all that normal humans need to know about my law firm interviews

Lots of folks have asked me questions about the on-campus interviews I’m currently doing. There are really only a few things normal human beings need to know about this process:

• Older, non-lawyer to me in elevator: ‘What? You’re not wearing black? Didn’t you get the memo?’ Honestly. I’ll never again be able to be wild and crazy by wearing a light grey herringbone suit. I’m treasuring it while it lasts.
• ~500 Columbia students, averaging 30 interviews each (I did 33), over five days, over 18 stories of one hotel, with shockingly few serious problems. The Columbia organizing staff is amazing (and actually live here for the duration.)
• We have breaks (at least five minutes, usually forty minutes to two hours) between the 20 minute interviews; interviewers typically do them back-to-back-to-back all day. Not easy for either the interviewer or the interviewee to be charming and cheerful all through that, but most actually seem to manage- I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations.
• After this is callbacks- firms that you’ve sufficiently charmed in these 20 minute sessions call you back, and you go to their offices to spend a half-day talking to folks and often doing lunch. From there they make the decision that marks the start of the rest of your life, and let you know; we have until early December to call them back with our final decision.

I think that’s it… been interesting, that is for sure, and frankly much more fun than I expected- I’ve met some interesting people, and it is almost a shame that I have to pick one and only one.

[I should note that going through this process doesn’t mean I had a bad time at Red Hat- I had a great time there, and I really look forward to working with some of the folks there in the future. But it just isn’t the right place for the next step of my career, so here I am doing lots and lots of interviews. Will write more about the summer soon.]