Who I am and why I'm writing this blog

I'm beginning this blog not just because it fulfills a class requirement, or as a way to update those who are interested in my graduate school adventures, but also as a repository for educational resources and articles I have run into that fascinate me.

But first, a bit about me and how, as a 29 year old, I came to be back in school after a more than seven year foray into the professional world.

Me at the Notting Hill Bookshop in London, England

For years I was unsure of what I wanted to be "when I grew up," but I knew I loved to write and to read. And with the ability to get in-state tuition to one of the best journalism schools in the country, as with Mizzou, I sort of fell into that major (I've heard this as a common refrain from other peers).

In some ways, I loved it: the frenetic pace of a deadline-oriented profession, the collaborative environment surrounded by some of the best young writers and editors, the Pulitzer Prize-winning professors! But a reporter by nature, I am not. I love to do research, but I found that I wasn't so great at getting pounding the pavement to get to the heart of a story.

And so I ended up in internal communications at Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago: a nice-paying gig in an academic environment with some of the best coworkers a young graduate could ask for. I was as happy as I could be, but when my now-husband had an opportunity in Kansas City, we loaded up the U-Haul (yuck!) and made a new home for ourselves.

We made wonderful, lifelong friends in those five years, but career satisfaction eluded me. Stuck in a tiny cubicle all day without motivation to do really good work did not make me a happy girl. New plans, a new career began to take shape.

Both my mom and my paternal grandmother were teachers, and I started to think: "Why not me?" Maybe not the best of reasons to embark on a career change, but it started me on a path of more than two years of research and planning.

 I love to teach -- perhaps to an annoying degree! -- in my everyday life, large groups of teenagers aren't as horrifying to me as they seem to be to others, I feel as though I'm just the type of person with the tenacity to make a difference (but also the type to not let it get to me too much if I can't), and over the years I've grown very passionate about inequality and urban education issues.

After moving back to St. Louis (where I grew up) the pieces all finally came together: I was accepted to Webster University, and am enrolled in the first three classes of my Masters of Education in Teaching (MAT) program.

With any luck, and likely a lot of hard work, I'll enter the teaching profession on a full-time basis in the fall of 2016. Wish me luck!