Mark is a Law Student at Valparaiso University Law School in Indianapolis, IN. Although halfway through his education, Mark is no stranger to the law, having spent over a decade working in various criminal justice roles. After leaving the NYPD for medical reasons, Mark spent time as a probation officer for Indiana, an Emergency Operations Manager for the Department of Homeland Security, and an Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for the University of Colorado Denver. Mark decided he could make an even bigger impact in criminal justice if he returned to school for his law degree. Now, with graduation a year away, Mark has his sights on next steps and fantastic advice for fellow graduating students.
Transcript
My name is Mark Livingston and currently I'm a law student at the University of Valparaiso School of Law, which is something that I started doing about a year and a half ago, after leaving government work for almost 10 years. To be honest, I'll probably go back to government service, probably a prosecutor or maybe an attorney for a government agency. I still think there's value in serving my community through government work, but I think I can maybe be more effective as an attorney. When I left school, when I left Ball State, eventually I ended up overseas and earned a couple of master's degrees in Scotland, of all places, sort of continuing my education there. When I returned home, I went to the probation department. I did that for a while, and then eventually hired by the New York City Police Department. But unfortunately, shortly after I started at the police department, I got a blood clot in my chest, and so that was no longer a viable option. Can't be a law enforcement officer and take Coumadin. So I left the police service and came back home and found my way into emergency management, which is ultimately where I've spent the last five or six years, prior to law school, first, with the city of Indianapolis and then with the state of Indiana, at Indiana Department of Homeland Security. I did that for five years. So after about five years, that was when I made that decision to go to law school. I got hired by the Marion County Probation Department, Marion Superior Court Probation Department, which is in Indianapolis, and I worked there for about, a little more than a year before I moved overseas. It was a hard job, not a lot of pay, lots of cases on my case load. But I learned so much about the system. It required us to go to court. We had to deal with people who had been previously incarcerated, so it was really a practical application of a lot of the things that I learned while I was studying criminology and criminal justice at Ball State.
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