15 Years in a Nutshell

For those of us who grew up in the technological dark ages, the advent of online social networking and powerful search engines has made it possible to reconnect with friends after separations spanning decades. In the past year I've gotten back in touch with people I haven't seen since the fourth grade (a third of a century ago!).

Each renewed acquaintance brings with it a need to account for my activities since our last contact. It happened again this weekend: I became a Facebook friend of the person who was the closest thing to an SGA advisor I had in college, after being out of touch for roughly 15 years. So how do you boil down a decade and a half of your life, and convey something of the person you've become? When my old acquaintance knew me, I was an undergraduate getting ready to head off to Harvard Law School. I was driven and impatient. I was young. His was a presence I took for granted back then; it never occurred to me to think about how he ended up in his job, working with student leaders. Now I find myself working in a role similar to one he was in long ago. How to explain?

Here's what I said:

"I guess you could say I stumbled into Student Affairs, in the sense that I didn’t even have a conception of Student Affairs as a profession until I was employed in it. As you know, I had gone to law school and then practiced in a Los Angeles firm. I hated almost every minute of it. The work was meaningless to me, the culture was toxic, and I had a very tough time playing the part of a hard-driving litigator (one of my supervisors appreciated my research and writing skills but said I lacked the “killer instinct”). I quit, determined to find something meaningful to do, but also struggling with a lot of confusion and doubt. I felt that the choices that had led me to become a lawyer had been poor ones, and I didn’t want to make another mistake.

After months of exploration, I took a job with a startup nonprofit based in Boston doing community organizing projects in cities all over the United States. The work was unglamorous, but it was powerful and felt real to me. I stayed with the organization for six years, taking on leadership roles and developing ideas about civic engagement and social change.

I left the community organizing group in 2002 to start my own nonprofit, with the idea of helping public agencies inspire and organize their constituents to make civic contributions. For example, we worked with the San Diego City Schools on a strategy for using Title I funds to engage parents in their kids’ education. I hoped to get some national funding to start a project that would have involved working with college student governments to teach them about community organizing and democratic engagement. But my timing was awful (post-September 11th, funders were more focused on bricks-and-mortar projects, less on idealistic abstractions), and I never got the big grant that might have catapulted the organization to success. I was also realizing that trying to change the world as a consultant (i.e., an outsider to the institutions I wanted to influence) had serious drawbacks. After my wife and I moved to the Washington DC area, I started looking for a job that would provide opportunities to pursue my passions with more support.

I saw an ad for a position advising the student government at a nearby university, spoke with the department head about some of the things I wanted to try . . . and here I am, six years later. It has been a magical experience. The work is meaningful, and I apply lessons from every part of my life every day.

Sometimes I wish I had considered Student Affairs much earlier, so I could have avoided some of the rougher patches along my career path. But the truth is I probably needed to do things like spend a couple of miserable years as a corporate lawyer just to dispel the false attraction of trying to fulfill other people’s expectations for me at the cost of my happiness and sense of purpose. Plus my setbacks and missteps have been as valuable as my enjoyable adventures as sources of insights and anecdotes I can use to nudge, support and help liberate student leaders."