Alumni advice

Lately I've been getting involved in the newly revived Harvard Law School women's alumni group. It's a fantastic group of women, both personally and professionally, and the ones who show up at events generally want to connect and network and mentor each other. I've left every event with contact information for at least two women to follow up with, and have met up with many of them. Here are a few pieces of the advice they gave me:

1. Lawyers at big firms are the best to network with because they know about interesting companies and new developments.

2. When evaluating a job, look at the people who have left and find out what they did next.
3. It's more important to be around as your kids get older, especially high school age. Try to be the one who drives them around, since this is when they're likely to talk to you.

4. Try to meet clients in person whenever possible.

5. Large organizations are generally less rational than you would think, and often pretty crazy the closer you get to the top.

Most of the events have been small informal gatherings, but there was one big one at the law school where the Dean spoke. A few of the women who showed up were from the very first HLS classes that admitted women in the 1960s. I loved the book Pinstripes and Pearls, about the first generation of women at HLS, and was surprised that the perspective of the women at the event was different. The book discussed the indignities visited on those women -- including a dean who invited them to his house and asked them why they were taking places away from men, and a professor who held "Ladies' Day," when he would deviate from his practice of never calling on the women by hauling them all up on stage and grilling them on a case (usually related to some "feminine" subject, like the return of an engagement ring). But one woman from the class of (I think) '66 argued that while those accounts were true, the male leadership at the law school also took the women under their wing. The same dean would also invite the women to meet judges and other legal luminaries, and the intrusive questions seemed to her like genuine curiosity.

Meanwhile, the women who graduated in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s truly hated the place. One after another said they thought they would never set foot in HLS again. I think that while the first few classes of women felt both singled out and protected in a way, since they were such a small group, the subsequent classes got all the indignities and none of the perks.

I'm lucky to have been there during the Elena Kagan era. After hearing the stories, I understood how much she transformed the student experience during her time as Dean. Before I started at HLS, I was apprehensive about having a baby during law school, given the school's reputation for unfriendliness and unhappy students. But the Dean of Students' office congratulated me and gave me a pair of Harvard booties. (And I give money to the school every year, while the women before me are bitter and want nothing to do with the place.)