On-campus interviews begin at the Hotel Durant (Durant and Bowditch) on Monday, August 24th. 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 for your visits to hospitality suites (see b-Line homepage for a list of hospitality suites/receptions). These suites are commonly staffed by recruiting professionals and/or attorneys from the firm. They are great networking opportunities. You can reinforce a good impression if you have an interview (or already interviewed) with the firm. Stopping by hospitality suites can sometimes even lead to an interview if you were unable to otherwise get on the firms’ schedule.
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.
There will be a student lounge available for you to use as a waiting area between interviews. It’s located on the first floor (which is actually one floor above the main entrance to the Hotel). The Hotel tells us there is wifi now available in this room [userid – “durantuser” password-“durantwifi”]. 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 Student Lounge 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, so please be sure its up-to-date (especially transfers whose Profiles were created before they had @berkeley addresses). 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 we appreciate your being as flexible (and as patient with us) as you can, as we try to accommodate the needs of 200+ employers and 400 students over the course of more than 5000 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 24 – 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 (Go to the Scheduled Interviews page and click on the Cancel button in the far right column). 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.
Remember that 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). Details for how to do this are here.
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!
P.S. — If you haven’t yet checked out the CDO’s Newswire blog, we’ve linked to some articles that may be interesting/useful to your OCIP prep. In fact, just today we posted a link to an analysis of law firm financial data from the second quarter of 2009. A feed of the Newswire appears on the CDO’s new homepage. There is a “OCIP” category with which we’ve tagged certain posts.
Also, the CDO Guides and Webcasts page (under “Other Resources” in the right side bar menu of the CDO homepage) has links to a couple of resources on the subject of effective interviewing, in case you are interested.