{"id":4,"date":"2007-02-02T15:23:03","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T19:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pon1\/2007\/02\/02\/a-month-already\/"},"modified":"2007-02-15T13:01:22","modified_gmt":"2007-02-15T17:01:22","slug":"a-month-already","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/2007\/02\/02\/a-month-already\/","title":{"rendered":"A month already!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to believe that it has been almost a month since I started working as an intern at PON.\u00a0 By now I\u2019ve established a basic routine \u2013 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 \u2013 but I can honestly say that each day here has brought something new and surprising.\u00a0
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\nOn 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.\u00a0 This is my first internship (except for an unfortunate summer-long photocopying job), and I didn\u2019t quite know what to expect.\u00a0 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\u2019m a city person).\u00a0\u00a0
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\nMeeting with Sarah (Sarah Woodside \u2013 I have to specify, being one of three \u201cSara\u201ds on the PON staff) definitely helped to settle my nerves.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Sarah asked me some questions I at first found difficult to articulate answers to (\u201cWhy do you want to learn more about the field of alternative dispute resolution?\u201d), 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.\u00a0 It was kind of refreshing \u2013 definitely a different way of thinking than planning out my next term paper back at college.\u00a0
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\nFor the next few weeks, I felt like a sponge \u2013 I tried to absorb everything I could about ADR, negotiation, the dynamics of the office, and PON as an organization.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There were countless instances in my first week when I looked back at my notes from a meeting or lecture and wished I\u2019d written down more details.\u00a0 Luckily for me, the staff in the office is so incredibly friendly that it was very easy to feel okay asking questions.\u00a0
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\nMy arrival at PON occurred in the middle of a really busy time at the office:\u00a0 the beginning of the Winter Negotiation Workshop, a course for law school students offered during the month of January.\u00a0 It was\u00a0amazing to have such interesting and renowned instructors hanging around the office \u2013Professors Robert Mnookin, Alain Lempereur, Doug Stone, and so many others.\u00a0 I even got to go to some of the plenaries (lectures given by the instructors)!\u00a0 It\u2019s incredible how dynamic and engaging the instructors are; the lectures sounded almost like oratory.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0
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\nI was also able to help out Sarah O\u2019Brien, 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 \u2013 for both faculty and students.\u00a0
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\nOne of the highlights of my time here so far was my participation as a \u201cclient\u201d in the Ellsworth divorce simulation, which is the culminating activity of the Winter Negotiation Workshop.\u00a0 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 \u201clawyers,\u201d played by students in the Workshop.\u00a0 The job of the lawyers is to negotiate with the opposing side\u2019s lawyers to land a satisfactory settlement for their client.\u00a0 I was pretty nervous about it beforehand (my acting skills wouldn\u2019t 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 \u2013 so when the date of the simulation finally rolled around, I felt like I had already been Ellsworthed out.\u00a0
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\nBut playing a client turned out to me much more educational, easy, and fun than I could have anticipated.\u00a0 After reading Ellen\u2019s life story, it actually felt very natural to get into the acting side of things \u2013 I wasn\u2019t super dramatic, but I tried to use enough emotion to challenge my lawyers.\u00a0 The lawyers also surprised me \u2013 I had assumed that, considering everyone took the same course and learned the same material, everyone\u2019s style of interacting with the client would be the same.\u00a0 But each set of lawyers (I had five pairs in all) was completely different!\u00a0 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.
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\nThere 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. \u00a0I remember many experiences like this in the past in other activities, when I\u2019ve had very strong \u201cfeelings\u201d about issues but not necessarily the rational arguments to back them up. \u00a0It makes me wonder \u2013 why is it that I instinctively assume that an emotional \u201cgut feeling\u201d is insufficient? \u00a0Does society in all its forms teach us that rationality and reason is more valid than emotion?\u00a0 I like to think that there is a place for emotion in debate and negotiation that is greater than merely providing support for\u00a0a logical argument. \u00a0But is it inevitable that \u201cirrational\u201d beliefs are defeated by the charge that they just \u201cmake no sense?\u201d
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\nNot surprisingly, I didn\u2019t quite resolve this question during my three days of acting as an Ellsworth client. \u00a0But 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. \u00a0\u201cWhen 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,\u201d he told me, \u201cit just makes me think that empathy and actual dealmaking can\u2019t mix.\u201d \u00a0
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\nAfter 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. \u00a0But who knows \u2013 I might have his same doubts had I grown up in a different system. \u00a0Hopefully, I\u2019ll 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.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to believe that it has been almost a month since I started working as an intern at PON.\u00a0 By now I\u2019ve established a basic routine \u2013 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":920,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1287],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pon-intern"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/920"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}