Interviewing

Anna,

I read your blog before making the decision to attend law school and right on through my 1L year. I've learned a lot. Thank you.

I attend the [deleted] School of Law and received a public interest fellowship to do a summer internship at [deleted], an NGO that provides free legal services to poor farmers in Cambodia. I'm part of the land law unit, which tries to protect rural farmers from land seizures.

In a nutshell, I signed on for a summer internship in a foreign country and have done almost no substantive legal work, partly because I was placed in a dysfunctional unit, partly because of the low English level of my colleagues, and partly because I'm having a hard time creating good opportunities to do legal work.

My dysfunctional unit. One problem is my colleagues and supervisors don't seem to do much. I nicknamed one attorney "man that stares at his cell phone" in honor of his 8 hour a day activity. The lack of work is partly due to the fact that government doesn't respond to motions, follow its own laws, or respect the court system. It's common to wait months for rulings, only to find out the court is "too busy" and will not issue any ruling at all, or the case file has been lost. As a result, the attorneys often wait around and do nothing.

I think my boss is depressed about the corruption. The program's two showcase lawsuits have been going on for 7 and 4 years respectively. In the first case, the local prosecutor has refused to correctly implement the presiding judge's verdict, and in the second case everyone involved in facilitating the fraudulent sale of indigenous land has admitted to taking bribes in a transaction that was, on its face, against the law (the land was sold to the sister of the Minister of Finance).

I should provide a little more context. At the end of the Vietnamese occupation following the Khmer Rouge, there were only a handful of lawyers in Cambodia. By 2007 there were 574. A good number work for NGOs and legal aid organizations. So it's understandable that attorneys have only a shallow pool of legal experience to draw upon when considering legal strategy, but we mainly do nothing. (A side note: At our organization the lack of activity is partly due to poor organizational structure. The bylaws allow the employees to elect the management team, which creates a huge disincentive for the management team to "crack the whip" leading to the current very weak executive director).

I know that one of the themes of your blog is that Gen Y's self-involvement leads to unreasonable expectations and more than an acceptable level of complaining. So I decided to create a writing project for myself where I would investigate how to go about filing a complaint in US courts against a Cambodian-American that dispossessed 23 families using armed men and bulldozers. I thought several allied NGOs were representing the families. I went to the province and met with people from the 3 other NGOs, but no one spoke sufficient English to discuss the case. I had to get the moto taxi driver to translate, which of course didn't work since the taxi driver's English was limited to "right, left" and not "motion, complaint." Then I went and interviewed an American ex-pat restaurant owner who witnessed the seizure. He was smoking pot during the interview. Anyway, long story short the NGOs weren't representing the families anymore because they never had actual title to the land and the Cambodian-American is politically connected and paid an acceptable bribe to the local families. The memo, while a nice academic exercise, would be functionally useless. Instead I'm writing another grant proposal and shadowing my boss to his infrequent meetings with court officials (going to an hour meeting in the provinces can take 3 days after factoring in driving).

But that's it. I've got an interesting story or two about the outrageous facts in the cases, but I haven't done much substantive legal work. In on campus interviews, I can show an attorney a picture of a client meeting with a monkey in the background but not a legal memo.

I am concerned about on campus interviews. Although I am doing public interest work this summer and will have meaningful service in my legal career, I would like to have the opportunity to work for a mid-size to larger local firm next summer and after graduation. My big hairy audacious goal is to be part of the legal community that shapes [US city's] land use regulations to meet the transportation and environmental challenges of the next century.

What advice do you have? I'm actually pretty down on my summer experience. The land law unit has a poor reputation with its donors and will probably lose its funding because of its failure to do much for its clients. For me personally, the unit's inactivity means I have a lot of dead time. I also haven't learned directly from any legal professionals that speak English well. When I'm asked to comment on what I did and how I liked it, I don't want to be too negative or dishonest. But honestly: "I sat around a lot in a foreign country, went to meetings that I didn't understand, and helped absolutely no one, in part, because the judicial system is utterly corrupt" is probably a conversation killer.

