Seattle

About two weeks ago I flew out to Seattle for the day to interview for an attorney position with the regional office of the Social Security Administration. Seattle is one of the places we think would be fun to live and when I heard about a public service career fair up there I applied for this job and decided to go out when I actually got chosen to interview. Luckily my mom helped me out with a frequent flier ticket (cuz she's AWESOME). It was fun to go and experience winter for a couple of hours. And I thought the interview went fairly well..However, today I got the tell tale letter and I didn't get the job. I can't help kicking myself because I don't think that I was passed over due to lack of qualifications or even because of the old standby "I'm not in the top 10% of my class and not on law review" but because I wasn't able to convey how much I WANTED the job....LAME....The interviewer responded to my experience and answer to the question "why do you want to work for the Social Security Administration?" with a question about whether I wanted to do litigation or policy work (since my background is in policy sort of stuff) and because I hadn't thought through the possibility of that (fairly obvious) question I wasn't able to sufficiently convince him that I DO want to do litigation if that litigation is for a federal agency in cases involving social security and disability claimaints. In this awful economy with every ASU law student stressing about what they are going to do after they graduate, I can't help wondering if this is the only chance I will get??? Needless to say, next time I interview for a more 'traditional' legal job I will be prepared to convey that I do really really really want to be a lawyer...even if working for some member of Congress might be more fun...