How did you go about obtaining the job with the senator? Did you have connections in his office or did you know somebody that knew him?
Most jobs on capital hill are serendipitous. You use your network,of friends and family to make the calls. It is a question of being at the right place at the right time. I was fortunate enough to have two choices and I chose to work for somebody that I really believed in, which makes all the difference when you are working very long hours on Capitol Hill.  It really helps if you like the person and believe in what they are doing.

Can you describe a typical day on the hill. What your duties are as a legislative aid or someone coming right out of college on the entry level in the legislative side; what you would be doing?
I would approach this question by dividing it in two -- the Senate side and the House side. They are very different experiences. I can speak to the Senate side and have some perspective on the House side. On the Senate side, there is no typical day. The Senate is ruled by 100 individuals and they all have the capacity to raise whatever issues they like on the floor that day. As a legislative aid, my responsibilities were to cover a defined set of areas. I handled all the entitlement programs for the senator, which meant that I was responsible for developing legislation; following legislation; pushing along any legislation that we may have authored; working with constituents to understand their concerns and doing outreach, and also ensuring all the letters were consistent.   During the course of the day you could have a bill on environment that would come up which the Senate would be debate and then somebody else would introduce a food stamps program. So all of a sudden you thought somebody else was handling the environmental issues and you could get some other work done for the day, and the next thing you knew, you were on the floor of the Senate defending your position. It is a very exciting place. There are tons of different ideas. You get a lot of responsibility at a young age. The hours are long; it is fairly hectic, but I can’t think of a better experience to get a broad overview of the legislative process than to work as a legislative aid. On the House side, there is just a little more structure because there are very tight rules that govern debate. You have a good idea of what your schedule is and you can plan your life a little bit better, but the duties are essentially the same.

Is there anything you would suggest to Trinity students who want to go into this field? What can they do to get a leg up in the application process?
The best thing you could do is either an internship at the state capital, or go down and do a summer internship in DC.  Many these jobs are a question of being there at the right time and knowing the right people. Doing an internship 1) will give you a sense of whether or not this is something you would like to do and 2) it gives you a leg up in getting to know some people. That is very important in DC, to actually have people know and then also to have some sort of sense of loyalty built up. A little bit of background in political science is helpful, because it is easy to get lost when you are down there.  

What part of the job down did you most like and least like?
I am a firm believer in the overall values of democracy, and here you are essentially in the legislative process which is were you have the will of the people and you are trying to do their business. It is a fairly complex process. I think it was Mark Twain that referred the legislative process as sort of like sausage making; you don’t want to look at it too closely. It’s a lot like that. In many ways it is not elegant, but boy it works and at the end of the day you really feel like you are pushing the agenda and you are doing good work. It’s also just the entire breadth of the experience. When I was a legislative aid, I handled telecommunications, defense, agriculture and I did entitlements for any sort of social spending and then I did campaign finance reform, national service and those were all in my ballywig, so it was absolutely wonderful just to have to think about those issues. I did not like the hectic part of the work. On my way home at about 6:00 and all of a sudden someone would introduce an amendment on the floor dealing with telecommunications and all of a sudden my evening was shot. It is hard to plan a social life.

Can you discuss your law school experience. Having been in the legislative field and almost getting entrenched into the system what made you want to get out and go to law school?
You have to decide whether you want to be a long-term staffer on Capitol Hill, and there are a lot of people that stay and they love the process. Going into the process I thought I wanted to go to graduate school. For example, one of the issues I covered was the environment, and I had a very hard time understanding Superfund laws. There is a concept of joint and separate liability, which means even if I thought I was doing the right thing 30-40 years ago and I only contributed say 2% to a toxic waste dump I could be held responsible for 100% of the liability. To me, I just couldn’t understand that, so I thought law school would be a good way to do that. Being so close to the legislative process I also thought that the process of making law is really the foundation for how we organize society, and that to me was an interesting question to think about.  had also spoken to a bunch of people and they said regardless of whether you practice law it was a good skill set to develop, to be able to think like a lawyer. So after 3 years I thought it is pretty much now time to jump ship and move on.

How did you narrow down which school to attend and how did you go about getting into Yale Law School?
I had been out for 3 years and had some friends that were already starting to go to law school so I talked with them. The most important things for me were 1) was it a good school and 2) was it a fun school because if I was going to spend 3 years somewhere I wanted to have fun. One of the things I learned at Trinity was that most of your experience is about who you go to school with and if you don’t like them or if the school is too intense then I think you miss out a lot on the joy of learning. So I visited a few schools, spent a couple days there because I thought that was the only way you really get a feel for the school and then just narrowed it down to two schools and was lucky enough to get in.

