On Going Back to School When Life Is Already Full
A few honest notes on why I am doing this, and what I am hoping to find on the other side.
I am a husband, a father of three, a paralegal, and an entrepreneur. In August, I am adding graduate student to that list.
People ask me why. Not critically, just genuinely curious. And I have been trying to give an answer that is more honest than “I just want to keep growing,” because that is true but it is not the whole picture. Growth for its own sake is not much of a reason to take on more when your life is already running at full capacity. There has to be something more specific underneath it.
Here is what I have landed on: I want to be useful in ways I am not yet equipped to be. Not useful in a general sense. Specifically useful. I want to understand how policy is actually made and where it actually breaks down. I want to have the vocabulary and the credibility to walk into rooms where decisions are being shaped and contribute something real, not just show up with good intentions and a strong opinion.
Good intentions are cheap. I do not mean that cynically. I mean it technically. Intentions are the starting point, not the destination. They are necessary but nowhere near sufficient. The people I most respect in public life are the ones who paired their intentions with a serious investment in actually knowing things, not just feeling strongly about them.
Feeling strongly is easy. It requires nothing. Knowing things, really knowing them, knowing the history of a policy and why it was designed the way it was, knowing what the research says and where the research falls short, knowing the legal framework and its limits, that requires time and discipline and the willingness to be wrong in front of people who know more than you. That discomfort is not a side effect of serious education. It is the point of it.
I have been working as a paralegal long enough to know what I do not know. And the list is specific enough now that I can match it to a course of study. That specificity matters. It is the difference between going back to school because it seems like the right move and going back to school because you can name exactly what you are going there to get.
There is also something I want to say about timing, because a lot of people in similar seasons of life use fullness as a reason to wait. I understand the logic. The kids are young. The work is demanding. The margins are tight. Add a degree program on top of all of that and something is going to give.
That is probably true. Something will give. The question is whether what gives is worth the cost of what you gain. And for me, when I measure that honestly, the answer is yes.
Here is what I have noticed about having people depend on you. It does not make ambition harder to justify. It makes it easier. When you are responsible for a family, for children who are watching how you move through the world, the cost of being underprepared is not a hypothetical. You feel it in real time. And that feeling is clarifying in ways that comfort and convenience never are. It is a lot harder to talk yourself out of hard work when the stakes have a face.
My kids will not remember the season when I was tired and studying late. But they will grow up watching a father who decided that the life he wanted to build for them was worth doing the uncomfortable thing to get there. That is the model I am trying to set, not because I am performing it for them, but because I actually believe it. The work matters. The preparation matters. And showing up halfway because life is full is not really showing up at all.
The degree is in Public Policy and Law. I am starting in August. By the time I finish, I want to be the kind of person who can sit down with a community problem and actually diagnose it well, trace it back to its policy roots, understand what has been tried and why it did not work, and propose something better with enough knowledge behind it to be taken seriously.
That is the goal. Not prestige. Not a title. The capacity to be genuinely useful to the people and the community I care about. Everything else follows from that.