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TCLA Vacation Scheme Applications Discussion Thread 2024-25
- Thread starter Jessica Booker
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- vacation scheme
- Sep 9, 2024
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Hi @Hana ♥ and congrats on the AC! I will link here some of the general and NRF-specific resources I think could be most helpful, but please let me know if you have any follow up questions after you have taken a look:
- For my best tips for interview preparation, see my Complete Competency Interview Guide;
- For an amazing guide for how to excel in negotiations, see Jacob's Guide.
- For a detailed description at past interview experiences at NRF, see these candidate posts from the 2019/2020 cycle.
! My top tip would be to focus on doing well and not on being perfect. Many people go to ACs thinking they need to blow away the partners and the recruiters to succeed, but I think this is the wrong attitude to have. First of all, while your achievements and skills might be impressive for this stage, it is quite unlikely you will manage to overly impress anyone no matter how hard you try - you will know a lot less about any given commercial law subject than lawyer in the firm. Secondly, this attitude will make you feel even more stressed than you would normally be and will therefore likely impact your performance. If you will be assessed for a total time of a few hours, it is impossible to be perfect in every moment. When you notice an imperfection in an answer, the right reaction is to acknowledge it but then to move past it and make the best of the rest. Instead, the overly perfectionistic candidates tend to stress about it a lot more than they should, and in attempting to fix the initial mistake they do a lot more harm to their progression chances. People with this mindset thus often end up creating negative feedback loops for themselves: they make a small error, then they begin overthinking it, which decreases their self-confidence, which impacts their next answer, which in turn further intensifies their anxiety; a series of events which can end up completely derailing one's performance.
To avoid this, instead of aiming to excel everywhere, I would simply aim to perform well - to do a good job on every task and score well on every relevant assessment criterion. This boils down to using your preparation to make decent substantive points and communicate them in a clear and confident manner. If you manage to do this you will have performed better than the majority of candidates and in most cases should be enough to get you progressed - it did for me 4/4 times. If you reframe your task in this way, I think you should feel a lot less anxious about it: while perhaps it is difficult to convince yourself that you will pull of an extraordinary performance, you should feel a lot more confident in being able to respond sensibly to tasks and to cover all your bases well.
A final piece of advice I have for calming down on the day and to avoid blanking out is to take your time:
Finally, know that just by getting to the AC you have proven yourself to be one of the very best candidates out of a huge pool, which means you have all it takes to succeed! Best of luck
- Firstly, taking your time before starting your answer. Instead of just jumping into a response the instance the interviewer stops speaking (which is a very natural temptation) take 3-4 seconds to think about and structure your answer. This will significantly decrease the number of times you find yourself blanking out mid-answer or having difficulty finding the right way to end a sentence.
- Secondly, if you have difficulty with finding sensible points for a question, it is perfectly acceptable to request some thinking time - just say 'May I please take a minute to consider my answer?'. In the unlikely case you do not find anything after that, explain that you are unsure what to say; but also walk the interviewer through your thought process of your best guess.
- Thirdly, aim to speak more slowly. When you are anxious, your hear rate goes up and you naturally start speaking at a higher pace, which is problematic in that this simply means taking less time to think as you answer. This naturally reduces how articulate and confident you seem, especially since speaking quickly more often leads you to losing your chain of thought or expressing yourself in unclear language. As such, try to slow down. Also, use strategic 2-3 second pauses in your speech to add emphasis to points and to get valuable thinking time as you are moving between the different parts of your answer.
Just off an a bit of a tangent, do you know if Slaughters has released the dates for its vacation scheme and what they are? Just wondering how it clashes.
Which scheme are you doing please? I haven’t received an email yet.
Hey Jesscia, thanks for this! Alternatively then, do you think it would make sense to talk about (again, taken from an article on FT) how discussions of 'the UK having less regulators' will impact clients across various sectors?
Also, should I be referencing specific clients?
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@Jessica Booker @Ram Sabaratnam @Andrei Radu @Amma Usman Hi! I was wondering if you had any tips and insights on how to prepare for a commercial exercise? The firm has said that we will get 25 mins to prepare and there will be 35 minutes of questions. This involves finding risks and recommending solutions for the same. I wanted to know if there are any resources I can use to prepare for this?
I have seen a few people on LinkedIn announcing that they were offered a place on this year's summer vacation scheme at Birketts
Milbank post-AC PFO @ 12:39 today.
i emailed them & they didn't tell me results only that i passed (tho applied TC)
hey I was asked for my documents last week - I am doing the first scheme though - so this may be why
I tried and got ghosted... sent a follow-up, ghosted again 😂 😂
Hi, I have an AC coming up and one of the exercises requires an in-depth knowledge of the firm, understanding how it works etc. This may be a dumb question, but I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to research the firm. I’ve gone through the website and found a few deals, but I’ve not really been able to gain an understanding of the firm’s operations. Any insights will be greatly appreciated. For context, it’s a US-headquartered international law firm @Ram Sabaratnam @Andrei Radu
Hi, I have just got the test a few days ago. Could you please share what is the format of it like is it like WG and timed? It would be really helpful! Thanks
1st round. I applied for either scheme but appeared to be on the standard ACs.
Me too! no idea what this arctic shores assessment is about....also wondering what they could possibly ask in the VI as the email syas it will only take 5-10mins
If asked in an interview why some of my module marks are lower than others, what should I say?
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