Laura Budzichowski
1. What was your ACE Site/ school/ grade level/ subject taught?
I was fortunate to be in the first group to teach at the Biloxi, Mississippi site, where I taught high school Spanish at Resurrection Catholic School in Pascagoula.
2. In general, how would you describe your ACE experience?
It was an amazing growth experience on every level. ACE was (and probably continues to be) built on three pillars – teaching, community and spirituality. And my experience was rich in each of those dimensions. Every day brought the professional challenge of reaching my students intellectually and emotionally while maintaining some sort of order in the classroom – not always easy when my oldest students were only two or three years younger than I was. Our community of six strong and diverse personalities required a lot of give and take, mutual understanding and mutual respect, which I think we achieved most of the time. In fact, we were told partway through the first year that the ACE staff who put our house together initially had some worries about how we would fare with our very different temperaments, but I think we wound up being one of the closer communities in the program at the time because we embraced and respected our varying perspectives.
Although our community did not engage in expressly spiritual activities regularly, teaching in a Catholic school during the year and spending the summers at Notre Dame provided many opportunities for discussion and reflection. My life tends to be pretty hectic now and in retrospect, I appreciate how fortunate we all were to have that time to reflect on who we wanted to be in life. During that transition from college student to adult in the real world, living in community with other recent grads while interacting with high school kids and their parents provided a rich opportunity to distill and refine important aspects of ourselves. Looking back, my 20s seemed to be so full of questions about where I was going and who I was going to be, and my ACE experience was instrumental in helping address those questions.
3. What have you been doing since you graduated from ACE?
In the time between ACE and law school, I did a service project in Chile, briefly temped for the US Tennis Association and worked as an executive assistant for a private equity firm. The private equity firm job gave me a good look at business and for-profit ventures, about which I knew nothing since I had always planned to be a social worker or psychologist. After a couple of years there, I went to law school as a middle ground between the public service camp and the profit-driven camp. Since graduating law school five years ago, I’ve been practicing as a transactional attorney with a law firm in Charlotte. Legal practice is like teaching in many respects because you have to constantly educate your clients and good organization is key. I also like the strong service aspect, whether I’m counseling a multinational corporation or an indigent client being represented pro bono.
4. How have you stayed connected to ACE?
Other than occasionally attending a retreat, I have not stayed formally connected to ACE – the institution. Rather, I have stayed connected through relationships with others who were in the program with me, most notably, my husband. He and I have carried into our marriage a lot of the community-building ideas and traditions we built while we were in ACE. What worked for a community of six also works well for a community of two or, as we are now, four. We also keep in touch with our roommates and are lucky enough to have two other classmates living in the Charlotte area. In addition, some of the most meaningful relationships we have maintained have been those with families we taught while we were in Mississippi.
5. What are the ways in which you continue to serve Catholic education?
At this point in my life, work and family don’t leave much time for outside service. With two small children, I feel the greatest service I can provide is to spend as much time with them as possible. Maybe when they’re older, I will turn my attention to the greater community again, but at this point, any free time and attention I have goes almost exclusively to my family.