On Campus Interviews: Interviews (Part 1)

This post is part of a mini-series about my experience with my first round of On Campus Interviews at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law. (Post 1: Interview Sign-ups ; Post 2: Interviews Part 1; Post 3: Interviews Part 2.)

Yesterday I wrote about signing up for On Campus Interviews. Today I will talk about the interviews I’ve had so far.

1L On Campus Interviews (OCIs) started here at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law Monday February 15th and will continue on through Friday March 5th. Interviews are held from about 9am – 5pm, but this depends on the particular employer, in one of several interview rooms here on campus.

When you sign up for an interview you get to select which time slot you would like. However, there will inevitably be people who had to choose a slot during class. Typically those students come to class and try to sneak out a few minutes before their interviews – the professors don’t seem to mind. It’s pretty simple to tell which students have interviews that day because while everyone else is wearing jeans (or other “normal” college attire), they are wearing suits.

I’ve been to three of my scheduled interviews so far and have found them quite unlike any other interview I’ve been to.  (Based on my conversations with other students who have been interviewing, I believe that my OCIs are typical of all the OCIs held here so far.)  During past interviews I’ve been to, the interviewer MIGHT give a very brief overview of the company, the department, or the job, but they typically jump immediately into a series of questions.

The On Campus Interviews, that I’ve been to so far, have a much different approach. The interviewer(s) spends at least half of the interview talking about the firm or company and have very little, if any, questions to ask. They have been much more conversational, and not so Question-Answer orientated. In fact, immediately after one interview I spoke with someone who asked about the interview. I made the comment that they didn’t ask me a single question during the whole interview. But after thinking about it a bit more in depth I realized that they had actually asked nearly a half-dozen questions. They were just cloaked within a more general conversation. Initially this surprised me, as I was expecting to be psychoanalyzed through a bombardment of paradoxical questions. I like it much better the way it is.

On Campus Interviews: Sign-ups

This post is part of a mini-series about my experience with my first round of On Campus Interviews at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law. (Post 1: Interview Sign-ups ; Post 2: Interviews Part 1; Post 3: Interviews Part 2.)

I probably should have made this post a month or so ago but I’ve been busy. Sometime shortly after grades were released, but before class rankings had been calculated, sign-ups began for On Campus Interviews. These interviews are primarily for summer, spring and fall clerkships, but I believe that 3L’s may actually interview for associate positions (don’t quote me on this). Career Services runs OCI through Symplicity.

Each student is allowed to sign up for as many interviews as they would like, but each student is only able to sign up for four interviews in a 24-hour period. After that 24-hour period has passed, students can sign up for four more interviews. An announcement was sent out several weeks in advance telling us when sign-ups would begin. I can’t recall exactly what time they began, but it was either 6 or 7 AM. So for several days I set the alarm extra early to ensure that I would be able to sign-up for all the interviews that I wanted.

This year 1L students had the opportunity to sign up for interviews with up to thirteen firms or companies. I’ll be honest though, most spots were full midway through the second day. So while there may be an exception or two, I doubt anyone landed more than eight interviews. I’d say the average was far fewer than eight.. but how would I know?

The employers included few bigger Arkansas law firms,  a few mid-small sized firms, the Arkansas Attorney General, JAG (Air Force & Army), and an in-house position for an Arkansas based business. The length and quantity of interviews is up to the individual employer, but the average time slot is 15-20 minutes.

Each employer had their own requirements for interviewees. All of them required a resume to be uploaded, many required transcripts, some required writing samples, while others also required cover letters. Almost every employer had scholastic requirements with the two most common being “Top Third of Class” or “3.0 GPA required”. Others required top 20%, and at least one had no scholastic requirement. A couple employers requested that their applicants be interested in a particular area of law.

I spent the weekend prior to the start of sign-ups reviewing the employers that would be interviewing. My goal was to prioritize them in such a way as to maximize the number of interviews I would have with those employers I wanted to clerk for. I rated each employer on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is a place I would NOT work and 10 is a place that I would LOVE to work. I then bumped down those employers who had an above average quantity of interviews and higher scholastic requirements, and thus a smaller pool of applicants. This gamble allowed me to push to the second day interviews that I believe would not fill up on the first day. It worked out fairly well as I was able to schedule seven interviews out of my top eight choices.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, sign-ups were a month or so ago and On Campus Interviews have already started. Check back soon for information on the actual interviews.

