I GOT A J.D., NOW WHAT?

I find myself around the parish church a lot.  I get to do a lot of important things around campus.  I check the postings that deface the walls and take them down when the dates that they announce are many weeks past.  When the dates are still in the future and the material is not all wrinkled and torn I leave it up.  Many times during my quasi aimless wandering I am acosted by people of various sizes, ages and colors.  Most of the time they are lost and want to know how to get to an office that may or may not be occupied for the moment.  This is the easy stuff because I have been vagranting around the same campus for well nigh 12 or 13 years now.  Sometimes I get asked something interesting. Like a short while ago I was met by a quiet, soft spoken lad who, after the initial greeting formalities announced that he had just passed the bar...first try, too. I was impressed and then quickly unimpressed.  Soft spoken lad says to me, he says, "What do I do now?  I have a JD and I want to know where I can find work where my JD will give me an advantage."  Whooooaa!  Similar to a question that I had 45 years ago.  So, I am ready.  Here's what I say to my new found quasi child.

This is a question that drives me to my innermost, deepest conviction about education. I am convinced that human life is a complex of experiences, all of which make up the “university” of hard knocks. So, every day we live and breathe is a day at school. My father drilled that into me from the day of my birth, and maybe even before.

I, personally, have come to the conclusion that we don't have JD, MBA, Ph.D, etc. we live the initials we place after our name.  

EFR Dion had to leave school in his sophomore year because of the death of his father. My father was the eldest of 8 children and this was 1914, before social services were a common way of life. He grew up in a machine shop environment. His leadership skills put him in lower management at 22. Before he was 30, he was the superintendent of a 50 person machine shop. At 38, he passed the state of Massachusetts professional tool engineer certification exam on his first and only sitting. All along the way, he told me to knit all of my life experiences together so that everything that I did would be inter-related to make me more and more knowledgeable about many things.

I have a master’s degree in Theology. That means that I was in school a long time. I worked my way through a private boarding school for 6 years. I worked for the Church, so a lot of my education was payment for my “in-house” work. Along the way I married, fathered children, lost jobs, quit jobs, was in debt, out of debt, totaled a couple of cars, sold vacuum cleaners, painted, drove airport shuttle vans, security guard, teach Catholic doctrine, Bible studies, organize and host religious pilgrimages and make a little bit of change as a translator. Through it all, I was a missionary pastor, a canon law counselor, a personnel recruiter and a personnel director. How much of what I learned in school did I apply? All of it. However, not all at once, of course. We never apply what we have learned, in school or along the road of life, all at once. No matter how much life learning we knit together, we only use what is sufficient for the moment. Furthermore, while we are using, we are learning from the feedback that the job gives us.

Therefore, everything that you have learned, from the crib to now is going to be useful for you on your first job, assuming that you are talking about your first job. If not, realize that you already know a lot. The first day on the job is going be your first day at new learning experiences as well as a new day of practicing some of what you have learned, not just in school but also in life.

So, don't carry your JD around like a badge or a passport. Live it.  Do what you want to do.  No matter what you do, you will be better at it because you are a JD.

We entered the church.  I said a short prayer for him, blessed him and he left.  I suppose that the next time we see one another he'll be on St. Peter's Public Defender staff.