Doing Good

How much do things like determination and grit correlate with future success? It's a big question, and one that intrigues me as a former admissions officer. After all, the gatekeeping function of admissions is to scour all these imperfect proxies (some might say tea leaves) to try to predict the future success of all those wonderful applicants.

On that subject, a recent article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic Monthly caught my eye. Many of my blog readers have heard of Teach for America, the non-profit that sends talented and eager college graduates into inner-city and rural schools to teach disadvantaged students. It's a very competitive admissions process to join the "corps" (as they're called). Last year, Teach for America chose 4,100 out of 35,000 candidates, and during the 2008-09 school year, 11 percent of Ivy League seniors applied. It's a very popular career choice for college seniors.

So Teach for America has all this mad talent to choose from. Over the decades that their own researchers as well as outside researchers have been measuring their teachers' success in the classroom, some interesting findings have emerged. The factors that correlate most strongly with great teaching (which they measure very scientifically) are:

• a previous track record of perseverance and passion for long-term goals, or "grit"
• "life satisfaction" (measuring how content they are with their lives) and
• two kinds of performance in college:
  
  • GPA and
  • leadership achievement, a "record of running something and showing tangible results"

Another fascinating finding: an applicant's overall GPA wasn't as good a predictor of success as the GPA from the last two years of college. It turns out that hitting some speed bumps the first few years and being able to get your act together the last two years demonstrates something important about you. That's the kind of thing one may have already suspected intuitively, but it's great to have some data to back up the intuition.

While those findings relate to success as a classroom teacher in particular, they do strike me as having wider applicability that college and grad school applicants might find interesting. What's the take-away? You should still treat your GPA and test scores as paramount -- those are the indicators that will matter most. But if you can also demonstrate perseverance and stick-with-it-ness (whatever your particular challenges might have been), and you are the kind of student who has seized leadership opportunities outside the classroom, you have a lot of great qualities to show off besides the numbers.

So if your applications are still a ways away, think about the choices you can make between now and then that will let you show off these kinds of qualities. And if your applications are starting to sneak up on you, take inventory of your achievements. What concrete achievements can you highlight to demonstrate perseverance and leadership? How are you going to showcase them? It's not enough to say you are a leader and someone who perseveres. You'll need to back it up with a track record proving those things.

This Atlantic article has so much interesting data and examples to chew on, with implications far beyond teaching skills. Take a look, and please leave a comment with your thoughts.

A very cool non-profit, Imagine H2O in San Francisco, is seeking to come up with solutions for the country's water problems.

They are looking for an interim director of operations as well as a permanent COO, and it occurred to me that there is currently no shortage of attorneys being offered the opportunity to go work for a non-profit while receiving a stipend from their current/future employer.  I said that I would put the word out and see if if there's someone out there who is suitable to join this exciting non-profit on either a temporary or a permanent basis.

If you know of anyone in the San Francisco area (or willing to relocate) who might be appropriate for either of these opportunities, please send them the links below.

P.S.  I realize that the job listing refers to MBAs, but I'm told that they are specifically looking at JDs as well.

1. Interim Director of Ops (looking for someone who wants to take a leave of absence, or has been asked to defer their start date post law school or MBA):

2. COO

Last week, 900 students gathered on a sunny day in Boston, 100 years after the founders of Harvard Business School determined that they would create a school to professionalize the art of management.  It was an honor being among those who received a diploma, but the afternoon session the prior day offered a different kind of special feeling.  After the class heard Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, talk about life lessons and a greater responsibility to local communities and society, several hundred graduating students gathered in the business school auditorium to take an oath to live up to a higher standard as managers.

My experience with business ethics started during my undergraduate years at the University of Notre Dame.  There, the faculty and administration were among the leading proponents of business ethics, not least because of the Catholic nature of the school.  As I was preparing to enter the working world, I wondered how all of this ethical focus was going to tangibly affect my decisions.

I got a clearer answer when I sat for the CPA and CFA exams, which each have a large ethical component as well as a code of conduct by which members are expected to act in their professional and personal lives—if these are broken, the penalties are severe, and can lead to loss of credibility and accreditation.

