Bull_Moose wrote:Thank you very much for taking questions. Any insight on how PT students fare at OCI compared to FT'ers? Also, do many PT'ers participate on journals or in clinics? Do the journals/clinics cater to PT schedules?
I can't speak to OCI (called EIW at GULC) performance from my or my classmates' perspectives since we just finished our 1E year and won't do OCI until 2E, but I have not heard anything bad about PT performance at OCI. The anecdotal evidence is that employers like candidates with work experience (which pretty much all PTers have) and that employers see the PTers as likely to be hard workers and good time managers, so we've been told PTers who want to do OCI do very well. I think a lower % of PT students do OCI than FT students for the obvious reason that many PTers are already in careers/jobs that they plan to stay in. That makes sense to me.
If you are a PTer and plan to do OCI then I assume you plan to leave your job in order to do a summer associate gig?
As for journals, loads of PT students do them without any problems. I could be mistaken, but I believe the editor in chief of the main journal next year is a PT student. Similar to OCI/EIW, I suspect a smaller % of PT students do journal than FT students since journal is really about landing a job and many PT students plan to stay in their job/career. We also don't have the kind of free time that FT students have in which to do journal. I'm not doing a journal, for instance. But if you want to do one there are plenty of PT students who have done it before you across all of the journals.
Clinics are tough because they are time intensive and normally require work during the workday that many PT students can't give due to our jobs. There is at least one (and probably more than one) that is geared toward PT students and meets at night. But yeah, on the whole clinics are harder to do for PT students. No doubt about it. The point of clinics is to get legal experience, so hopefully you can get legal experience out of your job rather than from a clinic.
Hope that helps. Happy to answer any follow ups.