 Hi, so now we've got our final panelist just stylishly coming in right at the start. That's great. So I'm Nells Pearson, Director of the Humanities Institute and Director of the School of Humanities. And I want to thank Dean Greenwald for his support of tonight's event, as well as my associate directors, Dr. Patricia Berry and Dr. Geraldine Johnson, as well as our invaluable program coordinator, Elizabeth Hastings, without whom this would not have happened. She's out in the hallway waiting, so she's working, right? So I also wanted to just briefly introduce the panelists and then I'll have to dim the lights to do a brief intro, because they tell me I have to do that to show a few slides that I wanted to show. But again, as Dean Greenwald said, we have a very wonderful panel here tonight representing a variety of years of graduation and types of careers and types of majors and minors. And in order of their graduation year, those are, as you can see in your program, Jennifer Locke, who was a Spanish and English major with a women's studies minor graduating in 2003, who is now Director of Project Management at Sarah's Therapeutics in Cambridge, then Sarah Howe Elliott, who graduated in 2007 with an English and Art History double major and a philosophy, I'm sorry, with a history major and minors in art history, Asian studies and classical studies, who is now the Director of Online Communications with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and is up from Silver Spring, right? Yeah. So she's come a good way. And we thank her for that. Megan Kuzniewski, who is a graduate in 2014 of English and Art History double major, also a graduate of the James Joyce seminar, which gives her an extra leg up in the world at a certain degree of craziness, I think, to go through that. And then a philosophy minor as well. And she's a graduate of St. John's University School of Law and is currently an associate with the international law firm Clyde and Company. We also have Ariel Miranda, who graduated in 2015 with a major in philosophy with minors in peace and justice and business law and several other minors as well. We couldn't fit them all on the program. And Ariel is a community associate with the mayor's public engagement unit, the City of New York, as well as a steering committee member of New York Uptown Progressive Action. And in his spare time, he's also been a mayor's education consultant for New York City. He's been very busy in the brief time since graduating. And we round of applause for these folks. So I'm supposed to be able to dim the lights from the touchpad? So I just wanted to say a few brief things and about... It's a little better with that. We'll put them back up before you guys have to talk. And I'll be brief. But I just want to say that the Humanities Institute this year created a new series called The Humanities at Work. And it's devoted to the social and economic impact of the humanities. So together with the School of Humanities, we are hosting this event tonight because we don't often take the time to really showcase how our degrees translate into impactful careers and roles in society. We primarily major in the humanities, I would think, to satisfy our insatiable intellectual curiosity, our drive to comprehend the history and the scale and the possibility of human experience, to think and communicate creatively, theoretically, critically. But the story we often forget to tell is that, unroot to those goals, we acquire skills of analysis, problem-solving, ingenuity, and the ability to articulate these ideas to different audiences that give us distinct advantages and make us crucial contributors in a variety of public and civic and professional scenarios, as our panelists represent. And if you haven't noticed, this is what I wanted to briefly show you, if you haven't noticed the national discourse on the importance of the humanities is starting to recognize precisely this fact. The emphasis is now turning to the importance of the humanities and the crucial role that they play in molding future leaders and professionals. For example, there have been a host of new books on these. On this topic, George Anders' wonderful book, You Can Do Anything, the surprising power of a supposedly useless liberal arts education. Scott Hartley's great book, The Fuzzy and the Techie, which basically explains why liberal arts grads are doing so well in the tech world right now, which was part of a larger boom. If you just Google that, you'll find lots of arguments about that. Forbes magazine did an article in 2015 whose headline was the liberal arts degree has become Tech's hottest ticket. And one of the things, you know, Google is finding this out as well. I mean, one of the reasons is the ingenuity, the ability to analyze things across and synthesize information and the ability to think outside of expected norms is really what their finding is required in that field. Randall Strauss' book, A Practical Education, Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees, has a lot of excellent stories about why humanities majors are killing it in the Silicon Valley. Christine Madsbeard, who was here on campus, has a great book called The Power of the Humanities and the Age of the Algorithm, in which he explains why his international consulting firm based in Denmark and New York City hires only liberal arts majors. They are strategically