How does law school fundamentally differ from your undergraduate experience? What can a student expect if they are going to go on to law school?
The difference is in your approach. By the time you go to graduate school, you should have a clearer idea, not necessarily that you know what you want to do, but you have a clear idea of why you are there.  At Trinity I took time taking a lot of different courses -- everything from the history of jazz music to art history to philosophy. When you get to law school you are being trained for a profession and it is a different approach. There is a great deal of breadth and width in the subject matter area, but I think you have a clearer idea of what you want to get out of it.  The people tend to be a little bit more focused. That can be, to a certain degree at least when I got there, a little scary because I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. There were some people taking all corporate law courses and I thought, wow maybe I should decide what I want to do. The main difference is that you become a little bit more structured, a little bit more focused. After I had been in the working world, it was wonderful to go back to school because you had a sense of just how priviledged that was to be able to spend time to just think and study as opposed to sort of working around the clock.

What about your time at law school really led you to not pursue a legal career, but rather to head into consulting?
I went in to law school thinking I wanted to become a district attorney or an US assistant attorney, to be litigator. What I realized was that era of using the court as a vehicle for social justice is over. The great decisions like Brown vs. Board of Education used the court to resolve a lot of the differences for society. I fundamentally believed that we should do that through the legislative process. It was all retrospective, to a certain degree, you are trying to heal a past wound. Much of what I learned about my own personality in law school was that I wanted to be proactive; I wanted to prevent the harm from occurring in the first place. Those two things together said, well perhaps you don’t want to be a litigator even though I enjoy getting up in front of an audience and having to think on my feet. I then turned to commercial law and what I found with commercial law is that I worked with a lot of business people and they just seemed to have a more interesting day than I was having reading through contracts. They were the guys that came up with the ideas for why they needed a contract, which made me start to look at business. It all came to head in my second year of law school when I had to decide whether I was going to clerk for a judge. I had 24 hours to decide so I sat back and thought about what I enjoyed as a person. Did I enjoy spending time in a library, working on developing briefs, and I decided that that wasn’t for me. I wanted a much more interactive experience.

What firms did you look at? Were you set on Consulting? Did you apply to multiple firms and McKinsey happened to give you an offer?
I chose management consulting because it was another way of gaining some additional skills, sort of a broad overview. I still didn’t have any idea about what I really wanted to do. I had some notion of what I enjoyed, which is important to learn as you go forward. I thought management consulting would provide me with a broad overview of many different industries, many different sort of functional areas; whether I wanted to be an operations person, whether I wanted to be a strategic person, whether I wanted to go into finance. So I thought it would be a good match in terms of the field, that was the first decision.

In terms of which firm I chose, I tried to look at some of the best management consulting firms. There are a number of great firms out there but what I wanted was somebody that was really used to taking lawyers and putting them in with business context. I had really never done anything in business before so it was a whole new vocabulary for me. I thought it would be helpful to have somebody that had taken lawyers before and knew how to deal with them and what the expectations were. McKinsey had been recruiting lawyers and had a program especially for lawyers, and for now Ph.D.s and for everybody, where they take you through a 4-week mini M.B.A. course at the beginning. After 6 months you go back for 2 weeks of training to really bring you up to speed on how to do business,, which none of the other consulting firms offered. I would take into account what your base line, what your start is when you look into consulting.

How did you prepare for the McKinsey case interview?
At McKinsey we are looking for a lot more than the case interview. McKinsey is really looking for 4 things. They are looking for problem solving, which is the case study interview. They are looking for your academic achievements. They are looking for your leadership capability and for personal impact and essentially that means your ability to work well with others because it is very much a team environment. You are solving problems together, people really want to see if you are going to be able to do that.

Getting back to the first part which is the case interview. The case interview is really just sort of meant to think how you structure problems, and how you work through them and do you work through them in a logical fashion. It is more of a framework of thinking as opposed to a sort of knowledge base that you have. People tend to hear about the case interview as very difficult, but you should go in with the mindset that it is more of just a well-structured discussion.

What advice would you offer to Trinity students looking to head into consulting and ultimately to land one of the positions at a top firm like McKinsey?
The advice would be to really be yourself. To think through some of those four areas I mentioned before. The first is problem solving. If someone asks you a question, I sometimes start off my interviews with a very basic question -- this is terrible, I just did a couple interviews a few weeks ago -- I just started out with a question of how many miles of roads are there in the United States. The framework for this is that President of the United States is about to give a speech before the national highway association, and he needs to know just roughly in 2 or 3 minutes how many miles of interstate highways there are in the US and you have 3 minutes to figure it out and no phone, how do you do it. I have no idea what the answer is but what I want somebody to do is show me how they would approach the question, well the US is x miles wide and y miles long and they probably need a road every z miles, just to see if they can walk through it. At that point I don’t really even care if they can add up the numbers, I am just more interested in how they approach the question.

