As summer heats up we ask industry executives:
What’s the most memorable summertime job you had during your high school and college years, and why?
Responses edited for clarity and brevity
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| Kennedy with the Yankees' Phil Rizzuto. |
Sam Kennedy
EVP, COO
Boston Red Sox
“Working as a summer intern for the New York Yankees in 1993 was by far the most memorable and important summer job I ever had. I loved every minute of it. I spent the entire summer in the ticket office and I learned more from those three months I did from four years of college.”
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Chris Wagner
EVP
NeuLion
“During college, I was a BBQ chef for Smokey Glen Farm in the Washington, D.C., area, and everything was cooked on charcoal grills. My most memorable moment: I cooked for Vice President Walter Mondale and his group at the Naval Observatory in Washington. While the vice president came to inspect the preparation of the BBQ chicken for his party, I dropped an entire grid of 50 chicken halves at his feet as I was flipping them over. Luckily, there were cameras there, so he pretended it didn’t happen. [I’m] still unsure whether or not he ate the chicken that night. …
I also cooked for Princess Anne of England. Eight hours of cooking a hind quarter of beef for her and her party, only to find out she was a vegetarian at the time.”
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Richard Brand
Partner
Arent Fox LLP
“[I was] a ‘law clerk’ for a small, five-partner law firm in Georgetown while I was still a Georgetown undergraduate. As an undergraduate student, I was pretty impressed with myself that I was able to get a job as a law clerk — so impressed that I was somehow able to reconcile (or perhaps ignore) the fact that most other law clerks in law firms don’t typically have to wait in long lines at gas stations during the oil crisis to fill up the partners’ gas tanks, nor do they pick up lunch or dry cleaning for the attorneys in the firm, or go to partners’ houses and pick up items from their wives. But the title was LAW CLERK, and I was happy to have it.
“More importantly, being around the law firm 35-40 hours a week gave me a sense of what lawyers did and how they did it, and through this experience I was able to begin figuring out what areas of law I did not like and what areas of law I did not want to do. I have continuously used the process of elimination in my legal career and, in fact, in my drafting and negotiation of documents, I am able to eliminate items and issues better than I am able to create issues. Perhaps that is why I never became a litigator — and I have the glorified ‘go-fer’/law clerk position to thank for it.”
— Compiled by Molly Hogan
