Interviews and Rationales

-- By ElizabethBrandt - 18 Feb 2016

Mock Interviews and Transcendental Nonsense

A mock interviewer recently informed me that I should “develop” a better story about coming to law school based on my unique resume experiences. The suggestion was that I needed to somehow explain why someone would leave a “successful business career” (whatever that means) to embark on a debt-ridden and risky venture which, empirically speaking, leads to alcoholism, unhappiness, and an early death. I choked back my natural instinct to tell the mock interviewer that it really wasn’t any of his business, but that if he had to know I came to law school to become a lawyer. Instead, I smiled politely and thanked him for such candid feedback. His response was to remind me to ensure that my story ended in such a way as to make it obvious that I desperately wanted to participate in some sort of specialty in which the firm for which I was interviewing engaged.

I stewed on these suggestions for a couple of days before realizing that the interview and job process coming out of law school are another example of transcendental nonsense. Interviews favor those who can string together a narrative of disparate experiences you have had in a way that creates a story about who you are and places you on an inevitable path to this place, this interview, this job. This is not unique to the law school interviewing experience. Every interview process in which I’ve participated, in business, law, or education has required this narrative that we all recognize at some level is mere fiction, created for the sole purpose of hurdling the immediate obstacle, the interview. With the benefit of hindsight and a little creativity, we can explain away just about any seeming deviation or detour in our career. However, these connections, at least for the vast majority of us, are created only in hindsight and with a bit of creativity. We might be moving toward an abstract goal, but few of us know the route or the destination. We create this fiction, this transcendental nonsense, to explain our lives and make our success seem inevitable to the obstacle in our path.

Realities and the Thinking Man

The reality of my choice to attend law school has little to do with anything that appears on my resume. I had a great job making great money and was on track to do incredibly well in the impending IPO of my former employer. I even loved the people with whom I worked. By most objective standards, there was little, if any, reason to leave my boyfriend, my life, or the weather in California. The thinkingest of Thinking Men would stay the course. But I had had an afternoon with my grandfather that I just couldn’t shake. Sitting in his living room, someone stopped by to speak with him, a normal occurrence on any given day. The man stayed for about a half an hour, talking about his restaurant, his family, and generally checking in on my not-that-elderly-but-in-poor-health grandfather. When he left, my grandfather told me that the man and his wife were both incredibly hard workers and had done well for themselves in the restaurant business. It turns out that after my grandfather, a former Commonwealth’s Attorney, had put the man behind bars for five years, he had some trouble getting a job. Ever the pragmatist, my grandfather lent him some money to start a restaurant, which turned into three restaurants and jobs for all of his family. The man periodically checked in at the request of my grandfather to see how things were going and to catch up, as though they were old friends – and they were.

I thought about my work and looked around at my life and realized that my community was no better off with me than without me. My grandfather participated fully in his community and reaped benefits far beyond an IPO payout or a new title every few years. My grandfather was a profoundly unhappy man, but his life mattered in his community – good in some ways and bad in others. I came to law school because I want my life to matter, too, and it seemed like the easiest transition from the life I was leading to a life that can have meaning for a community. The risk is not the debt, though the debt is daunting as well. The risk is that I left a stable and easy life for a future that might matter, and might not matter in the ways that I want it to matter.

Truth Beyond Resume

Every interview will still require me to play the part of Thinking Man and make up my best transcendental nonsense with which to convince the interview of the inevitability of our meeting. There’s no getting around the performance art of the interview. I’ll leave out the story about my grandfather for risk of sounding more emotional than a good Thinking Man should. I’m sure I’ll even enjoy some of the conversations that I have with interviewers, but answering this question will probably never be one of those enjoyable moments for me. Maybe one time I’ll feel non-conformist enough to tell the interviewer to bugger off because it’s, frankly, none of their business.

Part of the transcendental nonsense, to start with, is that the mock interview is training you to participate in other mock interviews. The ones you are thinking about are conducted by organizations seeking to hire workers. To be such a lawyer is already to have made certain choices. When I and my law partner, SFLC's legal director, hire lawyers, or when I decide to take students on who will become our lawyers, the interview has no such shape. We are hiring people we intend to work with directly, people with whom we two ourselves will actually be practicing. Such a conversation to elicit such a narrative is not helpful, let alone worth the time.

So everybody performs an unimaginative work that they have learned to do both sides of, but which is not the thing itself, which is something that has to be invented every time people meet in order to decide whether to have a relationship. Those skills, too, have fallen into such peculiar desuetude that people now try to establish using the computers that spy on them whether they are mutually attracted by such artificial narratives before they permit themselves to meet and to begin to perform their LinkedIn or Facebook profile, as the case of dating may be, as best they can under the disadvantage of presence as well as absence, also known as reality.

So you came to law school both in order to be a lawyer and to have a way of life that has meaning for good or ill in the society around you. Which means learning to bend reality by being fully present in it, rather than by making artificial "profiles" that abstract nicely from it and that can be packaged and promoted for sale to others the way every other commodity that has no effect on its society is sold.

This is a fine first draft, in that it clears the space for the excellent construction that comes next. You can now ask, what does it actually take in realistic terms both to escape the performance of these falsities and to continue moving swiftly and efficiently towards the sort of fully-involved life in the community you want to have? Thinking about that leads to planning and execution about that, which is better than all the successful performances of the profile of what you do not quite want in all the world.