The Last Cupcakes

It’s been a while, so here’s a brief summary of what’s going on with this “cupcake” business: one of my Class of 2011 classmates at Darden has a husband who did his 1L year at the law school at the same time she and I were doing our FY at Darden.  Said husband always referred to Darden as “Camp Cupcake” and insisted that the FY at Darden was much easier than the 1L year at the Law School.  So I decided to do a week-by-week comparison of the two programs, awarding a cupcake each week to the school that was easier/fluffier/more sugar-coated.  You can see the posts covering the first semester here, here, here, here, and here.  By the end of the semester, the final cupcake tally was Darden: 5, UVa Law: 13 (meaning that I found the first semester at Darden harder than the first semester at the Law School). 

And now, since I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with baited breath for the second semester cupcakes, here they are (I did actually keep a written list last semester, which I just uncovered in a heap of papers/outlines/notes/bills that I apparently just stuck on a shelf in my office…whoops):

The Week 19 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: We were technically on winter break at both schools, and since my family had started driving me absolutely insane, I was back in Cville both years.  In my FY at Darden, I generally chilled out at home, did some interview prep, and spent several hours sitting in the Admissions lobby talking to prospective students who were visiting for interviews.  On the whole, it was pretty fun.  During my 1L winter break, I drove back and forth to DE to interview with several law firms.  Since I hate driving around DC and since interviews themselves are more stressful than prepping for interviews (and since 1Ls are engaged in cutthroat competition for a tiny, tiny number of firm jobs), it was a lot less fun being a law student.

The Week 20 Cupcake goes to: UVa Law

Rationale: While this week was also theoretically still “winter break,” at Darden, interview prep kicked up to warp speed.  I spent hours doing consulting case interview prep.  During my 1L year at the Law School, I managed to convince the administration to let me take a J-Week class (a one-week course that gives you a quarter’s worth of credit) at Darden.  So, I spent a week taking a course on Crisis Leadership, which involved a visit to the Darden Media Lab, complete with a one-on-one on-camera interview, and a mock press conference (again videotaped) and crisis plan development exercise.  I felt a little bit like Eli Gold from The Good Wife, so it was super fun.  Also, all my classmates at the law school were still chillaxing. 

The Week 21 Cupcake goes to: UVa Law

Rationale: At Darden, we started Q3 classes AND were doing hours of on-grounds interviews (and learning team).  At the law school, we were still on winter break.  I did fly up to Boston for a law firm interview (for the summer job I ended up taking), but I also got to see friends M & D and paid a visit to my former co-workers at The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named, so that was much more fun than class.

The Week 22 Cupcake goes to: UVa Law

Rationale:  The things that kept me fairly busy and stressed out at the law school were all non-law-school activities: the Wine & Cuisine Club Conference/Industry Day (complete will tripping over the carpeting in the PepsiCo Forum and falling flat on my face in front of Dean Bruner), alumni interviews for local applicants to Brown, a trip to Indianapolis in connection with the advising I do for the local chapter of my sorority, and a stress fracture in my foot.  Awesome.  During my first year at Darden, we were also doing interviews, dealing with snow storms, putting together presentations for the Management Communications course, and doing a bunch of other stuff.  At the law school, we were still shopping for classes for the second semester.

The Week 23 Cupcake goes to: UVa Law

Rationale: Plain old class at the law school; class plus learning team plus recruiting at Darden.

The Week 24 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: Yes, Darden was busy, but it was the routine kind of busy to which I had become accustomed at that point.  On the other hand, at the law school, I was prepping for a trial advocacy tournament, attending info sessions for tryouts for journals and to be a Dillard Fellow, and I think this was the week that a bunch of 1Ls were doing on-grounds recruiting for summer positions.

The Week 25 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: I, too, am surprised that during the month of Feb Club (there are theme parties every night of the month at the law school), Darden is earning more cupcakes.  But while interviews were still underway at Darden, the stress was broken up by the SHE Auction and Gala.  At the law school, typical stress was compounded by continuing trial advocacy prep and a full weekend spent on my Dillard Fellow tryout.

