The Last Entry

This past weekend, I moved to Kissimmee, Florida. Later this month, I will begin my job as an Assistant Public Defender with the Ninth Judicial Circuit. It has yet to be determined if I will be assigned to Kissimmee (Osceola County) or Orlando (Orange County). Keeping my job is also contingent on passing the bar exam. Scores should be released on September 19th.

I am looking forward to this new chapter in my life. The people in the office seem very nice, and I should get a lot of trial experience in a short amount of time. I have not made up my mind if I am going to start another blog. If I do, it will have nothing to do with work. Most of the interesting stories from work, I will be unable to talk about. It is too risky to try and write about my experiences as a criminal trial lawyer while at the same time performing the appropriate edits to protect attorney-client privilege.

So here it is. My last entry for "The World of Law School."

Time flew by. The Florida State University College of Law has been good to me, and the school has given me a wonderful opportunity. The hard work does not stop, of course. There will always be hurdles to clear and obstacles to overcome for me to reach my goals. Law school has been a helpful rung on the ladder. I won't spend time trying to recount all the great memories I have. The high points are recorded in previous entries.

Going to school here reinforced my understanding that willpower is essential to success and a happy life. Florida State Law gave me the chance to study and compete with people possessing a great deal of willpower, intelligence and talent.

In the most recent edition of the magazine of my alma mater, Western Carolina University, I came across one of my favorite quotes of all time. Pat Kaemmerling, a 1971 graduate of WCU and vice chair of the WCU Foundation board of directors said, "See the world while you can. Do some fun, adventurous things before you have a mortgage, a spouse and children. When you have those, you can take two weeks and go to Europe, but you can't spend six months in Paris and get a job selling flowers on the corner."

To a certain degree, I have lived my life like that. I've been a mail carrier in Washington, DC, a car salesman in Las Vegas, and a National Park Service Ranger in Tennessee and Virginia, among other jobs. The single best year of my life (yet, I hope) was as a graduate student back at Western Carolina University. I got to relive my college days, 10 years later. I also spent three good years in law school in Tallahassee. Now, I wake up in the morning to the sound of planes flying into the Orlando airport and, after a few seconds to orient myself, I realize that I am a budding Florida criminal trial lawyer.

What stays with me the most about finishing the bar exam and moving from Tallahassee to the Orlando area is my parents.

Through it all, my parents have been there for me, helping me move back and forth and serving as a safety net while I made the transition from one thing to the next.

But I have gotten older in the three years of law school, and so have they. My mom had some health problems recently, and I could tell when my parents came to Tallahassee to help me move, they were operating at maximum stress capacity. So I see a shift happening between me and them.

My brain has not aged at all in law school. I've been frozen at 23 years old for a long time. In some ways, I could be just as happy working at the movie theater like I did when I was a teenager. But when I look at myself in the mirror, when I see myself in profile on those store security monitors- I know that I cannot pull that off anymore. I have aged physically in the past three years more than at any other time in my life. I see a body and face that I don't quite recognize. It does not match my mental self image. But there it is, reality.

Based on that reality, I know it is time for me to stop bouncing around. Easily fitting into new careers will get harder as I get older. More importantly, at this point in my parents' lives, to keep changing is... selfish.

Law school has given me a great opportunity to really be successful, and I need to take advantage of that. I need to make this work, if not for myself, then for my parents...

Law school ends quickly. A couple of my roommates who went straight into law school after college were a little sad as we packed up the house in Tallahassee. "College is over," one of them sighed.

"You could always be like me and go back to college in your early 30s," I said.

"That would be awesome," he replied.

"It was awesome," I said.

As a I get older, I realize that there is less, not more time to sit and reflect on my experiences. I must get on with trying to survive and thrive in a tough and competitive world.

This new chapter will be exciting, and I look forward to the challenges.

I say thank you to the Florida State University College of Law and to the people I met there. It has been a pleasure, and an experience I will treasure.

Best Wishes,

Nathan Marshburn