You should be looking at OCIP as just one tool in your job search toolbox. Those who rely exclusively on OCIP are limiting themselves to a very small slice of the larger legal marketplace (i.e., primarily very large, private sector defense-side corporate law firms).

Take charge of your own career decisions. Consider:

• b-Line jobs: Apply directly to many employers who want to recruit Boalt students, but are unable to visit campus. Listings are updated on a daily basis so check back frequently

•applying directly to employers not participating in the OCIP and not in b-Line (contact a CDO attorney-counselor for help in identifying appropriate targets)

•Public Interest: Work with Linda Maranzana, our public interest attorney counselor. Also, be sure to check out pslawnet.org.

•Public Sector: Work with Eric Stern, our public sector cuonselor. The Government Honors and Internships Handbook is a good place to start your research.

•Use your network: Explore other options with the @Cal Career Network, the Boalt Alumni Network, or contact your undergraduate institution to access its career network opportunities.

In pursuing these other options, you should be sensitive to the timeframe that other employers may be on in considering candidates for positions. For example, regional firms in other cities may be conducting on campus interviews right now at their local law schools. So, it’s not always best to be waiting to see how OCIP works out for you before pursuing other avenues for securing a summer or permanent position.
Talk to one of the attorney-counselors to develop of parallel strategy to OCIP.

Each Fall, some number of students return to Boalt from their summer jobs without an offer of permanent employment. While this is a difficult situation to be in, it need not become an insurmountable obstacle to finding satisfying employment. CDO’s Strategies for Success When You Do Not Receive An Offer From Your Summer Employer (available on the Guides and Webcasts page of the CDO website) covers some well-proven strategies for succeeding in the on-campus interview program and in other types of job searches. If you would like to discuss your situation (in confidence) with a attorney-counselor, please make an appointment.

Hope everyone is hanging in there as we pass the midpoint for OCIP. We know it’s an exhausting process on a lot of levels, but we hope you can muster some enthusiasm and energy for the employers who are coming during the second week. They are just as interested in Berkeley Law students as those who were lucky enough to have been assigned the first interview days. Among them may be the one that best matches your skills and interests, but you will never know if you choose not to attend the interview.

Here are some things to keep in mind at this stage:

1. If you do not have a good sense of how you are doing at this point, it may make sense to hedge your bets and sign yourself into some additional open slots for next week. There are some great employers (especially those in Palo Alto, LA, and Orange County) that have openings on their schedules at this point. They are making a special trip to come see Berkeley Law students – why not take full advantage?

2. Be mindful of the cancellation policy – you need to cancel by 5pm no less than 3 days before an interview (e.g., 5pm Tuesday is the deadline for cancelling your next Friday interviews), otherwise you have to attend. This means that you should be looking at your interview schedule now for the second week of OCIP, doing your research, and cancelling any in which you are definitely not interested.

Generally, you all have been very conscientious about this and we really appreciate your professionalism (and the consideration you’ve demonstrated for your fellow classmates). However, as OCIP continues, fatigue may heighten the temptation to be a “no-show” or to try to cancel at the very last minute with a non-emergency-based excuse. We hope you understand that we will not be in a position to accommodate these kinds of last minute changes.

Cancelling or not showing up doesn’t just have an impact on you and your schedule. Cancellations affect the employers and current and future Berkeley law students. Employers need time to adjust their travel or work plans to accommodate interview schedule changes. We also need to allow some reasonable amount of time for students to sign in to the slot opened up by cancellations. Finally, an employer faced with several last minute cancellations and no one to fill the schedule gaps may decide not to come to OCIP in the future or may conclude (however unfairly) that Berkeley Law students in general are not reliable.

The enforcement mechanism for this policy (which we need in order to prevent abuse of the system) is that you risk having your remaining interviews cancelled if you don’t follow it (i.e., if you do not show up for an interview and do not have a good emergency-based reason for failing to attend).

If you are truly ill or an emergency arises on the day of your interview and you cannot attend, please contact the Career Development Office at 642-4567 not the Hotel Durant. This should be done only in emergencies or if you are a 3L who has accepted an offer (in which case you will be canceling all your remaining interviews).

As you all know, on-campus interviews begin at the Hotel Durant (Durant and Bowditch) on Monday, August 25th. Please review your interview schedules on b-Line to ensure that you know the date and time of all your interviews. Remember to bring copies of your resume, transcript, writing sample and list of references to each one of your interviews. You should also have extra copies of these items for your hospitality suite visits (list of hospitality suites/receptions can be found on the homepage of b-Line).