The Week 26 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: This week was a close call.  During my first year at Darden, I spent this week in a bunch of interviews, including a trip to DC for a series of second-round interviews with a consulting firm and a branch of the federal government.  However, at the law school, I was still in trial advocacy hell, and I lost the second weekend in a row to a tryout, this time for journals.

The Week 27 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: It was exam week (always my favorite week of the quarter!) at Darden, and even though that meant it was almost Spring Break at the law school, I spent the first part of the week exhausted from two weekends of tryouts and then spent the first weekend of spring break  at the most mismanaged trial advocacy tournament I’ve ever attended (and this was my ninth year of mock trial competition).

The Week 28 Cupcake goes to: UVa Law

Rationale: Spring Break at both schools.  At the law school, this meant total rest and relaxation.  At Darden, this meant a trip to Barcelona.  Barcelona was great (duh.) but it was a week of “class,” therefore making it less cupcake-y than a week spent vegging out. 

The Week 29 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: Darden finished up spring break and then started a quarter of mostly elective classes (3 electives plus LO and Ethics, so no learning team any more).  At the law school, our LRW (legal research and writing) briefs were due, and we held our first of two admitted student weekends (which means a lot of running around, especially when one of your closest friends at the law school is one of the ASW chairs). 

The Week 30 Cupcake goes to: UVa Law

Rationale: My law school friends and I had time to go grab breakfast before class and to go on a Friday shooting trip (no animals, only clays, were harmed during this outing).  At Darden, I was still recruiting and attending a bazillion and a half group meetings for deliverables for various classes.

The Week 31 Cupcake goes to: UVa Law

Rationale: Finals panicking hadn’t started yet at the law school (and I had plenty of time to attend various Darden social functions), but during my FY at Darden, I had several more interviews, which meant travel, and I also took on a club leadership role, which meant transition and strategy meetings out the wazoo. 

The Week 32 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: At Darden, I still had 3-4 interviews and my classmates were trying to pick their classes for the whole next year, but at the law school, I was prepping for my oral argument for LRW, doing my oral argument (on a Saturday morning), and outlining season had started. 

The Week 33 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: Outlining stinks. 

The Week 34 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: Outlining really, really, really stinks, even more than group meetings for LO, marketing intelligence, and data analysis and optimization.

The Week 35 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: The Landels' (my awesome operations professor and his awesome wife) annual Southern Dessert Buffet will make any week great.  Darden Days, including the annual BBQ at King Family Vineyards, was just icing on the cake.  Even though I also got to participate in these activities while I was doing my 1L year, outlining really does take all the joy out of everything.

The Week 36 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: Exams at Darden are so much more pleasant than at the law school.

The Week 37 Cupcake goes to: Darden

Rationale: Darden was done, so I got to go to my cousin’s wedding in CT and then fly to Cannes for the Cannes Film Festival (another GBE).  While Cannes drove me nuts in many respects, it was definitely better than a second week of exams at the law school.

SECOND SEMESTER CUPCAKE SCORE:

Darden, 12; UVa Law, 7

FINAL CUPCAKE SCORE:

Darden, 17; UVa Law 20

Final Thoughts: Darden is definitely not Camp Cupcake.  While the final scores were actually pretty close, the FY at Darden is generally much more consistently demanding than the 1L year at the law school.  However, the month leading up to exams and the two weeks of exams themselves each semester at the law school are pretty darn miserable (and accounted for most of the cupcakes Darden earned). 

Retrospective: The Dreaded Career Search

Another thing I did not anticipate about Darden when I arrived: you have exactly 2.5 days to enjoy being unemployed, and then you start panicking about finding a new job. Surprisingly, this isn't because you are destitute; it's because the Career Development Center (CDC) will put the fear of God into you by immediately convincing you that you will never have a job ever again because there is a recession/you are a career switcher/nobody is hiring/the sky is falling/run, Chicken Little, run! OK, slight exaggeration. But still....

