursday at 5PM. Some schools have a complete pre-screen, where employers review resumes and select only those who they want to interview. Other schools have quasi-lottery, where employers pre-select a percentage of their interview schedule and the other part is based on a lottery where students bid on which firms they would like to interview. But here, we have a complete lottery, which means that a 2.5 GPA can get an interview with Wachtell as long as you bid high enough on it.

There's about 360 different interview schedules here, and we had to narrow those 360 down to up to 40 bids. Because I have no idea what makes cookie cutter big firm #1 different from cookie cutter big firm #2, I had a difficult time bidding.

Here's how I bid over the course of an hour Wednesday night:
1. Eliminate any firm not in California. By not in California, I mean any firm not located in either Los Angeles/Santa Monica (no, Irvine and the Valley both don't count as LA) or San Francisco. Left with about 190.
2. Eliminate any firm that does not pay market. Left with about 150.
3. Eliminate any firm whose GPA requirement I do not meet. Because I have a semi-decent GPA solely due to luck/sleeping with professors, I was only able to eliminate only 2 firms. Down to 148.
4. Eliminate any firm interviewing on Fridays. I don't have class on Fridays, and there's no way I'm coming to school solely for interviews. Down to about 120.
5. Take the Vault 100 and bid down the list, starting from #3 (Vault #1 and #2, both of which recruit here, were eliminated by Step 1).
6. Around Vault #85, my #40 bid runs out.
7. Click submit.

In about 10 days, I find out which interviews I got.

What's scary is that because firms are so alike, I was far from being the only student I know who bid the way I bid--no research, and bid based solely on name, prestige, and salary.

And on a completely unrelated note, can anyone tell me why there are so many unhappy young lawyers?

Impressions

So, I stopped by the law school for like 5 minutes today to do some OCI bidding stuff. Today also happened to be the first day of orientation for the fresh1Ls. Here's three general impressions I got from spending some time with them:

1. The 1L girls are most definitely better looking than your average law school girl. I'm sure lots of upperclassboys are excited, being able to play the "wise sophisticated 2/3L' card. The losers will be the upperclassgirls, who will be drawing less attention from the upperclassboys.

2. There's a lot more diversity in this year's class, and I probably attribute it to better financial incentives to the minority students. For example, there is by my count 1 African-American male and 2 half-white males in my entire 2L class of 340. I'm glad to see that there's a lot more color in the fresh1L class.

3. The fresh1Ls are much more hardcore than we ever were (and the 3Ls claimed that we're a lot more hardcore than they were). The fresh1Ls were asking me questions about exams and jobs and all that jazz, when they haven't even had a real law school class yet. But I guess that is the consequence of the whole "lets move to 14" mentality the administrators have, by drawing more students from the Ivies and less from Southern California that typically dominated the class.

WTF?

back

Back from the vacation, orientation starts Thursday for the fresh1Ls (this will be what I call them youngins from now on), and classes start on Monday. Should be back to a more regular blogging schedule once school starts.

Hottest Mega-University

not law school related at all, but...

Newsweek recently named the 25 hottest schools [no, not the kind measured by the quality of the student bod(ies)], and Cornell, in the frozen tundra of upstate New York, was named the hottest school overall.

And the winner for the Hottest Mega-University goes to...

University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif.

"Coming from a small Roman Catholic high school, Joe Iniguez found the 37,000-student UCLA campus was just what he wanted. "I wanted to experience something bigger," he says. Some students, of course, find the university daunting, but the opportunities are so vast and the undergrads so smart (the freshman class had an average GPA of 4.3) that most find their niche. With degrees in 120 majors, hundreds of undergrads do publishable research with senior faculty."

news

Sad news.

Harvard snags Bill Rubenstein from UCLA. Strange way it was announced.

What matters

I did a little road trip recently with some college friends who also happen to attend law school. We are driving through some little town in one of them midwestern states. Don't remember exactly where.

We stop off at this diner. Start conversation with a trucker. He asks us where we all go to law school.
Me: UCLA
Friend 1: Notre Dame
Friend 2: University of Chicago
Trucker: Wow, you two must be really smart [pointing at me and Friend 1]. Bruins and Irish. You two are really going somewhere. [Friend 2 is conspicuously left out]

Lesson of the day: it doesn't matter how many Nobel prize winners your school has (UChicago: about a billion). The quality of the football and basketball is what matters.

On with the road trip.