ITE 2011 Kids Discuss OCI (AKA "Have Mercy on Your Soul")

[,.,.,.;.,.,.]

These sample OCI questions are not helping me. Do I really have to ask questions like "What's the most interesting case you've worked on?"? I guess that one isn't bad. But some of these seem poor:

What attracted you to this firm?
Did you start in that practice area?
Where do you see your client base in five years? (ITE?)
How much client contact do you regularly get?

I like their questions even more:

What attracted you to law school?
Why Chicago?
Why this firm? (Ugh . . . because when you look at my grades and your Vault ranking, I think we're a good match?)

I also don't like these research tips. Are firms going to be impressed by some punk law student with a Westlaw account and free time? I imagined that it would be enough to know that, say, Morgan Lewis excels at Antitrust and Kirkland at Litigation.

Grade cut-offs will be the starting and ending point, I bet.

[M_Cool]

I've found that putting good "interests" on your resume can be a great conversation starter.  It seems like most employers picked up on my interests very quickly and it filled a good 5 minutes and broke the ice.  Still though, I did have one firm ask me an odd ball question: "About how many fast food restaurants do you think are in the United States?"

[dischord]

They ask you mickey mouse questions because they're just trying to observe your personality and see if you can successfully (read: not awkardly) make small talk.  They're not expecting you to say anything profound.

[,.,.,.;.,.,.]

My interests are:

Guitar playing in Top 40 bands,
Contemporary poetry,
NFL Fantasy Football

OCS told me that the more specific, the better. 

that's not an odd ball question.  I would have liked that firm.  M_Cool: are you 2010?

[dischord]

All my real interests are too weird/offensive to put on a resume    Not sure if I should just leave them off or take this as a sign that BigLaw isn't for me.

Speaking of "interests," I'm realizing that I'm going to have a hard time faking interest in things like "Capital Markets" or "Structured Finance" given that I don't even really know what they are.  The only practice area I know anything about is Antitrust, which, while interesting to me, is competitive and doesn't really exist in my desired market.

Of course, this is assuming I get any interviews at all.

[armyjag]

My only interest:

Lifelong fan of the Xs, the professional Y team in your office's Metropolitan Statistical Area

[M_Cool]

M_Cool: are you 2010?

2011.  This was 1L OCI.

[Ninja1]

...

What attracted you to law school?

...

autoadmit.com

[,.,.,.;.,.,.]

Did you mail merge using martindale or something?  I'm impressed.  I should do the same.

[BearlyLegal]

Why have punctuation 'tars spread to LSD?