Part 2 of our Practical Tips Series
0:00:03.4 S1: Welcome to the Legal Learning Podcast. I’m your host, Jolene, and with the Legal Learning Center, I help pre-law students and law students with their legal journey. Today, we will chat with Dave Strousberg, an informational interview expert, after I’ll give you my top takeaways, but first, a quick word from our sponsor, Financially Free Aspiring Attorneys is a course with over $300,000 in money-saving tips. If you wanna go to law school but you don’t wanna pay for it, visit legallearningcenter.com/financially-free. For more information on how you can avoid law loans.
0:00:47.7 S2: Thank you very much, Jolene. I am stoked to be here participating in your podcast, like you said, my name is David Strousberg. I am a management side employment attorney, which means that I represent businesses and all their employment and HR and organizational development type issues that they have, but really what I think that we’re here to talk about today with my experience is my skill set that I possess regarding informational interviews.
0:01:17.1 S1: Absolutely. I know that students tend to think of informational interviews, it’s just something they do on a rare occasion to get a little information from someone, but I feel like you think of them a little bit differently, how do you define informational interviews?
0:01:32.8 S2: That is a very good question. I would define an informational interview as really a conversation that someone that is interested in a particular profession is having with somebody in that profession in order to expand their professional network.
0:01:49.4 S1: So you use it to actually expand your network, not necessarily just get some information…
0:01:55.1 S2: Yeah, you know, I didn’t invent informational interviews at all. Okay, it’s not something that I came up with. I certainly didn’t, I’m not the first person that ever thought about speaking with someone before, but informational interviews have been really helpful to me, and I can go into some detail about how I got started with them if you want to do to…
0:02:15.3 S1: Yeah, I love that.
0:02:16.5 S2: So an informational interview for me is really just this tool to be able to have this non-traditional path to do a few things for yourself, it helps you to be able to… Hopefully, you can potentially land a job in a non-professional way, non-traditional way, but at the same exact time, it can help you really just learn about what it is that you wanna be able to do. I talk to so many students. So in addition to being an attorney, I’m also an adjunct professor at a couple of colleges and universities, teaching communication classes, and I always talk about informational interviews with students as well, and they utilize them to find jobs and internships, but also to learn what it is that they want to be able to do ultimately, because school is awesome. A big fan of school. I went to undergrad, graduate school and law school. It has served me well in my professional career, but one thing that I feel like school is lacking is it doesn’t necessarily help you figure out what it is that you wanna be able to do when you get out of school. So for me, I started with informational interviews way back when I was an undergrad, so I went to American University in Washington, DC, and I was going to be a Congressman or a Senator or something in government, just like everybody else.
0:03:36.1 S2: And it took me an internship with my congressman and a job working at a lobbying firm to decide I do not wanna do this, it’s not anything that I wanna really do at all. So I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do next, and I’ve always been a big sports fan, and living in Washington DC, the professional NBA team is the Washington Wizards, and Michael Jordan actually came out of retirement my last year of college, and I figured that Holy cow, I’m a big Jordan fan, I’ve gotta get a job with the Wizards, I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but I’ve gotta figure out how to get an internship, and I kept calling and calling, and I kept reaching out, sending my resume and nobody would respond back to me at all, and then I had an assignment from my professor in my Public Relations class to do an informational interview, and he said, reach out to somebody that works at a PR firm, or somebody that does public relations, so I figured I would try with the Wizards again. And I called up the team, and for the first time, they didn’t hang up on me, they transferred me, but they transferred me over to the women’s team…
0:04:45.0 S2: Mystics, the wizards and the mystics of the WNBA team, both owned by the same company. And I was able to conduct an informational interview with the director of public relations for the mystics. Well, it went so well, I enjoyed it so much, that entire process that at the end of it, I just said, Hey, if you’re ever looking for an intern, let me know, and the person that I interviewed with said, Well, we play during the summer and we’re in the fall now, so I don’t need anything, but I could contact the PR Director of the wizards. I know that they’re short-handed a game day operations intern, if you’d be interested in that. Yeah, obviously, I very much was. And the next day, I was talking to Michael Jordan, getting quotes from him post-game, asking him about how it felt to come out of retirement to have such a successful game, and then distributing those quotes to local websites, publications, stuff like that. I never really thought of informational interviews again, I just thought that that was really cool, it was this non-traditional path that I always kinda just stuck in the back of my mind, but I never really thought anything of it.
