It was a cathartic experience to email the Dean of Career Services at my law school and send him the link to my rather critical post on what I thought about his views of social media for law students. Since then, we’ve been working on a plan to create a best-practices guide for law students about their online identity. Topics include harnessing your top Google result to understanding Facebook policies and privacy settings to blogging, commenting and more. There also will be sections geared towards helping law school counselors and administrators, as well as employers, understand the reality of how students use social media.
Needless to say, despite my earlier misgivings about helping other students be competitive, I’m excited to work on this project. Now only to find the time… Maybe I can convince my civil procedure notes to outline themselves. If you have any ideas, I’m all ears (eyes? whatever).
UPDATE
I’ll admit I get a thrill out of seeing the gears of a giant bureaucracy turn. And on my crusade to push our law school to get real about social networking, which started as shaming them into admitting that even people who post beer bong pictures on Facebook might deserve a chance, I am starting to feel such a thrill. My law school’s career placement office has drafted a survey for students about how the use social media, and they’re happy to let me help put together information for students, staff and employers on the subject. If you would be willing to critique this survey, please email me for the link. Thank you!
After whaling on my career placement office in my
last post, I realized that whining does nothing to fix the problem of law students being advised to limit their online identity. But instead of offering help for developing something that might educate students on the strength and beauty of online networking, I kept my mouth shut. Why? Because I’m in law school. And that means I am competing with my peers in a way that I’ve never competed with anyone. I am in training to participate in the great “
adversarial system” that we call the exercise of justice. My instinct was not to help, because then these
same people that I’m competing with for grades and for summer jobs will have just as much advantage as me. And as I recently learned in my negotiations class, those who take the high road in the legal profession often get run over by the Mack truck of borderline ethics.
Then I had a good conversation with a career placement counselor, and his goodwill convinced me to try to change things, success be damned. So now is the interesting part of this experiment, where I get to find out how the bureaucracy responds to what might be, to them, a crazy and dangerous proposal. Stay tuned.
