Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis(60)
At Yale, networking power is like the air we breathe—so pervasive that it’s easy to miss. Toward the end of our first year, most of us were studying for The Yale Law Journal writing competition. The Journal publishes lengthy pieces of legal analysis, mostly for an academic audience. The articles read like radiator manuals—dry, formulaic, and partially written in another language. (A sampling: “Despite grading’s great promise, we show that the regulatory design, implementation, and practice suffer from serious flaws: jurisdictions fudge more than nudge.”) Kidding aside, Journal membership is serious business. It is the single most significant extracurricular activity for legal employers, some of whom hire only from the publication’s editorial board.
Some kids came to the law school with a plan for admission to The Yale Law Journal. The writing competition kicked off in April. By March, some people were weeks into preparation. On the advice of recent graduates (who were also close friends), a good friend had begun studying before Christmas. The alumni of elite consulting firms gathered together to grill each other on editorial techniques. One second-year student helped his old Harvard roommate (a first-year student) design a study strategy for the final month before the test. At every turn, people were tapping into friendship circles and alumni groups to learn about the most important test of our first year.
I had no idea what was going on. There was no Ohio State alumni group—when I arrived, I was one of two Ohio State graduates at the entire law school. I suspected the Journal was important, because Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor had been a member. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t even know what the Journal did. The entire process was a black box, and no one I knew had the key.
There were official channels of information. But they telegraphed conflicting messages. Yale prides itself on being a low-stress, noncompetitive law school. Unfortunately, that ethos sometimes manifests itself in confused messaging. No one seemed to know what value the credential actually held. We were told that the Journal was a huge career boost but that it wasn’t that important, that we shouldn’t stress about it but that it was a prerequisite for certain types of jobs. This was undoubtedly true: For many career paths and interests, Journal membership was merely wasted time. But I didn’t know which career paths that applied to. And I was unsure how to find out.
It was around this time that Amy Chua, one of my professors, stepped in and told me exactly how things worked: “Journal membership is useful if you want to work for a judge or if you want to be an academic. Otherwise, it’s a waste. But if you’re unsure what you want to do, go ahead and try out.” It was million-dollar advice. Because I was unsure what I wanted, I followed it. Though I didn’t make it during my first year, I made the cut during my second year and became an editor of the prestigious publication. Whether I made it isn’t the point. What mattered was that, with a professor’s help, I had closed the information gap. It was like I’d learned to see.
This wasn’t the last time Amy helped me navigate unfamiliar terrain. Law school is a three-year obstacle course of life and career decisions. One the one hand, it’s nice to have so many opportunities. On the other hand, I had no idea what to do with those opportunities or any clue which opportunities served some long-term goal. Hell, I didn’t even have a long-term goal. I just wanted to graduate and get a good job. I had some vague notion that I’d like to do public service after I repaid my law school debt. But I didn’t have a job in mind.
Life didn’t wait. Almost immediately after I committed to a law firm, people started talking about clerkship applications for after graduation. Judicial clerkships are one-year stints with federal judges. It’s a fantastic learning experience for young lawyers: Clerks read court filings, research legal issues for a judge, and even help the judge draft opinions. Every former clerk raves about the experience, and private-sector employers often shell out tens of thousands in signing bonuses for recent clerks.
That’s what I knew about clerkships, and it was completely true. It was also very superficial: The clerkship process is infinitely more complex. First you have to decide what kind of court you want to work for: a court that does a lot of trials or a court that hears appeals from lower courts. Then you have to decide which regions of the country to apply to. If you want to clerk for the Supreme Court, certain “feeder” judges give you a greater chance of doing so. Predictably, those judges hire more competitively, so holding out for a feeder judge carries certain risks—if you win the game, you’re halfway to the chambers of the nation’s highest court; if you lose, you’re stuck without a clerkship. Sprinkled on top of these factors is the reality that you work closely with these judges. And no one wants to waste a year getting berated by an asshole in black robes.
There’s no database that spits out this information, no central source that tells you which judges are nice, which judges send people to the Supreme Court, and which type of work—trial or appellate—you want to do. In fact, it’s considered almost unseemly to talk about these things. How do you ask a professor if the judge he’s recommending you to is a nice lady? It’s trickier than it might seem.
So to get this information, you have to tap into your social network—student groups, friends who have clerked, and the few professors who are willing to give brutally honest advice. By this point in my law school experience, I had learned that the only way to take advantage of networking was to ask. So I did. Amy Chua told me that I shouldn’t worry about clerking for a prestigious feeder judge because the credential wouldn’t prove very useful, given my ambitions. But I pushed until she relented and agreed to recommend me to a high-powered federal judge with deep connections to multiple Supreme Court justices.