Where can you go from here? Just ask Jennifer

The drive out of Lake Tahoe into northern California takes you down through the Sierra Nevada, down through the sequoias and ponderosa pines. You drive down the American River Gorge, through Placerville to the hills around Sacramento to the university town of Davis, California. There, every morning for the past two months, you would have found Jennifer Williams Porter, Tusculum class of 1995, riding a bicycle along the greenbelt to the university.

On a weekday afternoon in May, Jennifer finished classes at American University Law School in Washington, D.C. That same day she and her husband, Thomas Porter, packed their bags for Knoxville, Tennessee, to return to the University of Tennessee, where Jennifer had earlier completed law school residency requirements. On Thursday, she graduated in Knoxville and the couple drove to Greeneville to see Jennifer’s family and by Monday, they were in Davis, California, starting their postgraduate lives.

For Thomas, that life starts with working on the campaign for California politician Dan Lungren; for Jennifer, so far, it has been spent studying for the California bar exam. "I’m not a really political person," Jennifer says, in spite of the fact that she has spent a significant portion of her educational career working in seats of government.

As a junior at Tusculum College, Jennifer spent a semester as a legislative intern in state government in Nashville, Tennessee. At the University of Tennessee, Jennifer worked for three months in the Knoxville office of U.S. Senator Fred Thompson before moving to Washington, D.C. to serve as one of Thompson’s legislative interns.

Thompson, a member of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, was chair of a Senate committee investigating campaign finance indiscretions during the 1996 elections, and Jennifer had an inside seat to witness an investigation that made headlines in the national press. "It was actually a lot of hard work," Jennifer says. "We had over twenty file cabinets of material that had been subpoenaed from the DNC. The interns who had been to law school were given the job of indexing all the material and preparing digests for the committee to use in questioning witnesses." Jennifer and the other interns were also responsible for writing digests of several depositions taken on behalf of the committee.

Being on the sidelines of a major Senate investigation must have been pretty heady stuff for a young Tusculum College graduate, but Jennifer is looking ahead rather than looking back. In November, she will receive results of her bar exam, but in the meantime she will be looking for a job, probably in a small firm. "I really think I want to practice law where a client is sitting across the table from me and says, ‘here is my problem; how can you help?’"

Working directly with everyday people is also a characteristic of Tusculum College, Jennifer believes. "I benefited more from Tusculum College than I would have at a larger school," she says. "I spent more hands-on time with my teachers, and I was able to try out opportunities such as spending a semester in Nashville. I also spent time working in local government as a student at Tusculum, and I worked in a law firm as an independent study. Those kinds of opportunities don’t exist in the same way at larger schools. Whenever you decide you want to do something, twenty people are standing in line ahead of you."

On a bright morning in Davis, California, Jennifer straps on her helmet for the ride to UC Davis where she will take the bar exam. For now, there is no standing in line. She stands on the cusp of a new life for which she has thoroughly prepared herself. "You get out of college exactly what you put in," Jennifer says – a statement that could be made of an entire life as well.