Onetime College Dropout Credits Big Breaks for Success as Partner
As his mother lay wounded at a hospital from multiple gunshots, Jimmie McMillian took stock of his life, including his status as a college dropout despite his mother’s sacrifices. And he bargained with God. If his mother would pull through, he’d go back to school and make something of himself.
“God kept up his end of the bargain,” McMillian writes in “My Big Break” column for the Indianapolis Star.
After that traumatic ordeal, McMillian returned to Indiana University and pressed on to law school, promising the dean of admissions at IU School of Law-Indianapolis that if she’d overlook his poor GPA, he wouldn’t embarrass her if she admitted him. The “big breaks” kept coming.
McMillian clerked for an Indiana Supreme Court justice and was hired on as a litigation associate at Barnes & Thornburg, where he credits the firm’s general counsel, Kenneth Inskeep, with shepherding him through the partnership process.
