I have to say that Law School really soured me on school. I spent the first two of three years feeling intimidated, humiliated and degraded on a regular basis and almost as a rite of passage–and this treatment came from many of my professors. The goal of preparing for class was primarily so that you could avoid embarrassment in front of your peers, but that fact was usually inevitable. Then there was the constant competition among my peers to make it to the top of the class because that’s where the respect and high-paying job offers existed. Well, I think telling you that my first job as an attorney right out of law school only paid me $25,000 annually should give you an idea of my class rank.
Now, don’t get me wrong, no dummies graduate from law school or pass the bar exam on the first try, which I did. However, when you take the best of the best and place them in the situation of “someone has to be first and someone has to be last” then many factors come into play, like whether your family is full of judges and lawyers who can help you wade through the trials and tribulations of law school and stay on top. As a first-generational college student, I certainly did not have that resource in my family, so I struggled for most of my time there. To be fair, a few professors, administrators and students tried to mentor and help me, but, all in all, I felt alone through law school and was not eager to go back to school if I had to endure more of “that” experience that I gladly said goodbye to in May 1994.
Well, I am happy to say that I did not give in to the Enemy and shy away from this opportunity here at Aquinas. I continue to try to follow what the Holy Spirit reveals for me in my life everyday and everything so far leads me to believe that this will be a wonderful four years of part-time study filled with hard work with lots of encouragement–from administrators, professors, staff and my peers.
I do have to admit that my husband tried to assure me that the typical graduate school experience is different from law school. He has his Masters in History and is hoping to begin working on his Ph.D, so I definitely valued his input. Additionally, as part of the Apollos Project, I took part in a retreat that laid a wonderful foundation for me because I was able to commune for a weekend with people called forth from their faith communities just as I had been and they were just as anxious as I was about the experience of going back to school after being away for a number of years.
Overwhelmingly, though, I have to say that the best part of beginning my studies at Aquinas has been the people of Aquinas. Orientation laid the foundation, where I realized that I have a wonderful advisor in Carolyn Wright, who had taken care of a lot of things for us already and had provided a nice guide for my four years of study. I have a roadmap to success, which makes me feel pretty good.
After my first week in both of my classes, Pro-Seminar and Intro to Theology, I felt reassured by my two professors, Ann Garrido and Thomas Esselman, respectively. They both have already shown me that this will be four years of learning how to enter into the “conversation that is Theology” and doing it in such a way that will teach us, while preserving our dignity as students and preserving the integrity of the institution.
I’m glad I have a holiday to begin some of this reading, but I am actually looking forward to learning again–something I had given up on after law school.
