Hi Jessica!
Have a bit of an unusual question that I hope you could shed some light on, which I think will be helpful for people reading this post because it relates to the
importance of academic grades as well as the
status of international students during the pandemic where Vac Scheme applications are concerned. I write this because i was genuinely devastated before the recent spate of interview acceptances, and now i'm just really curious about what your take on this is.
A bit about my first-year background - I'm an Asian International student from Oxbridge (one of the two, can't specify for obvious reasons), and was ranked first in my cohort of 200 students overall, along with picking up individual awards for mooting and getting legal work published. Both my overall and individual subject modules are above first-class standard. Concurrently, I started an educational-technology venture and raised close to 100,000 pounds, alongside other extracurriculars.Obviously many sacrifices were made for this - I slept at 3-4am and woke up at 10am for most of the year, and clocking in the hours, invested over 1500 hours in studying for law alone. Moreover, I had legal and private equity internships back in Asia in 2019.
When application season came, I felt like the work had been put in, and interviews would be a shoo-in.
But then the rejections came one after another, with the exception of
Slaughter & May who had awarded me an academic prize. I didn't even make it to the interview stages for many UK firms with a "large intake" (50 +). At that point of time, I was in a bit of a panic. I wondered if my work experience or grades sounded unrealistic, or overly boastful. I speculated that as an International Student during the economic crisis, I was being discriminated against - or perhaps there was some sort of reverse-discrimination. Some of my friends, who I had assisted in drafting Cover-Letters for, eventually got onto their schemes and converted their TCs (Happy for them!).
Recently however, I received interview invites from the American firms with small intakes. including
Sullivan & Cromwell,
Davis Polk,
Skadden(Telephone Interview). btw, if anyone wants advice for
Davis Polk or
Sullivan & Cromwell (who have just sent out their invites, drop me a DM.) I've just done those and am happy to share.
I've spoken to career advisors at Rare/SEO as well as the University's career service, and they can't seem to figure out what the issue was with my previous applications. I was hoping that you might shed light on this situation. In particular:
(1)Are times tougher for International School students right now?
(2)Was the issue perhaps just poor responses to the questions on the application form / not showing interest? But it would seem anomalous that the American firms which are supposedly "more selective" seemed to have no reservations about my application.
(3)Did my application make me just sound too overbearing / a bit of a dick?
On my end, I would probably say that this experience shows that grades/oxbridge matter little for the VS process. Hope that this post was helpful to others, or interesting at the very least!