The doom and gloom and career-centric mindset started during International Student Orientation, continued through regular Orientation, became more intense during the first few CarMa sessions, and reached a fever pitch with the onslaught of company briefings, networking events, etc. that started a few weeks ago. To be fair, I think they really just wanted us to get on top of the job search sooner rather than later, but I thought I'd have a little while to just chill. Wrong.

We're currently in the midst of preparing our resumes (although resume drops don't happen until December, I've already been asked for mine a couple times). I'm having a bit of a hard time moving from a "look, I'm a great paralegal, hire me to work in the legal field!"-focus to a "look, I'm a great MBA student, hire me to consult/crunch numbers/develop a marketing plan/etc."-focus. I met with two second-year career coaches (one who was assigned to me when I picked the consulting industry as a focus, and one who will be working at McKinsey next year and had a similar non-quantitative, short pre-school career) and the consulting Career Coach last week, and I have a meeting with the "non-traditional careers" Career Coach tomorrow. Basically, my resume doesn't do a great job showing "results" right now, and I'm struggling to figure out how much I should/can (legally) share about what my jobs have entailed. I guess the good thing is that there are tons of resources available to me, so I'm going to keep taking advantage of them and "trusting the process," and hopefully it will all work out in the end.

Retrospective: Quitting My Job, Or, What Not to Do When You Quit Yours

I’d like to offer some helpful do’s and don’t’s for those of you who are planning to quit your job to return to graduate school. These may not all be applicable to everyone’s situation, but here’s my perspective.

1.) DON’T underestimate the amount of time that training your replacement will take.

At the Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named, I was the only person in my position, and, while I certainly never considered myself irreplaceable, I performed many tasks that none of the attorneys with whom I worked would ever in their right minds want to do (thinking cataloguing and filing electronic copies of contracts and filing annual reports with various states), as well as some that I’m perfectly sure they could do but which would not be a productive use of their time (think running relatively routine daily compliance/conflicts checks, answering tons of questions regarding the Firm’s ethics/professional standards policies, or sitting in on numerous meetings where some other administrative group or another needed a “legal perspective” but also wanted to cover plenty of information that really doesn’t matter from a “legal perspective”). So, despite a hiring freeze, my position was considered sufficiently “essential” to merit hiring a replacement. Apparently, I’m so essential that the Firm was willing to have my replacement, M, start 6 weeks before I left (July 31). Now, when I heard that I’d have 6 weeks to train my replacement, I thought, “This will be great! I’ll have plenty of time to finish some projects, train M, write a manual about how to do the job, say my good-byes, etc.” Wrong. M is extremely bright, but there are a ton of nuances to conflicts/compliance/ethics work, and I had apparently forgotten just how long it had taken me to get up to speed on everything, plus my job had gradually evolved into what it was by the time I left. M got stuck with everything all at once. By my last day, I was still scrambling to finish up projects, transition things to M, and salvage my personal effects from my computer. Word of advice: plan on “transition” taking much longer than you expect.

2.) DO start documenting your job responsibilities or compiling a how-to guide NOW.

I guess this may only apply if you are in a “new” role or a role for which your company does not already have a “manual” documenting your responsibilities. If you are going to compile such a guide, do not do what I did and wait until your last few weeks at the company. You will invariably forget things that you do and how exactly you do them. Someone new walking into your job will not necessarily have the institutional knowledge that you have and will benefit from a detailed how-to guide. I had originally planned to do this early on, but I was busy, so I kept putting it off. Then, I was scrambling to try to remember everything. If you start now, you’ll be able to capture 9-10 months of work activities. I recommend looking at time sheets, emails, etc. every couple weeks, identifying major responsibilities or projects, and writing down how you did them, names of essential contacts, etc. This documentation may also be helpful to you when it comes to be review/feedback time.

3.) DON’T, under any circumstances, work up until the day before you plan to move.

You will be stressed about moving, you’ll want to see friends before you leave town, and you will benefit from at least a few days “off” before dealing with the hassles of moving, getting settled in a new place, and orientation. I worked until 14 hours before the movers were supposed to show up. Bad, bad idea.

