Ed. note: This article is part of the Introduction to Law School series, powered by Thomson Reuters.
We recently published results of our survey about the most useful law school extracurriculars in helping you land a job. It’s not going to shock anybody that most of the legal profession regards law review as the only worthwhile thing to do with your free time. It shouldn’t shock anybody that being on the SBA is an active waste of your time.
But now we want to share some of the comments from our survey, which garnered more than 1,200 participants. About that SBA:
SBA is the biggest joke of all time. Honestly, if I’m ever hiring for a firm, I think I will actually mark down candidates who do SBA. It shows poor judgment and an inability to decipher good uses of time from total wastes…unless they were the ones planning bar review; then they get a gold star.
In my experience, involvement with SBA is almost a negative — I know three law schools fairly well, and it was almost always a proxy for planning events to maximize alcohol consumption.
One of the only things that ranked lower on our list of importance than the SBA was “theatrics.” But it seems to me that if you are going to law school to be president, acting and organizing events is the better use of your time than studying.
Not everybody can be on law review, and so we had a lot of discussion about the value of secondary journals. One clear theme emerged: It looks bad if you don’t do one.
From a student:
I think not being on a journal is like earning negative points for your résumé. Even if you can’t be on your school’s flagship journal, it shows that you’re not willing to roll up your sleeves if you don’t join a secondary journal. So while I don’t see secondary journals as particularly prestigious, I think that being on a journal is something you simply have to do while in law school.
From an employer:
I feel like people should probably do a journal, but non-Law Review journals aren’t necessarily impressive, it’s just that the lack of them seems lazy. Also, I don’t give a shit about editorial board positions on whatever journal you are on.
Not that employers and students agreed all the time: Students indicated political groups, like Fed Soc, were important. Employers thought affinity groups were more important.
But here are the two things everybody agreed upon:
Nothing will overcome going to a bad school.
Unless…
If you have an engineering degree, there is no need to spend any time doing anything but studying. The undergraduate engineering degree (+ engineering work product, if possible) is more than enough.
Now head out to bar review so those SBA types can feel like they’re not wasting their lives.
Earlier: What’s The Best Thing You Can Do While Not Studying?