Works and Days

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"interviews"


Interview with Jessica L. Benjamin

Nathan Martin '16, Assistant Editor at Works & Days, interviewed Jessica L. Benjamin '93, Senior Account Manager at Monster Worldwide.

How would you describe your career path? Do you feel it's been fairly straightforward, or more winding?

It's been fairly straightforward in that when I was entering college, I wanted to be a journalist, or a writer,  then I found out how much journalists made, and that there was another career path for me. I was a Quest editor, which is how I got almost all the experience I used to get my first couple of jobs, and then I've worked in media, one type or another pretty much the entire time. Even when I was in law school, it was part-time, and I was working in media part-time to make money, and so it seems fairly straightforward. What's happened along the way is that newsprint is not a way for someone like me to make money anymore and so I made the switch over to doing digital media. Then I discovered recruitment advertising online, which is one of the areas where there is money to be made. So I was doing it before in the sciences, and then when the NIH cuts came, and there was much less funding in the sciences, then I went to go work for Monster.

Interview with William Vickery

Madeline Wagar ’16, Assistant Editor with Works & Days, interviewed William Vickery '10, Classics major and Senior Investigator at Mintz Group.

Tell me a bit about Mintz Group.

I’ve been working with Mintz since January of 2012. Mintz is a traditional private investigation firm specializing in corporate intelligence gathering. Clients contact us when they are interested in figuring out what their competitors are doing. Clients are often interested in looking into how other people in their field are using similar trademarks, or in figuring out who is the best to do business with in their field of interest. It’s a very diverse company. Our operations fall into three categories. The first is foreign relationships, so we are investigating corporations around the world and making sure they are reputable. The second category is disputes and litigations. This category contains a lot of white-collar work. It’s often employment related, or dealing with the Internet, tasks like website preservation. We try to discover what has worked successfully in the past. We also investigate employee misconduct, so we might come in after an employee makes off with $100,000 to figure out how they did it. We will put together a profile of how it was accomplished, and the client can work out a plan for prevention in the future.