A final thought. Friends and family point to the value of a foreign experience and I think they're right. But for me, I think the marginal value of this experience is low. Like a lot of students that graduated from college around the time I did, I was fortunate enough to study abroad. I went to [deleted] for a semester. I also taught English in [deleted] after graduation for six months. Granted Cambodia is very different from either of those countries, but I still have a hard time saying with conviction that for me just being in a foreign country is a good use of my 1L summer.

I look forward to your thoughts. Any advice on how to spin gold out of this straw will be carefully studied. Thank you.

Holy cow, you've lived a lifetime in a summer. The only thing that could have been worse is if you'd spent the summer at Latham/Cravath/Kirkland/Perkins/BlahBlah. Seriously.

To prepare for interviews, you need to take the email you wrote me, put a far more positive spin on it, and outline at a practical level the barriers that stand between land-reform-in-theory and land-reform-in-practice. That’s the perfect (short) law review article to start writing now, and the fact that you've got it under way is a great talking point during an interview. "What did you do this summer?" "I started the summer trying to protect rural Cambodians from property seizure. The summer I got was more interesting than what I signed up for – I ended up studying what’s broken about the Cambodian legal system in practice, and now I’m writing an article about it." You're going to call it "Three Barriers to Real Property Protection in Cambodia," and I will be expecting a signed copy.

I also told a lawyer friend of mine about your predicament, and here's what he said:

It’s interesting because we’re trying to get a legal clinic going in Tanzania; that’s my next uber-project, I think. Same challenges all around, though we do expect less corruption than in Cambodia. We also expect just as much inactivity, lack of movement in the courts, etc. Property rights is a big thing.

If you take the narrow view of "what law did I practice?", then yeah, his experience is limited. But that’s not what law is in developing countries anyhow. My work in Tanzania so far has been spent trying to *see* a copy of the Tanzanian legal code. I finally did in South Africa, at the supreme court.

Incredibly experienced lawyers have a tough time getting anything done in the developing world, and you are at the teeny, weeny start of that learning curve. You have to start there, so try not to get frustrated just because you're facing as many hurdles as the superstar lawyers who are also getting stuck in the mire of "international law."

Back to interviews. What else can you do? You can talk about how grateful you are to be an American living in a country with laws and rights. You can talk about how hard it is to do any real legal work in a country where the government and the courts are hopelessly corrupt and no one bothers to do much about it. That’s not an interview killer; it’s an interview opener, especially if you approach it with humor and grace.

In the meantime, there's no need to mope around being depressed. You're there to help people, right? OK, you can’t do much legally, and I think you're right about that part of it. But you can do two things – you can learn and you can help. You should learn all you can about Cambodian law and government so that if it ends up being a country you care about, you can work for change there the rest of your life. You should go out into the community and do anything you can to help them. Teach English. Help with infrastructure projects. Pitch in at the local medical clinic. Anything. You went there not only to get experience for yourself, but to serve, right? So serve in whatever way you can, whether it's through your NGO or not. You'll be helping the people you came to help, albeit not in the way you originally intended. Add to that a positive attitude, good war stories, and a sense of humor, and law firms would be crazy not to hire you. They'll see a self-starter, a team player, and a smart guy who knows how to make lemonade. What more could you want in an employee?

You are also infinitely wiser than you were at the start of the summer. You've been up to your elbows in the glamorous world of "International Law" that every law school applicant and his brother swears he wants to practice. Good for you that you've gone out and done it, and figured out what that really means, and have a bunch of stories to tell.

And to think you could have been sitting around in some air-conditioned American law firm writing memos that no one will read about Section 226 of the Labor Code ("Social Security Number Truncation on Pay Stubs"). You are way, way ahead.

In case you're not sick to death of seeing me yack about the same topic over and over again.... This segment was on our local Fox affiliate in Boston. See the clip here.

There I days I don't miss being an admissions officer. Last week I attended an MBA admissions panel. I used to do those roadshows, where five admissions officers sit on a stage talking to an audience of hundreds about the admissions process in vague generalities and answer audience questions with vague generalities. Admissions officers are very limited in the candor they can express in public, but there were some nuggets that were dead on, so I'll condense them here and paraphrase a little bit:

1. If your college grades weren't so hot, be upfront about that and explain why. Show that you are in a better position now to do the work. How do you prove that? By taking classes and guiding your recommenders to cite examples from your job that could allay fears about your ability to hack it in a competitive academic environment. Admissions officers care about your undergraduate performance not because they want to obsess needlessly over who you were five or eight or ten years ago, but because they don't want to set you up for failure. They'll also scrutinize your transcript for evidence of both quantitative and verbal skills, so if your background appears to be lacking in one or the other, go make up that deficit either in the classroom or on the job or on your GMAT.

