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Old 26-12-2015, 02:00 AM
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Originally Posted by Unregistered View Post
I am a 2:2 from NUS and I had difficulties securing interviews (much less positions) in medium / large firms then. Most of the firms who interviewed me had less than 25 lawyers. I don't think I am alone in this as most of my 2:2 peers faced the same problems. A lot of us ended up taking positions in small firms that were a nightmare. I heard horror stories that life isn't peachy in SMU too and there were juniors who were unable to secure a TC even in Year 4.
Thats odd. I am a magna in my final year from SMU. Most of my batchmates, myself included, with cum laude and above received multiple offers from large and medium firms
Those below cum laude (slightly above half the cohort I believe) normally got their offers from smaller firms, and later in the application cycle (usually around y3s2). I believe this is the same for my batchmates in NUS as well.

I have yet to hear of anyone in my batch without a TC; pretty much everyone in my batch knows each other well so its not really likely that there is a significant number of people that haven't secured their TCs. That said though, I have heard of horror stories of smaller firms that offer no retention (i.e. they only take in trainees but do not convert them to associates) or extremely low pay. By extremely low pay I mean under 4k as a first year - might as well have done business or some other degree haha.

It is possible that the fact that SMU forces students to take multiple internships (minimum of 10 weeks total),to do volunteer work (i think it was 80h min), and to take classes on resume writing and interview skills, coupled with our relatively small cohort size (my batch had under a 100 due to an unusually high dropout rate), may have given us a slight lead on applications. It is also very likely that, as time passes, each batch will progressively find it harder to get places.
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