By Alexandra Tilsley

When Ginny Trethewey decided to leave her job as a lawyer with one of the largest firms in Columbus, Ohio, she says her 11-year-old son burst into tears. "Mom," he said, "it's who you are. It's what you do."

But Ms. Trethewey doesn't see it that way.

Sure, she says, leaving the firm was an "agonizing" decision, but the university jobs that followed have been just as great—and just as all-consuming.

Ms. Trethewey is now chief operating officer of the Ohio State University Alumni Association and served as the institution's general counsel before that. She says the law is in her genes. She graduated from Ohio State's Moritz College of Law in 1977 and immediately took a job with the local firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour, and Pease, where she worked for 15 years.

Ms. Trethewey left in 1991 to focus on raising her children. At the time, she had her older son and a year-old baby boy. "It was crazy doing nothing but work, work, work," she says. But about three years later, she was itching to work again. Just as she was starting to think seriously about finding a new job, she learned that Ohio State was looking for a new general counsel.

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"In all honesty, my answer was 'No,'" she says. But Ohio State called again, and in early 1995, she took the job.

"Being general counsel of a large, public institution is a lawyer's dream job because anything and everything can happen, does happen, and will happen," Ms. Trethewey says. "You just get exposed to so many interesting issues, the people are fascinating, and the stage is large."

In 1998, she took on the additional duty of serving as executive assistant to the university's president, William E. Kirwan. He had been looking for someone who knew the university and could act as a confidante and a messenger. That job, she says, allowed her to develop leadership skills and draw upon her lawyerly instincts: "Identify the problem, be calm, gather evidence, be sensitive to politics, and then carve a path."

Ms. Trethewey still relies on those instincts in her role with the alumni association, which she assumed in 2004, after stepping down as general counsel. "I really don't believe people should do the same thing forever," she says.

She made the move when Archie Griffin, an Ohio State football legend, was recruited to lead the alumni association. The two knew each other and decided together that Ms. Trethewey would become the group's second-in-command.

Moving from the university administration to the alumni association was a big leap—Ms. Trethewey compares it to going from a convention to a family reunion. "They're kind of in the same business, but the alumni association is really all about engaging and cultivating and growing relationships with a large number of people," she says.