How to Prepare for On-Campus Interviews

The first on-campus interview I ever sat in on, as a note-taker for a recruiting committee, lasted seventeen minutes and felt like watching someone parallel park under pressure. The student had clearly memorized answers. Every time an interviewer went slightly off script, you could see the small panic of a person searching for the card they had prepared and not finding it. She was smart. Her transcript was excellent. And she left almost no impression, because she never once stopped performing long enough to actually talk to us.

OCIs get a bad reputation as speed-dating interrogations, and the format does not help: short slots, a rotating cast of interviewers, back-to-back rooms, a hallway full of people in identical suits pretending they are relaxed. But the students who do well are not the ones who out-prepare everyone with scripted lines. They are the ones who prepare enough to relax. That is the whole trick, and this is how you get there.

Understand what an OCI actually is

An on-campus interview is a screen, not a decision. Firms are running a lot of candidates through a narrow window to decide who they want to invite for a longer look, usually the in-firm interviews that follow. Nobody is offering you a job in a seventeen-minute conversation. They are answering one quiet question: would I want to spend more time with this person?

That reframing matters because it changes what you optimize for. You are not trying to prove you are the single most qualified law student in the country. You are trying to be someone a tired interviewer remembers warmly at the end of a long day of near-identical meetings. Competence is assumed by the time you get the interview. What gets you to the next round is being a real, specific, easy-to-talk-to human.

The mechanics vary by province and by school, and the formal recruit timelines shift, so check your career development office for the exact dates and rules that apply to you. The underlying game, though, is the same everywhere.

Do your homework, but the right homework

Most students research firms the way you cram for an exam: they read the website, memorize the practice groups, and try to sound impressed. Interviewers can tell. Reciting a firm's press release back to them is not research, it is flattery with extra steps.

Better preparation is narrower and more personal. For each firm on your list, find two or three genuinely specific things you can react to:

• A practice area or matter that actually interests you, and a sentence about why. Not "I am drawn to your strong litigation group." More like "I saw you act on regulatory matters in the energy sector, and after my environmental law seminar that is the kind of work I keep gravitating toward."
• A person you will likely meet, if the firm publishes its interviewers. A quick look at someone's background gives you a real question to ask instead of a generic one.
• One honest point of curiosity, something you actually want to know. Curiosity is impossible to fake and unmistakable when it is real.

You do not need a dossier. You need enough to have opinions. The goal is to walk in with a few threads you can pull, so that when a lull comes (and it will) you have somewhere natural to take the conversation.

Build stories, not answers

Here is the mistake that turns an interview into an interrogation: preparing answers to questions. You cannot predict the questions. You can predict the themes.

Every OCI is really probing a handful of things. Can you handle pressure? Do you work well with people? Are you genuinely interested in this work, or in any job that will have you? Have you done hard things and learned from them? Instead of scripting responses, build a small library of true stories, four or five of them, each one flexible enough to answer several different questions.

A good story has tension and a turn. A moot where your co-counsel dropped out the night before. A summer job where you had to tell a supervisor you had made a mistake. A volunteer file at the student clinic that did not go the way you expected. When you have five of these ready, almost any behavioural question becomes a matter of choosing which story fits, not inventing something on the spot.

The best answer I ever heard to "tell me about a weakness" was a student who said she used to over-prepare so much that she froze when a conversation went off-plan, and that she was learning to trust herself in the moment. Then she laughed and said, "which is honestly what I'm trying to do right now." Everyone in the room relaxed. She got the callback.

Practise these out loud, ideally with someone who will interrupt you. Say them until they sound like you telling a story at a dinner, not like you reciting a paragraph. The moment a story feels memorized, cut it back down and start again.

Prepare questions that start a conversation

At some point they will ask if you have questions, and "no" is the worst possible answer. But so is a question you clearly pulled from a listicle. What you want are questions that a real person would find interesting to answer, because those turn the last few minutes from a Q&A into an actual exchange.

Ask about their experience, not just the firm's brochure. "What kind of work did you get your hands on in your first year here?" invites a story. "What is something a good junior did recently that made your life easier?" tells you what they actually value. "What made you stay?" is quietly one of the most revealing questions you can ask, and people almost always answer it honestly.

If you want a deeper bench of these, we wrote a whole piece on questions to ask in an articling interview that applies just as well to OCIs. The point is not to interrogate them back. It is to be interested, out loud, in a way that keeps the conversation warm right up to the handshake.

Handle the room and the logistics

Nerves are physical, so some of your preparation should be too. Know exactly where you are going and when. Have your suit sorted the night before. Bring a few clean copies of your résumé even if nobody asks. These small certainties free up the mental space you would otherwise spend on low-grade panic.

A few things that reliably help in the moment:

1. Slow your first answer down. Everyone rushes the opening because of adrenaline. Take a breath, speak a touch slower than feels natural, and your nervous system will follow your voice.
2. Treat every interviewer as a person, not a panel. Make eye contact with each one. If someone is quiet, address them directly with a question. Rooms remember the candidate who included everyone.
3. Let there be silence. A two-second pause while you think reads as thoughtful, not lost. Filling every gap with "um, yeah, so" reads as anxious.
4. Have a warm exit line. Thank them by name if you can, mention one thing you enjoyed talking about, and mean it. The last thirty seconds are disproportionately memorable.

Manage the day, not just the interview

If you are in a formal recruit, you may have several OCIs stacked into a single stretch, sometimes many in one day. That is its own skill. Between interviews, resist the urge to replay the last one. Take thirty seconds to reset, glance at your two or three notes for the next firm, and start fresh. Each room is a clean slate to the people in it.

Eat something. Keep water on you. The version of you that has not eaten since breakfast is not the version you want walking into your fourth conversation of the afternoon. This sounds like your mother's advice because it is, and because it is correct.

Afterward, a short thank-you note is a professional norm and worth doing, though keep it brief and specific rather than effusive. Reference something you actually discussed. Then let it go, because the follow-up matters far less than what happened in the room, and refreshing your inbox is not a strategy.

Keep it in perspective

OCIs are one door, and a narrow, competitive one. A great many excellent lawyers never went through a formal on-campus recruit at all, and a great many articling positions are filled entirely outside it. If OCIs do not go your way, that is information about a specific process on a specific week, not a verdict on your career. Our guide on how to actually land an articling position walks through the far larger world of positions that never touch the formal cycle, and it is worth reading no matter how your OCIs land. When you are ready to look beyond the recruit, our current job listings and the rest of the law school resources are a good place to start.

The students who come across best in OCIs are not the most polished. They are the most present. Prepare enough that you are not scrambling, then trust that preparation and actually listen to the people across the table. Do that, and the seventeen minutes stop feeling like an interrogation and start feeling like what they secretly are: a conversation between people who might end up working together.