A fair number of fiirst year students seem to have bypassed any anxiety about exams and moved on to anxiety what they will do for work next summer. There are two schools of thought on the issue:

1) since you have completed a whopping one year of law school, you are not tremendously useful to anyone so whatever job you could get is going to be pretty menial, strictly of the resume-padding sort, not of the meaningful learning sort.

2) law firms recruit on-campus during the fall of second year for summer jobs AFTER second year. These are considered important because they tend to lead to offers for jobs after graduation. Thus doing something interesting THIS summer gives you an advantage during interviews next fall.

I tend to believe (1). But that's mostly because I don't plan to participate in (2). The law firm recruiting process resembles the baseball draft, where kids coming out of school are put into the minor leagues to see how they perform before they get an offer to join the majors.

To fully buy into (2), you have to sorta believe that what you do the summer after your first year has major consequences for potentially the next 20 years of your professional life. That seems a stretch, doesn't it.

30 Oct 04