I used to believe that success meant staying close to home and building something meaningful where you started.
Now I’m not so sure.
Pursuing two master’s degrees at the same time has been one of the most rewarding and exhausting experiences of my life. On paper it sounds impressive. In reality, it has been a daily negotiation between curiosity, pressure, responsibility, and the quiet voice inside that asks a simple question:
Is this the life I want, or just the life I’ve been socialized to pursue by the American dream ?
Graduate school does something interesting to your mind. It stretches your thinking beyond the borders of your city and sometimes even beyond the borders of your country. When you spend long hours reading theory, discussing culture, and reflecting on society, you begin to notice something: the world is much larger than the systems you were raised inside.
And that realization can be both exciting and uncomfortable.
In the classroom, conversations about identity, culture, power, and history often reveal how differently people live across the globe. Some societies value rest more than hustle. Some value community over competition. Others treat art not as a luxury, but as a necessary part of everyday life.
What would it feel like to live somewhere that thinks about life differently?
For most of my life, my focus has been on building things; Taino Studios, teaching students, creating artwork, helping others develop their ideas. That mission still matters deeply to me. But education has a strange way of expanding your imagination.
You start to realize that growth doesn’t only happen by climbing higher within the same environment. Sometimes growth requires stepping outside of it entirely.
Travel has always been something I admired from afar. Now it feels more like a responsibility to myself. If art is about understanding humanity, then experiencing different cultures, languages, and ways of thinking becomes part of the artistic process.
The truth is, studying at this level has made me more curious about the world than ever before. Not because I want to escape Baltimore.
But because I want to understand it better by seeing how other places function.
Living abroad—even temporarily; could offer a new lens for my work, my writing, and my perspective as an educator. It could deepen the way I think about identity, community, and belonging.
And those are themes that already sit at the center of my practice.
The funny thing about education is that it rarely gives you final answers. Instead, it gives you better questions.
Right now, one of the questions I’m sitting with is:
Where in the world could I grow next—not just professionally, but as a human being?
Maybe the answer will still be Baltimore.
Maybe it will be somewhere across the ocean.
But one thing I’ve learned through this journey is that growth often begins the moment we allow ourselves to imagine a different horizon.
And sometimes, the most radical thing education can do is remind us that the world is much bigger than the map we started with.
Comments