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[Music] hello Blue Jays and welcome to the nest stories about life after Manor College i am your host Kelly Peiffer vice president of market and communications and this is the best part of my day my hope is that this podcast will encourage inform and inspire you making you feel like at Manor College you belong here always before we get to today's guest it's time for a segment of the show I like to call did you know did you know that Manor College is home to a Ukrainian heritage museum with rare artifacts embroidery and even Pysanky

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Ukrainian Easter eggs i figured I would talk about this because we are very close to the Easter holiday and Zinka um is popular around this time of year so Ukrainian Easter eggs is called Pysanky or Zinka they are very beautiful but they are a little bit more than just that they're actually steeped in tradition with intricate designs believed to ward off evil we've done a few stories on our websites and a few videos about this before but these are really really unique artifacts that come

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from Ukraine so to make the ancient art of Pysanky you'll need a special stylist called a kistka beeswax dyes and a raw egg we have a curator here her name is Chrystyna Prokopovych and she is wonderful at teaching others how to make Pysanky um so you apply wax in stages and then you use that little stylist and you draw intricate designs and each wax area resists the dye so when the egg is dipped and then you repeat this process of different colors you can build layers and patterns on top of the egg and it

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could be so so unique so finally the wax is kind of melted off to reveal your unique symbolic Pysanka it takes a lot of patience a lot of really um steady hands but the result is a really stunning piece of cultural heritage that you created yourself which is pretty neat so at our Ukrainian Heritage Museum you can find over 200 of these amazing works of art we have over 150 on display like I said our curator Chrystyna Prokopovych she will go to different schools different cultural communities and teach

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how to how to do Pysanka she's taught here a bunch of times to our students it is said that by creating Pysanka we will be keeping a legendary monster chained to ward off that evil so next time you see a Pysanka remember its beauty and powerful story i am now honored to welcome today's alumni guest today we have a fascinating guest who's taken a truly inspiring career journey from their roots in Elkins Park attending Cheltenham High School our guest today spent a decade as a therapist before making a significant pivot in her career

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having earned her paralegal certificate in May of 2018 she is now a litigation lead paralegal at the firm Grant and Eisenhofer in Wilmington Delaware working on multiple mass tors please welcome me in joining Manor alumni from the class of 2018 Rachel Freedman welcome Rachel hi nice to nice to meet you again yeah thank you so much for being with us today and for coming on the nest we're we're so happy to always happy to talk to alumni and um I'm particularly happy to hear your story i think it's a unique one but also one

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that I think a lot of students will probably find some some connection with so if you don't mind us starting off with tell us like why did you choose Manor and how did you first hear about Manor so I like as you said I was a therapist for 10 years i worked with children with autism for majority of that time and I also was an individual therapist um after a while I got pretty burnt out and I was torn between accounting and paralegal i had always been interested in the law um when most people my age uh back in the 90s were

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watching Dawson's Creek I was watching Law and Order LA Law all those legal shows i realize now it's not the same thing but uh basically I was torn between going either accounting or law um I came to Manor College um I think it was like right before the beginning of the January session of 2017 and the people there were just so welcoming i'm like you know what let me try Manor uh pretty much from the very beginning I felt completely welcome um the professors were great um so it was an interesting experience

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because the day after I started paralegal school we found out my dad had stage four cancer and I remember sharing it with my class and they're like "Oh my god why are you here?" I'm like "Honestly to keep my sanity." And my professors were great mary Sims was great um she was a very supportive uh professor advisor everything um my I had Rick Cataldi he was amazing i had a number of different professors and what's great about the Manor paralegal school was that they were all active lawyers they were not or

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paralegals they were not just professors they were actually in the field which I really appreciated um so and for the first time um the people I met there were so welcoming not just the professors but also the people like the individual classmates they ranged from being right out of college to like me changing careers which I could really appreciate i felt for the first time I was accepted unlike the other schools I had been to um I really found my niche there and just really enjoyed it oh that's um

