On-campus interviewing ("Oh See Eye")

On-campus interviewing ("Oh See Eye") season has begun at my school, which means two things to an otherwise unconcerned 1L:

1) My favorite study room, a luscious miniature library tucked away up on the third floor of the classroom building, has now become overcrowded to the point of uselessness. Every time I check, the gloriously-overstuffed leather couches and scarce electrical outlets are all occupied by folks in temporary exile from their usual place of study, the much larger room down the hall and around the corner that's currently serving as Oh See Eye headquarters.

2) People in suits. Elsewhere this might not be so laughable; but people are Californian at my school, and the standard dress code includes not only board shorts and T-shirts but flip-flops. No, not fancy thong sandals: actual plastic flip-flops in Day-Glo colors, the kind you'd buy at the drugstore and wear to the beach. I've decided it must be a SoCal thing, since locals -- myself and my husband included -- are much more likely to be seen in public wearing Birkenstocks. (At least I would if I ever got around to refreshing my two-month-old pedicure. But I digress.)

Anyways, the besuited throngs are cute in a penguinish kind of way. They fuss over their neckties and makeup in the elevator mirrors like actors headed for an audition, but unlike actors, they haven't quite figured out how to wear their new skins. Fidgeting abounds, which makes a crowded elevator all the more entertaining. The student services association is running a rather escapist "suit check" in the mezzanine lounge: if you can't stand to stay in character for the whole day, you can always drop your duds off on their bellhop's rack for a fee of $2 and attend class in your flip-flops.

What impresses me the most isn't the concept of Californians wearing suits -- I'll spot one on the train every so often, frequently enough that their mere existence has ceased to surprise me -- but the fact that the suits chosen by these particular Californians all seem to have come from the same dye lot. They are all straight-cut black-on-black affairs, better suited to a pallbearers' convention than an impression-making session. I took one look at a few similarly-attired folks queued up outside the ad hoc interview center and heard the lyrics to an old Sting song in my head: fussing and flapping in priestly black like a murder of crows.

My own interview suit dates from the "gray is the new black" era; I guess its time has come and gone, and now the new black is actually the old black again. I wonder if it still will be by the time my own Oh See Eye turn comes?

thus spake /jca @ September 23, 2002 07:34 PM