Congrats on being a finalist! AB is a great opportunity for you personally and professionally, and we're excited for you. We're obviously also super psyched to meet you and get to know you.lebongenre wrote:I'd love to hear more about the programmatic/career benefits of the scholarship, particularly the ASAP program.
I will leave the California specific portion to Tre to comment on. (East Coast/Best coast, etc.) But while we wait for him, I will comment on ASAP generally.
The ASAP process is pretty awesome. Basically, AB gets the top firms in the country to give interviews for 1L summer associate positions. There's a lot of hand holding and the program is constantly advocating for us throughout the process. This year everyone who wanted an offer got an offer (one person in the current 1L class opted out of the entire process because they aren't interested in the private sector). This summer, folks are working at Paul Weiss, Wachtell, Weil, Sidley, S&C, and Davis Polk, although there's a wider pool of interviewing firms than just these.
I think it's fair to say that the 1L ASAP process skews toward NYC, but Tre knows more about Cal. and AB than I do. My suspicion is that in targeting a place like Cal, the normal barriers to entry (grade cutoffs and ties) are going to be there; and I don't know how good the program is at removing those particular obstacles.
I will say, however, that there are certain faculty members who are very invested in the program and your success and you'll have an opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with them through the scholarship program. That includes Dean Morrison, the former Dean (Ricky Revesz, our current faculty advisor), and Troy McKenzie (former faculty adviser, on leave and being a deputy attorney general in Obama's Administration). There are also people in the Public Interest Office and Office of Career services who will take a special interest in your career simply because you're in the program. These sorts of things tend to happen when the Chair of the Law School's Board of Trustees starts your scholarship program and makes it a personal priority. In addition to that, our alumni are pretty engaged with the law school as a whole and AnBryce in particular. As a 1L I've been informally connected to a few opportunities/relationships that I never would have gotten without our alumni, including connections to federal judges I would be interested in clerking for down the line.
So, as a scholar, that's the foundation of your legal and mentoring professional network. And while I can't quite comment on the program's Cal. placement, I suspect that you'll have connections that the average T-14 law student won't and my intuition is that those connections can be helpful in a Cali job search, if not during 1L, then during 2L, 3L, and beyond.
I also apologize for the name-droppiness of all this.