Alumni Search Tool

Posted: June 16, 2025

I graduated from Law School in 2013 which was a tough year to graduate. Far too many graduates and far too few jobs. One thing that really frustrated me was the lack of data or way to interact with the data that did exist to see what the career path of alumni looked like. Did the person who is a criminal defense attorney now start out that way? Did they work as a public defender or state's attorney first? And for how long? How necessary are clerkships for certain law firms? 

These answers existed in theory maybe on a LinkedIn page or a law firm's biography. But first trying to find that for each person is hugely time consuming and two law firm biographies tend to leave out a lot information that may be perceived as less flattering.  The question is can we create a tool where law students can look up career paths their interested in and see how people got there. 

Using some available alumni employment data I built a tool that did just that. You search by keywords for the career that you're interested in. It can be "public defender", a particular law firm, or a title like "Judge". The program will search the database to find all alumni who at any point in their career held that position. Their employment information is then displayed in a timeline format so students can see what they did before and after that job. This allows students to get a better sense of what the path looks like and some potential contacts to reach out to if they need a mentor. 

The green dot shows when they graduated law school, the blue dot is the job or title searched for, and the red dots are other positions. You can hover over each position to see what it is. The dots are spaced out by years. 

 

Another common occurrence in law schools are students who want to practice outside of the state their school is in. This can be particular challenging as alumni communication tends to drop off if the alum is out of state and as time goes by. However, with some current employment data, you can map where in the country and even the world the alumni are located. This gives students who want to practice law in a different state or country a good starting point to find friendly contacts in that location who might be able to mentor them. This can also help law school administrative staff with law school recruiting.

In the map below, the student or staff member can click on the desired state, country, or in Hawaii a particular island, and a list of all the alumni in that location is generated below. This allows the student to find the alumn that might be the most relevant for their particular career path.

 

Technical Stuff:

The website was built in Python using the Django framework with a MySQL database. It was hosted on AWS elastic beanstalk. The website as a whole was kept behind a login screen since it contained contact information for alumni.

 

Challenges:

One of the biggest challenges is getting employment data and keeping that data up to date. I had to collect data from several sources and merge those sources together for the final dataset.