After six years with the U.S. Marine Corp. as an artillery officer and a nuclear weapons security officer, Platoon Commander Jason Barnes L’24 became used to moving from place to place every few years. He and his wife, who is on active duty with the U.S. Navy, along with their two children, are currently living in Oahu, Hawaii, but Barnes knows they will be stationed elsewhere in the not-so-distant future. Because of this, attending a residential law school program was out of the question, but the Syracuse University College of Law JDinteractive (JDi) program was just the right fit.
“Syracuse Law’s JDi program has been an excellent opportunity for me to create a new career for myself. There was no other way I could have reached that goal without the flexibility that Syracuse’s JDi program had to offer.”
Jason Barnes L’24
After leaving the military, Barnes was a CrossFit coach and gym owner from 2014 to 2017 and went on to work as a fitness coach when he sold his business. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Barnes decided it was a good time to look for a career change.
“The intellectual challenge associated with the legal profession intrigued me, and I thought, ‘I wonder if I can go to law school?’” says Barnes, who is a 2007 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. As he explored further, he saw that the flexibility of the JDi program would allow him to balance raising two children with earning a law degree from a school almost 5,000 miles away. He was accepted into the JDi program and began his coursework in the fall of 2021.
Barnes admits that the first semester was “a bit like finding your way through the dark.” However, his final semester grades proved to him that he was on the right path.
“Being successful during my first semester affirmed that I was where I should be,” he says. “The unapologetic intellectual challenge of the first semester for a 1L is amazing. I’ve never been academically challenged this way, but I found it refreshing.”
Working his way through that first semester led to one of the highlights of his law school experience—helping 1Ls as a legal communications research assistant (LCRA) and an academic success fellow (ASF).
“I really enjoy helping people and teaching others how to succeed—serving others, showing them how to study, tackling problems,” he says. “These are some of the same qualities that drew me to my military career. More than anything else, I enjoyed seeing others achieve what they often thought was impossible.”
As Barnes prepares to graduate this spring, he is pleased with the knowledge he gained from the JDi program. “It honed my analytical communications skills, and I noticed I can tackle problems in day-to-day life more effectively now,” he says.
As for the future, Barnes says, “I plan to grow where planted” when he and his family move on to his wife’s next assignment. He hopes to land in civil litigation with a focus on business law, although he is also drawn to entrepreneurship and other business-related areas, as well as the “adversarial component” of litigation.
“Syracuse Law’s JDi program has been an excellent opportunity for me to create a new career for myself,” Barnes says. “There was no other way I could have reached that goal without the flexibility that Syracuse’s JDi program had to offer.”
