Erin Walczewski
Ep. 11 — A reluctant beauty pageant winner finds a unique path to a Harvard education and develops a passion for public service / Erin Walczewski, Attorney, Cooley, LLP. When Erin Walczewski first entered the Miss Iowa beauty pageant, she never expected to win. Her goal was simply to win some scholarship money for college. To her surprise, the skeptical contestant won the Miss Iowa crown. Walczewski wouldn’t realize for a long time what the true prize was from that competition. Still a reluctant participant, Walczewski went on to the Miss America contest, which she lost. But it would prove to be the best loss of her life, giving her the opportunity to do a year of public service in her home state and develop confidence, poise, and invaluable public speaking skills plus enough scholarship funds to get her into college. Competing in those early beauty pageants continued to have a profound effect on Walczewski’s life and career. She won a prestigious scholarship with powerful mentoring, which eventually got her into Harvard Law School; later, a job on the 9/11 Commission’s Public Discourse Project (PDP) where her public speaking skills from her beauty contest days helped her play a key role in educating the American public about the terrorist attacks; and the opportunity to teach law at Georgetown University and later at Harvard. As a pro bono counsel at Cooley law firm, Walczewski recently had the chance to go to the U.S. Mexico border to provide legal advice to women seeking asylum. There, in the process of counseling these emotionally, physically, and psychologically traumatized women, Walczewski truly understood how the Miss Iowa and Miss America contests, in teaching her to communicate with and help those less fortunate than herself, had become gifts that keep on giving. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra: Hello and welcome to When it Mattered, a podcast on how leaders are forged in critical moments and how they deal with and learn from adversity. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology start-ups find their narrative. Chitra: My guest today is Erin Walczewski. She's a former Miss Iowa who competed for Miss America and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard Law School. She works as an attorney and a lecturer on law at Harvard. Before law school, Walczewski worked in national security notably on the 9/11 Public Discourse Project and she also taught high school English in Japan. Chitra: Walczewski currently serves as pro bono counsel at Cooley where she counsels non-profits and earlier this year traveled to the US/Mexico border to provide legal counsel to women seeking asylum. She also is a frequent public speaker and presenter. Erin, welcome to the podcast. Erin Walczewski: Hi Chitra, thanks so much for having me. Chitra: It's great having you. What led you to compete for Miss Iowa? Erin Walczewski: It's a funny question. I was just thinking about that in preparation to do this interview with you. And it almost, the fastest way to explain it is that I accidentally won a beauty pageant. We don't actually call them that. The Miss America organization is very clear that it's not a beauty pageant, it's a scholarship competition. That's actually a joke in the movie, Miss Congeniality, if you ever saw that, which I found hilarious. Erin Walczewski: But really I was looking for scholarship money. And at the time I was looking for ways that I could help finance my own college education and found out, found out through a recruiter about the, a local competition for Miss Iowa. And in a nutshell, I said, "No, no, no. I don't do pageant things." And they said, "Well, if you compete all five phases of competition, you win a minimum scholarship of $50." Erin Walczewski: And I thought, "Well, I could complete five phases of competition." And I did. And very surprisingly to me, I ended up winning the local competition. And they said,