My First Real Job : ‘I Started Out Pretty Much as a Gofer’

ALEX PILMER

Lawyer, 27, graduate of Loyola Law School, has been with Buchalter, Nemer, Fields & Younger law firm in Los Angeles since last October specializing in banking and finance

When I was in college, I got a job in a law firm, starting out pretty much as a gofer. I got more responsibility and the guy I worked for liked what I did. When I started law school, I worked at another law firm where I could work fewer hours and continued to be a law clerk. I did that for six years, and I think that being on my resume is why I got a job.

I did what was probably a very common way of getting a job 10 years ago. At law schools during the fall of your next-to-last year, law firms come on campus and interview people for summer jobs. After doing the 10-week summer program, they decide of those people who they’re going to make job offers to. So I went through that process and got a job offer for the summer at Buchalter. I was fortunate because I discovered there was a kind of anti-night-school bias at law firms. They kind of view them as second-class students, which is unfair because we go through the exact admission process, exact same classes, exact same professors. There’s no difference at all. I think night students have it much tougher: Most worked full-time and went to school at night.