helping companies like Lego and Reebok think their way out of puzzles and he wants only liberal arts majors to help him do that. You've got Microsoft's recent self-study, which realized that liberal arts majors are the key to the future of artificial intelligence and to innovations in the tech world that are going to drive things forward. Google, even more importantly, in the recent self-study, this has all been all over the internet recently, they did a self-study of their company in which they thought they would find what they believed to be the case about their company, which was that algorithms and the ability to be totally science-oriented would be the key to working at Google. They found that it wasn't true. They found that humanities-based skills were what were most crucial. I don't know why they have this guy reading Nietzsche. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but anyway, with these dark glasses and reading Nietzsche. So I just thought I'd say if you look at some of the test data, like the graduate management test, the test that you take to get into grad school and business, well, look who scores well. I mean, what is a test? Test quantitative reasoning, verbal reasoning, integrated reasoning, and analytical writing. Look who scores the best on it. Philosophy, history, art history, English, languages. Those are all on the top half of scores on that test. Who's actually in the lowest? And I'm sorry if we have any colleagues from business here. I know we have a great business school, but it's just worth pointing out. Accounting, business ed, marketing, management, those are some of the lowest on the GMAT. Look at the LSAT scores. Megan can talk to this too. Philosophy majors are the highest scores on the LSAT. According to data from the Law School Admission Council, economics, history, English, arts, and humanities. And those are doing better than the majors you think you're supposed to take, and that do prepare you very well for law school. Political science, criminal justice, psychology. So it's just things like this. In Scientific American, the editors recently took time out in the STEM debate to say, look, if we start getting too crazy with saying you have to take STEM, we're going to hobble our economy. Because they said, this is why a lot of countries like Singapore and foreign countries that have not focused on liberal arts education because they think tech drives everything. And professional education drives everything. They're starting to realize, wait, the inventiveness of the liberal arts may be why the U.S. economy keeps rebounding. And you have politicians like Jeb Bush saying, it's great to have a liberal arts degree, but you'll be working at a Chick-fil-A. Well, Jeb Bush studied Latin American studies at Texas, Austin. Bush studied history. Mitt Romney was an English major. Cuomo, Huckabee. So Obama said, don't take art history classes, and yet he's supposed to be a champion of liberal arts as well. So people on both sides of the aisle in politics have been kind of feeling that they have to say, don't study liberal arts and humanities, but it's not true. They did. So anyway, we have a lot of stuff like that up on our website at the Humanities at Work site. We have some more evidence and testimonials and things like that, but what's most important is to listen to the folks who have actually been in the degrees and have gone into the career world. So let me turn it over to them. Thanks very much. So I graduated from Fairfield in 2003. I guess I'm the oldest person on this panel. I don't consider myself that old, but I'm a double major in English and Spanish and a minor in women's studies. And I studied these things because they were interesting to me, because I love learning and because I really wanted to be bilingual. So when I graduated in 2003, I expected to take a job at Fairfield Prep as a Spanish teacher, because that made sense, right? Like, you have a Spanish degree, let's do something with that. And interestingly, I was in a panel in 2003 in women's studies, and a guy from UBS came in and he was talking about the challenges of women in the business world. And I took that as a bit of a personal challenge, because he didn't offer any solutions. And so I sort of said to myself, I've got this double major in English and Spanish and damn it, I'm going to go into the business world. And so that's what I did. So I returned back to Boston and I got my first job in nonprofit, and I was running a financial literacy organization in Boston, basically training executives to go into schools in the inner city and teach kids about money. I was like 22 at the time and had absolutely no business doing this. But I could talk to a crowd. I was an English major. And communication was really, sort of of key importance to me. So I worked in nonprofit for two years and realized that I couldn't pay the bills in Boston. Boston's a very expensive city. But I loved the work that I did because it was a great combination of my Jesuit education, all the work that you guys are doing here and your community service. I thought nonprofit was a great bridge. And then I landed accidentally, totally accidentally in consulting. And one of the things I'm going to sort of talk about is the fact that my career path has been quite circuitous. It's not been linear at all. In fact, I've just tried to be open to opportunities when