Expectations didn’t hold Robyn Moberly back from doing what she wanted.
The recently retired bankruptcy judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana was encouraged to pursue two traditional career paths for women when she entered college in the 1970s.
“I grew up in a different era than today, and most people anticipated that women would become nurses or teachers because it blended so well with having a family. And certainly my parents had that expectation for me, and so they insisted that I major in elementary education,” Moberly said.
She graduated from Indiana University Bloomington in 1975 with a degree in elementary education and economics.
Moberly said she couldn’t really get a job with an economics major without also going to graduate school.
As she was considering graduate school, she was surrounded by high-achieving women in a sorority house.
“Since a lot of the women were going to law school, and many are now physicians, surgeons, I kind of started thinking outside the box, and that’s what pushed me to go to law school, was the women I was around,” Moberly, who received her J.D. from the Robert H. McKinney School of Law in