WHERE TO GO ON INTERVIEW DAYS

The room numbers for each of your interviews can be found in the b-Line under the Scheduled Interviews tab. Please make sure you know in which room your interview is being held and try to be there a few minutes in advance of the start time. Interviewers do sometimes run over time, so don’t be surprised if the schedule is running a bit behind, especially if your interview is in the late morning or late afternoon.

The Regents room of the Durant Hotel will be available for you to use as a lounge/waiting area between interviews. It’s located on the first floor (which is actually one floor above the main entrance to the Hotel). We will be placing a couple of desktop computers in each one in case you need to do some quick research. As a back-up, the schedule of firms interviewing each day and their locations (room numbers) will be posted on the bulletin board outside the Regents Room as of about 8:15 am each morning.

INTERVIEWER NAMES

It’s not unusual for employers not to know who they are sending to interviews until relatively last minute. We have asked them — as soon as they know — to enter that information into b-Line. If they have done so, you should be able to see them by viewing the interview details (Click on the Scheduled Interviews tab and then on the underlined interview date). Don’t be surprised if they have not done so, or, if you wind up with a different interviewer than the one they’ve indicated because of a last minute substitution. We do track actual interviewer names as they check in on the morning of the interview, and we enter (or revise) them in b-Line by 10:00 am.

BEING FLEXIBLE

There may be last minute employer cancellations or interviewer substitutions. Interview rooms may also be changed. Please check your email frequently (at least once, preferably twice, a day) — for these types of messages, we will be using your b-Line Profile email address. We will give as much advance warning as we can, but please remember we cannot always do so. We know this is a stressful process for you, but please try to be as flexible (and as patient with us) as you can, as we try to accommodate the needs of nearly 400 employers and 400 students over the course of more than 7000 interviews.

QUESTIONS

There will be CDO staff at the hotel during certain portions of the day, but most questions should be handled by going directly to our office, which will be open an hour earlier, from 8:00 am -5:00 pm, from August 25 - Sept.8th. If you encounter a situation during an interview that you feel is inappropriate, please bring it to my attention right away.

CANCELING INTERVIEWS

Remember also that, if you must cancel an interview, you need to do so via b-Line by the cancellation deadline, which is 5:00 p.m. no less than three days prior to the interview date. After that, cancellations can only be accepted for emergencies and only by contacting me (do not contact the employer directly or the Hotel Durant). Unexcused failures to attend will put your remaining interviews at risk.

PROFESSIONALISM

You should maintain a professional demeanor during every moment you are at the Hotel and not just during your actual interviews. Employers will be milling about the Hotel – in the Lobby, the elevators, the hallways (and in their rooms — with the doors open to the hallways — when they are not interviewing) and will have the opportunity to observe you and perhaps (unintentionally) overhear your conversations in the public spaces of the Hotel.

KEEPING PERSPECTIVE AND BEING SUPPORTIVE

We hope that you will continue to support one another through this process. One of School’s greatest strengths is the way in which members of our community support one another. OCIP can bring out a competitive side in some, which can put a strain on this sense of community. Take it seriously and prepare thoroughly, but remember that getting an offer through OCIP does not mean that you are a better person or even that you are more likely to succeed as a legal professional.

If you find you are doing well and getting “call-backs,” that’s great, but please keep in mind that some of the people you may be talking to — or who may be within earshot of you in Cafe Zeb or at the Hotel or in the library — may be less certain of how they are doing. There are also many of your classmates who have chosen to forego OCIP entirely because it does not fit with their career paths. They may not have their summer job plans finalized until much later. So, please consider the impact of your words on those around you before you start talking about your OCIP results or asking others about theirs.

Best of luck!

Deadline Approaching for DOJ Summer Internship and Post-Graduate Honors Programs

If you are a 2L planning on applying for the Summer Legal Internship Program (SLIP) or a 3L planning on applying for the Attorney General’s Honors Program, the deadline to apply is September 2nd, 2008 at Midnight (EST). For more information on how to apply for SLIP, please click here.

For information about the Honors Program, please click here.

ATTENTION 3L STUDENTS: Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) Program

If you are interested in policy, anaylsis or other non-attorney management-type positions with the government, you should explore options under the PMF Program. For general information, click here.

Contact Eric Stern — estern@law.berkeley.edu — in the CDO for more details. 3L students will be able to apply on-line between October 1, 2008 and October 15, 2008.

Interested in Government Summer Internship & Post-Graduate Opportunities?

UPCOMING PROGRAM
Public Sector Summer and Post-Graduate Job Search Strategies
100 Boalt Hall
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
12:45 PM to 1:45 PM
In addition to the public sector employers participating in Fall OCIP, there are a number of high-profile federal, state and local government agencies with summer and post-graduate opportunities that have upcoming application deadlines. CDO Associate Director Eric Stern will highlight and overview the resources and strategies you need to succeed in your summer and post-graduate public sector job search.