0:05:54.2 S2: And then I got to law school. I thought law school was gonna be easy. I don’t know why. I got a Master’s in Communication. And that spoke to me, research and writing, I did well, but when it came time to taking law school exams, and I’m sure you probably have a Podcast or I’ve talked to people about how difficult those could be, I barely studied and I tanked my first semester, I did not do well at all, and here I am investing all this money, taking out all these loans… I’d just gotten married and I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m never gonna get a job because I got two Cs, a B minus and a B my first semester. I thought this was not going to go well at all, so I decided I was gonna turn to informational interviews again, and I started reaching out to one or two, which turned into a dozen, which turned into several hundred informational interviews with general counsels partners at law firms. Solo practitioners, just anything in any area of law that I was interested in, and all of a sudden, A, I learned more about what I wanted to do, B, I was developing my professional network and see I was getting job offers left and right for internships, externship, summer associate positions, and then jobs out of school.
0:07:14.2 S1: Okay, so I have several questions about it. Okay, so first, it could be really scary to reach out to someone, so how do you find these people, and then is there a special way that you ask them for an interview?
0:07:31.6 S2: Yep, that is an excellent question, and there’s really… There’s a couple of different ways that you can go about how to find somebody because you have to first and foremost, know what it is that you’re looking for, okay, you know what the goal is that you’re trying to accomplish, because that’ll start to narrow it down. Who it is that you’re gonna reach out to, and you have to say, Okay, I’m interested in family law, or I’m interested in what it’s like to be an attorney at a big huge corporation, or I’m interested in what it’s like to be a trial lawyer, so start there, okay, that’ll put you into focus instead of just kind of being all over the place. Now, one of the things that I talk to students about is, just because you’ve decided that you wanna talk to a family law attorney does not mean that you have to become one, just because you decided you wanted to talk to a corporate attorney does not mean you have to become one. You can do as many of these as you want, and the idea is to talk to as many people as possible, but there’s really two things that you can do then when you start looking to identify who you wanna speak with, A, you can either start with who you know, everybody has a brother-in-law or a friend or an uncle that know somebody who does this or that, well, it’s time to stop saying that you don’t know someone who does that and ask them…
0:08:47.9 S2: That person that you know, if they can put you in touch with that. The other thing is, you can also reach out cold, you could go on LinkedIn or… I Googled a lot of different websites and looked at lawyers bios at firms to reach out to, and there’s an inverse relationship between how well you know someone, how warm that lead is and how likely they are to respond to you, don’t worry if people don’t respond to you, it’s not a big deal, but the idea is you wanna keep your ask very short, so for instance, I would typically say, Hi, my name is Dave, I’m a student in Law school studying X. And I would always make it related to what they do, I would say I’m studying whatever, it doesn’t matter if you’re not taking a class in that, it doesn’t matter if you’re interested in family law and you’re not taking family law, studying can be a very general generic term. So I’m a law student, I’m studying family law. I would love to learn more about it. Would you potentially have any time for an informational interview? That’s it. I always see students wanting to present their resume and a long history of what they’ve done, you keep it very short and sweet, so it’s I’d like to learn a little bit more about what it is that you do. That’s it.
0:10:03.1 S1: That’s great. So it leaves no pressure on the person that you are hunting for a job or an internship or whatever, it’s just… I want some information. Can you give me that information? That’s great. And it’s scary. It is, it’s very hard. But it’s true, when I think back, I feel like I didn’t know anyone, but actually my neighbor was an attorney, so he may have done something I didn’t want to do, but I could still start by interviewing him and then ask for another contact.