they come my way and do my absolute best and sort of see where the tide leads me, which it finally has led me to something that I've been doing for 10 years. But the early part of my career was very circuitous. So by luck, I got a job at Cuba's Pharmaceuticals in Lexington, Massachusetts, basically sweeping the floors. So I've got this, I think I'm so bright. I've got this double major in English and Spanish, minor in women's studies. I've had some pretty cool experience. I have no business being in science. Absolutely none. I took a medical biology class at Fairfield, which I did not do very well in. I took a chemistry class. And so here I am now at an antibacterial company scheduling meetings and ordering lunches. And so I started there in 2008. And I spent seven years working my ass off, really learning the business and listening to as many mentors and people who knew what they were talking about much more than I did. And I worked really long hours. I didn't care what it took. I would take any opportunity. I would do any kind of research. And little by little, my work started to pay off. And so after seven years at Cubist, I ended up launching my first antibiotic drug, which for me was sort of the pinnacle of my career because I worked on a drug for seven years that will save millions of people's lives in the time that it's on the market. So in terms of advice, I want to say first of all, be open to opportunity. There's no way I could have predicted in 2003 that I would be working in drug development for the rest of my career. And I hope to be doing this until I'm very old. And I hope to have a lot more drug approvals. But I think with a liberal arts education, just like you're excited that you're in art history or you're in calculus, you'll be excited to be in whatever field that you're in, but you could never predict that now. So you have to be open to opportunity as it comes along. And it will come along if you're smart and you're motivated and you communicate well. I joke. I actually have no technical skills like none. My skills are really in people management and communication and team management in leadership. And these are all things that I learned as part of my liberal arts education. I don't have a technical background. I didn't study biology or chemistry or microbiome. That wasn't even a thing in 2003. So be open to opportunity. Two, your network is gold. So I learned this way too late in my career, but it turns out that you should all have a LinkedIn account. And you should make friends with your smart high school friends, with your parents' friends, with your neighbors, with your professors, with other students that you go to Fairfield with, people get jobs through their networks because people like to hire people that they know. And so I would encourage you to really use your network and to find opportunities within your network. And we all will give you our contact information so that you can add us to your network. So I think this is a really important factor is to use that network. So my third piece is work hard and be humble. So unfortunately, or fortunately, you just have to put the time in. You graduate from a great school and you think, I am too smart to be doing this. And I'll tell you a little story besides my own. My brother Johnny worked for the United States government for seven years for the TSA. And his first job at the TSA was counting change in the airport. My brother is a special agent with the FBI in Boston now. And he started by counting change in the TSA. So I think the lesson there is put your head down, be humble, and work hard. You've got to prove yourself. Every one of us have had to prove ourselves as we started our new careers. Liberal arts educations are a brilliant choice. And the reason why they're a brilliant choice is that they make students well-rounded. They make them learning agile. They make them adaptable, emotionally intelligent, and curious. You guys have strong writing and communication skills and you'll use these throughout the rest of your career. You also have critical thinking skills. If you studied a technical skill in university and your undergrad, there's a good chance that actually whatever you studied would be out of date by the time you started your career or a little bit later on. Like I said, microbiome therapeutics wasn't even a thing. So if I tried to study something related to it, we would have been already too late by the time I started my career in that field. And then I think employers, and I was actually talking to a bunch of other members of my senior leadership team at CERES, and one of the things we were saying is that employers value work ethic. They value creativity and they value liberal arts educations because you guys have the ability, as we all do, to think critically and to apply these skills in your career. And so I think it was a brilliant choice and it certainly, as you can see from the panel, it's been a brilliant choice for all of us. So good luck. And I want to put my money where my mouth is. So I have business cards up here and I have my notes, so please reach out if you're interested in drug development, if you just want to talk about my ridiculously circuitous career path. If you're ever in Boston, I'd love to take you out. So your network is incredibly important and I want to be a part of that network as well. So my career, I did not do any