To be honest, it was my hunger that was the catalyst. I saw a flyer for free pizza and found myself at a meeting for the University’s Entrepreneurship Club. Being surrounded by all of these driven and successful people awakened the passion for business I held since I was young. I chose to study philosophy because I had a passion for critical thought, but this meeting reminded me how much I missed being surrounded by people driven for achievement. The next day I spent hours negotiating to switch my major to business management and enroll in classes three weeks into the semester.
My passion for business began in my mother’s re-sale store for children where I learned to run the cash register by the age of eight and autonomously purchase inventory from customers by the age of thirteen. In our store, we didn’t have a black book of rules for making purchases; it was a nuanced skill that depended on strict attention to detail, an understanding of current fashion trends and prices, and an appropriate risk analysis estimation to determine how much to pay. Instilled with the ethics of value, business became a practice outside of my mother’s store. In middle school, I capitalized on my peers’ penchant for snacking throughout the day by selling individual candies between classes for a profit. In high school, after my parents divorced, my mother and I devoted extra time to garage sales to supplement the store’s inventory as well as my savings. On most weekends I would purchase household items, books, gifts, and clothes for myself, as well as clothes to re-sell for a total of barely $20 and would walk out of a women’s re-sale store the next day with at least a profit of $100. My academic studies became devoted to business as well, as I took high school courses in accounting, investments, and marketing. Competing in DECA after school exposed me to a world of peers with similar business passion and savvy and the ability to creatively solve problems.
As I sat in the advisor’s office completing the necessary forms to switch over my majors I was finalizing which class sections I would enroll in. A Dr. Carmond taught the only section open for the required management course. ‘You don’t really want to take his class,’ my advisor warned me, ‘most students don’t like him…. he’s a very difficult teacher, and his methods are rather…unique’. After pulling out all the stops to convince her to even allow me to enroll, I didn’t want to be picky and so I enrolled in Dr. Carmond's management course.
It was the best decision of my college career.
Dr. Carmond certainly was the strangest professor I had ever met, humming odd tunes as he waltzed through the door, weaving his way through the classroom as he asked questions, stopping to face a wall or gaze out the window for significant lengths of time and sporadically leaving and re-entering the room. He was also the most demanding professor I had ever had, requiring commitment, hard work, and vigilance to uphold the credibility of our university by renouncing training whenever it took the place of learning. Dr. Carmond demanded each student to sign a detailed academic contract, complete daily quizzes, perform in-depth analyses connecting distinct topics, create their own personal dictionary, write a research paper that required over twenty sources, and take exams that lasted three to four hours. As an undergraduate sophomore, and truthfully throughout my college career, it was the most any teacher expected out of me. He required us to come prepared to class and refused to repeat himself verbatim, making sure to always change his phrasing so that we would learn to use our own words rather than merely re-iterating his. I accepted his offers to join our outside study groups, utilized his weekly office hours, and made several extra appointments to review the material I missed in the first few weeks. Dr. Carmond emphasized long-term understanding, and his efforts to help us succeed struck a note with me and carried over into my other classes. Every day he started the lesson with two quotes, sources of inspiration he chose that emphasized actualizing one’s potential, demanding high expectations from oneself, one’s professors, and peers, and living life to the fullest.
Dr. Carmond taught business with an emphasis on the sociological and psychological studies and theories that helped shape models of management. I was drawn to his methods because he stepped away from the profit driven model of business and focused on exposing us to alternate theories of management. He reminded me of why I chose philosophy in the first place, stemming from my high school English class where I learned about the Transcendentalist Movement. Reading Emerson & Thoreau I felt inspired to analyze on a deeper level the meaning and reasons for our actions in life. This search is what led me to the study of the subjects of philosophy, psychology, and sociology during my college years. Reading books such as ‘Walden Two’, by psychologist B.F. Skinner, ‘Ishmael’ by philosopher Daniel Quinn, and ‘For Us, The Living’ by science fiction writer and social activist R.A. Heinlein, I learned that the fields of critical thought do not have disciplinary boundaries. I spent my time reading, discussing, and researching, trying to figure out the fundamental strings that I believed tied together the problems of humanity, which I desperately wanted to help alleviate. Outside of business, my studies focused on such diverse topics as charter schools, consumer health, female aggression, and gendered parenting.
I discovered the meaning of true respect for myself, for my professors, for education as well as the process of learning from Dr. Carmond. Despite succeeding within his class I decided to transfer back to philosophy at the end of the semester. I still continued to pursue courses that represented the fundamental areas of knowledge I sought, including another management course with Dr. Carmond. I have come to realize through time that I will never find business or philosophy alone fulfilling. The analytic and logic skills I developed through studying philosophy have paved my way to pursue a law degree. Opening my own business this past year has taught me that without action and passion nothing can be achieved. I am interested in continuing my education within the legal field because I believe it represents the foundational influence of society that I have been seeking. Any great social critique or new model of society begins by drawing out the laws that shape and guide that society. While law requires great intellectual ability it also requires strong action. I am very interested in pursuing a law degree at Northwestern University because you are one of the few schools in the nation that offers a program of study emphasizing law as it shapes society, as opposed to adjudicating disputes. I have always sought a way to influence society and my interdisciplinary background has reflected my understanding that our actions are shaped by numerous areas of influence. This includes the law, and the way we create and interpret it can have drastic real life influences. This is what motivates me to pursue not only a law degree, but specifically the Law & Social Policy focus that Northwestern offers.