0:10:32.9 S2: That’s a really good point. So anyone that you talk to, you say, Hey, this was really helpful. Is there anybody else that you could think of that potentially I could speak with? And one of three things will happen. They’ll say yes. And give you a name. They’ll say, Let me think about it. Or they’ll say No. But they say, No, you say, Okay, it’s not really that big of a deal. It’s also an interesting point that you bring up. That you don’t start out with, Hey, I would like a job here. Can you… I’d like to be able to talk to you about… Hiring me, that’s not what you do. So as much as I said that you have to know what you want, you have to know what you’re interested in learning, you have to be very comfortable with the idea of not getting it right away. Okay, it’s not necessarily going to happen. Now, I’ve been very fortunate and I’ve done so many of these informational interviews that I’ve gotten lots of job offers from them, but they happen organically, it happened through conversation and through getting to know the individual, not through saying, Hi, I’m a law student would you please talk to me about hiring me, it’s not how it works.
0:11:34.1 S1: So it sounds like these are things that would be good to do before you go to law school so that you can really see, one, if you wanna be a lawyer, but two, maybe what area to focus on before you even have a chance to take electives.
0:11:45.9 S2: And I talk about doing informational interviews all the time with students, but you don’t have to be a student, you could just be thinking about going and listen, if you’re gonna do your research on the law school that you potentially want to apply to, it certainly makes sense, to do the research on talking to actual practicing attorneys, and I would tell you that to become a critical thinker as you’re going through that process as well, you can talk to one attorney and they may think it’s the greatest thing in the entire world, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be for you. Or you could talk to an attorney and they could say that this is really terrible, I should have done it, I regret this, and there could be a whole host of reasons why they say that, that has nothing to do with you either, so I would suggest that if you’re trying to figure out if you actually want to be a lawyer, then try to get a very broad perspective for yourself going forward.
0:12:41.5 S1: Yeah, I definitely had someone on who talked about… He did ask questions, but he feels like… Maybe he didn’t ask the right questions. It sounds like if you ask a lot of people questions, hopefully you’ll start to get some of the right answers or get to know what the right questions are, but Do you off-hand know what pre-law students should be asking? What the right questions might be…
0:13:05.4 S2: Yeah, well, I talk about this a lot with students and with people that are not students. To people that are trying to change their career switch or what their job looks like, and it’s very hard to not think that, Okay, I’m gonna do an informational interview, So I’m going to make this an exceedingly formalized process, the truth is, you wanna ask the questions that you want answers to, Okay, so you wanna ask the types of things that… You’re curious about it.
So if you’re curious about what is it like to be a lawyer, that’s the type of question that you should ask, if you wanna ask a question of how many hours a week do you actually work, what does family work-life balance actually look like? My advice are the two biggest questions that I typically start with is, what does a typical day look like for you? And the response is always the same, I’ve done so many of these, the person will kind of laugh a weird left and they will say There’s no such thing as a typical day, and then you will get off into a great discussion, and then another question that I’d like to ask, Well, is, what path did you take to get to where you are right now? Because you’ll hear a couple of different things there, one, you’ll hear a super traditional path, you’ll hear several individuals that they went to undergrad and studied political science or pre-law or philosophy or something that lends itself to getting that law degree, or you’re gonna talk to people who are like, Yeah, I studied something not even closely related to this, and then I’ve got a job working in retail, or I did something that was not related to this at all in any way whatsoever, and here I am now, those traditional and non-traditional paths are super fascinating, and both of those questions, I think are great questions to start conversation.
0:14:53.6 S2: So my suggestion for people when they wanna think about questions to ask, and I actually had a student reach out to me on LinkedIn that had seen a YouTube video that I had done recently and said the same thing you’re saying, Jolene, I never know what types of questions to ask, so you discussing that helps me. The exercise that I would suggest before your informational interviews to take out a piece of paper or take out the notes app in your iPhone or whatever, is that you have to do and write down a few questions and write down the questions that you want the answers to, and don’t feel like you have to be married to those… During that informational interview, the goal is to make it as conversational for yourself as possible.
