It's been six months since I last posted here. A thousand apologies to anyone who would have liked to hear more about my journey. The truth is that I haven't touched my manuscript in that time. Life has a way of making you feel busy.
Since last time, I've decided to leave attorney work behind me. Instead, I'm headed back to school to do the thing I always should have done in the first place: economics. It was always the subject that stirred my passions and which felt "important". As a naive college student, the dollar signs that everyone associates with attorneys turned my head and I went to law school instead of continuing with economics. My experience in law left me completely disenchanted. I had expected to be a warrior for truth and justice. Instead I was expected to be calculating in maximizing billable hours and a proponent of truth only so long as it was relevant to the case I was building.
But there's no time like the present to correct past mistakes and so I've set off on the path toward a new career and the long term uncertainty that goes with a career change.
So now I'm a student once again, while also learning to be a teacher (on evenings and weekends I'm an LSAT instructor for a Test Prep company). Which is perfect because while my primary purpose in getting my econ PhD is to do research, I am very interested in being the best teacher of economics that I can be.
My professional life has been marked by a niggling thought: success in this world may be mutually exclusive with idealism. I'm hoping to find an outlet for my idealism in academia, but I fear politics and pragmatism rule every realm under the sun. Perhaps that is why I write, so that I may carve out a place for heroicism to flourish. What do you think? Can you be idealistic and successful at the same time?
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