Teaching, and going to rabbinical school might not seem like the most glamorous path for an Ivy League graduate to take, but Rabbi Judd K. Levingston '86 says that going to Harvard has helped him tremendously in his career.

"Parents and faculty extend me a certain degree of credibility," Levingston said. "They figured even if I didn't know everything, they knew I would know where to turn."

Levingston, who concentrated in History and Science, began teaching immediately after graduating from Harvard at an independent school in Baltimore, where he says some people reacted strongly to his educational background.

"When I was first introduced, along with one guy from Princeton and one from Yale, there were gasps in the audience, kids seemed impressed," Levingston says. "The kids aspired to go to these places."

But Levingston's job surprised many of his classmates.

"I would get things like, 'That's so great, you're donating your time to charity, but what are you going to do next?'" he says. "It was as if teaching was not a genuine career choice."

Education might not have been the popular career choice among his peers, but Levingston says he feels that he got the better end of the deal.

"Some of my friends seemed a bit envious," he says. "They felt pressured to go into investment banking, or work for two years and go to law school. I was doing my own thing."

In fact, Levingston did decide to go to graduate school, but it wasn't to study law or medicine. Instead, he enrolled in the Jewish Theological Seminary's (JTS) Rabbinical School and was ordained as a Conservative rabbi in June 1993.