I’m writing this entry from my mother’s living room and it’s great to be back in the great state of VA. I got here on Friday and will be heading back to Cali tomorrow to finish up preparations to move to ATL. While I’ve been here, I’ve been rushing around to take care of a bunch of things and I’m shocked that I’ve been able to cram so much into such a short trip. I’ve loked at this trip as a way to “close the circle” and do a sort of farewell tour for my peoples around here before starting the next stage of my life further down south.

The primary reason for this trip was to attend a family celebration that my mother planned for my graduation. The event was basically a gathering of family members and friends who couldn’t make the trip out to Palo Alto for the actual graduation ceremony. It felt good to see all of the people who came through to congratulate me and, since I’ve been 3000 miles away, I had only seen most of the attendees a handful of times over the past two years. Seeing the pride on everyone’s faces showed me how much my accomplishments meant to the people who care about me, which made all of the hard work worth it. As I talked to folks about my post-MBA career plans, I couldn’t help but smile and think “Wow, VA done come up!!!” Now, I’m hoping that some of my younger family members will follow in my footsteps and chase their educational dreams in the future.

Another task that I had for this trip was to do an interview with a reporter from the newspaper for the regional area of my hometown. The paper isn’t the NY Times or Washington Post, but it was cool that they wanted to do a piece on me. My mom set everything up for the interview and she pretty much wanted it to be a follow-up to an article that the paper had done on me in the mid-1990′s when I was about to graduate and head off to Princeton. This article is supposed to be a personality piece that will highlight everything I’ve done since then and what i’ve got planned for the future. My goal for the article is to serve as an example of someone from the area who had big dreams for himself and fought like crazy to acheive those dreams through educational attainment and hard work. When I was growing up, I didn’t really know of anyone from my little town who’d gone on to do the kinds of things I wanted to do, so I was pretty much flying blind. By sharing my story in that paper, I hope that the next kid from “the sticks” will have some sort of guide of how they can do their thing. Heck, I’d be happy if some of the readers of the article get inspired to think of college or some other type of training/education as a possibility after reading my story…that’s the major hurdle to get into a career nowadays. Basically, my goal for this is similar to my goal for doing this blog..to share my expriences so others can get an idea of what it’s really like to make similar moves. I’ll be sure to put a link up to the article once it is finished.

Gotta run off to DC to have dinner with some friends from college. I’ll write more soon…