A Decade Later, UT

​This Tuesday marked a sort of bucket-list professional milestone for me: performing for The University of Texas at Austin for their end of the year bash. 

When I first started working in the university market over a decade ago, I made a quiet promise to myself that if I only ever got to work three schools, I could hang my hat with a smile. Those schools were The University of Texas–Pan American, Texas A&M University, and The University of Texas at Austin.

The reasoning at the time was pretty simple: I wanted to perform for the university I was attending, while also working for the two largest universities in the state of Texas. It didn’t happen right away. In fact, it took a little longer than I expected.

In the meantime, I ended up touring all over the country performing for schools I had never even heard of before. Schools that took me through winding, snow-covered mountains in Colorado, into the heart of Boston, and all the way out to Rhode Island. Hell, I even performed at Texas State University — the same school where I earned my MA — while I was still enrolled there.
Every new campus became a kind of training ground where I could flesh out material, try just about every idea that crossed my mind, and see whether it played in front of live, rowdy college audiences. A lot of it worked, a lot of it didn’t, and all of it informed the work that came after. It was a blast.

Eventually, I felt like I aged out of the market and bowed out gracefully a few years back. I’m fortunate, though, to still work with a handful of fantastic universities and colleges throughout the country. It feels good to get back out there every now and then and shake things up alongside advisors and programmers I now consider friends.

But standing in the Shirley Bird Perry Ballroom on campus last week felt a bit different. The last time I was there was while I was attending a literary conference during my masters program.  It took me over a decade to get back to that room. Frankly, it was something that I thought just wasn't going to happen. It was worth the wait.