Diversity Day

Diversity Day will be celebrated all day. I have no idea what these celebrations will include, but I do know that they will last all day. That is all.

The Busier I Get, The More I Want To Do

Give me a week off with nothing to do, and I will accomplish that mission every time. But give me a week full appointments or tasks, and I will find a way to squeeze in a few extra activities. I’m not exactly sure why this is.  But perhaps this behavior is what causes some people to go to the gym for six hours a day, or fry in a tanning bed seven days a week. I really hate to use those examples because I tend to think of this behavior as a positive thing. As long as I am busy, I continue to keep myself busy.

This realization has been creeping up on me for years, but I wasn’t fully aware of its potential until law school.  I am busier in law school than I was throughout most of my undergrad (despite working up to forty hours a week with full-time classes during college).

But I keep making myself busier and busier. I’m constantly volunteering for more activities. I’m working on a few larger side-projects that I will eventually post about, but often times I find myself volunteering for smaller things. For instance, due to a student who recently dropped, my RWA professor asked for a pair of students to volunteer to give their oral arguments on two occasions. Because I enjoy speaking in front of people, but believe it is a skill that I need much more practice in, I convinced my partner that this was a good idea. (SIDE NOTE: His response, which I found quite amusing, was “Sure… I guess… I suppose I feel confident enough in myself to make people listen to me talk multiple times.”) I’m not sure if the professor will end up choosing us, but this is just the sort of thing that I keep getting myself into.

I’ve just remembered that I have yet to talk about my classes this semester. I’ll add this to my list.

Bowen Online

I have had a recent spike in visitors to the UALR Law Student blog recently. Initially this puzzled me, but I eventually tracked down the source of these additional visitors. Someone at UALR School of Law has recently added a “Bowen Online”  link in the “About Us” section of the school’s official website (OR it has been there and I haven’t noticed it until recently).

This new section lists, among other things, two student blogs:  Law School: What’s the Big Deal? and UALR Law Student. The neat thing about finding my blog on the official page is that I have not spoken to any administrators about my blog.

For those who have been reading this blog from the beginning, you may recall that in my first post I gave several reasons why I was creating this blog. My number one reason was:

Information for future Bowen students. Many months ago, after being accepted at Bowen, I tried my darnedest to find as much information on the day to day events of a UALR Law student as I could. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a whole lot of information. So this is my attempt to put a little more information out there.

I think the Bowen Online page is a great idea and a great way for people considering the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law to gain an insight into student life. Now if we can only get a few more student bloggers.

Snow Days

Those of you who may be reading this from up north somewhere may find this amusing but… when it snows down here in Arkansas we go bonkers. Walmart sells out of bread, schools close down & only a few people go to work.

Well… we got a few inches of snow on Sunday night. That means that school was canceled on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday. Closing classes on Monday made sense. I can at least understand why classes were canceled Tuesday because some of the snow had melted on Monday but had refrozen Monday night. I have no idea why classes were canceled on Wednesday.

But this is four classes that were canceled because of weather in the last couple weeks. I have a feeling that classes will be canceled again tomorrow if we get the inch or two of snow that is expected tonight. I’m not even going to attempt to figure out how many classes have been canceled this semester because a professor was ill, or how many “pre-planned” class cancellations (usually these have to do with a professors speaking obligations).

Folks, this isn’t undergrad. All missed classes will be made up. In fact, I just received the following email from Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Valerie D. Nation:

Just a reminder that law school policy requires that classes cancelled due to inclement weather be made up. The purpose of this policy is to ensure that we comply with the ABA accreditation standards (requiring a certain number of class minutes per credit hour etc.).

I knew this would happen but I didn’t expect them to give us the options they did. The law school sent us an email survey to decide how to make up the classes. Here were the two options:

Which option for making up Feb. 8-10 classes do you prefer?

Which option for making up Feb. 8-10 classes do you prefer?   Attend class for two days (Tuesday and Wednesday classes) on Tuesday and Wednesday of reading week and add one Saturday (Monday classes) replacing all three days. Make up all three days of class during the weekend – three Saturdays.