internships. I didn't even know that internships were really a thing when I was here at Fairfield. I worked summers at Walgreens in the photo department, back when they had photo departments. Don't even have them anymore. And at the beauty counter too, yeah. All the things. So my professional career got started and it was actually through a Fairfield connection. And it was senior year, kind of winter slash spring. And it was like, oh, I should probably figure out what I want to do after graduation. Luckily, through my advisor, Dr. Donka Lee in the history department, she knew another alum who was working at the Korea Economic Institute down in D.C. as the administrative assistant. And she had gotten promoted and now they were looking for a new office manager executive assistant. And this was back in 2007 before the Great Recession. So it was actually, they were having trouble finding people. So this alum, Julia, reached out to Dr. Lee and said, hey, do you know any Fairfield students who are looking for a job? Dr. Lee passed it on to me. I'm like, hey, I've got an Asian. I think she contacted me because I was an Asian studies minor. And so I applied because I knew I wanted to move down to D.C. It was just, I kind of made a list of cities that I would be okay living in. And so that was where I was concentrating my search. And so D.C., you know, something in Asian studies, let's apply. I got an interview, went down, and talked to the president of the organization. He later contacted some of my professors for references and just to make sure that I actually was more talkative than I had been at the interview. And yeah, I think one of my professors said, yeah, just let her warm up and then you can't shut her up. So I ended up getting the job and I worked at the Korea Economic Institute, which did South Korea economic policy and also some North Korea security policy work. Worked there for about two years and then I got promoted to be the director or associate director for programs and the internship coordinator. And that promotion kind of came about because I had proven myself over the previous couple of years and that I was organized and I could take on large projects and get them done. So I looked into what else could I do that kind of fits this thing I like to do and I found project management. And so on kind of my own time I went and took classes in project management and then studied and got my professional certification in project management. So now I'm a PMP. Get to put that after my name. It's actually a very difficult certification. It's one of the hardest tests I've ever sat for. It's like three hours on a computer, multiple choice. And the questions are tricky. They're tricky. They try to trick you. You're like, wait a second. And so actually, just to go off on a tangent on that, the ability to kind of read and parse something and kind of look for those gotchas was something that my liberal arts degree really helped with I think being able to kind of read between the lines and kind of figure out what's going on. So anyway, so got my project management degree, continued to do event planning and kind of membership relations at the chamber. But at the same time I was looking for how I could really get into the project management side of things. And the opportunity opened up on the chamber's communication team for a web production manager, which I didn't quite understand what that was, but hey, it sounded, production is close to project. Let's see what that is like. So I was able to kind of somehow convince the head of that team to give me a chance, basically saying, you know, anything I don't know now I can learn because I've proven myself at the chamber over the last couple of years. The only pieces of advice that I would, or bits I'd like to pull out of my story would be that once again, don't expect it to be a linear progression from one job to the next. Just kind of start out, figure out what you like to do. I would say that kind of the holy grail, the hitting the jackpot, is when you can find something that gives you the ability to have autonomy in your job, that you can kind of direct a bit what you're doing, that you can seek mastery of what you're doing, and that you have a purpose, that you feel that there is some type of purpose in what you're doing every day from nine to five. I think that those are three goals to kind of look for. I also think that you can look for each job to kind of build your toolbox of skills, so if you look at a job description and you can do everything that they want, you're like, oh, I got that, I can do that, that's easy, that's really fine. That's probably not actually a job you should apply for. Your next step should always challenge you a bit. So if you can check every box on it, you can do the job and you can probably convince them that you can do the job and you can get the job, but how long are you going to actually be motivated and interested in it because you're not really learning anything new, you're just doing what you already know. So for your first job, that may not be as relevant, but for that second job or that third job, once you do have some mastery, always look for what next thing can you add to your resume. Because it's not only about what you can do for the employer, it's about what can the employer do for you. It's a relationship. So just remember that. Last thing before