Evening Law Students and the Career Office

E-mail today from the Office of Career and Professional Development (OCPD). They’re pimping 7 upcoming events (including an interesting one on alternative careers and another OCI for JAG interviews). Several are at 5:00. The rest are during business hours. (But, let’s face it, 5:00 is during business hours. Though, I realize that scheduling anything later than 5:00 would get into class hours.)

I’m going to meet with OCPD later this spring. Not so much to find a job but to find someone or some resource to help me think through what the heck I’m doing in law school vis a vis my career (including a discussion on how a law degree can be used in my current job). Right now, there has been no indication that OCPD has invested in resources specifically for evening law students. There hasn’t been a workshop or panel. There isn’t a document on its website to deal with FAQs or other common challenges. Yes, I realize that I’ll need to answer many questions for myself. That’s fine. Just want some support from the school I feed $25K+ per year.

Obviously you can make an appointment. And I will. But a google search for “evening law student career planning” yields results from several law schools that have resources specifically for the issues evening law students need to resolve (i.e. how do we treat summers? how on earth do you transition? etc, etc).

I guess that’s my beef. While you can make an individual appointment, there’s no dedicated, standing resource to help you advance in your own thinking so that when you go to an appointment you are asking the right questions. I’m much more likely to take time out of my work day to meet with OCPD if I have some specific questions I need answered rather having the oh-so-nebulous, “How does an evening student find a job?”