Life

Crying in the coffeeshop

Last Wednesday, I went about my normal day. I worked at home some during the morning, then headed to a coffee shop in Chapel Hill to meet a student. While waiting in line for my caffeine, Logan calls, and since my student hadn’t arrived yet, I answered. He tells me that the Colonel at the Air Force base just called him. This is unusual, but Logan interns there, so I expected it be something about that week’s assignments.

“She said I got the commission – I got the JAG commission!”

Now, some back story: Logan is in his second year of law school at NCCU. One of the biggest things about law school is [obviously] the pressure to get a job afterwards. It’s talked about more than passing the bar. Closely tied to that is summer internships: most jobs grow from your 2L (second-year) summer internship. Logan has been wanting to pursue a career as a JAG officer for a while now, so that means interning with on a base for the summer.That alone can be competitive, and we were waiting on hearing back from some of those opportunities. He had also applied for an Air Force JAG commission: a job as a commissioned officer upon graduation as a member of the JAG Corps, the military attorneys. However, it’s incredibly competitive. So competitive that I wasn’t thinking about it that much: there’s not much of a reason for the Air Force to promise a position to someone when they can say “apply again when you’re closer to being done.”

So it wasn’t at all on my radar on that Wednesday morning. When he said his colonel called, it didn’t occur to me that this could be a big deal.

When he told me, I gasped audibly. [Apparently this is something that runs in the family. My mom says that when my dad gasps, he can suck all the air out of the room.] People actually turned and stared.

And then I burst into tears in the middle of the coffee shop.

He has worked so hard for this: he built the past year very specifically around seeking this one goal. Law school is really freaking hard, ask any law student. And their spouses nearly deserve a degree of their own for the amount of just plain hard it is to be married to a law student. There have been many hours of studying and saying no to fun things and tears and hard work.

So I cried. I didn’t really have much to say: I was so elated and surprised that I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me, but in a good way. The excitement, the relief, the affirmation, the sheer sense of security that comes from him having a job this early in his law school career is amazing, and the fact that it’s both his first choice is career and a vote of confidence to have been selected has been so encouraging in the midst of a tough season.


Getting selected for the commission means he’ll have built-in summer plans, and do a year of ROTC. Technically he starts getting course credit in the fall, but he’s already joined up with them now to prepare for the summer. Quickest turnaround on a job I’ve ever seen!

There’s still a lot of details left to figure out, and they’re slowly trickling in. Today, he got his ABU and let me tell you, he looks sharp:

Copyright Emma Myrick All rights reserved
Wrong name embroidered, but that’ll get changed soon.

In the words of my best friend (who also went to law school and is now killing it as a DC attorney): “Now you get to do the fun part of law school!”

Onward, Cadet Myrick. To the fun part of law school!

all images original to Teaspoon of Nose 

0 thoughts on “Crying in the coffeeshop

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.