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that's so good to hear i just I and to this day I actually still stay in touch with some of my uh classmates oh I love that i love that so much thank you for sharing that and I think it's so neat how you like took a leap and were like I'm getting burnt out and not just in this job but in this entire career i need to I need to make a switch and what what like bravery it takes to do that i mean that's a really I think scary thing for a lot of people so major kudos to you for for doing that and I'm so glad

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that manner could play a part in in that journey for you and I mean I can't even imagine what an experience like you start a new college you're starting something kind of big and scary in your life and then on top of that your dad gets diagnosed with stage four cancer i mean I'm so glad that you were in a place that was supportive and that was kind of that extended family around you because it sounded like at that time in your life you frankly need that you know you need that support um and um you know

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some of those professors were able to do that for you i know Mary Sims actually just yesterday we celebrated her retirement with a retirement party um and she's been working at Manor for 33 years so certainly she has touched a lot of lives of a lot of students and I'm so happy one of them was yours um Oh my god Mary was awesome actually um yeah any good Mary stories since we're so we have an amazing Mary story actually yeah so like I said my dad had stage four cancer and actually my cat was diagnosed with

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cancer not too long after that oh my gosh so this was like I think it was like May of 2017 and I literally was planning to go to see Mary to pick out my next classes for the summer and that morning I actually had to put my cat down because she had cancer and I and my mom was with my dad in a doctor's appointment for him and I I dealt with it i put my cat down and I came to Manor and I just like balled in her office probably for a good hour and she was just so supportive she gave me a hug she's like "We're going to get

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through this." She was just so amazing and actually she's a Facebook friend of mine like I can't She's been amazing she's been an amazing mentor confidant on everything oh that that is so great we're going to have to take that clip my our producer Anthony might need to snatch that clip that you just said and share it on Instagram or something because we've been we've been sharing Mary Mary's stories all week now and we have to add that to the collection that is just unfortunate for your cat but

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also a real testament to who who she is and how she treats students that's I I love that thank you for sharing that you're very welcome so it sounds like you came to Manor kind of at the right time in your life where like you kind of need those supports around you um so you were at Manor for about 18 months I would say a year and a half right about a year and a half um okay yeah i kind of did because I already had I actually had a masters I only needed to take the 10 classes sure sure so I did I think I did

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three in the fall i mean yeah three in the fall no sorry three in the spring two in the summer both with Mary and then three in the fall and then I did my uh internship that's great that's great so yeah how how was it transitioning like from I'm a professional I'm a therapist to I'm now a college student like what was that like for you because that could be kind of tricky for some you know I love being a student i love learning and like I said from my first day in paralegal school I'm like "This is

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where I want to be." Um my professors were amazing this was like where I should have always been um when I was in when I was in college I had some growing pains and um I kind of went towards the psychology field when I feel like I always was meant to be in the legal field so it kind of felt like this is the right time for me not to mention like I said there were other people even older than me who were in the midst of a career change so we really bonded over that that time of like okay this insecurity this stepping out of our

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comfort zone of our careers and really making that like you said that leap into a whole new career yeah that's great i think having peers along with you who are like "Oh yeah i'm I'm older too or I'm even older than you are and I'm right there with you." Like that makes you feel a little more reassured in what you're doing definitely and what was nice is like the classes like I bonded with people who were right out of college like I said bonded with people who were older than me um and just really like I said like I've

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been in multiple multiple educational experiences and programs and for the first time manner I was with my people that's how I felt i felt like I was with my people um I remember I was taking it was like in electronics was like learning about the different programs for being a paralegal and I remember there were like three or four of us who literally would stand outside after class it was an evening class and we would stand outside for like hours just talking about life about class about everything and I remember like one

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person like his girlfriend would be like "Are you coming home?" Cuz like the class would end at like 8:39 and sometimes we didn't leave till 10:30 11 we would literally stand in that um in the parking lot and just chitchat all night long right right well when you find your people it's hard to stop talking you know you just feel so um comfortable with them that's so cool to hear so kind of take us through um you graduate in 2018 you've been working as a paralegal for seven almost eight years now do you still feel like this is

