Running Thoughts (2)

Yes, I know it's not perfect, but does anyone care to comment?

Update 2: This is what I'm taking in to JT today. It's not done, but it feels worlds better than the first draft of this. By my numbering system, this is draft #6.

On the first Sunday of the school year, I stood up with all the teachers and administrators to be recognized. My church celebrates educators this way every year but I’d never joined them before. Despite working in higher education for five years, I wasn’t sure I counted. This year, though, standing felt right.

For most of my time working for the University of Texas, I've considered myself just another program coordinator and graphic designer who happens to work for a university. But my recent decision to go to law school, in the hopes of teaching law students someday, gave me new insight into the work I’ve been doing for the last several years.

Though my professional life has been focused in a visual direction, I’ve been investing in my literary interests for the last several years—taking writing courses and fine-tuning my editing skills. I chose to pursue a law degree because of my love of both the writing and the impact of language. As a literary discipline, requiring a mastery of language, analysis, research, and criticism, law suits me. Its vast real-world applications engage me. Above all, law appeals to my love of explaining words, and their affect, to others.

My job with the university was intended to be a stopgap, a way station, between my undergraduate and graduate education. Yet before I knew it, the job that was supposed to last for no more than two years stretched into four and a half years spent advising students and coordinating undergraduate programs; and then it led to a position building online courses for the university. I’ve been successfully working with students and educators for over five years without realizing my aptitude for education.

Even away from my professional life, I’ve been developing as a teacher. The most fulfilling part of the advanced writing seminar I took last year was wading through stacks of my classmates’ papers, marking them with line-item comments and thematic suggestions. As I worked with my own writing and helped others with their language, I discovered how much I enjoy the art of research, argument, and writing—the art of words—and that I excel at improving that art in others.

For five years, while I thought I was becoming a designer, I have been developing a career in education—even as I pursued the art of language. It’s been immensely fulfilling. Now I'm ready to take it to the next level and pursue a career in legal academia.

When I stood up that Sunday, and admitted to myself that a career as an educator was something I wanted to pursue, I was simply accepting the direction my life has taken and embracing it. I know that I want to teach the art of words to people for whom words matter most—lawyers.