0:15:37.3 S1: Now, what if the attorney… I think we’ve all seen this, even if we’re just asking a question of our boss or something like that, What if the attorney is very vague, isn’t giving you specifics, how can you corner them a bit more…
0:15:52.3 S2: I think that along the same lines of the idea of ask the questions that you want answers to, I think that it becomes important that you say, can you elaborate a bit more or… I’m not sure that I’m familiar with that. If something sounds vague to you or you’re not understanding and you really wanna know, then don’t hesitate to say, Hey, I really… I get that. You know this completely, but I know none of this. Can you help me out here? And by the way, I would say that for somebody looking to become an attorney, learning how to ask those probing type of questions for clarification is a skill set that is unbelievably helpful because for all of those newer attorneys that graduate from school, you will learn that you will get instructions from partners, supervisors, other attorneys, or you’ll even see guidance that comes from different statutes or court regulations, stuff like that too… That are not that clear. Okay, you’ll think that they’re clear, but that’s why we become lawyers… Okay, is to be able to interpret them. So That’s actually a really good point. This is a good time to work on that skill as well, about asking more questions, so if there’s something that you are not clear about, then it becomes this issue of thinking about, Okay
0:17:06.0 S2: Can I just say, I’d love to learn a little bit more about this. Can you explain it a little bit further? Or even saying, I’m not understanding what you’re saying at all, now, I’ll tell you that one of the biggest things that I’ve seen through informational interviews, covid has been a crazy thing, and I told you that I always… It sounds like such an understatement, I always teach different classes, communication classes, I teach public speaking, interpersonal communication, negotiation, business and professional speaking, and regardless of whatever class I’m teaching, I always have the informational interviews as an assignment. Well, this semester I taught a class, business and professional speaking that was all remote, all online, typically it’s in person, and I taught the class week by week how to do a conductive informational interview and have them start conducting their own, which was cool with 30 students at once, and then having these weekly meetups to sort of discuss the progress of where people were at, and one of the things that I found surprising about this because it was so intensive on informational interviews, normally my class is… That’s 10% of the class, 15% of the class.
0:18:16.1 S2: This time it was the inverse, it was the vast majority of the class. But one of the things that I learned from talking to students at the end of this was through doing informational interviews, and by the way, none of them stopped at one, they did one, and then they decided to do another one, and another one and another one, and what the students kept telling me over and over again was that by doing informational interviews, they were gaining confidence, they felt very… They felt like they were learning about how to interact with people and how to network, because you were talking about what school doesn’t do… We all hear how important it is, like you got a network, it’s all on who you know, it’s super important to attend networking functions, but nobody ever tells you what you’re supposed to do with them or what those conversations look like. So really, it’s just something as simple, to get to your question earlier of, Hey, I’m a student or I’m thinking about being a student, or I’m thinking about getting in this field. I’d like to learn more about it. Do you have a few minutes for an informational interview and then sort of see what the response is from there
0:19:23.1 S1: Now, at the end of the interview, ’cause I’m assuming a lot of these are… You have second-hand references, they are cold call type things, up at the end, how do you maintain that connection without sounding a little bit stocker-ish, I guess?
0:19:40.8 S2: Makes perfect sense. So I’ve learned from experience from doing these, that first of all, you’re not gonna wanna keep in touch with every single person that you talk to, I’ve had a lot of students that say to me, I feel like I failed this assignment, or This didn’t work for me, because I learned that I don’t wanna do this, and I’m like, No, no, no, you succeeded in this learning what it is you wanna do and not do is just as valuable as you sort of weed that out and go through your own path. Again, I’d encourage them to talk to more than one person, but for the people that you think that, Okay, this was helpful. I think I’m all right, I’m done with this. A simple email will be sufficient to say thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me, I really appreciated it, and the information that you provided was super valuable. Have a great rest of your afternoon, Dave. But for other individuals that you know you’re gonna wanna keep in touch with, and that in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, Man, I hope I can work here one day, you wanna be able to say to them at the end of the interview, there’s a few things that you…
0:20:40.7 S2: Close the interview out with. One of them is, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to keep in touch with you and sort of share with you my progress as I go through school or narrowing things down on my career path and just shoot you an email from time to time, and if you get that permission from them, which no one has ever said no. They’ll say, Of course too, that sounds fine, it feels better to have that permission structure in place, and then I’ve had all types of situations where with follow-up where I’ll send an email to somebody saying, thank you very much. I won’t hear anything back from them after that. And that’s fine, you don’t send a Thank You in order to hear back from them again, I’ll send an update again a few months later, nothing, I’ll send an update again a few months later, nothing. And to give you an example of this, I did an informational interview with somebody at Disney that was working in labor and employment, which is the field that I’m in now. I’m a huge Disney fan, always wanted to work at Disney, so it was a huge goal of mine, and I did an informational interview with several people from Disney, but one person in particular oversaw a department that I would be interested in, and I reached out to her, we did the interview.