UPDATED ON-LINE RESOURCES
If you are interested in pursuing summer internship or post-graduate opportunities with federal, state and local government agencies, you should review the 2008-09 Government Honors and Internship Handbook, a link to which can be found on our Public Sector Careers page.

New Government Careers List Serve
If you are interested in signing up for the new CDO Government Careers List Serve, please send an email to Eric Stern at estern@law.berkeley.edu to be added.

California Attorney General’s Office
Third year students may register for the Graduate Legal Assistant (post-bar clerk) or Deputy Attorney General exam online. The exam determines your placement on the hiring list. The exam is not substantive, but more like an employment application. To register go here, and then examination request form. The exams are given several times per year. The lists are good for one year. You cannot be considered for employment if you are not on the hiring list.

1. Both OCIP sessions — Phase 1 and Phase 2 — are now “live” on the b-Line, so be mindful of which session you are in when you are viewing employers (and when entering your conflicts). You navigate back and forth between sessions via the session search filter box on the OCI homepage.

2. Remember to enter your conflicts for Phase 2 dates. If you need to change or delete an existing conflict because you’ve dropped a class or for some other reason, you can do so by clicking on the blue shaded area that represents the conflict on the b-line conflict entry calendar and selecting “delete.”

3. In reviewing the Phase 1 schedules, we noticed openings for several excellent firms in NY, LA and also in other cities like Seattle, Sacramento, Irvine, Palo Alto, Boston and Chicago.

Even if you received 15 interviews as a result of bidding, you don’t have to limit yourself to just those 15, especially if you feel uncertain about your interviewing skills, have limited work experience or did not do as well academically as you would have liked. People who fit this profile have found some success in interviewing broadly, in large legal markets like LA and NY, and in smaller regional markets as well.

So, if you think you can benefit from interviewing broadly and think you can do so consistent with the demands of your course load, consider signing up for additional interviews.

NOTE: It’s possible that an employer with open slots may be one on which you bid unsuccessfully. That could have happened because: either you reached your maximum of 15 interviews before b-Line got to your bid, or the open time slots conflicted with your class schedule (or some other conflict you entered), or the allocation that the employer requested for your class year may have been reached (especially for 3Ls). In any case, you are free to sign up for any open slot on the schedules regardless of their requested allocation.

OPEN SIGN-UPS PROCESS:

To determine whether an employer’s schedule contains open time slots, review the “Available Dates” column on the employer list in the OCI section of b-Line (be sure you have selected Phase 1 as the session in the search field). For employers with available time slots, the date in that column will be enclosed in a box and have the appearance of a button. (Employers whose schedules are full will not have a “clickable” button in the Available Dates column.) Click on the date button to review the available times and sign up for a slot.

Do not sign up for an open slot with an employer whose permitted hiring prerequisites you do not meet.

If you are already on a schedule of a multiple office firm that requires that you interview only once for a firm, b-Line will not allow you to sign up for a second interview slot. You put both interviews at risk if you attempt to do so.

New open slots will be created whenever a student cancels an interview. Cancellations occur in real time. Accordingly, if you are interested in a particular employer, you should check the employer’s schedule regularly because slots may open up at any time during the permissible cancellation period.
At the time you sign up for an open slot, you will be able to specify which uploaded version of your resume you want to make available to the employer. If you do not select a version, b-Line will allow your “default” version to be viewed and downloaded by this employer.

Phase I Schedules are now available — click on the “Scheduled Interviews” tab of the OCI Section of b-Line to view them.

Some things to keep in mind at this stage of OCIP:

1. You can cancel an interview online up until 5PM no less than 3 days prior to the interview date. After that, cancellations can only be accepted for emergencies and only by contacting Assisant Dean Terry Galligan in the CDO (do not contact the employer directly or the Hotel Durant). Unexcused failures to attend will put your remaining interviews at risk.

We have had to put this policy in place and strictly enforce it for at least two reasons: 1) in order to give adequate notice to employers — many of whom are traveling a great distance to meet with Boalt students, and whose travel or work plans may need to be re-arranged in response to a change in their interview schedules; and 2) to protect positive and productive working relations with employers for the benefit of your fellow students and future Boalt students.

2. You can sign yourself up for open interview slots beginning tomorrow and up to the evening before the interview date. See page 8-9 of the OCIP Guide for details on how to do so. New open slots will be created whenever a student cancels an interview, so check frequently.

