If you have any burning questions concerning cheese, defer to the expertise of Judith Greiman.
She’s currently the president of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges. But for about 18 months following the completion of her own undergraduate education, she headed up a gourmet cheese store — in Wisconsin, America’s very own cheese capital.
“Yes, I was the cheese lady,” she said, referring to her days as head of the shop. With no experience in either shop management or cheese, she took over hiring, ordering inventory and preparing for farmers’ markets, among other things.
The job was her ticket to remain in Madison after graduation from the University of Wisconsin. Her degree was in social work, but Madison, as it happened, didn’t have a lot of job openings in that line of business.
People with social work master’s degrees were driving cabs, Greiman recalled. However, there were opportunities and a real need for cheese proprietors, and Greiman managed to convincingly argue that she was smart and capable enough to do the job.
It was her first time managing such a place, but not her first experience in food services. If post-college life was about cheese, high school was about bagels.
Greiman worked the counter at Kaufman’s Bagel Bakery & Deli in her hometown of Skokie, Ill., the suburban branch of a traditional Jewish bakery from the Eastern European immigrant section of nearby Chicago. Greiman served customers who were mostly second- or third-generation descendants of Jewish immigrants, likely patrons of the original Kaufman’s in Chicago, she said.
There were two general types of employees at Kaufman’s: suburban teenagers to work the counters, and older Jewish immigrants to do the baking and run the place. The shop was always crowded, Greiman said. She worked a 6 a.m. to noon shift on weekends, and there was often a line out the door as her shift began – usually packed with customers who were passionate about getting just the right bagel or sweet roll.
“It was just a sort of crazy atmosphere,” she said.
But the older employees set a good example for the younger workers, Greiman said: It wasn’t a glamorous job, but everyone worked hard to keep customers happy and do their jobs well, an attitude that Greiman said influenced the rest of her professional life.
That work ethic served her well when it came time to pursue her law degree in the early 1980s, she said. When it came time to interview for law clerk jobs the summer after her first year of law school, Greiman had to stay the course and maintain an even keel in what felt like a “No girls allowed” attitude among law firms.
Men’s job interviews were breezy conversations that included asking which position the applicant might be able to play on the firm’s softball team. Women, meanwhile, got grilled on questions like how many times they’d published work in their first year of law school.
The worst interview: When Greiman, an Illinois native, was asked, “Now, you do understand that it snows in Chicago?” The interviewer then explained to Greiman that her hair was likely to get wet during winter walks to the courthouse. Now, she’s using those legal skills in her job as president of the conference for independent colleges, a role that includes lobbying and working on higher education policy.
