Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:This is a timely thread. My youngest daughter is entering the career field in 2021, as she plans to graduate in December. She told me she wishes she had more real-world advice. I’m thinking I’ll buy her the parachute book, but I’m open to recommendations for more contemporary/helpful books to get her started. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.
Tell your daughter to make friends with the receptionist, the janitor, the copy room people, the secretaries. Remember their kids names, their birthdays. These are the gatekeepers and the people who will whisk away your garbage pail when you've puked into it, the people who can tell you when and where to run into the high-level person you're desperate to speak with, the people who will save your ass when you thought you needed 2 copies but now realize you need 22 copies in 2 minutes.
Tell your daughter to find the truly cool girls at each job. Not the popular ones, but the genuinely cool ones. The ones who agree they will all help each other out, will amplify each other's ideas in meetings, will always give credit where credit is due. I worked at a law firm full of women like this, and it taught me so much about the people I wanted to hang out with at work. If you put it out there that you don't gossip and you like to support other women, the other women who feel that same way will find their way to you.