I shut up would be about the whole going back to what Dr. Pearson put on the board about humanities and tech. Because once again, I don't have specific web development skills. I've kind of picked some things up over time, but I'm mostly directing technical people about what to do based on what our communications and strategic goals are for the organization and how, and then saying how technology and web things can help us achieve those goals. So I would just say that if you don't understand technology or digital things, then you're not going to really have any impact in the future. Technical people, they're the ones that are going to be building the things that have an impact, but if you have humanities and an understanding of the technical or digital realm, then you're going to be the ones that are telling the technical people what to build and that's going to be the stuff that shapes the future. That's awesome. My name is Megan Kuznesty. I was a member of the class of 2014 team. I don't know if you guys know this, but they won the Mac this year. The girls did. Grateful that I wasn't here for that because I would not have been a member of that team. So I'm pretty much just going to ramble and use my experience as like a rough timeline. I'll try to not talk forever, but so I came into Fairfield as a English literature major and then I realized that for the core I had to take a religion class and either a philosophy or a religion class and another philosophy class and it was only two more philosophy classes for the minor and then I had Dr. Drake for philosophy and I was like, I love this guy. I was an English literature art history major with a philosophy minor and then somewhere around my junior year I had always thought about law school. The LSAT it was really hard and just applying to law schools and going on interviews it's extremely difficult and at least for the LSAT I know that I know that the reason that I passed and did as well as I did on that exam was because of my majors. Not art history, but English literature the LSAT it's three different parts two of which are reading comprehension and one of which is logic and philosophy the logic section is really hard but because I had taken philosophy and I knew how to think logically I was able to succeed on that section and I started interviewing at law schools and I'll tell you one story I interviewed at Brooklyn Law School and they had given me a scholarship it wasn't as much as I wanted and I went and I interviewed with their president and something he asked me this is law school and I walk in and I sit down and this guy he decides to test me he goes what do you think about the Elgin Marbles and I had this second where I like completely blanked and could not remember what the hell those were I'm sure most of you have no idea what the hell those are and I was like and then it came back to me and I was like oh you mean the Marbles from the Parthenon that are in London that Athens is trying to get back and then he like kind of settled back and we had a great conversation and they ended up offering me a full scholarship and to pay for my books and it was because of that interview not just because I was able to you know pull that out of my ass and talk about the Elgin Marbles but because I can communicate and that's something else that you know my humanities degree without a doubt has given me an edge up um I'm really good at talking to people even right now is not a good example of it but one on one I swear I'm really good at talking to people and um without a doubt it's partially because of my humanities degree and then I went to law school and my first year the class that I did the best in was legal writing which is kind of funny because legal writing is entirely different than any kind of writing I had ever done in my life and it's entirely different than any kind of writing you would ever do but because I was an English literature major and because I took humanities classes and I had to write paper after paper after paper I was really good at kind of BSing and writing and doing it quickly and doing it well even if what I was writing didn't necessarily make sense it sounded good um and I ended up doing really well in legal writing and then the next year I was on a journal at my school I was on one of the law reviews and in my third year I was elected to the board of that law review and I ended up being in a position where I was the largest single site moot court competition in the country which I swear is impressive it doesn't sound you have no idea what I'm talking about but it's impressive and part of the reason I was able to do that first get on the journal was because at most law schools they have a writing competition and you get graded against everyone else who takes the competition who does this and you have seven days to write eight pages based on a fake court case and you have to write eight pages of footnotes seven days it was a 300 page packet and then I had to read all that that took a day and a half and then I had to write eight pages and eight pages of footnotes and it had to be grammatically perfect because anything that you got let any typo spelling error missing commas they would doc you for it and I had friends who were freaking out during it and I was like I wrote my final philosophy paper overnight you know bad idea I bumped out 17 pages and Dr. Drake and he