FOUR TIMES THE WORK, ONE FOURTH THE PAY

Sitting down in her bright office in the Law School’s new Wasserstein building, Shabecoff gestured toward the plushy blue chairs by the window—a symbol of her efforts to make difficult one-on-one counseling sessions with students more comfortable.

The conversations she has with socially-minded students about the future of their careers are often sobering.

“One of the ironies in life that I joke about with students is you work four times as hard to get a quarter of the money in public interest,” Shabecoff said of getting a job in the public sector.

She added, though, that students who persevere do find jobs.  "I want them to feel empowered to do the work anyway," she said.

In recent years, Harvard Law School has made special efforts to encourage students like Pagano to pursue public interest law: in 2009 HLS founded the Holmes Public Service Fellowships, and in 2010 it established the Redstone Fellowships.

Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow has said that she is committed to supporting students who pursue public service. Before becoming dean, she oversaw curricular reforms that led to the creation of a new program of study called “Law and Social Change.” In 2010 she rolled out the Public Service Venture Fund.

Despite these efforts on the institution’s part, public interest law does not have a recruiting process equivalent to EIP in scale. Instead, Harvard hosts a week of on-campus interviewing for second- and third-year students with some 30 public interest organizations. “I beg our students not to rely on that as a job search means,” Shabecoff said.

Though Shabecoff said she would love to see a similar program for public interest careers, she acknowledged that public interest organizations would not participate.

“They don’t have an incentive really to come recruit on campus because people want to do this work anyway despite the extra work...and the relative lower pay,” she said, adding that public firms also have limited budgets.

Julia K. Gegenheimer, who graduated from the Law School in 2010 and now works as a trial attorney for the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice, said she remembers the contrast between private and public sector recruiting. Unlike many of her peers, Gegenheimer said she had to do a lot of legwork, researching organizations and fellowships to fund summer opportunities.

Pagano said she was proactive in setting up informational interviews over the summer. This semester, while most of her friends have their summer positions locked down from EIP, she has had to continue interviewing for jobs.

“Last week, I went to two different offices, and I’m dressed up in my suit, and I’ve got to go to class, and then I go straight from class downtown to this interview and then I go straight back so that I can go to a group meeting,” she said. “It’s a little nutty. And it would be great to not have to do that.”

THE PRIVATE SECTOR ROUTE

Like Pagano, fellow law students Tyanthony B. Davis and Daniel Balmori had positive experiences working in the public sector. But Davis and Balmori have decided to accept positions in corporate law firms instead, discovering that despite the recent economic downturn, private sector jobs are easy to find.