Calling All Central Arkansas Legal Bloggers

If you are a blogger in Little Rock or Central Arkansas whose blog is related to the legal field, please let me know so that I can add a link to your blog somewhere on mine. This includes: Lawyers, Judges, Professors, Law Students, Future Law Students, UALR School of Law Administrators, Attorneys, Businesses, Not For Profit Organizations, and anyone else who has something to say about the legal field and/or law school.

Law School Exams – Part 3 (Civil Procedure I & Property I)

Continued from Law School Exams – Part 2 (Torts & Legal Research)

Civil Procedure was the next class. I felt pretty anxious through this exams for reasons I mentioned  in a previous post: A Suicide During Law School Finals. But all-in-all I felt fairly confident about my performance on this exam. Throughout the semester I heard more complaints about this class than I did from all the other classes combined. So my strategy for a strong grade in this class was to spend a longer studying for this than anyone else. I guess you could say that I wanted to be strongest where I felt others were weakest. I don’t recall exactly but I believe I finished up the exam a few minutes early. I probably could have written a lot more but I did not feel as rushed during this exam as I did for Torts and Contracts.

Property was by far the worst exam I took during my first semester at Bowen School of Law. I didn’t prepare all that much in the days prior as hearing of my friends suicide really took away a lot of my motivation. Also, while all the other classes had closely related principles that all tied together, Property seemed to be a collection of smaller, less-related principles. We also covered a huge amount of information. It also didn’t help that I took this test at 7:00AM with those of us who had to finish up earlier to attend the funeral.

(Note: Special thanks go out to the UALR School of Law and Dean DiPippa who arrived early for this exam and provided donuts, cookies and other breakfast snacks for those of us who were going to attend the funeral.)

I forgot all about that lesson I told you I learned from the Contracts Exam. I don’t recall the exact point distribution but I think there was a question worth 25 points. I spent a solid hour working on that answer and I have a good feeling that I answered it better than anyone else in our class. Unfortunately I spent so much time on it that I had to rush through two other 25 point questions and a 5 point question in an hour.

[Update: I checked my exam and I ended up getting 25/25 points on that first question but my other scores are more along the lines of what you would expect from a scenario such as this.]

Grade Distribution – 1L First Semester

In my Grades & Rankings post I posted the rankings of all 1L students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law. But for this post I will give the breakdown on how the grades in each class were distributed. I compiled this list from the Official Grade Distribution posted by the school. Last semester I mentioned (in Big Class, Small Class) that the courses were often broken down into smaller classes (sometimes called Sections). Well… in order for me to get a better grasp of how I compared to other students in each class I compiled this list.

Contracts:  A: 23,  B+: 33,  B: 49,  B-: 22,  C+: 19,  C: 6,  C-: 3,

D+: 4, D: 0, F: 0.

Torts: A: 28,  B+: 38,  B: 36,  B-: 25,  C+: 15,  C: 9,  C-: 6,

D+: 1,  D: 2,  F: 0.

Civil Procedure: A: 10,  B+: 10,  B: 2,  B-: 23,  C+: 21, C: 7,  C-: 3,

D+: 2,  D: 0,  F: 0.

Property: A: 5,  B+: 5,  B: 13,  B-: 14,  C+: 19,  C: 18,  C-: 18,

D+: 1,  D: 4,  F: 2.

Legal Research: A: 29;  B+: 27,  B: 24, B-: 27, C+: 15,  C: 15,  C-: 12,

D+: 7,  D: 1,  F: 2.

RWA (Prof. Gustafson): A: 1,  B+: 8,  B: 10,  B-: 3,  C+: 6,  C: 3,  C-: 2,

D+: 0,  D: 0,  F: 0.

SUPER BOWL PARTY!

… or not.

Instead of watching the game I will be cramming to finish my first Brief for RWA. The last thing I want to do is have a repeat of Memo 3.

Speaking of Memo 3, I ended up getting 5 points taken off for turning it in 3 minutes late. That reduced my grade for the whole class by 2.5 points (on a scale of 100). If you want a glimpse of the chaos that was Memo 3, check out one of my earlier posts.