was like it was a 12 page paper Megan what the hell did you do I was like I'm sorry I don't have to say without a doubt my humanities degree is the reason that I was able to succeed on that to be on one of the top journals at my school and then I was able to communicate and be articulate and being able to write well and having read a lot of really impressive writing um and that led me to get elected to the eboard and from there that has led me to where I am now at my firm and a lot of my friends people I work with now a lot of senior attorneys a lot of my friends in law school English majors history majors philosophy psychology random degrees that you would think wouldn't help you at all and a lot of them did better than like the accounting majors and you know more lucrative practical majors I had a lot of friends that I graduated with that went for the lucrative practical majors and I'm making a lot more money than them granted I went to law school but you know don't knock the humanities degree especially people tell you like oh what are you going to do with an English major like well I'm going to be a lawyer or like anything you can do anything with the humanities degree whereas if you study bio maybe you're a little limited there maybe not I had a friend who had a Ph.D. in medicine who went to law school because she is just a perpetual student but that's really hard to do whereas if you have a philosophy degree you can use that in any field pretty much I'm Ariel Miranda I am a community associate with the mayor's public engagement unit before then I had actually been a part of the class of 2015 studying philosophy as my major and then as Dr. Pearson pointed out I had too many minors as a business management minor business law regulation and ethics minor peace and justice studies minor and as well as ethics when I had first come to Fairfield I was completely unaware of what I wanted to do I came from a very disadvantaged community quite frankly 25% of the youth population there are unemployed there is a number of people who have pretty much grown up being homeless in my area there was a number of people who if you could look at our schools would pretty much be set up for failure we had a single digit proficiency rating throughout our entire school district and because of that I think that that shaped a lot of my adolescent years not having an idea for what I could do throughout the rest of my life and coming to Fairfield was I guess a big shocker to say the very least in the sense that I was all of a sudden being introduced to a number of great minds some of whom are actually in this room that taught me and are great mentors that I look back on today to start off freshman year that's the you know get into the core maybe you'll find your way around and I actually began by taking my first philosophy course Philosophy 101 with Professor Eric Jimenez he had been showing me the idea or rather the allegory of the cave I felt like I related to that because this was Fairfield this was me getting out of the cave that I was in before being given the opportunity to learn what is beyond my I guess my bubble that had been my adolescent years and it's actually because of philosophy and that class that I stayed in and did a philosophy major I started realizing there's so much value in what could be obtained from my philosophy course learning to question learning to think critically and specifically that came about actually because of course I actually took with Professor Sealy but because of the influences of the professors here I was able to grow and take these things with me I developed a sense of understanding, empathy and really a desire to want to change things thankfully I had actually been introduced my junior year first to a professor that was teaching the philosophy of ethics Nazar actually and he had been mentioning that he was sitting on a board of ethics and I think it was at the institutional view board at the hospital from there I was then given an opportunity because of what I had been doing to meet an amazing Fairfield alumni Jasmine Fernandez who had actually been working for the mayor in the city of New York I was given an opportunity from there to move into her office which was focusing on pre-k for all it's actually a nationally wide known initiative that was started to try and open up the number of opportunities for underserved families who had typically not been able to send their children to pre-k and as you'll find a lot of information now about how do we provide adequate care for young single mothers who need to have their children go to school so they can work and I saw this opportunity very important for my community because of the number of people who had a lot of children so this is the interesting thing we have a lot of children in that area but were in a very low income neighborhood many people could not afford to go to work because of the rising cost of child care and so I actually began working doing outreach in communities that were predominantly Latino and Hispanic in the city of New York interesting enough 40% of the city of New York is actually Latino and they speak Spanish of course not having as well because they're immigrants not having much of an understanding of the way the government in the city of New York works I was then able to begin showing that new face of government in those communities I actually