Hey. Steve Bodow here. I was one of the founders of Just Add Water, back in 1987 or so. The current group has asked me to write about what I've done since college, and, since JAW was such an important part of my Yale experience, I'm happy to do it.
Because space is limited, I'm going to omit the full accounting of my last 16 years & many and varied sexual exploits, and instead concentrate on what my professional pursuits have been.
I graduated from Yale (ES'89, History of Art, sine laude), moved to New York, and starting writing almost as soon as I got fired from my first job. To start, I was writing about music for a little local paper. Then I wrote for some magazines. Then for some bigger magazines. Then, I took a detour to Wall Street for a couple of years, but I didn't like it, so it was back to writing, this time for web sites as well as magazines. All this time, I was co-directing a (usually funny) theater company in New York. After about 12 years, I got to the point where I could reliably support myself in Manhattan as a freelance writer, sometime humorist and theater director. It was pretty good...until I started to get bored.
So in early 2002 I nagged a friend who was working at the Daily Show to tell me if and when any writing slots opened up. "Never happens," he said. Three weeks later, he called to say they'd just fired someone and were looking. I quickly put together a packet for them, they liked it, and I've been there ever since.
I got very lucky -- right place, right time, and it turns out that writing for Jon Stewart is one of the all-time great gigs. But I think it's also true that without Just Add Water, I probably wouldn't have landed the job.
Not because the group has a secretive post-graduation network wherein alumni give young members help with their careers. (In fact, if you get into JAW and then try to contact me about anything, let alone TDS, I will do everything in my level-4-on-a-scale-of-10 power to crush you like a pathetic undergraduate grape. I'm just putting that out there.)
But because Just Add Water is great training, and it has great people. Three or four years in JAW will leave you with the ability to think on your feet, confidently, in any situation, and that will prove invaluable no matter what you do after Yale. And JAW people are among the fastest, most incisive, and it goes without saying funniest at Yale. (When I was putting that TDS submission together and needed an editor, I turned to one of my oldest JAW friends for help. You're going to be close with these people for a long time.) And it's been that way nearly 20 years now.
OK, now I feel fucking old. I'm getting out of here.
So join JAW, already.