Those of you who know me outside of the blogosphere know that I am unemployed and have been for about a month and a half. My last day of work was March 31, 2011. After I graduated from law school, I lined up a job through a transition into legal practice program engineered by my school to pump up its U.S. News and World Report employment numbers and ease the burden on the masses of unemployed law students that were graduating. In my jaded world view, I think it was much more the former than the latter. Originally, I was to work with a nonprofit focusing on children in D.C. but as my grandmother's Stage 4 breast cancer worsened it quickly became obvious that she couldn't stay at home on her own and the idea of putting her in a nursing home as my relatives suggested was beyond ridiculous to me. So I found a job in the public interest legal sector in Atlanta and settled in to be here for a while. I sent in an application to sit for the Georgia Bar exam since I had previously taken the Maryland Bar thinking I'd be in the DMV area for a while, found out that the deadline had passed, and applied for an exemption given the exigent circumstances. It was granted and I settled in to spend the next three months at my fellowship.
As imagined by my law school, recent graduates would find unpaid 40 hour a week legal gigs in the public interest sphere and be provided with a $4000 stipend. That works out to $8.33 an hour. Yup, four years of graduate school to make $8.33 an hour. That's less than I made at my summer job right out of high school. Le deep heavy sigh. I digress. As planned, the program was to run 3 months, but 3 months later there was still a great need for experience and money amongst recent grads, so it was extended for another 3 months. Except this time, you could only work 24 hours a week because the rest of the time should be devoted to your job search. This worked out well for me as my 2nd 3 months would start in mid-December just as I would need to divert my attention to the Georgia Bar. Between my job and studying for the Bar, my job search was relegated to the backburner and mostly consisted of a weekly check of Simplicity (a popular web program for job listings in law school) and daily monitoring of bar association listservs. Occasionally, I would also check state and county websites. I kept applying to any jobs that caught my interest either in Georgia or the DMV but it wasn not my focus. Finally, at the end of February I turned my attentions to a hard-core job search but I was coming up short because I was not yet admitted to practice in Georgia and competition was massive for those jobs that were available in the DMV. And then March 31, 2011 rolled around and I found myself unemployed.
Over the next month, I put in applications for every legal job I saw that I might even arguably be qualified for on USAJobs, GA Careers, Atlanta city websites, county websites, Symplicity, PSLawnet, and even Craigslist. I got a few interviews but nothing ever materialized. I also applied for jobs that could capitalize on a Masters of Public Health; jobs at my college alma mater; and administrative jobs because those are the only "real" jobs I've ever had. Since I didn't work while I was in law school, most of my work experience has come in the form of summer externships in the legal field. And in college, I did admin work as well as some title search and public affairs stuff over the summers. I even registered with legal staffing and temporary agencies online to no avail. Finally, a friend suggested I call the temporary agencies to schedule an appointment. That worked and I was able to get on with two. One has yet to produce any jobs and the other is highly sporadic. I've been with them about a month. The first week I worked 4 days, the next week it was three, then one, then one again. This week I've worked two days so far.
I recently got my Georgia Bar results, I passed and I got sworn in. I'm officially a double esq. I'm admitted to practice in Maryland as well. I'm hoping that actually being a licensed attorney will help me in my job search. In the meantime, I'll keep writing about my misadventures as a broke Butterfly BAP, and hopefully, you all will enjoy my stories. The next chapter of this tale will be all about what you should not do when you first become broke.
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