So, after several years in the management consulting world, I came back to graduate school to study business and public administration at Harvard.  While I was surrounded by both capitalistic and public/non-profit peers and inundated with businesses cases across sectors, I have always wondered how the lessons we learned in my classes would bear on our day-to-day actions.

That is why I was so enthused when a classmate of mine told me about an idea he had for a ‘hippocratic oath’ for MBAs, just like doctors take.  In my mind the idea of both having an ethical framework as well as adding professionalization and accountability to the MBA graduate cohort was a great thing. 

Twenty-five of us have been working on this for the last month, and we have received a huge response from the current HBS graduating class (more than 50% signed the oath), graduating students at other business schools, alumni from several business schools, as well as several national press outlets.  While the press coverage and blogs have ranged from completely against/skeptical of the Oath to completely backing the effort, it has been a great thing to get a balanced discussion going on business ethics and how we as a profession and as a society need to learn from the current financial crisis.

A couple of the highlights from the Oath include:

Goal: Our long-term goal is to transform the field of management into a true profession, one in which MBAs are respected for their integrity, professionalism, and leadership. We hope to see hundreds of thousands of MBAs take the MBA oath, or something like it, as a step towards realizing this vision.

Preamble: As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can build alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face difficult choices.

So, what does this mean for all of those folks out there preparing to apply to schools this fall.  There are several questions you should consider and attempt to answer:  What am I expecting to garner from a prospective business school in terms of business ethics education and institutional knowledge about the causes of the financial crisis or business failures in general?  Do I see a value in having accountability for my actions as an MBA?  What sort of ethical code to I live by and aspire to?  Knowing that the Oath and its tenets are top of mind for many business school professors (and likely admissions committees), how can I relay these thoughts successfully in my applications?

While many bloggers have criticized the Oath for lacking teeth or any process for accountability, I am confident that this aspirational first step has been necessary to get the word out there.  I see a strong possibility that, like an MD, JD, or CPA, the MBA will begin to take on a stronger meaning and will embrace accountability standards that will reward and punish ethical and un-Oath-like behavior, respectively.

To learn more about the Oath, go to http://mbaoath.org.

Below is a selection of national news media on the Oath:

New York Times – “A Promise to be Ethical in an Era of Immorality”

Financial Times – “Harvard MBAs Pledge to Do Good”

The Economist – "Forswearing Greed"

CNN - “MBA Students Pledge to Serve the Greater Good”

BusinessWeek – “MBAs – First, Do No Harm”

Please share your thoughts and comments! 

 

Originally hailing from the Midwest, Paul Buser attended the University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate education. There he studied Finance, Accounting, and Public Policy while tirelessly cheering (in vain) for a Notre Dame football championship. After graduating summa cum laude in 2003, Paul worked as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and Thailand, specializing in operations and strategy. He has also directed a non-profit consulting team in Cambodia, Kosovo, and the U.S. through the International Business Council. Paul is a CPA and holds a CFA charter, and he just graduated with combined degrees from Harvard Business School (MBA) and the Kennedy School of Government (MPA). As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Paul works with business school and public policy school applicants.

Just received the following press release about a new program that employs social marketing to achieve measurable conservation goals around the world:

Rare---in Partnership with University of Texas-El Paso--Launches Groundbreaking Program in Four Locales, including Georgetown University in U.S.

(New York, NY; May 19, 2009) In a recent, much talked about Op Ed in The New York Times, Mark C. Taylor opines that we must “end the university as we know it” and make higher education “more agile, adaptive, and imaginative” if we want to solve the real problems facing the world today. An existing Master’s degree, with a new partner, is designed to better prepare community leaders to advance global conservation -- offers a look at how things might be done differently.

The majority of this Master’s Degree in Communication -- launched by the environmental non-profit, Rare (www.RareConservation.org), in partnership with the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP) -- takes place ‘in the field.’ Students from areas of highest biodiversity around the world implement an entire social marketing campaign designed around a specific conservation goal, by mobilizing constituents in their communities. Rare’s CEO, Brett Jenks, emphasizes that, “The Master’s program participants do not graduate until they’ve made a measurable difference in the way people think about and practice conservation in their communities. Essentially, these students don’t graduate until they change the world…at least, their part of it.”

