How to Spend Your Summer Vacation

In the good old days, if you nailed your exams, law school students were offered lucrative summer internships. You were completely not worth it but large firms looked at it as a way of sinking their hooks in early to top students.

In this economy, those days are gone. There are only a few legal internship that offer any payment--even at fast food wages. This leaves almost all first year law school students trying to decide what to do with their summer.

I have been interviewing for unpaid internships. This is where, believe it or not, you try to get somebody to let you VOLUNTEER at their office full-time in exchange for getting some real life legal experience and, hopefully, if you work hard enough--a letter of recommendation.

Another option is doing a summer externship. In an externship, you earn law school credit working volunteering for a non-profit. There is usually a very good educational/experience component to this. The downside is the college makes you pay for your credit hours. It’s $1,000 per credit hour with a minimum of two hours. So essentially, you pay a minimum of $2,000 to do volunteer work all summer. Because we pay a flat semester rate, the two hour you take this summer doesn’t lessen your fall or spring tuition. It’s money ON TOP of your usual college bill.

Then there’s summer school. There is a terrific intensive legal writing class I’d love to take. But it’s five credit hours ($5,000).

Which makes those unpaid internships look like an awfully good deal to me.