Welcome to Law School 3L: Zen and the Art of Networking

I've been forced to resort to networking. A million times since I first entered a career services department, I'd heard the familiar song about the magic and necessity of networking. It is a frightful, nebulous word that stirs up images of halting smalltalk at schmoozy cocktail parties, where everyone wears lopsided nametags, clutches sweating drinks and tries awkwardly to navigate the entrances and exits of clumped conversations. Deaf to the cries of every wise advisor and mentor, I ran the other way.

I grasped at any other job search method that presented itself, preferably ones in which the potential for hand-wringing social discomfort was minimized. The on-campus interviewing program, for example, brought the employers to us and even scheduled the interviews around our class schedules. It seemed to provide all the good results of that fearful networking without any of the stumbling over pleasantries and desperate business-card snatching. Although only 12 percent of students get jobs through on-campus interviewing, I put a big chunk of hope into it, mostly because it was easy and felt productive. It narrowed the field of potential law firms down from thousands to around forty, and it felt good to have so many interviews lined up. "Look! I'm working so hard to get a job! I'm in two or three interviews per day!" The problem was that the rest of my 200 classmates were also in two or three interviews per day with those same firms. And so was the law student population of UCLA and every other law school the firms interviewed at. The chances of standing out and being one of the few called back were very low.

That was second year. As a third-year, the employers who interview on campus aren't interested in you any more, and you're forced to stumble off campus, out into the city, to fend for yourself. If you don't accept or don't get an offer from the firm you worked at over the summer, or if you didn't work for a firm at all, you'll find yourself searching job listings (which allegedly offer only 1 percent of the actual jobs available), sending out a mass-mailing (which means paying exorbitant sums for Kinko's-like services or spending lots of time and tears battling with mail merge yourself), or, horror of horrors, networking.

With a bit of a perspective shift, it turns out that networking is not an excruciating cocktail party at all. True, it is indirect, vague and time-consuming, but in the end it is the method by which more than half of my peers will get their first jobs and the way we will all get virtually every other job we hold during our careers. The key to networking seems to be to avoid asking for a job and start asking how to get a job. This removes much of the horrendous fear of rejection, since people love to give advice and inherently want to help others. In fact, I have been consistently astounded by how far near-strangers will go to help me when I ask them how I should best go about getting a job. My resume has been forwarded to partners, calls of recommendation have been made on my behalf, names of good contacts have been offered, time has been set aside in busy schedules to talk to me about what I want and how best to get there.

I will not say that I am brimming with confidence throughout the process; I still find it disconcerting that there is no sure way of measuring how well I am doing or how much progress I have made. Perhaps most deflating is that I still don't have a job despite all the phone calls, e-mails, informational interviews and outpourings of help from those I've contacted.

What do I have? I have first-hand insider information about jobs and firms and the legal job market in general. I have a steadily growing list of attorneys who have met me, seen my resume and discussed my goals with me, people I can call with questions or e-mail with updates about my job search or scholastic successes. The way it's supposed to work now, according to all those people-who-have-been-there, is that with my name in e-mail inboxes and voicemail systems and minds throughout the population of New York law firms, someone will think of me when they need a first-year associate. Until it happens, I suppose I will have to take that last part on faith. But in the meantime, at least I have started seeing some familiar faces at those nerve-wracking cocktail parties.

Annika K Martin is a third-year law student at the University of Southern California Law School in Los Angeles, CA. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. She likes Swedish furniture, German cars, French films and Indian food.