Ordinary Girl Tip: Don't be so pretentious!

When I had a personal blog back in the day, I had this ongoing set of posts called "Ordinary Girl Tip:" Basically, each post was an observation I noticed and in my way of doing things I offered a quick and dry response to the observation. Often the "tip" was what I hoped the reader would take away after reading the post. In the law school setting, it's more than appropriate to bring this back. I'll start down a trip down memory lane from something I noticed this past semester.


At my law school, we had something called, "Lunch with a Lawyer," the title is self-explanatory. Usually the lawyer was an alumna/e. It was a great to network with alumni that made it past the law school clutch-hold and made something for themselves. I haven't been to many of these but one lunch has stuck out in my mind. So this particular attorney wanted the students to really generate in discussion. The lawyer definitely had a tough crowd because we weren't saying much. Well one student decided to participate in discussion, to keep things interesting.

Initially, the student starts to talk about all the things s/he did during the summer. Then continued to rambled on about their OCI journey this past semester. I personally was getting bored about this conversation, because it's like "we get it, you like to hear yourself talk and brag about how much better off you are." In the midst of my boredom, this student is talking about OCI and is defining what it is basically stating that the top 10% of students are selected for this process and mentioning how difficult it was to get second and third interviews due to the economy. I started to roll my eyes because I figured the student was trying to butter up the attorney to say this person is better than pretty much everyone in this room and possibly their entire class. The attorney knows how OCI works, the attorney is not stupid because oh I don't know they actually graduated from law school?! The only response that came from the attorney was, "oh good for you" or "that's great." I found that to be quite pretentious on the student's part and I didn't appreciate it.

To resolve this in my own twisted way, I actually asked the attorney the following question:

" How difficult is it really to get an internship and ultimately a job these days? I ask because I didn't participate in OCI, I am definitely not in the top 10, 20, 30 or even 40 - I'll stop there - percent of my class so what would my chances be?" 

Granted everyone chuckled at me going down the percentiles but I appreciated the attorney's answer and advice. The attorney even told me a story of a friend who had a pretty bad 1L year but managed to buckled down and did better later on and is doing quite well in their career. I felt that I got a genuine response from the attorney. I believe it was because I was honest and very candid about myself. I didn't feel the need to impress to the point of being pretentious in having a conversation with this attorney.. As a result, I think I got my time's worth at that  particular Lunch with a Lawyer.