2. Recommendations from people who've seen your day-to-day performance on the job are the best predictor of future performance. Ideally they'll talk about what kind of impact you've had on the organization and on the people with whom you work. Admissions officers know that you likely have not been managing other people yet at this stage in your careers, so you need to think about what impact you've had, and how you achieved those results without direct authority over people (meaning, you managed from the side and managed from below).

Guiding your recommenders is fine: take them out for coffee (the best five bucks you'll spend) and give them examples that you think highlight and demonstrate that impact. Admissions officers insist that you can't and shouldn't write those recommendations yourself, but honestly, they are delusional if they think that even a majority of the recommendations they receive were written by the recommenders rather than the applicants. If admissions officers enforced the rule, they'd have to cut their applicant pool in half. The fact is, most recommenders will not take the time to write the letters themselves and delegate that task to the applicants to varying degrees. Still, it's in your best interest to find recommenders who are willing to write the letters themselves. Those letters are almost always stronger, in my experience, than when you try to speak for your recommenders.

3. Admissions officers are not impressed by long lists of activities. They'd rather you whittle that list down to the activities that really matter to you. Schools are building communities, and they seek people who are engaged with the world around them. They want to see demonstrated, continued involvement, so banging some nails for Habitat once a year isn't going to cut it. Activities are also often a great way to demonstrate your leadership experiences and lessons in your essays.

There were a few statements that made me scribble furiously in disagreement:

1. "Try not to worry about your essays." Huh? That makes no sense. The essays are the most labor-intensive part of the application. I would hope applicants worry about them, if that means taking them seriously and expending a lot of effort on them. It's insulting to require all those essays and then tell applicants not to worry about them.

2. In your essays, "be yourself." "Differentiate yourself." How is that helpful advice? It's not. At all.

3. "Embrace the opportunity to interview." "Be yourself in the interview." Except that some people really stink at interviews. Not everyone is good at interviewing. It's a learned and learnable skill, but it takes practice and plenty of feedback.

4. It's not enough that admissions officers from top business schools butcher English grammar; apparently they have to butcher Latin grammar as well. My ears bled a little bit when one of them referred to her school's "curriculi."

One other observation: I spotted a large number of women dressed inappropriately for a professional event. Simple rules to remember: no miniskirts, and no high-heeled slides (which, aside from looking unprofessional, also sound unprofessional: slap, slap, slap. Not good.)

A last note: this particular admissions event was co-hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Alumni Club of Boston and Kaplan. The venue was papered in slick Kaplan brochures and folders and fliers. Do not choose Kaplan just because of their huge advertising budgets. There are much better GMAT options out there.

I gave an interview recently to the Boston Business Journal on the subject of helicopter parents in the workplace. You can check out what I said here, but I thought I'd also paste in some interesting statistics cited in the article:

According to nearly 25 percent of the 750 employers responding to the Collegiate Employment Research Institute's 2007 Recruiting Trends survey, parents are indeed taking on more than their share of their kids' job searches. Forty-one percent gather materials from prospective employers.

Thirty-one percent submit résumés on behalf of their children. Twenty-six percent actively promote their kids for positions -- and 4 percent actually attend job interviews.

"Some parents even aggressively court companies to hire their college senior and will even berate human resources staff for not making their son or daughter an offer," said report author Phil Gardner of Michigan State University, which houses the institute. Some even assist with work assignments once the student does get hired, he added.

But Stephen Seaward, director of career development at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Conn., said employers are having a nightmare with helicopter parents. He said he has heard of instances of parents calling employers to negotiate salaries, or to ask why their kid didn't get the job.

"Meanwhile," Seward said, "the employer is thinking, 'Can this student handle himself if they have to have someone do this for them? How will I ever be able to use this person to interact with customers?' It does not create a favorable impression."

