The Canadian Law School Blog

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
The Test of Patience and Endurance

In my ongoing quest to secure employment upon graduation, I wrote the Foreign Service Exam this weekend to become a Foreign Service Officer. A diplomat as it were. This was not a fun experience. The exam is actually three exams. The Graduate Recruitment Test, the Written Communication Proficiency Test and the Situational Judgment Test. Registration for the first exam was supposed to start at 8:00 am and instructions were to begin at 8:30. I show up at 8:00 am thinking there may be some line up and that things would have just started. Instead there was simply a herd of 800 people or so hanging around in the lobby, nobody was doing any registration and we all waited. By 8:20 or so they had actually started registering people and we were all ready to write the exam by around 9:15 or 9:20 or so. This process was repeated two more times for each of the other exams and it was all over by 5:30 or so.

My biggest problem with the exams is the Situational Judgment Test which writes like a bad online personality sorter. You are given 50 situations that could happen in the workplace and 5 actions you could take in this situation. You have to choose the least effective and most effective of the actions. I think half the questions dealth with two co-workers (sometimes yourself, sometimes not) having an argument or disagreement and how they would deal with them. It left me thinking though, is this really the people that they want to be our foreign diplomats? It doesn't matter how much you know about the world, or how much you could learn about the world, but if you are really good at managing office politics your a shoo-in?

Normally I wouldn't post about something like this, given that it isn't all that law related. The job market is such sh*t right now though there are a lot of others like me in third year. I wonder what they are looking into?

In any case, that was a nice story to tide you all over until next time. Maybe my next post will be about suspended hockey players.

Comments-[ comments.]
Posted by Setu @ 4:49 p.m.

Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Hey, Sorry I didn't Write last week...

Nothing worse than having to make that call to the parents or wife or whatever. And I guess I'm making it here. Sorry everyone.

What is going on you may ask. Well a few things. I finally got the archive problem fixed so all you new readers should be checking those out. Thanks very much to the people at Blogger for helping me out with that. I will also add a new poll soon so that my site doesn't look so outdated. Thanks to those who responded to the last one, I look forward to reading those novels. ;)

School, yeah I'm back at it. I must say that my third year has left me somewhat listless even without a job and it is very difficult to get motivated, although this seems to be a common problem amongst my fellow third years. I know one girl in one of my classes has been to that class maybe twice. Although she has a job, who am I to judge. Most of us do show up for our classes, those of us who are left anyways. It seems that the number of third years has dwindled slowly away with people going on exchange, leaving school, transferring to other schools etc. etc.

My moot is awesome. The problem is super interesting (its about ICC jurisdiction and what constitutes genocide. Lots of fun!) The team is also a good group of people to hang out with, and one guy is even on the Eagles hockey team and we get along rather well. I would go into more detail, but there may be other Jessup mooters out there, and I don't want to give anything away.

Speaking of the job thing again, it looks like it is about a 50/50 proposition on who has jobs lined up and who doesn't. I also am noticing that there is a lot more people who have lined up jobs with smaller places than I remember people doing last year or the year before. The morale remains pretty high still though and I'm sure most of us will shake something out, but it's just a matter of what and when. For my part, I am more and more seeking the "alternative careers" route. My interest in international issues and law is just too strong so I'm looking at things like the Department of Foreign Affairs and NGOs or IGOs (if I can convince my wife she really does want to move to the US).

Other than that, hockey, rugby and volleyball are up and running again and I'm having lots of fun with the new 1st years. Good luck to those who just wrote the LSAT and I promise I'll write more. No really I will.

Comments-[ comments.]
Posted by Setu @ 4:23 p.m.