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I received an e-mail this week from Felicia Brown, a colleague at Tulane's Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, telling me about the two Tulane law students who are working with the Institute's policy team this semester.  Third-year law student Ashvi Sivapalan is completing her Public Interest Externship at the Cowen Institute.  (More on our Public Interest Externships below.)  Ashvi has been assisting the Institute with its legislative work, researching and writing on legal and policy issues relevant to public education, while learning about policy development and implementation at the local, state, and federal levels.  Third-year law student Holly Reid, who has been working with the Cowen Institute for almost two years, has worked on various education policy issues, including Louisiana desegregation litigation and the governance of the New Orleans school system.  She has written research memos, reports, a blog, and has even given a presentation to state officials in Baton Rouge.  Holly is an alumnus of Teach for America, through which she taught in rural Texas prior to coming to law school.

The Public Interest Externship program at Tulane is an expansion of our original and long-standing for-credit externship program, through which our students have for many years spent an entire academic year in a judge's chambers, or at the National Labor Relations Board, or with a few other selected organizations.  Several years ago, however, our faculty significantly expanded the public interest organizations at which students could do supervised, credit-bearing externships during the regular academic year.  And this year, the program was expanded again, to include summer opportunities.  As a result, we expect to see many more students taking advantage of opportunities to simultaneously gain valuable legal experience and provide valuable service to the community. [This was originally posted in January 2011; a spelling error was corrected in September 2012.]

Now that our students have returned to Tulane Law School for the Spring semester, it’s time to focus not only on classes, but also on securing summer employment.  Our first-year students are working diligently to apply to positions that will give them substantive legal experience this summer.  To assist in that endeavor, the Career Development Office is hosting a series of mini-courses for 1Ls during January and February.  Last week’s course focused on the Spring Interview Program held on Tulane’s campus.  Tulane Law is lucky enough to provide first-year students with Spring on-campus interview opportunities, including interviews with local law firms for 1L summer associate positions and public interest organizations for internships.  We will welcome over 30 employers to campus during March to interview members of the Class of 2013.  In this week’s mini-course, the 1L CDO counselors discussed interview skills, do’s and don’ts, and everything from proper attire to interview questions to thank-you notes. We also invited Delaine Poland, our TLS Lexis Nexis representative, to give a presentation on using the online legal research website to learn more about employers and practitioners to prepare for interviews.  On February 8, we will host local law firm recruiters and a government hiring attorney to speak to the first-year students about interviewing from the employer perspective. We are hopeful that these 1L mini-courses will give our students the edge needed to stand out in a competitive legal market.  Our wonderful students are sure to shine in their interviews this Spring!

Katie O'Leary
Assistant Director, Career Development Office

I noticed this story in Tulane University's electronic daily newsletter last month, and although I wasn't surprised to learn about yet another interesting activity in which one of our law students is engaging, I was intrigued enough to track him down and ask him to tell me more about his involvement.  It turns out that Roman Griffith was a French and Political Science major in college and had taken advantage of the opportunity (after his first year of law school) to take one course each semester in another division of the University.  In Roman's case, he planned to take one French class each semester "basically to keep my language skills up during law school."  Along the way, Roman found that his interest in international law has been enriched by assignments he completed in a French translation course.  The assignments required that he transcribe and translate documents from the French colonial period, stored at the Old U.S. Mint (a part of the Louisiana State Museum)--and as it turned out, most of the documents involve legal matters.  So not only were the assignments more relevant to his primary interest in law than he thought they would be, but Roman's ability to do the translations was certainly enriched by his knowledge of legal terminology and his understanding of legal concepts.