Law Schools

This T14 Law School Writes Terrible Cover Letters

A school-wide email lambasts lazy law students.

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Writing cover letters is a tedious task. Where to begin? How do you convey excitement in a specific job when your only real interest is in “having anything that pays”? At what point is the whole exercise needlessly rehashing your résumé? And at the end of the day, the employer is probably just going to chuck the cover letter anyway.

Nevertheless, you need to put some goddamned effort into it. Oh, you don’t like tedious tasks? Then don’t be a lawyer. In fact, let’s replace the LSAT with a cover letter writing assignment. If a student balks at the mind-numbing, detail-oriented task of drafting 20 perfect cover letters, they don’t get to go to law school. Everyone would be much happier.

Apparently, Cornell Law has an epidemic of don’t give a f**ks when it comes to cover letters. Last month, Elizabeth K. Peck, the Director of Public Service at Cornell, fired off an email to the whole school explaining just how awful their cover letters are:

A couple of thoughts. One, literally no one other than DeMarco Murray really wants to be in Philadelphia. Two, what is Cornell’s career services office doing? I’m pretty sure NYU’s career people strapped us into the Clockwork Orange chair and made us swear allegiance to the Church of the Tailored Cover Letter before the end of orientation week. It was annoying at the time because most of us actually possessed the common sense to understand how cover letters worked, but career services wasn’t taking any chances.

So, moral of the story: check you cover letters, Cornell.

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