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You might have seen her at work on her laptop in Javajodi’s Coffee House, with a bowl of her favorite roasted red pepper soup by her side.

That’s when she wasn’t at home working in her pajamas.

A sight that confused her two daughters, said Shannon Trice Black during an interview at, where else – Javajodi’s.

“Margaret told her teacher she didn’t know what her mother did,” said Black. I didn’t go to work and I wasn’t a stay at home mom.”

“It told them I was going to school.”

And that’s what Black, 37, has been doing for the last three years, working on her doctorate from the University of Virginia. She graduates May 17.

Black grew up in Goochland and has spent most of her life here, except for her undergraduate days at William and Mary and a year teaching English in a small town in Hungary after she graduated.

“That was the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

But in June she will move to Williamsburg to and start teaching this fall in her new job as a professor in counseling education.

Her husband Gary, an assistant principal at a Charlottesville middle school, is looking for a job in the area, and their two daughters have mixed feelings about moving away from friends and family.

“One daughter says she’s excited,” said Black. “The other says she’s not going. But they’ll be all right.”

Black graduated from Goochland High School in 1989 before going to school at William and Mary, where her parents and sister also went to school.

She worked as a counselor in the Goochland and Louisa school systems and received her Masters in Counselor Education from University of Virginia in 1996.

Along the way she discovered she loved counseling students, even developing her own curricula to teach counselors how to meet students’ needs.

Her decision to go back to school full-time to work on her doctorate led to tight times for the family, said Black, going from two incomes to one.

“Had we known about the recession coming we might not have done it,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been brave enough.”

But Black said she leaned on her Christian faith when times got hard and her husband was always supportive.

“Gary said, ‘You’ve gone this far into it – you can’t stop now,’” she recalled.

And having her daughters see her graduate and take a new job is a big positive, too.

“It’s great for them to see that women can achieve their goals at anytime,” said Black.

It was hard work too, said Black, who confessed to being a work-a-holic.

“I have to be doing something all the time,” she confessed, saying she had just starting stripping some furniture to keep busy.

“But the Ph.D. program almost leveled me,” she said. “It took a lot of time and energy.

Now things all seemed to have fallen into place for Black, who starts teaching in August. She’ll have two courses each semester teaching masters candidates in counseling

Then of course there is the pressure to publish in her new tenure-track position.

Even though Black will miss family and friends in Goochland, she’s happy to be going back to William and Mary. It was her first choice as a place to teach.

“I was so blessed to get this job,” she said.

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