So tonight what we're going to talk about.

The most frequent thing that students come to talk to me

and make appointments to come talk to me in my office about

is negotiating their career.

And they come with different questions.

How should I choose a career?

What job should I take?

How do I negotiate my salary?

How do I negotiate with difficult people in the job?

How do I get out of a job?

And they all involve negotiation.

There are two primary things that we'll talk about tonight.

One is specific transactional negotiations, such as salary, job transitions.

And then not surprisingly, for this course, relationships, kind of how you manage the relationship

throughout your career so that you have a more successful and happy career.

What I'd like to do is start by talking a little bit about my

career and not doing so in a way to say that this is the right choice. This is just kind of what

happened to me. There's some good things that I've learned from that, some things that I wish I'd

done differently. We'll start by talking about that and then we'll get into some of the assumptions and the lessons from that. So when I was five years old, I decided I was going to be a fireman.

And I remember sitting on the corner with my friend Peter Kelly, and we got very detailed,

you know, which station, how we were going to slide down the pole, you know, who was going

to drive the truck, and I was absolutely sure I was going to become a fireman.

...