3. You are not free to give away your interview slot to any other student, nor to trade slots.

However, in the event of an unforeseen or unexpected conflict, you will be able to seek permission to switch your time slot with any other willing student who is on your same schedule with the same employer (firm and office). For details, see page 10 of the OCIP Guide. I would ask that you seek this permission as sparingly as you can — last year, students participating in OCIP felt oppressed by all of the emails they were getting from their classmates on their schedules asking if they would switch!

4. If there is a change affecting OCIP generally, it will be communicated via this listserv. If there is a change that affects only certain schedules, we will send a message to the email address listed in the b-Line profile of every affected student, so insure your b-Line profile email address is up-to-date and your email box is in working order, and check it every day during OCIP.

5. Bring extra photocopies of your resume, writing sample, list of references and photocopies of your transcript to each interview (for more information about references and writing samples, see page 12 the OCIP Guide). Employers do not get an advance look at your transcript and you should politely decline any request you receive from an employer to provide one in advance of your interview (you should tell them the CDO instructed you to do so). If you have not already done so, you should pick up your transcript from Simon Hall Room 789 (if you are a 2L) or from the Registrar (if you are a 3L who pre-ordered one).

6. What if your bid on an employer you were really interested in was not successful? See OCIP FAQ number 7 (FAQ is available at Fall OCIP webpage).

7. Phase 2 bidding opens tomorrow! Check the OCIP Calendar for Phase 2 dates and deadlines

Lavender Law Conference and Career Fair, September 4-6, 2008 at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero in San Francisco.  The event will feature two dozen workshops on cutting-edge legal issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals and the community, as well as a Career Fair with over two-hundred employers.  For more information, visit: http://www.lavenderlaw.org or contact Eric Stern (estern@law.berkeley.edu).

Equal Justice Works Conference and Career Fair,  October 10-11, 2008, Washington D.C.  This annual public interest career fair includes employers and law students from across the country, with a particular emphasis on East Coast organizations. Student registration will begin in August.  You can apply to interview with attending employers in advance of registering.  Please visit the rolling list of 2008 Career Fair employers and follow the directions specified by each employer on how to apply.  For more information, please http://www.equaljusticeworks.org/events/ccf/student/.  As an EJW member school, we receive a limited number of free registrations.  If you would like to attend, please contact Linda Maranzana (lmaranzana@law.berkeley.edu) for more information.

Peggy Browning Fund National Law Students Workers’ Rights Conference, October 17-18, 2008 in Silver Spring, MD.  The Conference aims to create greater understanding of the issues facing American workers, as well as to provide law students with opportunities for networking with fellow law students, top labor lawyers, professors, nonprofit practitioners and government officials.  For more information visit: www.peggybrowningfund.org.  Only 3 students per school may register and slots will be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.  Please contact Linda Maranzana (lmaranzana@law.berkeley.edu) if you are interested in attending.

Firms Sponsoring Split Public Interest Summers — Several law firms have instituted programs that enable law students to work part of the summer with the firm, and part of the summer with a public interest organization, with the firm paying the students’ salaries for the entire summer.  A list of these firms, which was updated over the summer, and a description of their programs can be found on the Fall OCIP webpage of the CDO website.

3Ls -  A number of state and federal agencies have Honors Programs from which they do much, if not all, of their permanent entry level hiring.  Many have early fall deadlines.  For details, please review the 2008-09 Government Honors and Internship Handbook, available online via the Public Sector section of the CDO website (under “Jobs” on the right sidebar of the CDO homepage).

One such Honors Program is offered by the U.S. Department of Justice.  The application deadline is Monday, September 2, 2008.  Information and an application, which must be completed online, can be found at: http:// www.usdoj.gov/oarm/oppls.htm.

If you have any questions about summer or permanent positions with federal, state or local government agencies, please feel free to contact or set up an appointment with Eric Stern in the CDO (estern@law.berkeley.edu or 510-643-4260).

Many deadlines for postgraduate project-based fellowships land early in the Fall semester, and deadlines for organization based fellowships fall throughout the Fall and into Spring.  The most comprehensive online resource for identifying fellowship opportunities is www.PSLawNet.org (online registration required – but its free).  In addition, PSLawNet provides a very useful, updated calendar of Fellowship deadlines, and a fellowship guide, both available under the “Postgraduate Fellowships” link on the left hand side of the home page.  You can also search for fellowship opportunities in the b-Line, by choosing “Post-Graduate Fellowship” or “Fellowship Sponsor” option from the “Position Type” pulldown menu.  Visit the Post-Graduate Fellowships page of the CDO website for additional information and helpful links, including the CDO’s online publication “Public Interest Fellowships and Funders.”

In addition, Linda Maranzana is available to assist you in all steps of the Fellowship application process, from identifying opportunities, to reviewing application materials, to preparing for interviews.  Please feel free to call, email or set up an appointment with her.