courtesy, please.

hello all.

my name is nicolle...and i'm a new contributor here. (thank you, Calculating!) i've been blogging (a little) about law and (a lot) about random, non-legal things for a few years over at the last refuge of the persecuted crack smoker, and i'm currently a 3L at Washington University in St. Louis.

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there is a lot of advice on here for 1Ls, so i'm going to start with something that is probably near and dear to a lot of 2Ls and possibly 3Ls right now, and will become more and more present for 1Ls as the year wears by: the job search.

but, i'm not going to talk about how to find a job, at least not yet. i'm going to talk about common courtesy during the job search.

during OCI, people often gush about how great their interviews went, how many interviews they have, or how they have taken the offer of their dreams. be excited about it...but don't spend all your time squeaking and gushing and bragging about your interviews to your jobless friends. tell your friends what is going on if you're close to them, and if that is something that they talk about with you as well. it definitely helps to have people you can talk about the job process with respect

but, know the boundaries. don't brag to people you know are jobless, or to people you know didn't get a ton of interviews through the application process. it's frustrating. they don't want to hear it.

right now, it's still august. it's still early, so people aren't likely to be nearly as frustrated yet if they don't have a ton of interviews or a job offer than they will be in a few weeks. large rounds of OCI, large job fairs...they are still going on. still, it's starting, and hearing that Bob The Gunner has forty-five job interviews with big firms is not going to make the average person, someone who doesn't have forty-five interviews, feel very good about the perfectly respectable number they do have, or the fact that they are planning on doing government, public interest, or small-firm work--for which they will not have interviews or offers until winter or spring. most of them probably don't want to hear Bob The Gunner gush to anyone in a ten-foot radius about the fact that he is spending more time in airports than he is at home, or spending more time sipping expensive scotch with equity partners than he spends within the confines of the law school.

by mid-september, or early october, tensions will run even higher among students who are trying for those biglaw jobs. some people will be trying to winnow down their offers to the five that they can keep considering under NALP regulations, while others are still interviewing, interviewing, interviewing...trying to get just one offer. last year, i was one of the lucky ones...i had the offer i really, really wanted very early in the process. i was excited about it...but i definitely talked a lot more about than i should. some of my friends were having easier times with it than others, and it took me way, way, way too long to get the hint that i needed to calm down about it. finally, when i did, relations with people i knew at school were a lot smoother. i wish i had just been a lot more toned-down about it from the start. now that i'm watching interviewing season with a detached eye, i can only imagine how much less stressed out everyone would be if people were a lot more tactful about the process, instead of doing even more to stress each other out.

job hunting season is a stressful time--so if you're lucky enough to have interviews, to have any offers on the table, make sure to be nice about it. be excited, but don't expect everyone else to be as excited about your job offer as you are about your job offer.