After doing well my first semester, I have a chance of getting an internship with the 6th circuit court of appeals. I've been told by the person who would set everything up that I have a "decent shot of getting [this]." The same person told me if I wanted a district court gig, my shots were a "practical guarantee."
life is good
Woot woot! Wanna be lawyer fist-bump.
Slightly OT, what are the internship/career prospects for lawyers in America?
Generally speaking, I think most of my class went to law school to learn how to be better criminals. So, after graduation, I see the top of our class being wealthy drug lords and the bottom of our class in prison for DUI.
Joking aside, it's generally portrayed as negative. A few years ago the wages for entry level work ballooned, the media made a big hype about how smart of an idea law school was, a lot of people went, saturated the market. Combine this saturation with the recent recession and the legal market got hit hard. But I think it's improving for three reasons: (1) the baby boom lawyers are about to retire, freeing up jobs, (2) the number of applicants to law school continues to drop (since 2010), and (3) with the recovering economy, it is easier to find work (out-of-college) today than 5 years ago.
Also, a lot of these focus on the law school class in the aggregate. As a rule of thumb, the people near the top of their classes always do better job hunting than those at the bottom. A lot better. And I'm near the top of my class, so I have that going for me.
As far as internship/career prospects, internships are mostly unpaid. Every now and then a big firm posts work with a decent stipend ($5000-$10,000 for 7-10 weeks of work) but most jobs are unpaid. As far as career prospects, and internship too, it's diverse. There are a lot of fields people can look at including criminal prosecutions for war criminal tribunals (I have a friend doing this), business and administrative law, work with contracts and breaches, and one of my friends went to a decent law school, stayed near the top of her class, and now works prosecuting sex offenders in a small town (go figure). I guess I don't know much specifics because I've never held a legal gig, but work is definitely diverse (and unpaid without a J.D.)
Combine looking at health law as a field, I would be surprised if I couldn't get a fall back job working at a trans-advocacy center with all the shit we put up with health care wise.