Second-career Academics

I am one of those people who started out in one profession - and made the transition to another in mid-life.

My first career was in journalism, where I made my living as a newspaper editor & reporter for a couple of decades, both in the USA & abroad. In the late 1990s I began to move out of that world, although I was not aware of this fact at that time. I had been working in Russia during the Yeltsin administration, and when the whole economic system collapsed in 1998, I found myself wondering about my understanding of the subject that I was covering. I had been writing about business in that strange & wild new world of post-Soviet capitalism, but my own education in economics was limited to a couple of introductory classes I took as an undergraduate years earlier.

I enrolled in an international relations program at Syracuse University, earned a master's at the Maxwell School, & headed back to Russia, where I worked in Khabarovsk for Institute for Sustainable Communities. It was a wonderful job, working with new community organizations, but my interest in political science had been piqued after a class on political economy at Syracuse. I returned to the States, enrolling in the doctoral program in political science at Binghamton University.

Since then, I have occasionally written for publication, but I haven't earned my living at it for more than a decade. I may post a few links to these pieces later.

For now, here's a brief account of how my experience in journalism enriches my current college teaching.