Why I’m an Educator: Barbara Selmo, Ed.M.’94, Ed.D.’04

1984. I am a newly minted master’s degree recipient and am stand­ing at the front of an empty classroom, waiting for my 15 students to file in. It is September. I am about to teach the first freshman English class of my career. I am shaking in my new black pumps. 

Why did I choose to teach? The career counselor at my graduate school suggested I might give it a try. What else does a 24-year-old English major and creative writing master do with those degrees? School had always been a comfortable place for me, a safe place, a rewarding place. I found a teaching job, much to my parents’ delight, that was near them. Safe, solid, recession proof. 

Those three years of being an English teacher were a crash course in adolescent development, curricular struggle, inflexible community norms, and the challenges of being a woman in a traditional board­ing school setting. But I had mentors and senior teachers whose life examples taught me a lot about being a teacher and about being an adult. The children — and despite their swagger, smoking, and so­phistication, they were children — taught me that the real world, their world, learned very different things from Shakespeare and Thurston and Dickens than my insular world of graduate school bothered to discuss. “Poetry — it’s all about death, right, Miss Selmo?” a fresh-faced sophomore once said to me. They were looking for big themes. 

Yet I was impatient but couldn’t define my impatience. So I left, and I pivoted, as we are fond of saying these days — but rushed into another school setting — higher ed. 

2004. I am wearing a crimson graduation gown, a black velvet hat, and sandals (no black pumps this time). I am about to walk down the steps of Longfellow Hall, Appian Way, along with my fellow Ed.D.s, leading the procession of graduates of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The crowd is cheering. My legs are shaking, again, but I am also cheering inside. It took me 10 years to get here, 20 years from that freshman English class in Connecticut. 

I jumped from the high school setting to the university setting to work and support graduate students. I replaced study hall moni­toring with office hours, grading essays with putting together award packages. I worked at many institutions, with students in many dis­ciplines, but fortunately for me, always in places where the pursuit of knowledge, the testing of oneself, the commitment to doing some­thing larger and greater, were uplifted and valued. I went back to graduate school myself, earning two degrees from HGSE, and all the while thinking “this journey is about something.” For me, it was about great learning (capital and small “g”); it was about teachers of all kinds moving you into places and mindsets you would never have imagined. It was about crying every day after class (statistics) or laughing every day with people who became my lifelong friends. (You know who you are.) It was about becoming a teacher inside, outside, around, above, behind, or below the classroom. 

2025. My father would have been proud. I managed to keep a job in a school, in one way or another, all these years. I still wear black pumps, sometimes. I have worked with, hired, mentored, and cheered on so many fellow HGSE alums. So many other 24-year-olds giving education a try, thinking it is “safe,” learning that it is mind-blowing and challenging no matter what your role — if you decide to stay.

Barbara Selmo, Ed.M.'94, Ed.D.'04, is the director of graduate admissions at Emerson College. Prior, she held admissions and enrollment services positions at the Ed School, Lesley University, Boston University School of Law, Babson, and Columbia Business School