For any parent, juggling two young children can be challenging enough. Imagine adding law school into the mix.
That is what Angela Keibel, 33, has done.
The Red Deer mother of a six-year-old girl and four-year-old boy just finished her second year at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Law and is spending the summer working at Chapman Riebeek, a general practice law firm in Red Deer.
Having settled into Red Deer, Keibel said making the decision to go to law school was difficult for her and her husband Kevin. “My family has lived here for five years, my husband has a good job and we didn’t want to uproot our family,” Keibel said.
“But law has been a passion of mine so we decided to make it work.”
This past academic year, Keibel travelled to Edmonton on Mondays to attend full-time courses at the university. She would come home to her family on Thursdays.
“It is definitely a juggle, trying to manage a course load as anyone going to school can understand, but when you have children you realize you have to make the time that you study count,” she said.
“It teaches you to be more focused.”
Not only has she balanced family and school, Keibel has actually thrived.
She and a classmate, also a mother, beat out teams across Canada in April to win the first Canadian Client Consultation competition and, as a result, she received the opportunity to participate in the international law competition in Ireland.
The competition involved three judges who evaluate the students on how they handle a legal scenario. Keibel and her classmate represented Canada and ended up tying for second in Ireland.
Keibel said her children sometimes do not understand why she is gone but she said her husband has “stepped up completely.”
“He has been more involved with them than maybe he ever would have been had I not done this.
“There is a tendency, I think, for some women to think that they have to do it all, that they should do it all, and this has really shown me that my husband can do wonderful things with the kids and teach them things that I never would have thought.”
Keibel said she will come back to Red Deer when she graduates next April. Chapman Riebeek has already offered her an articling position.
“It is going to be hard for one more year and then we are going to be together all the time, but it’s just three years, 16 weeks at a time,” Keibel said.
“It is not impossible.”
jjones@www.reddeeradvocate.com