The program is administered in four languages by regional university partners in Mexico, China, Indonesia (as of late 2008), and, as of Spring 2009, at Georgetown University in the U.S. All graduates receive an accredited Master’s Degree from UTEP’s Department of Communication. UTEP has a strong commitment to grounding cutting-edge research and theory in real world applications. It is academic home to Dr. Arvind Singhal, one of the world’s foremost researchers and authors in the field of communication for social change. Dr. Singhal believes that the Rare/UTEP partnership “is a model of strategic alliance for conservation and beyond. It is a model of how social change should happen.” Rare’s Jenks adds: “We believe our partnership with UTEP fills a real educational gap in the conservation field – arming leaders with practical tools and solutions for mobilizing millions and changing behaviors as we race to stem the tide of species and habitat loss.”

Rare’s proven, honed model for changing local awareness, attitudes, and behaviors regarding climate change is called a ‘Pride’ campaign, so-called because it inspires people to take pride in, learn about, and act to preserve the precious natural resources that make their homes so unique. All students in the Master’s course are simultaneously ‘Pride’ campaign managers throughout the two-year program.

The Master’s program includes classroom training where participants -- most of whom are already career environmentalists chosen by Rare’s local partners -- learn how to change attitudes and behaviors, inspire support for environmental protection, and reduce threats to natural resources. The curriculum includes topics from social marketing and messaging, to threat analysis and multi-disciplinary strategic planning, as well as organizational, intercultural, and environmental communication and both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The ‘in the field’ multi-media, social marketing component of the program includes the design of 30+ marketing vehicles, i.e., posters, mascots, bumper stickers, radio spots, press releases, festivals, school activities, sermons, workshops, billboards, etc., used to change minds and behaviors. Rare campaigns have been used to create new protected areas, reduce destructive fishing and illegal logging, and increase adoption of more sustainable agriculture, among other outcomes.

As the college admissions season starts to wrap up, I wanted to share some observations from another very interesting year:

Rock Climbing

I sat on a number of college admissions panels this past year (seminars and workshops for applicants and their parents), and one exchange in particular stood out for me.

As we were discussing school visits and the best ways to go about picking a college, one mom raised her hand and launched into a discussion about her son's grand passion for rock climbing. She recounted their various school visits in terms of this rock climbing wall and that rock climbing program, and she asked me to weigh in. How should they go about making their decision?

My response: "So you're going to select your son's college education based on a rock climbing wall?"

The room fell dead silent, and then people started laughing (including the mom who had asked the question). I hadn't meant to be sarcastic or snarky, and I don't think they took it that way. I had wanted to find a way to suggest that they might have lost some perspective and that they should take a step back and reassess what their priorities are in a college education.

Sometimes those priorities get lost in the big shuffle of the college application process, especially when schools in recent years have been seducing applicants (and their parents) with bling-bling amenities, gadgets, and facilities. That's less of a problem in this new era of shrinking endowments and budget cuts, but the overall message remains.

In any event, apparently that one-line response did the trick, and now "rock climbing" is my shorthand for asking people to reflect on their priorities in the college search process, whatever their priorities might be.

Heartbreak

I also heard an admissions officer from a very competitive liberal arts college give some great advice to a group of high school students. Paraphrasing roughly: Admissions officers are trying to assemble well-rounded classes; they're not necessarily looking for well-rounded people. If you let yourself fall in love with one dream school in the application process, you are setting yourself up for heartbreak, because you have no way of knowing if the admissions team that year is going to be intensely interested in adding a soprano or a fencer or a debater or a trombonist or a Latinist to the mix. And whatever well-roundedness gaps they're looking to fill this year might be different from last year's, so predicting what those gaps will be -- and whom your dream school is going to court -- is difficult.

On a related note, I'm reminded that college admissions heartbreak can come from different sources. Over the years, I've heard from a number of applicants whose hearts were broken by an athletic coach who was courting them hard and making big promises about their likelihood of admission. It's amazing to me how many coaches talk as if admission were a done deal. Sometimes they have that kind of admissions pull, but sometimes they don't. Don't let a coach break your heart; take their promises of admission with a grain of salt. 

Community service

In talking to many college applicants as well as admissions officers, I've noticed that community service jobs have come to crowd out other kinds of extracurriculars. Service jobs are great, but admissions officers know that many high schools require them, or give out awards and perks for logging a minimum number of hours. As a result, community service has become highly inflated (in terms of résumé value), and it can be hard for an applicant to stand out through service activities alone.

