Just because you're having a bad experience with your clerkship or your intern, that's fine, that's normal. Practicing law is a completely different animal than any type of experience working anywhere and most attorneys get slammed when they get their first jobs. You should not really worry about it, but you should throw yourself into it. The fact that you didn't get a job at OCI, I think that you should be applying to firms that don't necessarily interview at OCI. So you can apply to firms on your own in New York, you can apply to firms on your own in whatever markets you want to, that don't necessarily come there, so if you're at Vanderbilt, it's not necessarily a big place where firms from Miami come, for example. So why not apply to firms in Miami? Or firms from Los Angeles don't really come to Vanderbilt very often.
You just need to be careful about getting bogged down by the requirements of your law school to apply to only certain places. And I don't think you can really say you have no interest in law, everything is acquired. A lot of times, attorneys and law students aren't interested in law because they're just getting bad feedback when they start, because they don't know what they're doing. And no one cares you did well in college or anything at this point, the employers want to hire the best people they can for the jobs that they have. So I honestly don't think you need to get too wound up by any of this. Keep pushing, you will get a job if you keep pushing. People aren't talking to you probably because you're not being aggressive enough and applying to enough places. You just need to keep learning and learning.
I'll say a funny story. When I was in eighth grade, I failed math. When I was in ninth grade, I got C's in algebra . I just kept trying. And by the time I got into college, I placed into honors calculus and all this sort of stuff, because I just didn't give up. And I hated math. I was like so bad at math that I thought I wouldn't graduate from high school, and then I ended up doing really well on SATs and all this stuff in math because I didn't give up. Everything just takes time. People learn at different speeds. So you learn about law firms at different speeds and it's nothing to worry about. I think you shouldn't wanna drop out at this point. And no one should, this early in your career. It's not a good move. You need to be very careful and realize that everything is about persistence. And the more persistent you are, the more you're gonna learn, the more things are gonna fix themselves.
