Ari Goldfine worked as a campaign staffer during and after college, advocating for candidates and, as she puts it, “pushing a lot of policies.” She considered law school a chance to “understand, at an operational level, how those policies worked.” Goldfine wanted to attend a law school in a new city that could facilitate placements in D.C., and Vanderbilt ended up meeting those criteria and more.

She found her first year to be rigorous, with exceptional professors and a community she could bond with through the challenges. “Vandy is quite small, and it allows you to develop a really solid group of friends,” she explains. “(First year) is a shared experience, and you are getting through it together.”

First year students choose one elective in the spring; Goldfine’s choice – Antitrust Law, with Professor Rebecca Allensworth – helped set her career aspirations in motion. Prior to Vanderbilt, she had worked on the presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren, a noted proponent of antitrust enforcement. “I had some previous interest in the subject, but I didn’t have an economics background, so I was fairly intimidated,” she said. “I bought an economics for dummies book over the winter break, but it turns out I didn’t need it, because Professor Allensworth taught us all the concepts through her course. She’s an incredible professor.”

Goldfine wanted to work at an agency in her 1L summer, and Allensworth recommended she contact alumni at agencies that piqued her interest. “I cold emailed several alumni at the FTC thinking nobody would respond,” she recalls. “I got more than I bargained for. Everyone was so kind and excited to talk to me—those conversations were so helpful.” She ended up getting an offer from the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, where she spent her summer in the Health Care Division, conducting legal research and witness interviews as a part of long-running investigations.

She returned to the Bureau of Competition the following July after working as a summer associate at Williams & Connolly LLP. “I was interested in private practice and government, and I didn’t really want to close off either opportunity,” she explains. Goldfine ended up accepting a full-time offer at Williams & Connolly, citing a desire to experience life at a firm with expertise in trial litigation.

Goldfine followed the traditional On-Campus Interview process when applying for positions at firms but relied more on the Career Services team for guidance on how to navigate splitting her 2L summer between the FTC and Williams & Connolly. Career Services also helped her weigh full-time offers. “I was deciding between offers and asked Nick Alexiou for advice, and he gave me paragraphs of information about each DC firm I was considering.”

As a 2L and 3L, Goldfine took courses to prepare for her career in litigation. “Administrative Law with Professor (Kevin) Stack was one of my favorite classes,” she says. The same semester, she also took Networks, Platforms & Utilities, taught by Morgan Ricks and Ganesh Sitaraman, which provided “the substantive meat” of how different industries are regulated. She also joined the Legal Aid Society and currently serves as the Senior Notes Editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review.

“Vanderbilt has been a very good experience,” Goldfine says. “The collegial reputation of the school is very real. I thought that it may have been marketing, but it’s true.”