One admissions officer also pointed out that it's immediately obvious when applicants haven't really internalized their service experience, because they parrot what some adult has told them to think about the experience. Guess what: teenagers don't observe the world or reflect on it the way grown-ups do. Admissions officers can spot the authentic reflections -- and the parroted ones -- a mile away, and that can sometimes mean the difference between acceptance and rejection at the most competitive schools.

 

Please share your own experiences and feedback. I'm curious to hear how the season went for you.

From our law school admissions and career consultant, Nicole Vikan:

Prospective and current law students are often confused about what it means to practice public interest law—and they are usually excited to learn about the wide range of work that falls under this umbrella. Public interest law encompasses work done not with the primary goal of making a profit, but rather to protect individual rights, advance justice, or enhance the public good. Therefore, public interest law includes the following employers:

• Government agencies, which represent the country and its citizens in a wide range of practice areas. For example, lawyers handle consumer protection cases as Assistant Attorney Generals, work on employment and labor law issues at the US Department of Commerce’s Office of General Counsel, and write public health regulations at the Environmental Protection Agency. 

• Non-profits, which assist individuals and groups seeking justice and advocate for social change. At legal service providers, attorneys engage in direct service with clients seeking asylum, housing rights, or custody of their children, among other issues. At legal reform organizations and “think tanks” (such as the ACLU and the American Enterprise Institute), attorneys may use a variety of methods, including litigation and legislative advocacy, to affect change nationwide on particular issues (e.g., juvenile justice, racial discrimination, or gun control).

• International organizations, based in the US and abroad, which focus on trade, treaties, economic development, or human rights. Employers include government agencies like the State Department and Department of Commerce and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank.

• Prosecutor and public defender offices, which handle criminal law cases. To prosecute individuals for criminal offenses, one must work for the government, either at the federal level for a US Attorney’s Office or at the local level for a State Attorney’s office. Lawyers in public defender offices represent indigent clients accused of crimes; people with resources to pay for representation must hire attorneys from private law firms.

• Public interest law can be business-oriented, as evidenced by the current economic crisis and the many government agencies involved, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Board. Moreover, public interest law can be “conservative” or “liberal,” depending on the organization, think tank, or congressperson for whom one works (there are many lawyers on the Hill, in appointed and elected positions!). 

The opportunities are vast—as is the salary range for these jobs—and I am happy to address questions! Post them as comments, or email new questions to me here.

A while back I wrote about the predicament of an American law student who feared he was wasting his summer working for a non-profit in Cambodia. He felt frustrated by the corruption, the non-existent law enforcement, and the inertia he was witnessing in the legal system, and he was feeling useless and a bit depressed:

When I'm asked to comment on what I did and how I liked it, I don't want to be too negative or dishonest. But honestly: "I sat around a lot in a foreign country, went to meetings that I didn't understand, and helped absolutely no one, in part, because the judicial system is utterly corrupt" is probably a conversation killer.

I advised him:

You're there to help people, right? OK, you can’t do much legally, and I think you're right about that part of it. But you can do two things – you can learn and you can help. You should learn all you can about Cambodian law and government so that if it ends up being a country you care about, you can work for change there the rest of your life. You should go out into the community and do anything you can to help them. Teach English. Help with infrastructure projects. Pitch in at the local medical clinic. Anything. You went there not only to get experience for yourself, but to serve, right? So serve in whatever way you can, whether it's through your NGO or not. You'll be helping the people you came to help, albeit not in the way you originally intended.

Turns out, I was wrong. There are things you can do wearing your legal hat. This week's New Yorker has an article about a Harvard and Chicago trained attorney named Gary Haugen who went to Cambodia to offer legal services to the poor. In particular, he focuses on the absence of proper law enforcement -- the "abusive police, entrenched bribery, mismanaged courts.... The poor didn't just need lawyers; they needed new legal systems." In short, he's out there helping to fix all the things that were getting our intern down.

Since 1997, Haugen and his team of lawyers have provided legal assistance to almost 15,000 people in twelve developing countries: "bonded laborers, children who have been sold into prostitution, widows who have had land seized, poor people who...languish in jail for crimes they did not commit." 