First is just getting confortable and second it is not all the case interview. Third, what have you done in your life beforehand and how is that consistent with becoming a management consultant. What have you done to show leadership skills, and that can be everything from hiking in the appalachian mountains to your team sports to your academic achievements. You spend a lot of times working in teams in consulting, going to a client where you are asked basically to become a leader overnight and help provide leadership for your own internal McKinsey teams and also for the client teams that you work for.    The fourth thing is just to realize that while someone is talking with you they are making the decision about 'do I want to work with this person?', it’s 9:00 on a Thursday night and we are still working 'do I still want to be there with him?' That goes through your mind and you want someone that is going to be relaxed and fun to work with and at the same time be able to do the work. It sounds really trite, but really be yourself and know who you are and what you want to do and don’t try to overly impress.

Realizing you were an associate at McKinsey, can you talk a little about the analyst program that most undergraduates go into.
The business analysts are the smartest people at McKinsey, they are incredibly impressive. The program is amazing in that it is a 2-year program designed basically for you to go on to graduate school afterwards and if you go on to graduate school and come back to McKinsey, they will pay for it. In terms of the qualifications, again it is the four things we tdiscussed.  What we are looking for is, why someone would want to do that. I think it is great exposure to the business world coming out of college. There is sort of a similar program to bring you up to speed on business vocabulary, how to approach business problems and I think in the first 2 years of McKinsey you will go through about 6 weeks of training, which I think is just incredible invaluable. The team experience, it is very much working with a bunch of different teams and learning from your coaches. It is a great program, I wish I had known about it when I graduated from Trinity, but I didn’t.

Can you discuss the business consulting lifestyle; underneath that, what is best about it and worst about it.
My own view, I am married and I have a one year old, so that conforms my life right now and I like to spend a lot of time with my family. The best thing about it is the people. I love the people I work with. Two, I think is just the way in which you work with the them which is very team oriented. A typical day at McKinsey would be you get into the office and do an hour or two talking and meeting with the client personally. You spend a lot of time at the client’s site and then coming back and having a team meeting and saying where are, how are we proceeding, who is going to go do what moving forward and problem solving as a team. It wasn’t a 'here’s your task, go do it' environment. It was a, 'gee what do you think, here’s the problem, here’s how I would approach it, what do you think and we figure it out together' approach. In that aspect, I think you learn a lot more in the program. The 3^rd thing I loved most about it is the breadth of experience. I worked in private equity for a year where I touched upon every sector. I helped start a telecommunications company, I worked with a major national hospital chain, I worked on starting up a web hosting business, and I looked at a beverage company. Before I did a lot of work on the internet and I did a lot of work on pharmaceuticals and insurance and it was a great overview of different industries.   Within those areas, I did everything from strategy work to operational work to developing business plans. In a short amount of time I could gain a lot of exposure, which for somebody like me who had not figured out what I wanted to do it is just nice to see, even if it was just to rule out that I didn’t want to do it.

The thing I didn’t like about it were that sometimes traveling can get old. Being away from somebody you love and your family and friends can get old after a while. I was able to manage because you get greater flexibility as you become more senior. I think you just sort of lay down the rules. If I had to be with a client on an extended engagement (McKinsey puts a premium on being with the client) I had a rule that I wouldn’t schedule meetings before Monday at 11:00 that allowed my team to spend Sunday night at home and get up at a reasonable hour on Monday and get to the client on time. I would try to get back by Wednesday night so I was only away 2 nights and also I had a lot of studies at home and that made a difference. One other thing that I think is hard about the life of consulting, you do work with one team and then you move on to another team and just when you really like the folks you work with you’re forced to work with a bunch of other folks.

Moving into your current situation in the White House Fellowship. Where did you first learn about this program?
I heard about it when I worked on Capitol Hill when I met somebody one night who was doing it and it just sounded really interesting.  I didn’t really think about it again until it came up. I was reading an article in the local paper and they said so-and-so was named a White House Fellow and I thought this would be very interesting to do. It was very serendipitous. Having worked for the legislative branch of government, I had always been interested in how to work for the executive branch and how things would be different and, as it turns out, things are very different so I am very glad I did it.

To what do you credit your landing this really prestigious position?
Mostly luck. I say that in all seriousness. The commissioners are looking for three things. 1) leadership, 2) consistency in who you are in helping others and public service commitment, and 3) achievement in something in your field. For me I realized, I think at Trinity, that public service was very important to my life. Trying to work with others and think through how to make other people’s lives better was something that I found very fulfilling and challenging and something that I wanted to be a part of my life. Ever since I’ve graduated I have always tried to have a part of that in to my life, and I haven’t viewed it as separate from my work, I have viewed it as sort of that is what I need to do to make me happy. I think the commissioners looked at that and said here is somebody that even if he is going to go back into the private sector into business, will always be interested in public service.

