In two months, I will pack my bags and travel to Quantico, Virginia, to begin Officer Candidates School for the United States Marine Corps. After graduating from the University of North Carolina and while pursuing my legal education at Loyola University New Orleans, Louisiana, I took an oath to defend the Constitution as a Marine Corps Judge Advocate, also known as a marine lawyer.
To do this, I have to leave Mississippi, again.
I left for undergraduate and I left after undergraduate, but I am not the only one. For decades, our state has suffered from a well-documented and deeply painful “brain drain.” Every spring, thousands of our brightest young minds cross the state line to pursue degrees, launch businesses or accept corporate jobs in Atlanta, Dallas or Washington, D.C. We are a state that successfully exports our most valuable resource: our future leaders.
The traditional narrative is that leaving Mississippi is a sign of success and staying is a sacrifice. But as I prepare to ship out for military service, I realize that this narrative is fundamentally broken.
Leaving our home state should not be viewed as an escape; it should be viewed as a deployment.
Mississippi faces complex, deeply rooted challenges. From the closure of rural hospitals in the Delta to the unreasonable insurance rates on the Gulf Coast and the crumbling infrastructure of our county roads, our problems cannot be solved by maintaining the status quo. We need fresh operational tactics, executive discipline and leaders who know how to build systems that do not fail. That level of expertise often requires stepping outside of our borders to learn from the rest of the world. In my case, I am choosing the Marine Corps. I want to learn the logistical mastery, the unwavering discipline and the strategic legal framework of the world’s most elite fighting force. Others might leave to learn advanced engineering at a tech startup or global finance at a major firm.
But gathering those skills is only half the mission. The second, more crucial half is the return. If Mississippi is going to compete on a national level, the generation currently leaving must commit to coming back. We cannot abandon the rural counties, the small towns and the communities that raised us simply because it is easier to build a life somewhere else. We owe it to our state to take the world-class education and the high-level executive experience we gather out in the world and bring it back to the soil that gave us our start.
I am leaving Mississippi to serve my country. I am stepping away to learn how to lead, how to defend the law, and how to execute a mission under pressure.
But when my tour of duty is done, I am coming home. And I challenge every other young Mississippian building a career across the country to make the exact same promise. In return, I ask that the rest of the state stop demonizing us for it. Mississippi doesn’t just need us to succeed out in the world; it needs us to bring that success back home.
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