I was tired last week, but this week I am weary.

I got callbacks from all three Mighty Big Firms I interviewed with last week, which means that in a month I go down to New York and make nice for half a day with each of them. One sends most of its summer interns overseas. Hm.

The daily ritual of washing hair, blow-drying hair, putting on makeup, putting on suit, and walking over to the large hotel where most of the interviews take place is getting old. On days where I have only one interview it seems almost a waste -- I put more time into getting ready than actually interviewing!

The interviews range from fairly casual, to sort of stiff. The guy on Monday kept asking me: "So do you have any other questions?" and since the career services people tell you to never say no to that question, I kept coming up with things to ask. "Uh, tell me about the cases you work on." "Uh huh, and what do you think makes a successful and happy summer intern?" "That's interesting." "I see." "Of course." When I got out, I realized that it had gone on for 40 minutes -- apparently, there'd been no interviewee after me, so the guy had kept on going. No wonder I had to reach deep into my bag of questions -- usually it's only 20 minutes.

I went to the financial aid office today and a nice young woman there printed out all these sheets with numbers on them showing how much income I'd have after loans every month if I made $50K (upper end of low-level public interest), $100K (in-house counsel), or $125K (big firm in NYC). Crimson has a really good loan repayment program -- beow $38K, they pay all your loans for you, and then it's a sliding scale up to $64K or so (for people with about $74K in loans -- like me). I'll have to peruse the numbers and figure out what they really mean (NYC housing, for example, would eat up a lot of the $6K after taxes and loans per month as a big firm lawyer).

I'm going to drop Accounting -- fueled by the physical revulsion I felt every time I looked at the book, I consulted with the career services folks and public interest folks and was relieved to hear that dropping a 1-credit class isn't probably going to do much harm. The career service guy was especially helpful: "The only thing I'd say is that you want to figure out what your comfort level is with numbers, so you can decide what career path to try out. So read the Wall Street Journal, Money magazine, Kiplinger's -- get familiar with the terminology. Buy a book at Borders -- one of those 10 Week-MBA things. This class may not be for you, but don't let that scare you off from the field."

Okay, off I go to the gym and then another 20-minute interview, the reading for tomorrow hanging over my head. Oh, and researching firms for tomorrow too.