Haugen has his critics, and his hiring practices in particular have come under fire (his organization is explicitly religious, and he requires a statement of faith from job applicants). But I wanted to share what he's doing because it demonstrates one way that people are using their law degrees to make real and immediate progress in the developing world.

A note of caution -- and career planning -- for law school applicants who want to do this kind of work. You'll need to get hands-on litigation experience before you become useful out in the field:

[H]e prefers to recruit government prosecutors, defense lawyers, and corporate lawyers who have extensive casework experience. "The circumstances afford no generosity for those who bring only good intentions, the best of motives or the most tender of hearts."

Today we're welcoming Nicole Vikan to our team. Nicole is a graduate of NYU Law School, has worked as a criminal prosecutor (including the Homicide Investigation Unit) at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, joined Fordham Law School's Career Planning Center as a career counselor (focusing on both the private and public sectors), and currently serves as a career counselor at Georgetown Law Center's Office of Public Interest, where she advises students pursuing public service careers.

Nicole will be working with law school applicants and people exploring legal careers (whether before, during, or after law school). She will also be blogging here. Keep an eye out for her first post!

If you'd like to work directly with Nicole, please email us.

Welcome, Nicole!

Anna,

I read your blog before making the decision to attend law school and right on through my 1L year. I've learned a lot. Thank you.

I attend the [deleted] School of Law and received a public interest fellowship to do a summer internship at [deleted], an NGO that provides free legal services to poor farmers in Cambodia. I'm part of the land law unit, which tries to protect rural farmers from land seizures.

In a nutshell, I signed on for a summer internship in a foreign country and have done almost no substantive legal work, partly because I was placed in a dysfunctional unit, partly because of the low English level of my colleagues, and partly because I'm having a hard time creating good opportunities to do legal work.

My dysfunctional unit. One problem is my colleagues and supervisors don't seem to do much. I nicknamed one attorney "man that stares at his cell phone" in honor of his 8 hour a day activity. The lack of work is partly due to the fact that government doesn't respond to motions, follow its own laws, or respect the court system. It's common to wait months for rulings, only to find out the court is "too busy" and will not issue any ruling at all, or the case file has been lost. As a result, the attorneys often wait around and do nothing.

I think my boss is depressed about the corruption. The program's two showcase lawsuits have been going on for 7 and 4 years respectively. In the first case, the local prosecutor has refused to correctly implement the presiding judge's verdict, and in the second case everyone involved in facilitating the fraudulent sale of indigenous land has admitted to taking bribes in a transaction that was, on its face, against the law (the land was sold to the sister of the Minister of Finance).

I should provide a little more context. At the end of the Vietnamese occupation following the Khmer Rouge, there were only a handful of lawyers in Cambodia. By 2007 there were 574. A good number work for NGOs and legal aid organizations. So it's understandable that attorneys have only a shallow pool of legal experience to draw upon when considering legal strategy, but we mainly do nothing. (A side note: At our organization the lack of activity is partly due to poor organizational structure. The bylaws allow the employees to elect the management team, which creates a huge disincentive for the management team to "crack the whip" leading to the current very weak executive director).

I know that one of the themes of your blog is that Gen Y's self-involvement leads to unreasonable expectations and more than an acceptable level of complaining. So I decided to create a writing project for myself where I would investigate how to go about filing a complaint in US courts against a Cambodian-American that dispossessed 23 families using armed men and bulldozers. I thought several allied NGOs were representing the families. I went to the province and met with people from the 3 other NGOs, but no one spoke sufficient English to discuss the case. I had to get the moto taxi driver to translate, which of course didn't work since the taxi driver's English was limited to "right, left" and not "motion, complaint." Then I went and interviewed an American ex-pat restaurant owner who witnessed the seizure. He was smoking pot during the interview. Anyway, long story short the NGOs weren't representing the families anymore because they never had actual title to the land and the Cambodian-American is politically connected and paid an acceptable bribe to the local families. The memo, while a nice academic exercise, would be functionally useless. Instead I'm writing another grant proposal and shadowing my boss to his infrequent meetings with court officials (going to an hour meeting in the provinces can take 3 days after factoring in driving).

