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Post-work summer activities and fun

Fortunately, getting into school is typically a security blanket for keeping your job. Most of my friends have been coasting at work ever since February. I’ve gotten more IMs and facebook messages than ever. Because most of these admits are already on the way out of work, it wouldn’t make much sense to layoff a skilled employee, lose productivity and pay severance to an employee who was going to leave anyways. To me, it seems like a pretty bad investment, not to mention bad PR at the business school where the employee will be attending.

I was one of the lucky ones. For the last two years I had been working for a consulting firm, Watson Wyatt. We have a lot of pretty big clients at Watson Wyatt, but we were a middle market firm and often couldn’t compete with the top tier firms. Unfortunately, when the economy sent south last fall, many of our clients started reducing budgets, and so did my company. For my company headcount was really important so it was one of the first ways they thought to cut costs. After I had gotten into school in December, I was lucky enough to get on the radar for layoff and severance pretty immediately. I was not originally so keen on the idea, thinking that I wanted to work through the end of the summer to save up for school. But a firm partner and all of my friends convinced me that staying stopping work was the best case scenario. After a few weeks of behind-the-scenes chaos, I ultimately spent my last day in the office in early March.

Turned out, stopping work in March was one of the best things that could have ever happened to me. Since March, I spent quite a bit of time with family and friends and traveling around the US. I’ve been to NYC twice, Chicago three times, Arizona, California, and Denver. I also have a coule of really fun trips planned for July. This summer, I’m also doing a pre-JD/MBA summer clerkship at the Attorney General’s Office. Such internships are generally reserved first and second year law students, but I sent out my resume and did a little networking.

My internship is great because I get really cool exposure at the top government agency, I’ve met a lot of really cool people there, and my hours are really flexible. I spent my first couple weeks in the Community Services division. In this division, we help serve the community by responding to consumer complaints about local business and similar issues. In reality, it felt a lot like a customer service job. After networking a bit in the office, I eventually made my way to the executive office, where we handle all issues directly for the Attorney General, including setting up and participating in meetings, scheduling his interviews and call, and doing all things press related. It’s been a lot of fun, and lots of important people come through. Just last week we had a meeting with Obama’s new Border Czar and his team from the Department of Homeland Security. It was a really busy day but the meeting went really well. It will definitely be a great job to chat aboutduring law school recruiting this fall.

Despite liking the AG’s office, I’m already trying to plan my exit so I can take full advantage of the rest of the summer, I’m already planning 3 or 4 trips up for July, and I’ll be making a short trip to NYC at the end of June. My trip in June is for Bain’s Pre-MBA Diversity Session on June 30th. I am excited about it, becuase I am pretty serious about the management consulting field, and it will be a good way to see a lot of friends hopefully. I’ll be sure to write about the session next week.

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