Make my current job part-time in order to do an unpaid legal internship?

Prospective 1L at USC. Goal is Cali biglaw.

My current full-time job (admissions consultant) started last December initially as an internship and turned into a full-time job offer this February, and will ideally last until mid-August when semester starts. This job has a quite flexible schedule, and I don't have much to do each day because application season has ended. Even when application season restarts in summer, the work can still largely be done remotely.

Now, there is this legal aid organization near the law school I'll soon attend, which offers me a legal internship role starting June, ideally lasting until semester starts in mid-August as well. Although it's not corp law which I hope to practice in the future, I still want to take this role because 1) it's still a legal internship at a legal aid; 2) I can get a sense of what the school surrounding is like before semester starts; 3) it's just more interesting than the current admissions consultant job I have.

My concerns are:

  1. ⁠Since I only started my full-time job this February, and I didn't have any full-time job prior to this one (I was unemployed since college graduation), I'm worried turning it into a part-time one after only 4 months of doing it would look bad on my resume.
  2. ⁠This legal internship is similar to the legal internship I did years ago at a different legal aid. I wanna do biglaw in the future to pay off my debt, but all the legal related experiences I have would just be nonprofits. Not sure if that matters to biglaw firms.

Ideally, I hope to make my current full-time job a part-time one, and do a full-time internship at the legal aid. But I won't do it if it's gonna look bad on my resume. Advice?

I'd also like to know if law firms/the bar would check with the organization to verify the specific working hours when they conduct reference checks. If I do this internship as full-time and only list it as part-time, would that cause a problem? Or can I list both internship and the job as full-time on my resume?

Posted Mar 8, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

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