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My Struggle to Control ADHD Hyperfocus
Sometimes it’s a good thing, but sometimes it’s not
Disclaimer: this article is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your physician regarding any questions or concerns about your own health or mental health, particularly regarding medication.
As a law student who just finished his second year as an evening student, I have been applying to post-law school jobs. I work during the day as a special education teacher, so I take fewer credits than the regular law students the year below me and am competing against those students for these positions.
To be fair, we’re all only applying to summer internships next year, but in law school, the narrative is “the internship you get after your second year of law is your job after law school.” I have applied mostly to law firms, through a process known as “pre-OCI.” In the past, recruiters used to come directly to law schools to recruit students, but right now, most law firms are skipping the whole OCI process to start early and get the best candidates.
I have, for lack of a better term, been neurotic about the process. Use any word you want to label — obsessed, hyperfixated, and borderline anxious. I have had a couple of interviews so far and all of them have, in my estimation, gone well. In some, I have asked insightful enough questions that the interviewer has talked more than I did.
However, these interviews have an initial “screening” interview and then, if you pass that stage, you get called back for a more extensive, 90 minute interview. This latter interview is called a “callback,” and if you pass this second interview, you usually get an offer.
I have not heard back from a single firm about the callback.
Yes, I had all my interviews in the past week and maybe it’s just too early to hear back. But I started not only freaking out not only about the interviews, but whether I would get a job after law school at all. I irrationally started wondering whether I should ask the interviewers about whether I would hear back at all, despite knowing how desperate it seemed.
I started to hyperanalyze whether I had completely misunderstood how amicably or how well the interviews went. I started to wonder…
