They're watching, man...

Long time since I posted. I have, in the past two months, attended the final two sessions of Writing for the Bar: session 3, in which we did another essay problem, and session 4, in which I learned that MBE questions are really hard. It's not that I'm surprised by this knowledge, it's just that there's a difference between intellectually knowing the MBE is hard and trying practice problems of which you only get 3 out of 10 right. (Our calmly smiling instructor assured us that we only need to get 60% of the questions right to do well, and that if we are scoring that at this point we are geniuses of some kind. Reminds me of the European grading systems, where students who are scored on everything by adding points from zero rather than taking away from 100 would no doubt laugh hysterically if they heard we stressed this much over bar exam grading.)

But my central preoccupation of late has been finding a job. I always had a plan of where I wanted to go and how...it just turns out that reality did not sign on to my plan. Additionally, my current job will end at the close of May, so as I don't relish starving to death I need to find some job of some kind, hopefully a law-related one that pays decently. It's really only come home to me recently that I have no idea what I'm doing. I wonder how you're supposed to learn these things: where to look for jobs, how to pick what to apply for, how to apply. I have a general sense of the procedure but still an overwhelming feeling of incompetence. I've never hunted for a serious job before; I came to law school straight out of undergrad, and there's not a whole lot of finesse involved in seeking summer employment at CVS. This is clearly an entirely different game.

I wonder how many of my classmates feel this desperate and lost; how many of them also feel stressed and depressed and ashamed that they are drifting Without Employment thus far. I wouldn't know, because it seems to be a taboo subject. You can ask what bar review someone decided on but nobody asks about jobs. If you see someone in a suit you might say, "Looking good," and ask what the occasion is. But they will tersely reply, "I have an interview" and there will be no mention of the employer and you will not ask; the word "job" isn't even used. I'm not sure if we're just all too stressed out to want to talk about it (there are days when I know if anyone asked me if I found a job yet I would burst into tears), or we're all paranoid about perhaps tipping off the person who is going to steal this job opportunity away. I can't really blame people for not wanting to tell me where they're applying, because I feel the same way.

3 years of cheerful cooperation are gone and we are suddenly all panthers slipping through the trees, too hurried and paranoid to stop to mark our territory, but so starved for meat we're prepared to kill others of our kind for it, then stand growling over the carcass to frighten others away. Grr. My job! Welcome to the workforce!

So yeah, that's about all I'm going to say publicly about the job hunt. It sucks and I have nothing yet and I'm still looking.