0:21:57.1 S2: I kept following up after I didn’t really hear anything at all, I think over the span of three years, I might have checked in six times… So maybe once every six months or so, I never heard anything back. Then all of a sudden, one day I got an email, woke up to an email from her saying, Hey, we are hiring for a position in my department here. I was thinking about the interview that we had done a few years back. Not sure where you’re at right now. I keep getting your updates… Sorry, having written back, but let me know if this is something that you’re interested in and I can put you in touch with the right people. And I was blown away
0:22:36.8 S1: Wow, that’s really impressive. And I’m a little impressed at you’re continuing to follow up despite no response, I think I would have dropped off, so apparently I probably wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity…
0:22:49.6 S2: Well, let’s say that you do 10 informational interviews. Okay, and let’s say that three of them you decide that you don’t wanna really keep in touch with at all, and then another four of them you want to keep in touch with and you do, whether it’s on LinkedIn saying, Congrats on your work anniversary, or is sending an email occasionally, and I think… But for me, the best idea was to send updates, it’s, Hey, I just made Dean’s list in law school, or, Hey, I just graduated, I passed the bar exam. Hey, I got married. Hey, just checking in or to check for them in the news as well, because you may see that they’ve been Top 40 Under 40 or made partner or something like that as well, so I try to keep it tethered to something. But for the people that you really wanna be in touch with, then I don’t see any harm, you would say… You wanna be wary of the stacker-ish-ness behind it, but you certainly don’t wanna reach out to them every week, but twice a year to drop a line and say hello, and that’s just an example of where a potential job opportunity came, there’s been plenty of informational interviews that I’ve done where I had sent two or three follow-ups over the span of 18 months, and then all of a sudden got the equivalent of a three-page email from the person telling me what they’ve been up to and what they’ve been doing, so it’s all about just expanding your professional network,
0:24:40.7 S1: I think as a pre-law student, or even as a law student, even though law students are very busy, I think it’s hard to also understand how busy different lawyers are depending on their field and of course, their personal circumstances so I could understand where a couple of emails got dropped, maybe an intent to say, Good for you…Thanks for keeping in touch. But you just don’t get to it.
0:24:43.8 S2: Yeah, that’s okay. I think part of it too is I’ve worked with a lot of students or students thinking about going into law school as well, that’ll get really discouraged because the person that they wanna talk to at one firm is not responding to them, and it’s always… Don’t worry about it, you don’t know how much they’ve got on their plate or what they’re doing, or how many other students are reaching out to them, if it’s somebody you really wanna connect with, at some point you’ll figure out a way or that opportunity will come or it won’t, Don’t become too obsessed or focused on one potential individual, instead you wanna get to know as many people in a particular area or industry as you possibly can.
0:25:32.5 S1: Do you recommend that students or non-students, the interviewer try to create some type of follow-up with the person they’re interviewing, so for example, if I’m interviewing you and then I say, Well, do you have any… Obviously, you had other people to interview, but it could be other homework, like do you have any books you recommend that I read or something like that, and then that way… Yeah, six months. Three months down the road when I finish the book. Finally have time to get to it. Hey, I finally had time to get to his book… Thank you so much. Here’s what I love.
0:26:04.5 S2: Is such a great idea, and books are so key. I think that’s an awesome idea. And to be completely honest, I do that all the time with… Not necessarily with informational interviews, but before I became an attorney, I was a sales person for a long time, so what I’m trying to maintain for the long game, a potential business engagement, I will often utilize books them as well, just to kind of drop that hook to be able to follow back up to discuss that again, so I think that’s a really good idea, and there’s no harm in saying, Are there any good books that you could potentially recommend, and then following back up after you’ve read it, I’ve done that. I can’t even count how many times I’m sure you have as well. So I think that something that’s really helpful as well, if an informational interview is going really well, there’s no problem with asking if you can pick up the conversation at a later date. Can we continue this conversation? And I’ll tell you what, I’m happy in my career, but at the same exact time, I continue to conduct informational interviews to this day, I still do them just because they’re great practice and a great way to expand your professional network.
