1996-1999 My Career During John's Law School

As we settled in Dallas for John to start law school, I settled into a career in HR. I was working for a company in Fort Worth, who had just been acquired by a large corporate financial service company. It was a company going through a lot of changes, and it seemed the right home for this eager professional.

The company had just been acquired, and soon after I started, we would acquire a competitor, merge the two companies, and chart success. Then, about a year later, the parent company was ready to sell this combination to another competitor. This seemed so cruel at first, to have hired me and not inform me that the company had plans to sell off the business. I was still very naive in this regard. It was an exciting year and a half, when I was able to be a part of 2 acquisitions, a merger, and then a divestiture. At the end, I found myself looking for a new job, but I was armed with some great experience that someone at my level would love to have.

I landed this time with a Big 6 accounting firm and professional services firm. I ended up in a role where I would commute from Dallas to New York every week for about 2 years. It was exciting at first, and exhausting in the end, but I learned so much. This was a great job to have while John was so focused on law school. We were both free to focus on our goals, and we became stronger together because we had supported each other's goals so well during this time.

In 1999, a good 10 years after we first started dating, we were finally both out of school for the first time. It was absolutely something to celebrate. We had plans to move back to Houston, he had a job, and my traveling career could continue from Houston. Everything seemed in place.

Oh, and we had a perfect 3 week trip to Europe planned for after he took his bar exam. We had earned this trip, and were looking forward to it for sure!