4.) DO network at least a little before you depart.

I wish I’d had more time to do this, but (if you haven’t sensed a theme from this post yet) this is another area in which I feel like time snuck up on me. Ostensibly, if you’ve been at a company for some period of time, you’ll have formed connections with at least some of your co-workers. Take the time to go out to lunch, grab drinks, etc. before you leave. Thank your mentors. If they were particularly influential, you may want to keep in touch with them later, and this will be much easier if you’ve cultivated the relationship before your departure. Also, you may want to return to the company after school, and I would imagine this is easier if you do some work before you leave.

Why a JD/MBA?

***Warning: this is a very long post. Consider yourself warned. I didn't mean it to be quite so long, but it ended up that way.***

Julie asked a while back, in a comment regarding my admissions options, why I had decided to enroll at Darden. I promised (also a while back) that I would actually answer that question, so here goes. However, before I can answer the “Why Darden?” question (actually, the “Why UVA?” question since my decision had to take into account the Law School, too), I need to address the “Why a JD/MBA?” question.

As context for that whole discussion, I should state up-front that I have known that I want to be an attorney for at least the last 10 years. Like most kids, I think I tried on various career options for size when I was very young. None of those options stand out in my memory, so clearly I wasn’t too committed to them. I do remember that for a while, I wanted to be a chemist, but that dream died well before AP Chemistry class (though not before I’d bought – or conned my parents into buying - all sorts of books of experiments that you could do at home and miniature chemistry sets, etc. In the end, I don’t think I was actually allowed to do much with these tools of the trade, as my mother didn’t want me making a mess, and “experiments” for kids are inherently messy). But I digress.

I decided I wanted to become an attorney during my freshman year of high school. All it took was joining the mock trial team on a whim – a few months of the nerve-wracking exhilaration as I stood in front of a “judge” and argued that the scant fact pattern must lead to only one conclusion (“Your Honor, obviously my client was just defending himself against the unprovoked attack by the man sitting next to him on the train that day!”), the edge-of-my-seat tension as I portrayed an expert witness whose testimony could be easily misappropriated by the cross-examining attorney (“I said it was technically possible that the aneurysm killed the victim before the defendant stabbed him, but that certainly isn’t a plausible explanation!”), and the frantic mental steeplechase as I jumped to my feet and scrambled to state the right objection and grounds (“Objection! Rule…um…407! Subsequent remedial measures are not admissible to prove negligence!) – and I was sold. When I grew up, I told myself, I was going to be a trial attorney. With some practice, I could even do that really cool “walk over to the jury box and look incredulously at Juror #4 as the witness says something completely preposterous” thing that Sam Waterston/Jack McCoy always does during a trial on Law & Order (believe it or not, mock trial judges actually love this move if you do it right; they swear that they don't because it isn't "realistic," but then they give you amazing scores).

So, clearly, my desire to become an attorney was based on several things:
1.) Law & Order was my favorite TV show.
2.) I was a huge mock trial nerd.
3.) I loved (and maybe still do love, just a little bit) to argue. Arguing was more than just something I did when I was mad; it was a full-fledged hobby for a while.
4.) I really loved to argue when I knew that I was right and/or that I had evidence to back up my argument.

Fortunately, even at age 14, I knew that reasons #1-3 above were insufficient grounds upon which to select a career. My ultimate decision to pursue a legal career is actually a prime example of my tendency to ensure that I am making a well-reasoned decision (which is also reason #5 to become an attorney: apparently, I kind of rock at thinking logically/analytically). So, having hypothesized that I wanted to be a lawyer but realizing that mock trial had likely not provided the best example of how lawyers actually spend their days, I subsequently set out to prove that I was, in fact, interested in a career as a lawyer. This "mission" led me to several years working at a law firm in Delaware (a "large" firm by DE standards, but mid-sized by conventional standards), where I worked my way up from working in Records to working as an administrative assistant (a secretary by any other name is still a secretary) and then to working as a litigation support clerk (read: paralegal who doesn't yet have a B.A.). It's amazing what you can do in 4 summers, 3 six-week winter breaks, a semester working part-time remotely (covertly) from Rhode Island, and six weeks between finishing college and getting a new job. :-)

