So far, this column has, broadly speaking, discussed ways in which your law school’s Career Service Office can help you while a student or even after graduation. But today, I want to turn the tables and talk about what you can do to support your CSO.
Before delving into that topic, let me revisit last week’s column on networking and make an important addition. Loyal readers will remember that I talked about three levels of networking: friends and family, alums of schools which you attended, and random acquaintances. Let us slide into that list (probably as a subset of alums) your fellow students and more specifically, law school student organizations. As anyone who has stepped inside a law school in recent years can tell you, there are A LOT of student organizations ranging from purely social to advocacy/political groups. Yet regardless of their size or scope, each of these organizations can be an important networking tool. Social organizations, or those just limited to your school, can help you connect with 2Ls and 3Ls who can give the best insight into various employers based on their first-hand experience. Larger, national organizations like the American Constitution Society (full disclosure: I joined ACS the third day of law school and subsequently worked in their national office before coming to Vanderbilt) have sophisticated networks which act as pipelines, cultivating students while in school and then supporting them once they are in practice and beyond. It is not an accident that it is far quicker to count the number of federal judicial nominees from the current administration that have not been members of the Federalist Society than the opposite.
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Networking is a topic that this column will probably turn to several more times, but for now, let’s talk about how you can help Career Services. Now, I should preface this section by pointing out that structure and function of a law school CSO is going to vary highly from school to school. What might be true for me at Vanderbilt could very well be antithetical to how other CSOs operate. I also want to stress to any Vanderbilt students reading this column that, rest assured, I am not subtweeting (subblogging?) anyone in what follows. That being said, as a student (or even an alum), the first thing you are probably wondering is, “Why should I help Career Services, shouldn’t it be the other way around?” The answer is that yes, CSOs exist to work with students, but the more you help Career Services, they more they can help you.
Tell your CSO about your career goals and, more importantly, tell them if and when those goals change. It is perfectly fine, and indeed, somewhat normal, to want to be an appellate litigator as a 1L, only to have a burning desire to be an M&A attorney as a 3L; but if you keep this change of heart to yourself, you run the risk of missing out on outstanding employment opportunities. Employers will frequently reach out to Career Services looking for candidates to fill an opening. While these positions can be broadcast to the entire student body, often times, employers want a carefully curated list of potential candidates. The only way I will know to include you on that list is if I know what you want to do and where you want to be. In short, I do not know anything about you unless you tell me.
Not only should does Career Services need to be kept abreast of changing career interests, but they also need to know when a student lands a job, be it for 1L summer, 2L summer, or even for after graduation. It cannot be overstated how much of the work done by a CSO deals with tracking and reporting employment data. Accurate record keeping is vital. Such information is, hopefully, of great value to prospective students when making their law school selection, but it is remarkably time consuming to collect, a process that is made all the more difficult by students who are secretive with their employment status or just non-responsive.
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That segues nicely into the next point which is simply, answer your CSO when they ask you a valid question. More often than not, if you are getting an email from a career counselor asking you about your job status, how an interview went, whether you were able to make contact with a particular alum, etc., they are asking not merely to make e-conversation, but rather, because they need to know that answer for some internal metric. And if that email is the first time that you have heard from Career Services in a while, remember that there is not a personal vendetta in the office against you. Career counselors are human. While we would love to spend all of our time with each student/alum, there are a lot of you and a finite amount of time, unless . . .
If you send a note to a counselor that you need your résumé reviewed and the job posting closes in two hours, you will have managed to both demonstrate a remarkable lack of time management abilities and imply that you think your issues trump that of all your other classmates.
Finally, perhaps the most important thing to remember about Career Services is that its role is distinct from that of a headhunter/recruiter. It is a delineation between job advising and job placement. Yes, there might be some instances where I will go all Roger Sterling, break out my 21st century version of a rolodex (i.e., my email/cell phone contacts list), and start calling people to directly place a student in a job, but those situations are atypical and if there are not enough hours in the day to give each student undivided attention, there definitely is not enough time to track down a job for everyone. Instead, the role that my colleagues and I play is to show you the best ways to get the job(s) that you will need to secure the job you really want either after graduation or at whatever point in your legal career you might be.
Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at [email protected].