Since you are already accustomed to living on a budget, don’t let compensation get in the way of pursuing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A clerkship may not be your most immediately lucrative option after graduation, but your clerkship will help you make connections that will help throughout your career. The nature of the judicial appointment and election processes naturally mean that judges tend to be extremely connected people! A phone call from the circuit judge for whom I clerked helped me secure my first post-clerkship job as an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles! And your career isn’t measured in the year or two of lower compensation while you are clerking. Some clerkships open doors that will make the financial sky-the-limit. And as corny as it may sound, you may end up looking back fondly on the financial challenge. My clerkship salary was supporting me, my husband, and then two-year-old daughter. We couldn’t afford a rental car when our sole car needed repairs. So I rode each day to and from the three-day California bar exam on the back seat of a tandem bike with our daughter behind us in a trailer. It was actually kind of fun, and my husband and I still laugh about the situation. The bottomline: rarely does anyone regret clerking, despite the lesser compensation; but people often regret not clerking!