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my thing I should you know and has it been that like sense of confidence and and as you continue in your career you know it's interesting um I actually I my first professor actually hired me part-time right out of right out of graduation um at the time my dad was still very sick and I needed a very flexible experience so he's like I will hire you part-time so I was part-time paralegal doing disability um my actually my in my uh internship person was like "You can stay on." That was an employment law so I was literally

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working part-time as an employment uh intern paralegal part-time as a disability paralegal and I was also working part-time at the part-time job I had started when I started um at Manner so I was literally working three part-time jobs wow just so I could have the flexibility of helping my mom out with my dad sure sure so I really got like dug in into that and that the disability paralegal job was it really I realized like I was meant maybe at some point if I had changed careers long ago nursing doctoring being

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a doctor I don't know cuz pretty much the majority of what my job is now is going through medical records and finding that um that needle in a hay stack that proof of injury that proof of use so yeah can you actually take a step back and explain for us what working on mass tors means if I had to look that up myself um in my my show research so if you could maybe share what that means i think that's really interesting and really specific type of of law you're Sure actually that was my first full-time job

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was a master basically what we do is we sue bad drug companies um the bottom line is a lot of pharmaceutical companies okay let me take another step back the pharmaceutical companies are basically who pay for the FDA they're the ones who pay the FDA so you can imagine there's some back and forth going on right so basically what we do is when a drug has come out and we find later that there's some severe side effects that they didn't tell people or they kind of lowballed the severity we go after

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that um so where you've got when you've got like your regular like personal injury medical malpractice you've got maybe 50 60 70 clients at one time in mass sort like for instance I probably have maybe about a thousand clients or more at this point um in approximately five or six different masters so for instance um we are doing we are the head uh law firm in the Gilead uh lawsuit which is in California that is an HIV drug they are one of the largest um pharmaceutical companies in the country and in the

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world they came out with pharmaceutical drugs for people with HIV and unfortunately those drugs caused more injury and death than they led on to so that we're doing Gilead um I'm sure you've heard of Johnson and Johnson and the talcum powder we do that uh let me think uh Roundup I'm in I'm in charge of that one as a paralegal and also I'm sure you've heard of the Camp Lejeune case um all those military personnel their families their friends who drank the water and now have 50 60 years later are suffering severe side effects so

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basically what mass sword is is rather than it's like a class action but the difference the way I tell talk about it is because it's a health issue every single person is taken differently so let's say you have a class action for a bank that they committed fraud and everybody gets the same amount it doesn't work that way in mass because everybody's health consequences are different so for instance you've got people who had cancer and passed away they would be they wouldn't be able to get more money than somebody who survived and

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maybe only had like a fatty liver or something so everything is taken into consideration in an individual case so I mean this is it's so much my goodness the volume of things that you need to know is insane not only the legal stuff but you also need to know medical i mean yes my goodness Rachel I don't know how you do it because this is How does one brain even think of all that that's so um just hard to wrap my head around it frankly well honestly that first I I would say like almost year working in the disability law

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really helped a lot cuz I literally spent hours on end going through medical records trying to pinpoint the worst injuries to basically say "Hey Social Security Administration this guy deserves disability because they have such and such injuries." Now it comes to um basically proving now with mass tort um rather than looking at one or two people like I said you're looking at thousands yeah sure wow well incredible and I'm so happy that there are people like you doing this type of work because it's certainly needed and

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hopefully just so appreciated by your thousands of clients um so kind of tying things back a little bit here um how can you see the value that your time at Manor brought to where you are in your career today you know for one thing um like I said like I I had a lot of difficulty being accepted where I wasn't have I had a low self-esteem when I first came to Manor um having been burnt out and having had all those experiences um I finally found my niche found my self-esteem found my confidence um and you know I went from going to a

