Chicago is where I grew up, LaGrange Park, in the western suburbs. Football and basketball, my brother and I both played defense, and something about that team and that community stuck with me more than I expected it to. Then I left for Nashville, for Vanderbilt, and for two years after that I didn't really stop moving.
The real education in Nashville wasn't in the classroom, it was building a nonprofit called Trash Troopers from nothing and learning how to keep people showing up to something that didn't exist a year before. I studied Human and Organizational Development on paper. Off paper, by senior year, I already knew I wasn't staying in Tennessee once it ended.
That senior year, I studied abroad in London for a semester, living in Elephant and Castle and working at a private equity firm there. That's actually where it clicked that I wanted to be on the relationship side of finance, not just the analytical side. Nobody there had known me longer than a few weeks, and I liked that more than I expected to.
Then New York, to live and work in private equity: three firms in a few years, Blue Wolf Capital, Coastal Partners, Kingfish Group. That kind of turnover is its own restlessness, but it's also how you learn fast, watching different desks move deals differently. I liked that city too.
Here's what five stops in two years actually taught me. I wasn't chasing something new each time, I was running from standing still. Comfort made me anxious; new rooms didn't. That works fine at twenty-two. It stops working as a plan.
So coming back to Chicago was on purpose, not a fallback. Staying in the city I already know is the first time in five years I've picked a place instead of just leaving the last one. Next part gets written back home.