Today was my first day of my first career job. A little intimidating (an intern in name, but only because I'm not a fully licensed lawyer yet), but exciting, still.

First stop was the security desk. We had to report at 8:30, but it was 9:00 before anyone came and got us. And then it was only to take us into an orientation session already in progress for non-Office of General Counsel (OGC) folks. Apparently HR doesn't usually do orientation for the legal interns, so it threw everything off. Add to that the fact that they didn't have enough copies of all the forms for the extra people, and it was chaos incarnate. Plus they were a bit snippy that not all of the legal interns had used their own printers to print off the tax forms we had been emailed (even though one person explained that he had been expressly told not to worry about it).

But we finally got through all that, and they brought someone in to talk at great brevity about our benefits package. The problem is that there are about a million health plans to choose from, and so they can't really give anyone advice on what to choose. Instead, they just advised us to ask around in our offices, look online, and call the different companies. Helpful, but that was about all they could do. The retirement briefing was little better.

We got a tour of the building, showing us the location of the gym and the cafeteria--extremely important--and then it was time for lunch!

After lunch we got to go to our respective offices. All of the legal intern folks got to meet the OGC personnel folks, including the Deputy General Counsel for Operations. She was extremely friendly, and she really took the time to answer all the questions we could think to throw at her, and to even give us tips on using the phone! She also pointed out that the retention rate after the first year is 90%--basically, if you don't seriously screw up, you have a job. They've even been known to take people who haven't passed the bar after 2 tries and make them paralegals, keeping them on. Then, they still have a 5-year retention rate of 50%, which will probably increase in this current economy. In meeting my fellow "Legs and Regs" lawyers, the vast majority of them are Honors alumni, some as recent as last year, others up to 20 years ago.

From there it was on to our offices, where we had just enough time to be introduced around to folks in our offices before meeting with the General Counsel herself, Helen Kanovsky. We didn't have very many questions for her (we were all overwhelmed a bit by then), but it was cool to get to go to the offices of the head honcho--blue carpeted hallways, extra guards, and everything!

I then had a brief chat with my mentor (who, by the way, graduated from scUM, but married a Spartan, so isn't all bad!), before heading to Capitol Hill to meet some other interns for a celebratory drink (or two) at the Hawk and Dove.

I get my first assignment tomorrow am!