It’s hard to believe that it has been almost a month since I started working as an intern at PON. By now I’ve established a basic routine – the commute from my home in Lexington, the elevator ride up to the fifth floor of Pound Hall, settling in at the front desk or in whatever space is available – but I can honestly say that each day here has brought something new and surprising.
On my first day, I arrived at the office jet-lagged, having just returned from a trip to London, and feeling a mixture of excitement and trepidation about what lay ahead. This is my first internship (except for an unfortunate summer-long photocopying job), and I didn’t quite know what to expect. Having grown up in the Boston area, I have spent a lot of time around Cambridge and Harvard Square over the years, and I was frankly looking forward to some time away from the rural landscape of Dartmouth (I think I’m a city person).
Meeting with Sarah (Sarah Woodside – I have to specify, being one of three “Sara”s on the PON staff) definitely helped to settle my nerves. On that first day, I set about writing out some of my specific goals for the internship, which I think was a nice starting project. It was somehow reassuring and encouraging to see my goals written down in front of me, instead of just having them percolating in my head. Sarah asked me some questions I at first found difficult to articulate answers to (“Why do you want to learn more about the field of alternative dispute resolution?”), but it really forced me to pinpoint my long-term goals and helped me think about specific ways that my time here at PON will help me achieve them. It was kind of refreshing – definitely a different way of thinking than planning out my next term paper back at college.
For the next few weeks, I felt like a sponge – I tried to absorb everything I could about ADR, negotiation, the dynamics of the office, and PON as an organization. I learned early on that I should carry around a pen and legal pad with me at all times (and a calendar most of the time), and, when in doubt, to write everything down. There were countless instances in my first week when I looked back at my notes from a meeting or lecture and wished I’d written down more details. Luckily for me, the staff in the office is so incredibly friendly that it was very easy to feel okay asking questions.
My arrival at PON occurred in the middle of a really busy time at the office: the beginning of the Winter Negotiation Workshop, a course for law school students offered during the month of January. It was amazing to have such interesting and renowned instructors hanging around the office –Professors Robert Mnookin, Alain Lempereur, Doug Stone, and so many others. I even got to go to some of the plenaries (lectures given by the instructors)! It’s incredible how dynamic and engaging the instructors are; the lectures sounded almost like oratory. I wasn’t expecting to be able to follow the material very well, but because of the emphasis on storytelling and concrete examples of the abstract concepts, I actually ended up learning a ton of content that still sticks with me now.
I was also able to help out Sarah O’Brien, the Workshop coordinator, with some organizational tasks, which gave me a humbling sense of how big a job it is to make sure a course like this runs smoothly – for both faculty and students.
One of the highlights of my time here so far was my participation as a “client” in the Ellsworth divorce simulation, which is the culminating activity of the Winter Negotiation Workshop. Basically, the role involves learning the background information of a divorced husband or wife (I played Ellen Ellsworth), and persuasively giving that character a human emotional element when interacting with your three sets of “lawyers,” played by students in the Workshop. The job of the lawyers is to negotiate with the opposing side’s lawyers to land a satisfactory settlement for their client. I was pretty nervous about it beforehand (my acting skills wouldn’t even land me a non-speaking part in my high school play), and I had also worked for a couple weeks to recruit volunteers to play the clients – so when the date of the simulation finally rolled around, I felt like I had already been Ellsworthed out.
But playing a client turned out to me much more educational, easy, and fun than I could have anticipated. After reading Ellen’s life story, it actually felt very natural to get into the acting side of things – I wasn’t super dramatic, but I tried to use enough emotion to challenge my lawyers. The lawyers also surprised me – I had assumed that, considering everyone took the same course and learned the same material, everyone’s style of interacting with the client would be the same. But each set of lawyers (I had five pairs in all) was completely different! I had one pair who were very empathetic, another pair who were very technically- and financially-oriented without paying much attention to feelings or emotions, and a few who fell somewhere in the middle.
There were definitely some points when I felt completely out of my depth during the discussions of legal and financial technicalities, which made me feel surprisingly vulnerable. I remember many experiences like this in the past in other activities, when I’ve had very strong “feelings” about issues but not necessarily the rational arguments to back them up. It makes me wonder – why is it that I instinctively assume that an emotional “gut feeling” is insufficient? Does society in all its forms teach us that rationality and reason is more valid than emotion? I like to think that there is a place for emotion in debate and negotiation that is greater than merely providing support for a logical argument. But is it inevitable that “irrational” beliefs are defeated by the charge that they just “make no sense?”
Not surprisingly, I didn’t quite resolve this question during my three days of acting as an Ellsworth client. But I did have a thought-provoking conversation with one of my student lawyers, who, coming from the United Kingdom, was used to a very different model of empathy in legal negotiation. “When you have a solicitor whose entire job it is to talk to clients and feel their pain, and a separate barrister who does all the negotiating and legal business,” he told me, “it just makes me think that empathy and actual dealmaking can’t mix.”
After a month of working at an organization that seems to fundamentally believe that empathy and dealmaking can mix, I tend to respectfully disagree with him. But who knows – I might have his same doubts had I grown up in a different system. Hopefully, I’ll leave PON at the end of March not only possessing more organizational skills, but perhaps also being more alert to ways in which the society we take for granted each day, and the practices we engage in without thinking, affect our beliefs on negotiation.