My first week on the new job.

I began work for the Office of the Indiana Attorney General this week.

The first day

I had to force myself to get up incredibly early after not being able to get to bed before midnight (even with the help of Benadryl). I wanted to work in plenty of slack to shave and get dressed up; naturally suiting up takes a bit more time than throwing on my usual t-shirt and shorts. I was scheduled to check in at my office at 8:30…although driving to Indy from Bloomington only takes roughly an hour, I left at 6:45 to account for possible traffic issues in downtown Indy as well as possible issues of getting lost since I hadn’t been there before (I landed this job through an interview held within our school). Sure enough, I arrive in downtown Indy a good 40 minutes early, and initially thought I overshot a bit. Then traffic got thick really quickly. Then I struggled to find the parking garage we were directed to, making me worry that I was actually going to be cutting it close. Then I finally found it and was turned away by a lady saying the garage was full, which compelled her to direct me to another one. Happily, she gave me wrong directions to an intersection that didn’t even exist. It now became really clear that I was indeed going to be late despite the fact that I had seemingly been cautious; I phoned in and apprised them of my situation before I ever actually got late. Eventually, after arriving to within a few blocks of my office 40 minutes early, I strolled in more than 45 minutes late, agitated as could be. Obviously I apologized profusely, and they did understand (especially given the unexpected parking issues that had plagued others as well). I was assured that no harm was done and that nobody I was working for would even realize I was late since I was just dealing with HR people for orientation initially, but it wasn’t exactly the auspicious debut I had hoped for either. Orientation is what it is. It’s boring no matter where you are, but companies have to do a certain amount of it. By orientation standards, this was an eminently tolerable day. They got most of that stuff out of the way, and midway through the day we were already assigned projects to work on and basically told, “Have at it. Tell me if you have any questions.” There wouldn’t be much else to say, except that a surprising twist took place during the second half of the day. After going out to lunch with a few of my new co-workers (the majority of them being people from my class), I got back to my desk and had an e-mail waiting from the HR Director with the subject line, “Question,” and a body that simply said, “Leif, could you please come to my office or call me when you get this?” Naturally this spooked me since it sounded negative and I had no idea what the problem would be. Not knowing exactly where his office was, I just called him up. After standard greetings (I’ve really liked this guy since he initially interviewed me for the job; it seems that we struck up a really good rapport immediately), he says, “So I don’t want this to be like a bait-and-switch. This is completely your choice and you shouldn’t feel at all pressured into taking this spot.”  He proceeds to tell me that a need for some different kind of work had arisen, and that I was one of the new workers that he wanted to approach with an offer to switch over to it. I told him quite sincerely that the work he described sounded interesting, but since I fully believed both that I was truly free to stay in my current assignment or switch over to this one, and since I also fully believed that he would shoot straight with me, I said, “My one concern is this: given my goal this summer of doing good work, impressing people and hopefully positioning myself in the best way possible for a post-graduation offer…is it really wise of me to leave an established department in the organization that will never go away to do work for a commission that is temporary in nature?” He quickly assuaged my fears on this point. He said that he didn’t want to over-sell the whole thing, but that yes, a number of people high up in the government are behind this project and those who switch over to do this work will be looked very highly upon. He further said that this was high-profile work that most law students wouldn’t get to work on. He also mentioned who would be running point on this operation, and while I’m not going to mention her by name in this blog (due to the fact that a quick Google search doesn’t seem to turn up an association between her and this project within the public record and I want to err on the side of paranoid in respecting confidentiality rules at the office), she is an accomplished lawyer of several decades who has served in prominent federal positions. She also is closely associated with someone who is fairly famous and powerful not only on the state level, but nationally. Not a household name yet, but any avid follower of the news will have at least heard of this person’s associate. Working for her sounded kind of amazing. The HR guy supplied the coup de grace when he flatly stated that if this move didn’t help me a decent bit, it certainly couldn’t hurt me. At this point I pretty quickly asserted, “Okay, yes I’m interested.”

Aftermath

I was basically caught in a state of limbo for the next day and a half, working on projects for my initial department that I suspected would not get done because they were somewhat long-term and I was set to be switched at any time. On Wednesday, the switch occurred, as a meeting was held to further introduce the few of us switched to this project to what we were doing.

You see, when I heard I was working for the aforementioned woman above, I assumed that meant that I was working well beneath her. Actually though, it was just five of us and her in this meeting and it looks at this point as though I’ll just be reporting to her directly. To do good work for her and impress her could really pay dividends, and that actually applies both in the government sector and in the private sector. She actually works for a big firm a couple of blocks down the road in Indy rather than working for the Attorney General; the reason for the overlap is that this project is being worked on together by both her and the Attorney General, and the AG promised to send some help her way. Between just generally strengthening my resume a decent bit, and giving me connections in both the public and private sector, this is exciting stuff and could be a really good break to pave my way toward a good future career.

In case you’re curious, the work I’m doing is for the Indiana Criminal Code Evaluation Commission. The work is basically to evaluate all kinds of things about how Indiana carries out criminal prosecutions. I won’t bore you too much with the details, but it’s basically a potential overhaul of criminal classifications (felony vs. misdemeanor and sub-classifications within those), sentencing guidelines…all kinds of things. If the work we do is adopted by Indiana legislators, then it could have significant influence in this state for decades. While I don’t share many of my fellow law students’ notions of needing to be doing influential work, it’s certainly nice to be able to have a chance to try doing that in this case. I think I’m going to enjoy this work quite a bit.

General thoughts

It’s a cool thing, going and working in the big city. Many of my friends are also working in Indy, and the biggest part of the legal community of the city is consolidated into this downtown area. I met one of my friends working a different job for lunch last week, and I’ve set lunch plans with other friends in different firms for this week. It’s good to have so many of my connections at an arm’s reach. While I haven’t gotten to explore Indy in its entirety, this district is really nice and I like working there so far. That’s a very good thing, since it seems like the most likely candidate at this point for me to set up after law school.

Advertisement