During my time at The Firm, I performed a variety of tasks, some exciting, some mundane. Yes, I spent HOURS filing, pouring over reams and reams documents looking for one critical reference, photocopying, Bates-stamping, and putting together hundreds of trial binders. But, I also got to go to court, interact with clients (both individual and corporate), and gain a pretty decent understanding of the actual mechanics of filing lawsuits and conducting trials, appeals, etc. in several courts (DE Superior, DE Bankruptcy, DE Chancery, US District of DE, and US Court of Appeals- Third Circuit). I learned that pretty much every "legal" show on TV offers a horribly inaccurate representation of what attorneys actually do all day. However, I did actually enjoy most of the work, and the experience didn't convince me that I no longer wanted to be an attorney....

...so that brought me to graduation (or rather, six months before graduation, since I finished undergrad early), at which point I knew that law school was in my future but that I wanted to "take some time off" before I continued my education. I knew I wanted to move to Boston, so I started looking for jobs at law firms here, but I couldn't really find a position that I liked enough to make a commitment. Then I opened up my search to in-house legal departments (i.e., internal within a corporation, not at a law firm), and I was fortunate enough to find my current position at The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named. I’ve had a great experience here, too (which I’m sure I’ll talk about in some sort of retrospective fashion before I leave at the end of the month), but what I got to see here that I hadn’t seen as much at a law firm was the real intersection between business issues and legal issues. It has been my experience at The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named that convinced me that I still want to be a lawyer but that I also want to get my MBA.

The work that my Legal Dept. colleagues and I do every day isn’t purely “legal.” The pure-and-simple “legal” answer to any question may not be the “right” answer because there is some other “business” issue that causes us to modify the “legal” answer. Law isn’t practiced in a vacuum; the business environment should really shape any “legal” advice that an attorney gives, but I think at some law firms,* some of the lawyers are not necessarily good at taking the business context into consideration when they provide legal advice.

I know it’s hard to explain what I mean by the above, so I’ll give the example that I used during all of my business school interviews**: Let’s say you have a pharmaceutical company called Miracle Drug Co, and they make a variety of drugs, including Pain Drug A, Pain Drug B, Pain Drug C, and Cancer Drug D. Let’s assume that Miracle Drug Co holds patents on Drugs A, B, C, and D, and Miracle Drug Co has recently learned that Super Cancer Drug Co is making a product that Miracle Drug Co believes is just like Cancer Drug D. Miracle Drug Co. goes to its law firm and says, “Hey, Lawyer, that punk company Super Cancer Drug Co. is infringing on my patent and making a drug that only I should be able to make! They are making a drug that is just like Cancer Drug D, and I’m losing money because of it! What should I do?” Well, if Lawyer looks at the information available and talks to a few experts and looks at the relevant law and feels that Miracle Drug Co may be right and Super Cancer Drug Co could be infringing on Miracle Drug Co’s patent, Lawyer is probably going to provide the legal recommendation that Miracle Drug Co sue Super Cancer Drug Co and will work to develop a trial strategy, because that is what lawyers are trained to do: if someone is infringing on your client’s patent and causing lost profits, you help your client sue the infringer to make them stop infringing and pay your client damages. Telling Miracle Drug Co to sue Super Cancer Drug Co is probably fairly sound legal advice. But, let’s assume that there are other “business” issues at play here, too. Miracle Drug Co makes 3 pain medications and this one cancer drug. Making this one cancer drug costs a lot more money to make than the 3 pain medications together, and it requires a completely different manufacturing process, a totally separate marketing plan, and it is used by far fewer people than those that use the pain medications. Actually, when it comes down to it, Miracle Drug Co would love to stop making Cancer Drug D and focus on making just Pain Drugs A-C and developing a new Pain Drug E. But, by the time Miracle Drug Co sues Super Cancer Drug Co and wins, Miracle Drug Co will have spent tons of time and money on litigation, and they’ll still be the only makers of Cancer Drug D, which they feel obligated to make because it helps people. If Lawyer looks at the business issues here, Lawyer may actually recommend that Miracle Drug Co sit down with Super Cancer Drug Co and talk about a licensing agreement under which Super Cancer Drug Co would be able to make and sell Cancer Drug D in exchange for paying a fee to Miracle Drug Co. Then, Miracle Drug Co could get out of the cancer drug business, cut costs, and focus R&D on inventing new pain drugs, all while still making some money off the fact that Miracle Drug Co did invent and patent Cancer Drug D. This second “legal” option may actually be the better one for Miracle Drug Co, but it isn’t necessarily the one that Lawyer would have suggested if Lawyer wasn’t also listening to what Lawyer’s client was saying about the business context.

