Jennifer Kuykendall-Smith, attorney at law, sat at her desk and tracked her time for the tenth time that hour, writing down all she had done in the past 6 minutes.
The monotony of the work bored her.
She decided to leave the firm and move to another, but she still didn’t feel fulfilled. So finally in 2012, she settled her internal debate and decided to leave to become a teacher.
Kuykendall-Smith worked as a lawyer for two years before deciding to become a teacher.
“I went and practiced law in a law firm downtown. It was a civil law firm, but handled a variety of different types of transactions,” she said. “As a small firm there were only eight partners.”
Having graduated law school in 2011 in the aftermath of the financial crisis law firm jobs were few and far between.
“I was lucky to kind of get one in the first place, but I didn’t have a particularly positive experience at that firm,” Kuykendall-Smith said.
Kuykendall-Smith said some of the things needed for survival of the firm are what drove her to leave, such as having to track her work every six minutes.
“I just didn’t find the work particularly fulfilling at the firm itself, and so I left there to go work in procurement at Bell Helicopter, which is where you’re procuring items in the
upply chain, so I negotiated those contracts,” she said. “I actually liked the contract negotiation piece. I just–day in and day out–didn’t enjoy it as much.”
A Bos graduate, Kuykendall-Smith grew up in this community, and she wanted to give back to it.
“I was successful in what I was doing. I was to an extent enjoying it, but I just didn’t feel like I was kind of meeting any bigger purpose,” she said. “I didn’t feel like I was serving anything other than a big corporate conglomerate, and for me that meant the better option was to look at where my heart would be happy.”
Having nannied kids through college and having coached, Kuykendall-Smith said she knew she was happy working with kids.
“At the end of the day, it was just kind of a choice, money or enjoying your job, and I chose the enjoyment,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed it ever since.”
Having made this choice Kuykendall-Smith worked on her alternate certification while at Bell Helicopter.
“I turned in my resignation and they offered a lot of incentives to stay,” she said, “but at the end of the day it was more important to me to do something that I felt was meaningful with my life, where I can make a difference day in and day out.”
Kuykendall-Smith taught a variety of subjects at Saginaw for a year, then taught at Wayside, and is now at Boswell. This year is her fourth.
“At Saginaw High School I taught US History. At Wayside I started out coaching, and then seventh grade ELAR, and then I taught eighth grade U.S. History, sixth grade World Geography. And then once I came to Boswell I taught on- level U.S. History and then AP U.S. History,” she said.
Kuykendall-Smith said she loved teaching all of these courses, but in high school the teacher is what really made a class great for her.
“I had Mrs. Freeman for pre-cal my junior year and calculus my senior year,” Kuykendall-Smith said. “Math wasn’t my favorite subject, but she was—and is—very, very good at what she did and made me feel like I could do it and very much prepared me for college calculus.”
She said her experiences at Bos influence her teaching now.
“One of my goals whenever I taught was to be somebody who could make an impact and to help students kind of have those positive interactions,” Kuykendall-Smith said.
Her time as a Pioneer didn’t start when she transferred here to teach. She was a student here as well.
“In high school, if you’d asked me what it means to be a pioneer, I think I would have said someone who has pride in their community,” Kuykendall-Smith said. “A pioneer was somebody who was participating, who was giving back to their school, not just taking.”
Kuykendall-Smith now has a different answer to what makes a pioneer.
“The biggest thing in terms of being a pioneer to me is that commitment to the community,” she said, “truly to have that desire to give back to your community to invest in yourself and in others in whatever way that works for you.”