A Scully-wannabe

So this past spring as I was in the process of committing myself to law school I was simultaneously trying to figure out how I could not be a lawyer. I know, pretty bad reasoning. But there it is. I was looking through some info on "alternative legal careers" and it turns out that the FBI hires a lot of J.D.'s. In fact, a lot of special agents are lawyers. In fact, J. Edgar Hooever used to *require* that every special agent be either a lawyer or an accountant. So I look at the FBI website - they have a summer honors intern program.

Fast forward to this fall. I realize in September I should do something about this, and then in the last half of October get myself in gear to meet the Nov. 1 application deadline. Application goes in, I forget all about it.

Tuesday I got a call from the Albany field office. Wednesday I call them back. Today I interviewed with them.

I'm not actually sure how it went, though. it just kind of felt perfunctary, like it didn't matter what answers I gave. They read off the sheet, and they didn't ask any follow up questions to any of my answers. Which would normally be a bad thing - but I didn't get bad vibes, either. And afterwards, after the whole 15 minutes of questions or whatever brief amount of time it was, they said "do you have questions". And since it was 3 women interviewing me, and I felt pretty comfortable, i bit the bullet and asked if the FBI was really an old boys club, and then we just talked about things for awhile - not really that but just opportunities at the FBI, and the special agent telling me how she got to be a special agent, and saying how I was obviously very qualified and my essay was wonderful and a really good piece of writing, and if I didn't do the honors internship I should apply to be a special agent after graduation, and Rob could get a job there too. So that seemed kind of positive to me. And they said Chinese and Arabic were the two languages they needed the most.

In the end, however, it's up to headquarters, not the field office, who gets picked to fill the internship. And even though I have nothing to hide in my background, it weirds me out a little, the idea of having my entire life's history checked up on a scrutinized and put in an FBI file. As Rob pointed out, they could do that anyway, but the point is by trying to work for them I'm putting myself on their radar screen. It's kind of weird.

And in any case, there's another really exciting summer opportunity tantalizing me. Cornell Law just decided to offer a 3 week summer program in China. 3 weeks is extremely short, but on the other hand, it's late in the summer so that we can 6-8 weeks to do something else before going to China, like work for a non-profit or whatever. The program sounds really interesting, and I'd love to get back to China - it's in Suzhou, about an hour from Shanghai, and so in a part of the country I didn't see the last time. And I desperately want to brush up on my Chinese skills. I miss speaking Chinese, and I really would love to get fluent. That's never going to happen unless I spend more time there. Now granted, 3 weeks isn't going to help much on that front, but it is perhaps better than nothing.

So we'll see.