A Meticulously Edited Stream of Consciousness

I sat down to write this entry and I didn’t know what to write. Not because I did’t have anything to say today, but because there are so many things I want to write about that I don’t know where to start. 

Should I give you a riveting synopsis of a lecture I just saw about death penalty litigation in the State of Georgia? And I do use the term ‘lecture’ loosely. Christian Lamar - Deputy Director of Litigation at the Georgia Capital Defender - brought a small but surprising bit of levity to the topic. It was just enough to keep the audience engaged, but not enough to appear unseemly under the circumstances. 

Or should I tell you about a little phenomenon I call ‘law school guilt’? You feel guilty when you miss an event of some significance to a person of some significance in your life. You feel guilty when you have to say to a friend, “I know you are having a personal crisis right now, but I have sixty pages of Constitutional Law reading to finish by tomorrow morning.” You feel guilty when your voice mailbox gets so full that it actually starts sending the voicemails back to the people who left them. You feel guilty that you can’t drop what you are doing and drive to your home town on a whim to spend time with your loved ones. And if you do talk to that friend in crisis, or make that whimsical trip home, you feel really guilty that you neglected your schoolwork. (Luckily for me this last one is the guilt I find most tolerable.) You may encounter at least one, and in some cases a combination, of the above, and in many cases you need to be willing to make a less-than-pleasant choice.  I can tell you from experience that in surprisingly many cases your loved ones will understand.

Or should I tell you about the irony in the fact that last summer I had one job offer and this year I have already turned down two offers and accepted one? I guess that puts me in a position to share meaningful insight from both ends of that spectrum. Finding the right summer position is one of the little known challenges of law school. And depending on the type of position a person is seeking that particular challenge can be daunting indeed. To the extent that you’ve chosen a particular path, show potential employers that you have the clarity of purpose to stick with it. Seek continuity in your resumé. Even before you start your summer job hunt, be sure to pursue activities that offer a readily identifiable foothold into your future goals. That is not to say you should limit yourself in the activities you choose. By all means, explore. But if that foothold is not readily identifiable, be prepared to discuss how that particular experience fits in with your ultimate goal. Think about how the skills inherent in each position on your resumé will contribute to your likelihood of attaining your ultimate goal.

It’s amazing how different aspects of different experiences can emerge to claim different measures of importance in one’s life. For instance, a person may accept a particular position because it brings with it potential exposure to someone on whom it would be very beneficial to make an impression. Or because it allows the flexibility to pursue other aspects of one’s personal path, such as a summer course to lighten one’s Fall course load. Or it may present the type of opportunity that is immensely valuable and equally rare, such as filing briefs and motions with a state or federal court. So think long and hard about how you will spend your law school summers, because that decision is infinitely more important than it was in college.

So as you can see I cheated today. I didn’t actually choose a topic.  But I figured I would be pleased with myself as long as I got through this entire entry without mentioning Don Imus.  And that was no easy feat.