0:27:16.0 S2: And I was talking to somebody last week that one of our mutual friends had put me in touch with her, and she’s got a job that I find fascinating, and we spoke for maybe about a half hour and then went scheduled a call for right after the new year to continue the call because our half hour, our time, was up, and that’s something important that I wanna say for prospective students or students as well, you wanna stick to a certain amount of time. And you wanna say to somebody, Do you have 15 minutes? Do you have 30 minutes? You wanna keep it short so that it feels like it’s not this huge burden, and chances are it’ll go beyond that… Okay, they’ll go more than 15 minutes or more than 30 minutes, but at the same exact time as the person conducting the interview, you wanna be the one that’s in control of making sure that you’re keeping your eye on the clock, on your watch, on your phone or whatever that is, so that you can say, I’m being respectful of your time. I know that we have two minutes left, if you have some more time, or do we need to wrap this…
0:28:17.3 S2: Or do we need to wrap this up? And if we do, you can say, Is it okay if we perhaps schedule something in the future to continue to continue to talk?
0:28:26.0 S1: I love that because it’s so hard. Especially I think the newer you are, or the more you’re in a position of, I don’t know, perceived weakness, lower-ness is that you just… You don’t know how to continue the relationship or to ask for more, and so again, like you said, with asking for more time, asking for a second time or following up with a topic like a book that…
0:28:53.4 S2: I’ve gotta tell you, I’m 39 years old. I’ve never been to a traditional interview, I’ve never sent my resume in some place and then have been called for something and then we’ll follow up with you or anything like that. Every single job that I’ve ever gotten literally has been through an informational interview, so I don’t quite get what it looks like on me, on the other side, I’m sure I’d probably be terrible at that traditional sort of path, but one of the things that students learn or perspective students learn as they do more and more of these… Is the idea that you’re in control of the interview. Okay, you’re the person that is there, they’re obviously helping you out with the questions that you have, and I don’t mean in your control in a bad way, not a negative connotation with it, but just sort of the idea of… It’s your job to confirm… Okay, at the time. Okay, if you set a time and say, Let’s talk next week at 10-00 AM on Tuesday, it’s your job to reach out to them on Monday to say, Are we still just confirming that we’re still on, if you’re going to be late or anything, it’s your responsibility to make sure that you let them know that it’s your responsibility to make sure that you’re keeping track of what the time sort of looks like you are in control of that interview, you’re asking the questions, you’re directing where that conversation is feeling, and that’s very intimidating when you’re first starting out, but the more that you do them, you’ll find it to be this unbelievably freeing experience, and you’ll hear what I have heard over and over again, while I really like your approach, like this is what a unique way to be able to communicate with somebody, again, I did not invent informational interviews, okay, they’ve been around way before me and they’ll be around way after me, but I am someone that really thinks that they’re so important for not just getting information about what that job is going to be, but about developing yourself professionally and expanding that profession.
0:30:58.9 S1: Absolutely, it’s very clear that this has benefited you, so if we can all avoid interviews, I think we’d all be happier or… So is there a way that people can reach out to you if somebody had follow-up questions for you.
0:31:17.6 S2: Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to be able to get in touch with me. And again, my name is Dave Strousberg I’ll link that up to… And I’m happy to talk to any students that have any types of questions at all about sort of what to do, and it’s something that’s really exciting for people to be able to participate in, again, a lot of people will end up saying to me that I’ve been doing these before, I just didn’t even know that. It’s what these were called. You know, I was having these conversations before, but I didn’t realize that this is what they were referred to, and that’s fine, but the idea is if I could just give some parting advice to any prospective students or any students as well, try to focus in on what it is that you wanna do… And it’s okay if you have multiple options. What’s not, okay is to suffer from analysis paralysis and do nothing, so if there’s 10 things you want to do… Awesome, okay. There’s still a bunch of things that I wanna do professionally. Okay, I still have envisioned that my career is gonna take a whole bunch of different paths trajectories as I go, but start to identify something that you wanna be able to do, and then start talking to people about that…
0:32:37.1 S2: Begin with the people that you know, and then if you can’t, then branch off into those that you don’t and be patient, waiting to hear what you’re going to hear back, make your ask very simple and direct. Okay, I’m a student, I’m a perspective student. Interested in law or whatever. In a particular area of law, do you have some time that we could be able to talk for an informational interview? They’ll say yes, they might say no. You don’t hear back from them after a few days, feel free to send a follow-up, you don’t hear back from them after that… Don’t worry about it. Okay, not move on to the next person. When you meet with them, be mindful of the questions that you’re asking, that you wanna ask the question, the things that you want answers to… I don’t ask anything offensive. I don’t think it’s that great to say to somebody, How much money do you make, but you can very easily say to them, Can you give me an idea of the range of what the salary looks like for a person in the position such as yours that works as well.