reformed the application process for the entire city of New York Department of Education the largest city of New York the largest city run educational department in the country so that it would actually be more applicable to the Latino community and actually people would be able to understand what was going on when they applied for these programs so thanks very much to all of our panelists and we had on our docket to go from 6 to 7 30 so I know we're close to that but if anybody wants to stick around ask a few questions please feel free to do so if you need to leave that's fine but if you have a question for anyone on the panel please ask and I'm sure they'll be happy to answer question for Jenny you talked about in particular talked about opportunities just kind of coming your way I believe one of your jobs you described it as you kind of accidentally fell right to the job and I just graduated and I'm finding that to be the case but while I'm waiting for things to kind of come to me passively I don't know what I should be doing in the meantime to try to make certain stances in the first place what should I be doing with myself as I wait for these little opportunities that's a great question and I'm gonna say work on your network so we all will be part of your network and it's like the Kevin Bacon right like the relationship to Kevin Bacon whatever the six whatever it is six degrees of Kevin Bacon so I don't know where you live maybe in Connecticut so I might be connected to somebody in Fairfield somebody I went to undergrad with maybe they're connected to somebody who works where you might want to work and so it's the six degrees of networking that you can be working on now so that you can create a whole network of people that you can depend on and people want to help people just like we all want to help you that's why we're here to help people and so you can email people out of nowhere and say hey I went to Fairfield or I know so and so that went to Fairfield would you be willing to introduce me would you be willing to have coffee with me I can't tell you how many times in fact I just introduced my husband to a few people that I work for because he's looking for a career change so people are willing to help so work on your network definitely and be open to any kind of possibility like I said I started my career in non-profit and I've swapped careers a few times and I've been ordering lunches and sweeping floors like I really mean that when I say that so be humble and but I think really number one is your network get on LinkedIn start connecting with students that you went to your undergrad your parents, friends, your physicians your neighbors anybody because that's how you get connected to people people want to hire people that they know and Megan talked about that as well we feel more comfortable with people that we know but it's a great question and don't worry you're going to land just fine could I comment on that also don't be afraid to reach out to people randomly I when I was applying for jobs one of the firms that I applied to was a really big firm and I was told that and I really wanted to work for this firm and obviously I did not get the job but I was told that to get an interview with this firm you had to be like top 10% of your class at law school and I was not but I out of nowhere reached out to one of the head partners at that firm who I believe I did it because he was a Fairfield graduate there was some common denominator between him and I and I didn't know this guy but I think the connection was Fairfield and I reached out and I said I am also a Fairfield graduate I really want to work for your firm I love what you do and I would really love an interview with your firm and I never heard back from him and then we I ended up getting an interview with the firm and once I was in that's all I needed because I had a 10 minute interview with some low level associate at this firm and I talked my way into around two interview which if only 15 people got the first interview only I was the only person who went on and I'm not top 10% I wasn't 10% of my school so I probably was the least qualified person but once I was in the interview I talked my way into the second interview and I was the only person from my school who got that second interview there's also such a thing as informational interview so you should know that there's such a thing you may not be actually interviewing for a job specifically but you might be just trying to get information from someone to get connected to somebody and this happens to me all the time I would say I probably get I don't know 5-10 requests a week from people that are in my right who just are interested in my career they're interested in working for the FBI they're working you know they're interested in where I grew up they're interested in Fairfield they're interested in whatever it is that they're interested in so you can actually request just an informational interview like would you have coffee with me would you have lunch can I meet you to take a walk it doesn't have to be interviewing for a specific job so keep that in mind that if there's something that you are really passionate about you think you really want to know about a company you want to know about a person you want to meet anything that you want to know about people are willing to help and you can just ask for information