So there we have it – an attorney who is attuned to both the legal and business concerns of her clients is more likely to provide responsive legal advice that helps her clients reach their business objectives. That is why I want to get an MBA in addition to my JD. I’m sure some of you will say, “Yeah, but you don’t need an MBA in order to be a lawyer who listens and provides legal advice that takes business issues into consideration.” You are absolutely right. There are plenty of lawyers who can do this without getting an MBA. However, there are also plenty of lawyers who just can't do this at all, and law schools are not necessarily in the business of training lawyers to do this; I think business school will help give me the perspective and the training that will allow me to do this better than I would be able to do so if I did not get an MBA.

If you still think I’m crazy (and I’ve met plenty of people who think I’m nuts to pursue a dual degree, including one of the attorneys who wrote some business school recommendations for me), I’ll offer some additional justifications for the dual degree:
1.) Law firms are businesses, but many lawyers do not think like businesspeople when it comes to running a law firm. I have seen and read about several instances in which law firms have been managed in ways that just don’t make a ton of sense from a business perspective. Plus, especially if I ever strike out on my own, I’m going to need to know how to run a business. I don’t think my sociology degree has provided terribly great insight into how precisely one runs a business well.
2.) Business schools help you build networks. So do law schools, but many (though certainly not all) people who go to law school become lawyers. Business school alumnae, on the other hand, tend to go off to work at or lead companies that may need attorneys. Therefore, business school may help me build a network of potential future legal clients.
3.) I know I want to work at a law firm for a while, but at my current relatively young age, I’m just not ready to say that I want to be at a law firm forever and ever. I may want to consult either before or after joining a firm, or I may strike out on my own, or move in-house, or do any one of a number of other things. Having an MBA opens more doors.
4.) Law firms are increasingly seeing the value of hiring associates with MBAs. For instance, Goodwin Proctor is offering a $20,000 signing bonus to new associates who have both degrees.
5.) Women have made great strides in law and in business in the last several decades, but I still firmly believe that as a woman, you have to work harder to prove that you have “street cred.” Collecting degrees doesn’t establish street cred, but getting an MBA does give you a shared experience with the CEOs who are your clients, and shared experiences tend to help foster stronger relationships, which permit you to develop street cred. Getting an MBA also enables you to speak the same language.
6.) It’s an interesting intellectual pursuit, if nothing else.

Still not convinced? Check out this discussion (or this one or this one) of pros and cons, or leave some comments below. I’m happy to discuss.

*Note – this post is rife with generalizations. I know that, and I apologize. Given the constraints of blogging, please just go with it. Please do not assume that what I say is necessarily representative of all law firms, all consulting firms, all lawyers, all business, all legal issues, all business issues, etc. Please also do not assume that the examples I use are direct reflections of my experiences at either The Firm or The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named.
**Again, this is a slightly contrived example, used for illustrative purposes only, not because I actually saw this exact thing happen. The people who interviewed me seemed to like this example, so I’ll use it here again.

