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The mission of the Professional Development Office is an educational mission. We're here
to work with the students to provide them with the professionalism skills, the job search
skills, and really the interpersonal skills, in some ways, that make them successful in
the job market and in their careers.
As a student progresses through their legal studies, and eventually their legal career,
we help them out in a variety of different ways. Whether it's helping them figure out
what they want to do with their law degree, to which career they want to pursue going
forward, to helping them find summer internships, even right down to helping them pick out classes
that will best fit and be tailored to their future career goals.
College of Law grads can have many career paths. Our grads are in public service, they
have public interest careers, they also work for law firms, and we also have a lot of graduates
who are in non-legal careers in fields such as compliance and business consulting.
The great thing about a degree here is that you can take it where you want to go. It can
lead you in so many directions. We have a vice president who is an alum, we have a dean
of a law school who is an alum, we have people who work as small town lawyers, the largest
law firms, bankruptcy litigators, corporate dealmakers, district attorneys, county attorneys...
It's a really great degree with a great network of people that can really help you build the
career that you're looking for.
We certainly have an internally-facing role, where the students are our main focus. But
we also have to have an external-facing role, where we deal with employers, professional
organizations, and our alumni on a regular basis. So it really gives us the best of both
worlds, so we can connect those two groups. We start relationships with students that
really last throughout their career.
Because of the national reputation of the university, we have graduates all over the
country, and really all over the world.
In any given year we'll have students -- new graduates -- take 24 different bar exams and
perhaps work in 44 to 50 different markets.
Our office is designed to facilitate job searches on a nationwide and worldwide scale. Using
our vast alumni network, we connect students with practicing attorneys in their desired
geographic markets.
The Professional Development Office tries to make a concerted effort to incorporate
networking into each and everything that we do, whether it's programming or one-on-one
counselling sessions.
We have a great program called Connect for your Future, where work with student leaders
to help the 1Ls learn how to network with alumni. And we bring back a great group of
alumni, working with our advancement office. We also do small programs. Sometimes its a
lunch where they get to talk to an alum who has the career they hope to have some day.
We try to engage alumni and employers by going out and visiting them, as well. These visits
often yield valuable information, such as what they're looking for in an ideal candidate.
Sometimes we even get some inside information on the interviewing process. So, we try to
engage them on a variety of different levels, whether it's incorporating them into all of
our programming, or visiting them to hopefully lead to job sources for students.
The Office of Professional and Career Development has a a lot of strategies for engaging with
employers. Post attorneys work in small law firms, and so that's a market that we really
have to work hard to engage and reach out to. They don't hire all the time, so we find
ourselves trying to meet new lawyers as often as we can. We also work with our alumni base.
A lot of our alumni are very committed to helping the students and the new graduates
of the College of Law as they develop their own careers.
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