Spotlight On... Jill Maguire
Robert Deal
Issue date: 2/8/05 Section: Features
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Jill has been over-achieving through academics and school involvement since she was a teenager. Though she split time between athletics, where she was a member of the cross-country and track teams, music, where she was played clarinet in the school band, and student council, where she served as a class representative, Jill still found time to work part-time, study and graduate valedictorian.
"I just tend to work better under pressure," she said. "It's just more draining to me to be sitting around with out a lot on my plate."
After high school, Jill attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where she earned a degree in International Studies. With only 1200 students, Austin College was another small school in a small town, just 45 minutes north of Dallas, near the Oklahoma border. She quickly immersed herself in activities, serving as Treasurer and Program Director of the Delta Phi Nu sorority.
In order to enhance her international experience, Jill took every opportunity to travel and study abroad, spending her junior year in Spain. In the fall, she studied Spanish culture and economics at the Institute for European Studies in Madrid, where all of the courses were taught in Spanish.
"The constant Spanish made the first couple of months a constant headache," she explained, "but it taught me to live as a Spaniard."
For the Spring semester, Jill studied international security and modern history at La Complutense, also in Madrid.
"It was truly eye-opening to be there studying modern history and see the Kosovo crisis unfold from a perspective other than the standard American, and realize how many different ways there are to look at events," she said. "It's something you just don't get from studying [in the U.S.] alone."
During her senior year, Jill spent a month in Patagonia, Argentina as part of an advanced Spanish immersion program. Traveling throughout the country's cosmopolitan and waterfront areas, she gained yet another perspective on Spanish culture from the South American viewpoint.
After college, Jill entered the job market working as an antitrust paralegal at the Washington D.C. offices of Vinson & Elkins. It was during this time that she accomplished what she considers to be her greatest achievement, completing the Marine Corps Marathon. In October 2001, she made the 26.2 mile trek around the nation's capital and past the Pentagon, just weeks after the September 11 attacks.