But that's it. I've got an interesting story or two about the outrageous facts in the cases, but I haven't done much substantive legal work. In on campus interviews, I can show an attorney a picture of a client meeting with a monkey in the background but not a legal memo.

I am concerned about on campus interviews. Although I am doing public interest work this summer and will have meaningful service in my legal career, I would like to have the opportunity to work for a mid-size to larger local firm next summer and after graduation. My big hairy audacious goal is to be part of the legal community that shapes [US city's] land use regulations to meet the transportation and environmental challenges of the next century.

What advice do you have? I'm actually pretty down on my summer experience. The land law unit has a poor reputation with its donors and will probably lose its funding because of its failure to do much for its clients. For me personally, the unit's inactivity means I have a lot of dead time. I also haven't learned directly from any legal professionals that speak English well. When I'm asked to comment on what I did and how I liked it, I don't want to be too negative or dishonest. But honestly: "I sat around a lot in a foreign country, went to meetings that I didn't understand, and helped absolutely no one, in part, because the judicial system is utterly corrupt" is probably a conversation killer.

A final thought. Friends and family point to the value of a foreign experience and I think they're right. But for me, I think the marginal value of this experience is low. Like a lot of students that graduated from college around the time I did, I was fortunate enough to study abroad. I went to [deleted] for a semester. I also taught English in [deleted] after graduation for six months. Granted Cambodia is very different from either of those countries, but I still have a hard time saying with conviction that for me just being in a foreign country is a good use of my 1L summer.

I look forward to your thoughts. Any advice on how to spin gold out of this straw will be carefully studied. Thank you.

 

Holy cow, you've lived a lifetime in a summer. The only thing that could have been worse is if you'd spent the summer at Latham/Cravath/Kirkland/Perkins/BlahBlah. Seriously.

To prepare for interviews, you need to take the email you wrote me, put a far more positive spin on it, and outline at a practical level the barriers that stand between land-reform-in-theory and land-reform-in-practice. That’s the perfect (short) law review article to start writing now, and the fact that you've got it under way is a great talking point during an interview. "What did you do this summer?" "I started the summer trying to protect rural Cambodians from property seizure. The summer I got was more interesting than what I signed up for – I ended up studying what’s broken about the Cambodian legal system in practice, and now I’m writing an article about it." You're going to call it "Three Barriers to Real Property Protection in Cambodia," and I will be expecting a signed copy.

I also told a lawyer friend of mine about your predicament, and here's what he said:

It’s interesting because we’re trying to get a legal clinic going in Tanzania; that’s my next uber-project, I think. Same challenges all around, though we do expect less corruption than in Cambodia. We also expect just as much inactivity, lack of movement in the courts, etc. Property rights is a big thing.

If you take the narrow view of "what law did I practice?", then yeah, his experience is limited. But that’s not what law is in developing countries anyhow. My work in Tanzania so far has been spent trying to *see* a copy of the Tanzanian legal code. I finally did in South Africa, at the supreme court.

Incredibly experienced lawyers have a tough time getting anything done in the developing world, and you are at the teeny, weeny start of that learning curve. You have to start there, so try not to get frustrated just because you're facing as many hurdles as the superstar lawyers who are also getting stuck in the mire of "international law."

Back to interviews. What else can you do? You can talk about how grateful you are to be an American living in a country with laws and rights. You can talk about how hard it is to do any real legal work in a country where the government and the courts are hopelessly corrupt and no one bothers to do much about it. That’s not an interview killer; it’s an interview opener, especially if you approach it with humor and grace.

In the meantime, there's no need to mope around being depressed. You're there to help people, right? OK, you can’t do much legally, and I think you're right about that part of it. But you can do two things – you can learn and you can help. You should learn all you can about Cambodian law and government so that if it ends up being a country you care about, you can work for change there the rest of your life. You should go out into the community and do anything you can to help them. Teach English. Help with infrastructure projects. Pitch in at the local medical clinic. Anything. You went there not only to get experience for yourself, but to serve, right? So serve in whatever way you can, whether it's through your NGO or not. You'll be helping the people you came to help, albeit not in the way you originally intended. Add to that a positive attitude, good war stories, and a sense of humor, and law firms would be crazy not to hire you. They'll see a self-starter, a team player, and a smart guy who knows how to make lemonade. What more could you want in an employee?