I'll second that. As I told CNN in an interview a few weeks back:

Employers have gotten used to this, but at the same time, they're wondering, "Who's this person going to be in ten years? Are their parents still going to be this involved? How are we going to promote these people? How are we going to turn them into leaders?" It's a big challenge.

You'll hear employers (like those quoted in the Boston Business Journal article) saying how much they welcome parental involvement in the job search process, but they have to say that because they don't have a whole lot of choice right now. There's a lot of eye-rolling behind the scenes, and parents don't realize how much they are embarrassing their adult children in the workplace and stunting their growth. It's a bit pathetic that these parents just... can't... let... go.

On a related note, in the "I thought I had heard it all" file: a newlywed couple reporting that one set of parents accompanied them on their honeymoon -- and felt entitled to because they were picking up the tab. Have they no shame?

More on helicopter parents here.

I did a really fun segment on CNN recently about helicopter parents in the workplace. We discussed the usual bugaboos -- parents who show up for job interviews and that sort of thing. A couple of things made me laugh afterwards: (1) the number of people who called me saying they had seen me on TV while they were working out at the gym (good for you!), (2) the cheers I've gotten for going on CNN and advocating "tough love," and (3) the fact that I didn't get preempted by Paris Hilton -- an indignity I don't think I would have survived!

Here's an interview I gave recently about helicopter parents to the Atlanta Journal Constitution ("Boomer Parents Hover over Careers of Offspring").

Great anecdotes in the article:

Shortly after one Emory University student was rejected for an internship at a prestigious Wall Street firm, the student's mother called Emory's career center: Could someone there get the firm to reconsider?

Never mind that the student had missed a sitdown session and canceled a phone interview with the company.

"Her mother got into full swing," said Tariq Shakoor, director of the career center. "She felt we should do more to get her daughter this internship."

A recent Georgia State University breakfast for MBA candidates drew 200 people, including two dozen parents who asked most of the questions, said Diane Fennig, GSU's director of graduate student services at the Robinson College of Business.

"I wouldn't have expected it at the graduate school level, but they're here."

I've heard similar stories, which I've written about here.

Here's a quiz to determine whether you've crossed the line into helicopter parenting:

You are a helicopter parent if you ...

• Drive your son to a job interview, then try to sit in on it.
• Call your daughter's prospective employer to find out the status of the job offer, reschedule or set up interviews, inquire about benefits, or follow up on why she didn't get the job.
• Show up at any of your son's student- or job-related events.
• Camp out in your daughter's dorm room during student orientation week.
• Accompany your son to the registrar's office and select his classes.
• Argue with the registrar about why your daughter can't take an 8 a.m. class.

I'm excited to be quoted in an article on CNNMoney.com, also the internet home of Fortune magazine. The article is about mistakes that new college grads make in their job searches. They even mentioned the Ivey Files -- it's enough to make a blogger blush.

By the way, I'm a big fan of the Ask Annie column in Fortune. I've enjoyed reading it for years (including back when I read the paper version of Fortune).

Yahoo lists its 10 Biggest Interview Killers here. I like these tips, but I would qualify them by saying that Gen Y can come off as overconfident and a bit entitled in interviews, so don't go overboard with tips 2 and 4.

In yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer:After decades micromanaging virtually every aspect of their children's lives, baby boomers aren't backing off.

With their kids out of college, companies say, parents are now meddling in the workplace, trying to negotiate salaries or finagle second chances for rejected sons and daughters with bruised self-esteem.

"We were [planning] a phone screen with one candidate, and the parent came in to give us a picture of her child so we would know who we were talking to," said Karen Fox of the Vanguard Group in Malvern.

So many anxious mothers and fathers have called (and visited) that last fall the financial services company began sending letters to the parents of recruits, announcing that an offer had been made and touting the company's virtues as an employer.

The tactic - similar to Army TV ads designed to involve parents whose children want to enlist - has increased the percentage of college students who accept Vanguard offers, Fox said, and decreased annoying phone calls.

"You can't swat them down," Fox said of the hyperinvolved career advisers. "So you might as well embrace them."Read more here.

Employers weigh in at Inc.com -- great advice on what not to do during an interview.

See also here.