Law Applications

Just read my mission statement opposite which apparently included bitching - haven't done much of that recently so here goes...

Law applications.

Let's face it, money is useful. It enables you to do things like eat, drink and go to India. That's fact one.

Fact two - studying costs money; when I got the bill for my law masters from Oxford it was nearly £1k more than I had been expecting.

Putting these facts together, a job paying money after University is a good thing to have; a job that gives you a grant to be a student for a year, then pays you a starting salary of around £28k is a very good thing to have. Welcome to the world of training contracts - a world to me at least shrouded in mystery.

So off I trot to these law firms with my LSE degree; and the first thing they do is hit me with a lot of bullshitty questions. "Describe when you saved the world from nuclear destruction as a member of a team (always remember the 'T' word) - this is obviously a trick question - who's ever seen a disaster movie without a single hero acting alone ?

But you get the idea; assuming you write crap they like, off you skip to the interview; this may be a relatively civilised thing (two partners for half an hour @ £500 an hour a partner). Alternatively, if the firm has been stupid enough to let HR (human remains) get its claws in too deep you're met with various group and individual assessments designed to test whether, in the words of R.E.M. you're a 'shiny happy person'; the key is to be shiny and confident on the outside - its not whether what you say is right but its whether how you say what you say is right.

Some of my more astute readers may sense a certain bitter and twisted vibe here - the fact that I got rejected for every training contract I applied for last year has, obviously, nothing to do with the tenor of this post. Nor does the fact that I'm going through the whole bullshit forest again, with only a day's interview skills training between me and future unemployment, before you add on the predictable parental paranoia about unemployed graduate offspring.

The things we do for money...