You are also infinitely wiser than you were at the start of the summer. You've been up to your elbows in the glamorous world of "International Law" that every law school applicant and his brother swears he wants to practice. Good for you that you've gone out and done it, and figured out what that really means, and have a bunch of stories to tell.

And to think you could have been sitting around in some air-conditioned American law firm writing memos that no one will read about Section 226 of the Labor Code ("Social Security Number Truncation on Pay Stubs"). You are way, way ahead.

(See update here).

I was so excited to hear about Princeton's plans to formalize a Princeton-sponsored gap year for their students before they start college. In this case, the gap year program will be for applicants who have already been admitted to Princeton, but gap years are also a great idea for high school students who have not yet finalized their college plans.

I have almost daily conversations with parents in which I recommend a gap year for their high school students, and most of the time, those parents are resistant. Many of them aren't familiar with the concept, worry that admissions officers won't like it, and wonder if a gap year will put their children at a disadvantage.

I've written here before about gap years, but here are my two cents in summary:

Admissions officers love gap years. Freshmen who arrive on campus after a gap year have had an extra year to mature, see the world, learn about themselves, gain a better sense of what they want out of college, and recharge their batteries. Every day I see what happens when people start college before they're really ready to make the most of it -- you can spot that in their transcripts a mile away. It helps when heavy-hitters like Princeton and Harvard and Yale officially get behind the gap year concept.

To get a sense of the cool things people do during their gap years, see Harvard's admissions website. Below is an excerpt from their page called "Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation." Note especially the last sentence: "While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college."

Perhaps the best way of all to get the full benefit of a "time-off" is to postpone entrance to college for a year. For over thirty years, Harvard has recommended this option, indeed proposing it in the letter of admission. Normally a total of about fifty to seventy students defer college until the next year.

The results have been uniformly positive. Harvard's daily student newspaper, The Crimson reported (5/19/2000) that students who had taken a year off found the experience "…so valuable that they would advise all Harvard students to consider it." Harvard's overall graduation rate of 98% is among the highest in the nation, perhaps in part because so many students take time off. One student, noting that the majority of her friends will simply spend eight consecutive terms at Harvard, "wondered if they ever get the chance to catch their breath."

During her year off, the student quoted above toured South America with an ice-skating company and later took a trip to Russia. Another interviewed in the article worked with a growing e-commerce company (in which the staff grew from ten to a hundred during the year) and backpacked around Europe for six months....

Members of one recent class participated in the following activities, and more, in the interim year: drama, figure skating, health-care, archeological exploration, kibbutz life, language study, mineralogical research, missionary work, music, non-profit groups, child welfare programs, political campaigns, rebuilding schools, special needs volunteering, sports, steel drumming, storytelling, swing dance, university courses, and writing - to name some chosen at random. They took their interim year in the following locales: Belize, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mongolia, Nepal, Philipines, Scandinavia, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, United States and Zimbabwe.

Many students divide their year into several segments of work, travel, or study. Not all can afford to travel or to take part in exotic activities. A number have served in the military or other national service programs. Some remain at home, working, taking part-time courses, interning, and still finding the time to read books they have never had time to fit into their schedules or begin to write the "great American novel." Others have been able to forge closer ties with parents or grandparents from whom they may have drifted away during the hectic pace of the high-school years....

Students taking a year off prior to Harvard are doing what students from the U.K. do with their so-called "gap year." Other countries have mandatory military service for varying periods of time. Regardless of why they took the year off or what they did, students are effusive in their praise. Many speak of their year away as a "life-altering" experience or a "turning point," and most feel that its full value can never be measured and will pay dividends the rest of their lives. Many come to college with new visions of their academic plans, their extracurricular pursuits, the intangibles they hoped to gain in college, and the career possibilities they observed in their year away. Virtually all would do it again.

Nevertheless, taking time off can be a daunting prospect for students and their parents. Students often want to follow friends on safer and more familiar paths. Parents worry that their sons and daughters will be sidetracked from college, and may never enroll. Both fear that taking time off can cause students to "fall behind" or lose their study skills irrevocably. That fear is rarely justified. High school counselors, college administrators, and others who work with students taking time off can help with reassurance that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Occasionally students are admitted to Harvard or other colleges in part because they accomplished something unusual during a year off. While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college.