2L Summer Job Question

One year ago at this time I faced a dilemma about what to do for my 1L summer. Several of you, my kind readers, offered advice that proved invaluable—you said work for the public defender, I did, I loved it, and now I'm planning to make that my career. With that in mind, the time has come to make another career/summer job decision, and once more I seek your advice. Here's the situation: I worked last summer for a great PD's office where I had a great experience and learned an incredible amount about being a PD. It's a small office (only about a dozen attorneys) in a medium-sized city. I'm thrilled that they have asked me to return this summer, and I'd love to do so. But my question is this: Should I go back to the same PD office I worked in last year, or will that look bad to future public defender employers? The benefits of going back to the same job are that I know them and how things work in the office so I should be able to help them out more and get more responsibility in return. The office is also in a jurisdiction that allows 2Ls to get a “second year practice certificate” so I could represent misdemeanor defendants in court (w/a licensed attorney present and ready to step in at any moment if I start to screw up). Also, returning to the same job should send a message to future employers that I did well there, they liked my work, which seems like a good message to send. So basically, it would be an awesome opportunity that would give me some really good experience. The drawbacks I see are simply that if I return to the same job, my only real knowledge of being a PD will come from this one office and it just seems like it might be a good idea to see how another office does things. What do you think? If you were looking at hiring a new PD, would it matter whether the candidate had spent two summers in the same PD office, or would that make no difference? Any thoughts you have would be appreciated. (Please feel free to throw in your two cents even if you're not a PD yourself or never have been. I'm just trying to make sure I see all the angles here.) Thanks!

Posted 08:51 AM | Comments (16) | 2L advice law school

Ambivalent Voices: Synecdochic

The latest edition of Ambivalent Voices is now available for your downloading pleasure (or you can get it via RSS here). This edition explains why “synecdoche” or some variation of it would make a great blog/blawg name. After recording it, I decided my favorite variation would be “synecdochic,” because it could be pronounced so many different ways, depending on where you put the emphasis, and it just looks and sounds cool. The podcasting experiment continues to slowly evolve, this time with the introduction of simple “bumpers” —little bits of music to lead into and out of the podcast. The bumpers come by means of GarageBand, which also helped reduce a little of the background noise in the recording and helped cut the file size in half for faster downloading. (Side note: This was my first time playing w/GarageBand and I can already see I probably shouldn't have started b/c I might never want to stop. It's very cool, esp. for something that comes free w/new macs.) If you would like to say anything at all on Ambivalent Voices (ok, anything w/in reason that can be said in five minutes or less), let me know and we'll set it up. Your soapbox or comedic stage is waiting!

Posted 06:46 AM | Comments (3) | voices