E-Mail This Article to a Friend Off the beaten track Once you have the basics in place, you can take an advanced degree in all kinds of unusual directions BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	Where to find them • Boston College Law School, 885 Centre Street, Newton, (617) 552-8550; www.bc.edu/schools/law. • Boston University School of Law, 765 Comm Ave, Boston, (617) 353-3141; www.bu.edu/law. • Harvard Graduate School of Education, Appian Way, Cambridge, (617) 495-3414; www.gse.harvard.edu. • MIT Sloan School of Management, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, (617) 253-1000; mitsloan.mit.edu. • Northeastern University Bouvé College of Health Sciences, 123 Behrakis Health Sciences Center, Boston, (617) 373-2708; www.bouve.neu.edu. — NM

Like the jobs we have, the cars we drive, and the places we live, the academic degrees we’ve got immediately suggest a host of characteristics about us. When someone says, "I drive a Prius" or "I drive a Hummer," a certain set of associations comes to mind; likewise with degrees. When someone says, "I go to law school," a web of impressions presents itself: swiveling leather chairs; crafty word-spinning; Dewey, Cheatem & Howe; and an articulate, impassioned Tom Cruise in his various roles as do-gooder litigator. For business school, it’s dark suits and briefcases, money-hungry investment bankers, and maintaining the Beacon Hill apartment–two car–three plasma television lifestyle. A master’s in nursing calls to mind images of bedpans, the ubiquitous blue scrubs worn by half the people walking around Longwood, and TV nurses — from M*A*S*H to ER — wiping brows. Whether you study archeology (Indiana Jones) or higher math (protractors, pocket protectors), stereotypes surround every choice in higher education.

And that’s because most degrees — especially the most popular ones — have typical tracks that lead toward a specific career path. A person goes to law school and then works at a law firm; after an MBA, it’s on to banks or businesses; a master’s in education leads to a classroom. But getting a traditional degree doesn’t mean you can’t go on to have a non-traditional career. The set of skills acquired from most graduate degrees — critical thinking and analysis, problem solving, communication — are marketable no matter what your field. It’s up to you to decide where you want to take those skills. It’s up to you to create your own opportunities.

Take Lakshmi Balachandra, for example, who’s using a background in business and comedy to teach boardroom skills to students and clients. While working at Axxon Capital, a woman-owned, woman-focused venture-capital firm based in Boston, Balachandra was advised that she needed to get an MBA. She heeded the advice, and received her MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management this spring. When she started at Sloan, she didn’t have a clear sense of what she wanted to do. After college, in between opening a toy store and working in investment banking and venture capital, Balachandra had done improv comedy, working by day and rehearsing and performing by night. Then she’d quit the proverbial day job and tried to make a go of it in LA doing improv and stand-up every night.

"I was doing okay," she says. As in business, "it’s all networking and whom you know. The more people you talk to, the better you figure out how to get on stage. And I got on some big stages." But after about six months, Balachandra decided she didn’t want to lose her previous career track. "I didn’t want to take the risk of not making it," she says, "so I started thinking about coming back to Boston."

During her second year at Sloan, Balachandra saw a listing for a class taught by an actress who used acting to teach leadership skills to businesspeople. "I was fascinated that you could have this career," says Balachandra. "And I asked her if I could be her [teaching assistant]." She was hired. One week, while the teacher was away, Balachandra led a few classes on her own, and the reaction was huge. "People thought it went really well. I realized I could teach."

Every January, MIT offers an Independent Activities Period during which anyone can teach a class. Balachandra took her experience in the classroom and on the stage and used it to offer a three-day workshop called "Improvisational Bottom Lines: Using Improv in Business." "Improv can teach you the skill of reacting to things," Balachandra explains. "You learn about presence and preparation" in business school, "but not how to read a room and handle it. That’s what people got out of it. It should be fun and funny, but I want people to learn some of these communication techniques that get lost."

The workshop was such a success that students — including an employee at Goldman Sachs — urged Balachandra to consider offering it as a full-semester course. After writing proposals and meeting with professors and deans, she was hired as a lecturer at Sloan. "And in the meantime, I’m trying to sell this type of thing to businesses," she says. Goldman Sachs is her first client. "I never could’ve done this without an MBA. Sloan gave me a lot of opportunities. But I also made my own opportunities."

Maris Abbene, the director of career services at Boston College Law School, offers a law-school gloss on Balachandra’s experience. "I always tell people it isn’t a law degree that gets non-traditional, it’s you," Abbene says. She explains that most people with law degrees do go on to work at law firms first, but that, armed with the ability to analyze on their feet, negotiate, and a host of other marketable skills, people with a law degrees can go anywhere they want. Helen Long, director of the Career Development Office at Boston University School of Law, cites David Kelley, producer of the Boston-based law-firm show Ally McBeal (among a host of other shows) as one of BU Law’s most famous graduates, and a good example of someone who took his law degree in an atypical direction. She also mentions another BU Law grad, who founded Barrister Books, a bookseller directed at lawyers.

Long herself didn’t take the average attorney path. She went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, worked for big firms in Boston and New York, started her own private practice, realized something wasn’t right, and decided to pursue a doctorate in management at BU. While there, she taught, "and I learned that what I really liked was working with students. I like working with lawyers a lot. I just don’t necessarily want to be one."

But how to decide if practicing law is right for you? "It’s the same type of advice you give anyone taking their career in a new direction," says Long. It’s a combination of knowing what you want to do, what your skills are, and which of those skills you like to use. "Law is a ‘slash’ profession. There are a lot of lawyers/journalists, lawyers/poets, lawyers/CEOs." Law school’s primary purpose, explains Long, is training lawyers. "You need to go through the creative process on your own to decide where you want to go."

A master’s in education can also lead to the road less traveled. "In so many cases," says Mary Frazier-Davis, the acting director of career services at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, "the creative positions are created. Individuals use their talents and skills and find a need and address it." Frazier-Davis points to a recent graduate working as an education-facility planner for an architecture firm, as well as graduates who go on not just to classrooms but to creating educational software or to heading up nonprofits supporting underserved populations. "In education there are so many opportunities," she says. "It provides a tremendous foundation for many professions. I see a lot of individuals with great passion, tremendous ideas, and commitment to the improvement of society. People use the education degree to shape institutions, within the classroom and out, locally and globally."

Nursing, which has long suffered from negative stereotypes, also prepares students for a variety of careers. "Nurses use their backgrounds to go on to law school, to become physicians, to run teen-health centers, to work in embassies or prisons," says Barbara Kelley, director of the graduate program in nursing at Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences. She talks of a nurse who bought the office practice where she worked. "The physician works for her," says Kelley. Usually people think of nurses "following doctors’ orders — and we’re very good at that — but it’s good to hear that people are taking different steps." Skills developed in nursing include "critical thinking, communication, knowledge of people, how to work with ambiguity and change, and how to be responsible for your actions," says Kelley. And like any degree, "once you get graduate preparation, what to do with it is up to you."

"Students can feel pretty fragile" if they’ve started pursuing a degree in a field they’re not sure is right for them, says BU Law’s Long. "Try something," she adds. "If you don’t like it, no one will force you to continue, and it can be a valuable experience for something else. You’re always building on your experience."

Nina MacLaughlin can be reached at nmaclaughlin[a]phx.com.