When Jenny Hochenberg was growing up in Sofia, Bulgaria, “America was the country of great opportunity,” she said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast. Her goal was to attend college in the U.S., which she did, entering the country for the first time when she started at Dartmouth College in 2002. She then went to Stanford Law School and is now an M&A partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP in New York.

Hochenberg, who advised BP plc (BP) on its $4.1 billion purchase of Archaea Energy Inc. in December, was immediately attracted to the demanding nature of M&A; she said her mother told her at one point, “You need the intensity, otherwise you just can’t function.”

Still, Hochenberg said: “You have to carve out something personal for yourself. That was the most difficult part of the pandemic for me, when work enveloped everything.”

In her free time, Hochenberg enjoys going to museums with her husband and their two small children. Her favorite painting, she said, is Jules Bastien-Lepage’s depiction of Joan of Arc at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

“She’s so tall and big and alone and strong and pensive at the same time. It combines a lot. It shows you power, and also a different aspect of power, this pensiveness and loneliness and struggle,” Hochenberg said.

Listen to the podcast with Jenny Hochenberg below:

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