In honor of this week’s private sector theme, I wanted to shed some light on what happens when private law firms come here to HLS to recruit. Whether you hear people calling it OCI or EIP (On-Campus Interviewing or Early Interviewing Program), it’s the same thing — hundreds of firms and companies descend on Cambridge to conduct 20-minute interviews with hundreds of law students to determine which ones to invite back for a second-round interview at their firm’s office.
Location: The vast majority of these interviews are held in hotel rooms at the Charles Hotel. This always seems strange to outsiders, and it will probably seem odd to you at first, but after your third or fourth interview it will seem like the most natural thing in the world to have a professional interview in a hotel room. It also answers the question I always had in hotel rooms, which was “Who ever uses that random table and two chairs they always put alongside the window?” Law firms do, and so will you!
Tchotchkes: Ah, free stuff! Interviewing season is prime time for stocking up on whatever your needs might be in the department of pens, travel mugs, luggage tags, umbrellas, USB drives, water bottles, Starbucks or iTunes gift cards, etc. — all lovingly imprinted with a law firm name. A lot of the firms will start to blend together in your mind after a while, so sometimes your friends will identify them by their giveaway. “What’d you think of Smith & Smith?” “Were they the ones with the super-fancy post-it note dispenser?” “No, that was Miller & Miller. Smith & Smith were the ones with the fleece blankets.” Hold off until after interview season on buying office supplies in particular, because you’ll pick up enough random free stuff to supply yourself for a year or two.
Hospitality Suites: If tchotchkes are the reason you don’t have to buy office supplies for a while, hospitality suites are the reason you don’t need to eat regular meals for a while. Many firms will get a suite in addition to their interview rooms for students to hang out in before or after their interviews. They’re teeming with food and usually staffed by recruiters, human resources people, and occasionally some associates, all of whom are there to chit-chat with the interviewees.
I have a tip here — go by the hospitality suite before your interview and pick up anything with the firm’s name on it (a tchotchke or brochure) and then take it into the interview to set down on the table in front of you. That way, if you accidentally forget which firm it is you’re talking to, you can just glance down. I realize this sounds asinine to people who have never been through this, but most firms have three or four or five names in their title, and when you do three or four or five interviews in a row, and you’re doing this for two weeks straight, your brain turns to mush and the exact name of the third firm on the fifth day might at some point slip your mind. At that point, free stuff to the rescue!
The interviewing season is busy but fun, and you never know what’s going to come out of it. I, for instance, met Ben Affleck on the elevator on the way to one of my interviews (true story). But perhaps more importantly, all that job interviewing got me. . . a job!
– Erin
