the good news is...

that the resumes i turned in for the job fairs in the northeast and texas are not complete and utter crap. i had a mercifully brief meeting with the new career services lady yesterday and she assured me that there was nothing about either my resume or cover letter that was hideously bad. she made some small suggestions that should help improve my standing for socal and the southeast. overall, i like her. i wouldn't say she's better than the old lady, who i worked pretty closely with last semester (when i had no clue at all what i was doing and had considerably less to sell to potential employers). just different. plus she isn't straight out of the private sector; she has been doing the job for several years at another fairly top notch school in the area.

job fairs are weird. they are a cattle call, quite literally. you assemble endless packages of resume, transcript, writing sample, and cover letter, send them in en masse with the packages of a bunch of your classmates, and usually several schools are included in the whole event. the employers cull through, spending seconds glancing mostly at everyone's gpa for the first pass. once they see that your gpa is within their acceptable range, they read your other materials to make sure you're not a complete loser. then they choose who they'll interview. you have to sign an agreement when you turn in your crap saying that if you get more than one interview, you will attend. i think if you welch you are precluded from doing any other job fairs. then you fly out, put your best face on, sell yourself like julia roberts in pretty woman, and hope like hell to find your richard gere.

the cool thing about all this is the one fell swoop factor; if you were to try to do all this on your own, the result would likely be several trips to various (and in my case geographically diverse) places for an initial interview, callbacks, etc. they usually pay your way, but you still have to figure out the logistics, dealing with missed class and the tremendous time suck that is job hunting. the sucky thing is that i haven't even finished with my job(s) for this summer and i'm already worried about next summer, and by extension, post-law school employment.

i promise tomorrow i will post some juicy bits about something NOT related to all this job finding drudgery. i was just thinking that is some hapless 1L stumbled upon my site, it would be nice to give them a little info. maybe someday i'll learn how to put my posts in categories like the cool kids and i can have a whole section on my law school mistakes and how not to make them.

here's the deal

okay y'all. i was going to manually move all my old livejournal posts to this shiny new blogger bloggity blog. but it's an epic pain in the ass and i'm a lazy biatch. so on the sidebar there is "leaving nola OLDSCHOOL" and that is the old livejournal. the archive if you will. i wish i knew how to make this little post stay at the top for a while, but i only have about two readers anyway (vague, crooked?)...oh yeah, and my faithful pet sitter/moot court partner. and they all know where the old LJ is. so no worries. i still may try to relocate, but it will be piecemeal as i have time. and i never have time.

holy freaking crap!

my hand is a claw. my eyes are blurry. i slugged some red wine way too fast.

you guessed it--job search time is nigh. again.

i have always despised looking for jobs. i hate "selling myself." i hate the gladhanding and the fakeness and the bullshit.

after today, everything will be much easier for the rest of the meat market season. but today I had not only to update my resume and tweak the physical appearance of it, i also had to write a new cover letter from scratch. both items had to be short, more than a page is too much. sounds easy, right? except that there's a ton to say and no space to say it. and i fell in love with a particular font and had to make everything fit even though it's significantly larger than the old one.

the good news is that i actually have something to sell this year. more so than last year. my grades are better and i have worked two law related jobs--unlike before when i was just barely in the top half of my class and had only been a waitress or clerk.

so here is my advice to the up and comers...

bust your ass first year!!!

i cannot stress this enough. your job searching can end first semester of your second year if you play your cards right...but you have to have done well enough by the end of your first year to secure a good job at a decent firm (or elsewhere) that will make you an offer at the end of your 2L summer. then, voila! you can relax and just be a student instead of assembling 88 individual packages of resume/cover letter/writing sample/transcript in a single night.

so i've signed, stapled and collated myself raw and all i want to do is crawl into a hole. talk to me tomorrow, i'm sure i'll feel totally accomplished and badass. right now i'm just spent. send good mojo to texas and the northeast for me. i'd hate to have done all this work and get no interviews or jobs out of it.