Alumni Spotlight: Lori (Powell) Craig ’94

While at the Indiana Academy, Lori (Powell) Craig had the opportunity to attend a presentation by playwright Edward Albee. A line from his play, The Zoo Story (1959), has become something of a theme in her life: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”

After graduating from the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities in 1994, Lori completed a double major in French and Slavic Languages and Literatures and graduated from Indiana University – Bloomington in 1997. And then, “I had no idea what to do with myself.” She thought about international business and tried a couple of classes, but that wasn’t a great fit. She tried a few different jobs and some were better than others. (She has worked at three major big-box retailers.) She got married and tried being an at-home wife. The marriage was (and is) great, but the staying at home thing didn’t work. After some time, and the birth of her first child, she went back to school and completed an associate’s degree in paralegal studies. She worked as a paralegal for a number of different law firms and eventually received her national certification. When her youngest daughter was in kindergarten, she finally decided to apply to law school. She was admitted and began studies in August 2011. Lori will graduate in December 2014 and sit for the Indiana Bar Exam in February 2015.

Lori says, “The Academy made me brave enough to fail and that made me brave enough to try.” Lori joined the band the second semester of her senior year, just because she thought it would be fun. She joined the chess team because she wanted to learn to play and took Russian because her roommate did and it sounded super cool. She helped with the American Sign Language club because it was interesting. She says she sees this playing out again. In law school, Lori has participated in incoming orientation every year, just because she thought it would be fun. She participated in law review because she wanted to improve her legal writing. She is on the board of an interdisciplinary outreach clinic serving indigent and underserved populations in Indianapolis, because this is an amazingly important component of legal advocacy (and super cool). She has taken courses on unusual topics, just because they were interesting. In one of those classes, she discovered another alum and they came to the conclusion that the Academy was their first really safe place to be different, to be smart, to be remarkable.

In the words of Douglas Adams, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

Lori and her husband, Marty, live in Martinsville, Indiana with their two daughters and a large pile of legal textbooks and other reading materials.