I love ideas because of the influence that ideas have in personal and social change. As I began a full-time job soon after graduating high school, I felt that I was missing exposure to greater, more powerful ideas, as well as the opportunity to develop my own. For this reason, I left my job as a machine technician and enrolled in community college for the fall. Though I felt confident in the decision, and assured my single father that I would find part time work soon after settling into classes, arguments began about my decision to “throw away” a perfectly good job.
Shortly after the semester began, my father came home from work to find me building a desk and assumed I bought it for myself. Outraged that I would waste my savings while being unemployed, he smashed the desk and threw me out of the house warning me not to return until I had a job. I was building the desk for a friend for extra money. When faced with the decision to leave college or to leave my family home, I decided that developing both intellectually, and as a person, required me to pursue the formative opportunity of education.
Fortunately, I was taken in by friends, though my fall semester grades suffered between the search, and working, of a retail job, and consistent family turbulence. My grades improved dramatically the following semester but my relationship with my father did not and the first 2 years of my college career passed effectively estranged. During this time the study of philosophy, critical analysis, and cultural theory had the most significant impact on me and the legal system began to appeal to me as a manifestation of the powerful, foundational structure these ideas provide for our society.
Though I would return to father’s house after my sophomore year to mend our relationship before I transferred to the state school, I did so with a managerial position at the retail store and 4.0 gpa for my sophomore year. In the reconciliation, we discussed our future as father and son, and my own academic and professional goals. I feel a great deal of this process was made possible by the study and development of my critical thinking and communication skills, and makes me believe that our relationship was saved through the cultivation and efficacy of ideas.
I continued to work throughout college and sought to expand my communication skills in other ways and began writing short stories and screenplays. As this hobby progressed, I could not help but consider the intersection between the structured discourse of the law and the authorship of ideas. Now working at a legal publishing company, I proudly consider myself to be facilitating the spread of legal knowledge and wish to pursue a legal education of my own to further explore the intricate capability in the interaction between idea and reality.