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small firm in Master changing a couple times um trying to find where I really belonged to my husband finally saying "You can do this." Like I when I started mass tort at a different firm I was the only paralegal on three different mass tor cases but I had maybe 3 400 cases when it came time to finding a new job my husband's like "You can do this you can handle this." And I I basically jumped in jumped out of my comfort zone and said "You know what you're right i can." And the great thing about Gran and

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Eisenhofer was um they really let me grow in that field like I went from being what's called a client paralegal just basically doing the day and day day to day reaching out to clients reaching out going through medical records to they finally they're like you know what you can do this you can do the litigation and and I grew in that field like I started as a client paralegal and now I'm a litigation lead in multiple um and also when I hear from my clients and my attorneys you're doing a great job i really appreciate you that really

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really helps that um I literally have clients who love to reach out to me and talk to me and just tell me what's going on and that's actually it's interesting because that's where my therapy experience really helps in the matter is that um these clients that I have that I'm dealing with that I talk to every day they're going through it they're very sick they're going through trauma they're going through crisis and they feel comfortable enough to confide in me they reach out to me they're like "Hey I

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need to talk to you." Um I have reps uh who are representatives of clients who have deceased who call me and they cry to me and I feel honored that they feel comfortable enough to cry to me to talk to me that they're like I need to talk to you because this is what's going on yeah wow well I think that's it's so cool to hear that like you're seeing how your experience as a therapist is helping you serve these people now and that Manor gave you the confidence to take that leap and now you know with

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your husband cheering you on and your own kind of self hopefully self-esteem um you know you're feeling confident that like yeah I can do this I can help people and and I think as you're talking and sharing about what you do and how you help people and and Yes it's a job so obviously like you know you are making a living doing this and that's that's so great but also I think you are serving society in such a a really special way and like I was just thinking about how um our our mission at Manor College our mission statement the

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last line in our mission says that Manor graduates are prepared to serve society effectively and compassionately and I feel like you are just a walking breathing living example of that so um I'm I'm so happy to to hear it and see it and just hear your story and I hope that anyone listening is is feeling encouraged and inspired too because I think how can they not be you know it's so cool to see um as we wrap up here Rachel do you have any advice for current Manor students who are kind of in in student life and in college life

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right now and you're kind of on the other end of that any advice or encouragement for them yes actually I do um when I was in college I was so focused on the degree on the grades on everything and I missed out on like the the social life and finding myself and it took me till I was 35 36 to really find what I loved like take your time enjoy the social life get involved in the activities and you know what if you don't know what you want to major in that's okay like explore the classes i so wish when I was in undergrad that I

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had taken more electives that I had taken more classes to really find myself and the other thing is like you don't need to be focused on that it's great to have wonderful grades but in the long run what's going to matter is your development as a human being as a person finding your passions finding what you want to do for the rest of your life and focusing on that take that take your youth and take that time to explore yourself to explore everything that life has to offer because by the time you get to my

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age you're just you're kind of stuck in a you can get stuck in a rut and I'm actually so glad that I had that burnout that I chose to change careers at the time I did because I think if I would have stayed as a therapist much longer I don't know if I would have had that impetus to change careers so you know what man our students are mostly undergrads they're 18 19 take your time if you want to take four five six years to figure out what your major is do it there is no rush in this world take your

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time find yourself find your passion and when you're ready to graduate and become an adult do it because adulting is not all cracked up to be right but I think I think just your sentiment of like you know kind of enjoy your college years because they are fleeting obviously and like find your people find your niche find yourself is really important you know college is not just about in a classroom and and that's it homework and the studies it's it's kind of it's definitely a holistic experience and we certainly strive to be

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that here at Manor College where students are getting holistically growing in themselves and not just in their studies so well said thank you so much Rachel for being with us today i really enjoyed our conversation and I know our listeners will enjoy it as well thank you for tuning in today if you like what you heard listen and subscribe on Spotify or YouTube stay up to date with all new episodes by following Manor College on Instagram at Manor College and that's a wrap on another episode of The Nest stories about life after Manor

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College remember Blue Jays you belong here always [Music]