When her sister got back from her year abroad, our younger one wanted to go to the USA, too. But, she said her sister went to a day school, so she wanted to go to a boarding school. Expensive, but I hadn't spent a cent of my inheritance, anticipating this. I said, well, OK, there were plenty of boarding schools in New England. No, she said, that is too cold in the winter. I said, whaddya want, Hawaii? She said, yeah, that sounds good. Ha ha. Sure. Hawaii. You don't even know if there ARE boarding schools in Hawaii.
Already the born lawyer, she said, well, you don't know, either, do you? Nope, I didn't. So we got on to our (very new) internet, and looked up the Hawaii department of education. Well, sure enough, there WERE a couple of boarding schools there, but they mostly seemed to be for native Hawaiians with Hawaiian language instruction to keep the culture alive. But, sure enough, there was one with an international student body. Pretty tough curriculum, but that's what she was looking for anyway.
But Hawaii? That was 12 time zones away--exactly halfway around the world. Go any further, and you start to head back to Germany from the other direction. She said, well we should go look at the place. Oh, sure, just head off halfway around the world to look at a school. Again the future lawyer--well, you've never been there, either, so why not? Well, spring break in Germany was coming up, so, OK why not. Her elder sister says, no WAY you're going to Hawaii without me. I said, no WAY I will have the two of them hating each other for life over this, so I said, sure, you can come along. My wife said all three of you are crazy for wanting to go halfway around the world for 6 days to look at a school. So she stayed home. The long and the short of it was that the entrance exam was brutal, and she passed it, and ended up going to school halfway up an extinct volcano on the Big Island. 2000 feet above sea level, this was not some extended surfing vacation disguised as high school.
The graduation ceremony was something out of a 1950s movie, except that half of it was conducted in real Hawaiian, some of which my daughter understood at this point (no idea how). She didn't get into any fancy Ivy League schools (they refused to set up interviews in Hawaii outside of Honolulu, and thus trashed her application), but she did get into GW in Washington DC--ironically enough, about 18 miles from where my family lived when I was young (Falls Church, Virginia). She didn't do overly well on the LSATs, either, since there were lots of English words she didn't know (yet), and LSATs are ALL law schools look at these days, apparently.
But again--sheer determination (and wicked smart). In undergrad at GW, she ended up being what Ellen Malcolm, founder of EMILY'S List, told me was "the best intern they ever had," and graduating Magna at her "second tier" Law School in White Plains, New York. She graduated from Law School at the height of the Cheney/Bush recession, and couldn't find a job in the USA. So, what does she do? Runs over to Frankfurt for a legal job fair--right in the middle of the Icelandic volcano eruption, causing all transatlantic air travel to be canceled. She gets recruited by the Frankfurt arm of a British law firm, and then head-hunted by a big international law firm out of New York. She quickly becomes their big star, shamelessly puts in for partner before she has been there three years (you are supposed to wait 7 years), and becomes their youngest partner ever at age 31. She makes multiples of what I do now. Harvard Law? Never heard of them. NOW who's the second tier law school?
THOSE are the genes my daughter brought to the table, and her partner is just as smart. I just hope she doesn't experience burn-out like so many high IQ people do at an early age. But she displays no signs of it at all. The same calm "I can handle this" attitude she has always had ever since she grew out of having screaming matches with howler monkeys at the Duisburg zoo as a toddler.
So, yeah, these two girls of hers might turn out to be VERY special. Their future partners had better get used to knowing who is boss very early, because with these two, I have no doubt at all who it will be!
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