Laura Bergus

Today the controversial US News law school rankings dropped (well, ok, they’ve been leaked online for a few days…). I’m not going to comment on the ridiculousness of the rankings and how they distort what would otherwise be a competitive system. I’m just going to point out that there’s a picture of me in the current issue of US News. :) There’s also a rather awkwardly-worded quote at the end, about the importance of following and commenting on blogs (something I’ve been preaching for a while). In any case, I’ll take the publicity. After all, this is print, and it’s print that reaches thousands of men over the age of 50. Ooooh.

Several people have asked me how I happened to end up in a national magazine, so here’s the story:

In February I got an email and follow-up call from Jessica Rettig, US News reporter, who had found me online through Legal Geekery (go Josh!). She and I talked twice, at length, about how law students can use social media to connect with experts in their interest areas, present themselves as intelligent humans, and maybe even discover a meaningful career. Obviously that story won’t sell as many magazines as the “OMG law school is ’spensive and there are no jobs!!!!1″ story that I ended up being quoted in, but such is the media business.

In March US News flew a photographer out from Maryland. To my house. In Iowa. The photographer was Jeffrey MacMillan, a first-class news veteran (note the pictures of presidents, senators, etc. on his website…) who’s now focusing on helping colleges and universities visually promote themselves. (So, any law schools out there who might want alumni coverage in the DC area, drop him a line.) He spent the day with my daughter and me, taking pictures for about five hours. Being a good photojournalist, he’d done some research on me and had even watched some of the video I directed about homelessness in Iowa, and was impressed with the quality of my video work. That little tidbit made my day. He also had great stories of campaign coverage and politics in Washington. When we went to Iowa City’s famous Hamburg Inn for lunch, he pointed to Bill Clinton’s official presidential portrait on the wall and said, “I had lunch with the guy that took that just the other day.” Very cool.

This is a social media success story. (Thanks to my Twitter friend Omar Ha-Redeye for pointing that out, clichéd as it may be.) If nothing else, it’s evidence of the point that most journalists start with Google, and if you’ve made any kind of SEOed name for yourself in a particular field, they can, and will, find you online.

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.

Once again, the career placement office at my law school is there for me. This time, it’s to remind me how bad the internet is when you are looking for a job. Their weekly email newsletter sent to all students included a “REMINDER RE USE OF FACEBOOK AND OTHER SITES WHILE JOB SEEKING.” Ah-ha! I thought: perhaps they are catching on to the value of fb as a professional tool. Maybe they now see that 150,000,000 people can’t all be wrong.

If only. Here’s what they had to say:

For those students seeking employment, please remember that it is now a common practice for employers to check Facebook, MySpace and blogs when considering prospective hires. Remember it may not even be your entry, but that you appear somewhere else in what an employer may feel is a “lack of good judgment” situation. Make any deletions/corrections now…..it is not always as easy as one may think to delete something or have it taken down. We have in the past two years had students lose offers because of the above and have heard from employers last fall that in searching several of our students, they found information that entered into their hiring decisions. Please be cautious. What you post should be professional.

This narrow view does nothing more than illustrate how little the people espousing it know about the internet, let alone about the power of social media. They forget that most students have grown up using online tools to meet people and share information. Students today have far and away a better understanding than administrators and faculty of what it means to put themselves online. We know who might be looking, from our grandparents to federal agents. We know that once something is online, it never goes away. We know how easy and assumed it is that our name will be googled the instant a potential employer finds us even remotely interesting or hirable.

And most of all, we know that things we post on facebook in an album entitled “Let’s pretend it’s undergrad!!” or “Never again: New Year’s Ughhhh” will for the most part be taken for what they are: windows into the real lives of real adults. If a potential employer can’t deal with pictures of beer bongs and lingerie, they probably shouldn’t be conducting research about recent college grads on, well, facebook.

Imagine how dull the world would be if all you could gleam about someone from the internet was “professional.” No pictures of grandkids, no sharing recipes or hobbies. Just where you’ve worked, your GPA and a laundry list of carefully sanitized “interests.” That’s not the world I want to participate in. I trust someone who finds me on LinkedIn to know its purpose, and the same of facebook or twitter.

Let’s have a conversation about the value of getting to know people, and the internet as a vehicle to meet. Career services should understand this: they’re willing to send me off to BigLaw cocktail parties to network, but shudder to think if the photos therefrom ever see the light of day…