0:33:37.1 S2: And enjoy that conversation. I love the idea of the book for a follow-up, I think that’s so… And again, just like with informational interviews, it’s something I’ve been doing, I just never really thought conceptualized it that way, and then stay in touch, stay in touch as best as you possibly can, and really take advantage of while you’re thinking about going into a particular career field, learning from the people that are actually in them, I see so many times in LinkedIn, people put like, they’ll post their resume and they’ll just be like, Hey, so if anybody knows anyone who’s hiring for anybody in this field… Well, first of all, congratulations. That’s good. That’s hard to do, that putting yourself out there is always an accomplishment, making yourself vulnerable like that is not easy. But at the same time, what I wanna say to them is, Why don’t you reach out to the people that are in the field that you’re interested in? And say, instead of saying, Here’s my resume, let me know if you’re hiring, say, Hey, I’m trying to get into this field, I’m trying to learn about this, can I just talk to you for a few minutes and pick your brain an informational interview and take it from there.
0:34:46.0 S1: I love that, I networked with somebody months ago, and then when they needed a job, they were asking me just in general for assistance, but not specifically me or anything like that, but it just felt so much more natural and that sounds so much more natural, let me ask you a few questions, and then you can let them know that you are in that place where you are kind of starting to look and you need a little assistance, but not that you’re asking them for that assistance, but then it comes more naturally that they may want to help you… Love that.
0:35:19.2 S2: And I’ll tell you this, I had 30 students this semester, 12 of them with job and internship offerings, out of the 30 that learned how to be able to do this, and then… I was gonna say another… Just under a dozen of them feel like they’ve gotten… All they keep saying is they wish they started doing it sooner, you know that this has been unbelievably helpful, and I thought that students would do one, maybe two… I’ve got students that have done two dozen, they just keep reaching out to individuals because they wanna learn more and they want to expand their professional network,
S1: That’s so great. I think that clearly shows that you’ve empowered them and it’s something so simple, we all know about it, we just need to think about it.
S2: I think that’s, very well said.
S1: Alright, thank you so much for joining us, Dave. I really appreciate all your really helpful information,
S2: I’m so happy to do this, Jolene, thank you for inviting me to be able to do this as well.
0:36:24.1 S1: Before we get into my top takeaways, a quick word from our sponsor, Juno, if you need to take out student loans, check in with, Juno first. Juno can often offer law students one to 2% lower interest rates than the federal government, and not only with no cost to the student, oftentimes with cash back as well, visit joinJuno.com/p/legalLearningCenter for more information. Alright, so my top takeaways from this chat with Dave, first informational interviews are not just to gather information about a potential job, but can be used to expand your network. Number two, stay in touch with those that you interview and wanna stay in touch with, even if they don’t respond regularly, number three, you are in control, so honor the time limit, ask for follow-up, ask for clarification of question, if you feel we’re not properly answered, but just be cautious of potentially rude questions. Alright, that’s it for this episode. Now, all the tips, links and so forth will be available in the show notes, a full transcript is available on my website, legallearningcenter.com/Dave, and next week we will be speaking with Christine Luken., Christine is a financial life guard something we all need when we are drowning in student loan debt. 0:38:03.0 S1: So don’t miss out, and then if you learn something today, please like share, comment, subscribe, so that more people can see this and can benefit from it. Thanks.
If you missed the first part of our Practical Tips Series, be sure to check out Episode 13 – Mentoring and Networking Like a Pro with Leg Up Legal founder Anjie Vichayanonda.
