Kathleen J Byrnes, JD | Vice President for Student Life
“I graduated summa cum laude from college and a year later started law school at Duke University. I was on a trajectory for worldly success, coming out of a top law school and working for a prestigious law firm in Washington D.C., and at a law firm in Philadelphia. The problem was, I was miserable. Though I loved the study of law – its nuance, its power, its logic, its analysis – I did not like enjoy the practice of law, at least in the “big law firm” setting. When I thought about my situation, I thought –I’ve committed three hard years of my life to law school, and tens of thousands of dollars of student debt, what can I do now? I was a complete fraud and failure. I dressed up every day, I took depositions and reviewed documents, I holed up in the library to research caselaw, wrote motions and briefs, yet I despaired. This was not what I wanted with my life. I sought connection, meaning, purpose; for me, I was not finding those things in what appeared to others to be a very credible, reputable legal career that also offered significant financial compensation.
Ultimately, I realized I needed to walk away; I needed to find another path to explore. Since I was in my early 20s, I’ve had a mantra: If I died tomorrow, would I like how I lived today? I realized I would be most disappointed if I did indeed die tomorrow. I needed to change that. After some searching, I found the opportunity to work at Villanova – first at the law school, then in Student Life. When I first made the change, my salary became 50% of what it had been. But I lived simply and had some savings from my lawyering days. And I took the leap to a new career, to what became a true vocation. And I have not looked back. What I’ve learned from this experience is that it is hard to know what you want to do for a career when you are 18, or when you are 22 or even 32. It’s okay to explore, to try different things. Every experience we grow from – we learn, we develop, and we take those lessons with us to the next part of the journey. I also learned that life is indeed a journey – that’s not just a cliché. We continue to discover what fulfills us, what we are good at, how and with whom we want to spend our time. I’ve learned that this discovery takes time – and that’s okay too. In fact, it probably takes a lifetime.
I can also say that I’ve learned to love aging: because every day I learn something new, I become a different version of myself, and collectively, over enough days, I am slowly becoming a better version of myself. That only comes with time, with patience, with the bumps and bumbles along the way, which have helped me. I’ve learned from them and acquired wisdom from them. And I feel grateful for both the successes and for the hard things because all of those things together make me who I am, and make me better at what I do in my work life and in my personal life … because of them. I feel blessed.”