Can you describe what you are doing right now with the vice president?
I am a domestic policy advisor to the vice president. He has 5 domestic policy advisors. My responsibilities include covering agriculture, transportation, international trade, overseeing Social Security reform, and USA accounts for the vice president and I am the point person for the administration on livable communities, which is efforts to help communities grow according to their values. What that means that I cover those issues is that when anything comes up in those fields, I am responsible for keeping the VP current and providing him with whatever counsel and advice he needs and answering any questions he has and I deal with constituents.

What is the most valuable thing you have taken from this experience?
First and foremost, it is helpful to describe what the fellowship is. It puts you in a job, a full time paid job, and then as part of the fellowship we have an educational curriculum which has essentially two components, the first, we have lunch or dinner three times a week with the nations leaders in the public, private and independent sectors. Those are just off-the-record sessions that just give us a chance to talk with Colin Powell, and every sort of leader in the White House; we talked with the CEOs of some of the international companies. And then we have trips that we undertake to various cities around certain themes. We have been to Miami to look at some of the immigration as well as social equity questions as well as how do you deal with a city that is experiencing wide growth and balancing the environment and development. We have also been to Atlanta where we looked at racial issues and again, dealing with how do you grow and how do you grow according to your values as well as we visited the CDC down there and had a chance to meet with the local leaders. The second component to that is visiting the military establishments. The one thing I have taken away is a tremendous respect and awe at our folks in the military uniform that are doing service to their nation. It is amazing, we had a chance to watch maneuvers and fake battles and to see what these folks do it is just absolutely incredible. We were down in Camp ______ in North Carolina, and we watched a mock battle and a mock hostage rescue situation. To see the individuals putting their lives on the line to save one of their own comrades and the seriousness and dedication and hard work and the long hours that it takes is extremely impressive. So that is one thing I will carry away is just a new-found and tremendous respect for the military.

Looking back now at what you have done and especially your time at Trinity, what did you think you did while you were an undergrad that has prepared you best for leading your career path?
Trinity gave me first the chance to take whatever courses I wanted, to develop a relationship with professors because the classes were small. It really gave me the confidence I think to experiment and just do different things and realize that you could do different things, and it exposed me to so many ideas and potential ways of looking at the world, which I think helped me in law school, where you sit back and you don’t say what is the law you say why is the law the way it is, which is a different way of looking at the world and I think going to a liberal arts college, especially a small one where it is fun like Trinity, it increased my joy for learning, which I think is the most important thing.

I tend to think that there are three things that I have seen in going through this year and meeting a lot of people. The people that I think have done tremendous things with their lives seem to have sort of three things in different balances: there is the IQ component, which is specialized for whoever you are; the EQ component, which is how well do you get along with others, do people enjoy spending time with you, can you sit down with somebody and forge a compromise; and the last ingredient is passion, just really loving what they do. Everyone that I met figured out the last question, what were they passionate about. And they might not have known it was this one thing, but they knew sort of what kept them happy and that was sort of a guide to them. Then, once they figured that out, the rest of it came in line because if you love something you do a good job. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the world and if you are focused on something you love then you tend to work well with others because you are surrounded by people that also love that or you are very committed so you are willing to work with people to get it done. That is the major take away for me this year is just really what ever you do, try to figure out what makes you happy don’t try to judge yourself by somebody else’s yardstick. I look back, when I was here grades were not that important to me, but it was something that I thought was important and large at the time and it has been, over time, switching to sort of say ok, the yardstick is not what somebody else thinks of success it s what makes me happy and what gives me time with my family and my friends which is what makes me happy.

With 20/20 hindsight, is there anything you wished you had known while you were at trinity that you know now?
I didn’t think about what I wanted to do until my senior year, and then all of a sudden I felt a crunch to try and figure it out. I thought my first step out of Trinity that was what I would do for the rest of my life. I have switched jobs, fields and sectors every three years since then, and I wish I had known that. I wish I had known that my first job was important just because it was sort of that narrowing effect of trying to figure out what to do, but it wasn’t what I was going to be stuck in for the rest of my life. I wish I had known just how much fun the working world was. At Trinity, I spent my summers teaching sailing and playing tennis and surfing and didn’t spend any time in the work place. I wish I had sort of gotten a little bit of business experience during that time.

Are there any words of wisdom you would like to pass on to Trinity students?
Yes. I am going to be a little preachy. Realize what a tremendous opportunity it is to have the opportunity to sit back and study and learn and take risks. If you are interested in something you don’t know anything about, take the course, really expose yourself to different ideas because you never know if you are missing something. Really take advantage of being surrounded by your friends and the chance to just sit back and think about some really cool issues because when you get into the business world there is a little bit more narrowing you have a little bit less time. Then as you get older you get even less time for that.