-: 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.