Law Schools

What Happens If You Don’t Like Career Services?

Don't let personal tension derail your career prospects.

By  
on

A consistent theme since the start of this column is the need for law students to work closely with their school’s Career Services Office (or whatever career advising happens to be called at a particular school).  Establishing and cultivating this relationship can help students navigate the perplexing world of legal employment so they can land summer employment as both a 1L and a 2L, as well as a post graduation job. But as many of today’s 1Ls are quickly discovering during their first semester, choice can be an illusory concept in law school, not only when it comes to first-year faculty but also when it comes to those who staff an array of law school departments, including Career Services. As an only child raised by two very loving and doting parents, I can still have a hard time believing that anyone could not like me.

But having worked with hundreds of students during my time at Vanderbilt Law, it is fair to assume that I am not at the top of everyone’s holiday card list. So as a law student, what should you do if your relationship with Career Services sours?

First, try to figure out the source of your CSO frustration. Oftentimes, students turn away from Career Services because they are unable to secure a particular job. Even if this job is the sole reason a you came to law school, the inability to land that position may not lie entirely at the feet of a particular career counselor. Yes, there are instances when a bad piece of advice can harm a candidate’s chances, but in my admittedly limited experience, those circumstances are few and far between. More likely is that a multitude of circumstances, most entirely outside the control of Career Services, caused a particular career path to hit a roadblock. If this is the root of your ire, consider redirecting that anger to a more deserving target.

That being said, there are times when someone in Career Services can take an action that is truly harmful, be it abusive, discriminatory, or something else altogether. In those situations, a student’s anger is more than justified and swift action should be taken by both CSO and the law school administration to ensure said student has proper and competent career guidance.

The structure of a law school’s CSO will determine a student’s ability to forge a new relationship with Career Services if the existing one has fallen apart. Many, if not the significant majority, of law schools have a CSO staffed by multiple counselors. In that case, the best course of action would be to work with someone else in the office — if a student has an issue with multiple CSO counselors, then they would be advised to read the previous paragraph on misdirected ire. At some schools, students can pick and choose counselors based on availability at a particular time. In such a circumstance, the way to work with someone else is relatively straightforward. However, at some schools (Vanderbilt included) students are assigned to a particular counselor and are expected to work with that individual during the entire period of their enrollment. If you find yourself in the latter circumstance, talk to your counselor about switching to someone else. While the counselor might initially feel a pang of hurt feelings, especially if there were no signs of the student’s unhappiness, everyone who works in CSO wants what is best for the student and most likely to help them on the road to employment — indeed, it is a necessary condition for continued employment. If that includes a new CSO counselor, then so be it. In the unlikely circumstance that your counselor is reluctant to discuss a change, talk to the Dean of Career Services or someone else in a position of authority who can help ensure such a transition takes place.

For those students who go to a law school in which there is only a single member of Career Services, switching to another counselor is impossible. However, it is still likely that you are going to need help traversing the legal job market. If the relationship with the CSO cannot be repaired, find someone else in the law school who can serve as an informal mentor/counselor. This could someone else on staff or a member of the faculty. While this individual might not have the same knowledge and contacts as would be the case in Career Services, having someone experienced to serve as a sounding board can be of vital importance to a successful job search.

Sponsored

When the relationship between Career Services staff and a student collapses, both sides can be tempted to blame the other with rudimentary, and flawed, criticisms. Students might see those who work in CSO as little more than high school guidance counselors with no real understanding of the legal job market. CSO staff might write off student complaints as the misplaced howls of millennials — a critique which is misplaced both because the popular perception of millennials is wildly inaccurate and because we are now, apparently, giving those who were college sophomores on 9/11 lifetime appointments to the U.S. Courts of Appeals. But neither party benefits from attacking the other and, ideally, any ruptured relationship can be repaired. However, if such a repair is impossible, students should make sure they are getting legal career advice from someone in the law school, be it from someone else in Career Services or a wholly different source. The legal job market can be difficult to traverse even when you have an experienced sherpa, but without one, the level of difficulty gets turned up to 11.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzLP2Z7JVZA&feature=youtu.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].

Sponsored

Topics

,