Jim Janson
Dalhousie University
At 17, Jim Janson started working in a Halifax-based carnival, travelling the Maritimes driving trucks, becoming an expert at fixing the cotton candy machine, and running a popular gambling game where customers throw plastic hockey balls at different-coloured squares. He also enrolled part-time in Dalhousie University that year—1979—eventually earning a degree in economics, but he wasn’t particularly interested in university.
The carnival life treated him well as a young man. But in 2004, after 25 years in the business, Janson realized that he had to do something different with his life. He had six children. One of his oldest daughters began travelling with the carnival before she was three months old, he remembers: “Her first crib was a fish tray next to our bed in the travel trailer.” He wanted a more settled lifestyle for his kids. Besides, two of Janson’s bosses had died of heart attacks at the ages of 54 and 65. “There are not very many old guys who work at the carnival,” he says. “They all wear out. It’s an intense lifestyle.”
Janson set his sights on becoming a lawyer, wrote the LSAT and applied to Dalhousie. But he had been out of university for 20 years, and the admissions officials needed to see that he could handle the academic load. He was rejected. So he started taking courses—intro to law, criminology and so on—and he excelled. When he was rejected a second time, Janson began to get frustrated but, finally, he was wait-listed on his third try and was eventually accepted.
He thinks that his perseverance was key to getting into law school. “I was very serious about doing it once I decided,” says Janson, 48. “I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll have to do whatever they tell me I have to do, and I’ll get in.’ And it worked.”
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