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In this essay, the author discusses her journey from her first year of the PhD program at USC, and the work she is doing now for a company that builds infrastructure in Afghanistan. She explores the ways in which studies for her 1985 PhD in Rhetoric, Linguistics and Literature did and did not prepare her for the work she does now. Her memoir shares her educational and pedagogical journey by connecting the dots between important places along her way, from a whites-only first-grade classroom in the rural south to a Southern women's college; from her first experience teaching composition as an MA English graduate teaching assistant to her Ph.D. in Rhetoric Linguistics and Literature at the University of Southern California, where she was among the five founding editors of "The Writing Instructor"; from her grant-funded post-doctoral literacy work in Southern schools to her work as a teacher of ESL to national women in newly opened public universities in the Middle East. (Contains 4 notes.)