Forte Foundation MBA Women's Conference/NYC Weekend Update

Apparently, I’ve fallen off the blogging bandwagon again. But I’m going to jump right back on the horse (how’s that for mixing metaphors?) and try to catch up on my recent pre-school activities and goings-on.

This past weekend, I trekked down to NYC for the Forté Foundation’s MBA Women’s Conference. Forté is a consortium of corporations and top business schools that works to increase the number of women business leaders. Forté provides networking forums, career education, workshops, job boards, and other resources, and Forté annually hosts the MBA Women’s Conference, at which there are panel discussions and workshops on the experiences of getting an MBA and of being a female leader in business, networking opportunities, a chance to meet with various companies (including the corporate sponsors), etc. The Forté sponsoring schools (including Darden) have made a commitment to attracting top female candidates to their respective MBA programs, and each school names a certain number of “Forté Fellows” each year. I am pleased and honored to be a Forté Fellow in the Darden Class of 2011 (really 2013), and it was great to get to meet some of the other Darden Fellows in NYC. I think we all seemed to hit it off, and (as I’ve thought each time I’ve met someone else starting at Darden in the fall) I’m continually impressed with the amazing experiences and skill sets of my future classmates. Having a few more contacts has made me even more excited to move to C-ville at the end of the month!

In addition to allaying some of my concerns about b-school (working in Learning Teams/study groups, having a background that didn’t require consistent use of quantitative skills, surviving case method classes, etc.) while simultaneously freaking me out about my impending internship search (all you career switchers out there who are stressed should really try convincing folks that you are a desirable MBA internship candidate when you have a legal-focused background and won’t be out of school for four – count ‘em FOUR – years), the Conference also gave me some other cool opportunities. As mentioned above, I met some really great people, both from Darden and elsewhere. Additionally, The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named (where I still work) became a sponsor of the conference at the last minute and had all sorts of folks in attendance. I got to meet some women from our NYC office whom I have emailed frequently but hadn’t actually met previously, and I took some time to chat with a few of the Recruiting representatives who were there. I’ve been seriously considering consulting for a couple years before joining a firm, and I hear law firms are starting to view a couple years of consulting experience in the way that they have historically viewed clerkships – as a valuable “training ground” of sorts that can help make you a better attorney. Hopefully, this isn’t just a rumor and will still be true when I’m done with school…in 2013. Regardless, I decided long ago that if I ever went into strategy consulting, I would really want to do it at The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named. What can I say, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. :-) I also had a great discussion with a certain biomedical company near and dear to my heart (they pretty much keep me alive; no joke), and they seem open to discussing a customized sort of internship that would combine my soon-to-be-developed MBA skills with my existing (and soon to be further-developed) legal skillz (yes, that one gets the “z”) and compliance/training background from The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named. I’m not terribly good at asking for what I want in an employment setting (usually I’m just so happy that I’m getting the experience/opportunity to do something fairly cool and career-furthering that I’m willing to accept pretty much anything), so the fact that I even broached the subject - let alone that they were receptive to some personalization - is amazing. So, I will definitely have to follow-up on that front, too. Very exciting!

I was staying with T in NYC, both because I’m a cheapskate (and she is super accommodating of my cheapskate tendencies) and because I realized I probably won’t get to see her forever since I’m moving kind of far away. Sad. But we had the chance to do some talking and catching up, and I took my first-ever trip out to Long Island after the Forté conference ended to meet her friends from home, grab dinner, and see some fireworks. We were kinda running late coming out of dinner, so we never really made it to the fireworks location; instead, we watched from a Home Dept parking lot. I think the view was better from where we were, honestly. And it was great to meet all of T’s friends from home, since I’ve heard so much about them in the last 6-7 years and had never met them (sometimes I joke that I’m the friend she’s embarrassed to introduce to others, but really, schedules and whatnot just haven’t worked out in the past). Then, on Sunday, we grabbed brunch at the Sunburnt Cow, recovered from that experience (let’s just say that brunch in NYC is focused on something other than that on which the average non-NYC brunch is focused), and I hopped back on the bus to Boston. All in all, a good weekend.