divine angst

I try to engage myself as much as possible in the various events Law School has us participate in. For instance, today, we had sessions on ethics and on networking. (Yes, on a Saturday. Yes, I had to be at school at 9 am on a Saturday. Yes, this alone is enough to make me bitter about the thing.)

So there I was, at school, on a Saturday, when I have a paper due Tuesday morning and a ton of reading for the week, and my parents are in town and we’re going to watch a football game tonight, and I was trying to be good-natured about it all. I made it through the ethics sessions without getting too annoyed (though I don’t know how I ended up in a group of people who didn’t want to talk…sigh).

But the second session I had to attend? The session on networking? ARGH! (This is all stuff I put on my evaluation, so it’s nothing I wouldn’t say to the organizers’ faces.)

First, the entire session came at the idea of networking from a “lowest common denominator” perspective. So we had one of the presenters telling us that networking isn’t just good for your career; it can also help you in other ways, like when you need a good gardener or a house painter. Um, hello? I’m not sure that was news to anyone in the room—the idea that, when you need to find a service provider, you should ask your “network” to recommend someone.

Second, we had a number of “activities,” some of which were better than others, but that were mostly pointless. We had to find someone we didn’t know and introduce ourselves and then critique one another on handshakes, eye contact, and stature. We had to get into groups and find “common points of connection.” We had to “network” within our group. (That last one was actually not bad, but you had to need something that someone in your group might be able to help you with. Being as many of us are new to the area, that might be tough for us. But there were successes; I just didn’t have any.)

So I see the value of the event; I get what they are trying to help us do. But dragging us to campus on a Saturday to do it? When we are three weeks in and the work is starting to pile up? Not cool. And then putting us in a room with presenters who, essentially, patronize us, is even worse. I seriously felt like I was being treated like a college freshman who had never had a job and didn’t know how to interact socially with her peers. YES, there are people who have never had a job and who don’t know how to interact socially, but the presentation I was at was likely of no more use to them than it was to me, and it’s all because of the WAY it was presented. We aren’t children. We don’t need the presenter to impress us by name-dropping. We don’t need to critique one another’s handshakes.