Roughly two weeks ago, I was informed that I had made it to the final stage of the application process for Teach For America. For those of you who have somehow managed to avoid the monstrous jaws of this organization’s campus outreach campaign, Teach For America (TFA) is a national corps of high-achieving recent college graduates who dedicate two years to teaching in our country’s lowest-income communities.

A noble concept, I thought to myself when approached by TFA’s senior recruitment director earlier this semester, but it just wasn’t for me. It’s not as if I was drowning in alternative job offers with my hotly anticipated liberal arts degree. But plunging headlong into a two-year commitment that promised to be depressing, frustrating, and, depending on the grade level to which I would be assigned, terrifying as well? Pass the cyanide tablets.

But the recruitment director asked for just 15 minutes of my time at Moonstruck, and admitting that I didn’t really know the whole story on TFA, I agreed to meet with him. I tried to be up front. Since I have always felt the urge to dry heave upon hearing the popular libertarian argument that everyone has a fair shot at succeeding in life regardless of socioeconomic circumstances, I find working to counteract the undeniable funding disparities in America’s public school system to be a very important cause. TFA did seem like a great outlet in that regard.

That being said, I was worried that I might not be able to leave my TFA duty with my sanity intact. Additionally, I was not an education major, nor did I possess even the mildest interest in teaching as a long-term career. As an aspiring politico hoping to dive into the D.C. scene after graduation, TFA seemed irrelevant to my professional pursuits, and I could not ignore that.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I was informed that most members are not education majors and that while many alumni do go on to serve as teachers and administrators, Teach For America has assembled a cadre of leaders with ties to a variety of professional sectors – not just education, but government and policy, business, journalism, medicine, the sciences, and the arts.

TFA alumni also receive considerable benefits, including an online job bank, mentorship from career coaches, and partnerships with over 100 graduate schools – including top-tier public policy schools and the law schools of Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, and Georgetown – which offer both TFA alumni and current corps members perks like two-year deferrals, waived application fees, and specially created financial awards or fellowships.

Furthermore, many alumni now serve as advisers to prominent public officials – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, to name a few – drawing upon their firsthand experience in our nation’s neediest schools to influence critical decisions pertaining to public education policy.

My notions had been shattered. Upon learning that Teach For America was far from being the two-year professional hiatus that I had imagined, my concerns about the day-to-day classroom stress were not enough on their own to pull me away from such a critical movement: the movement to show the people of America that students in low-income communities can and consistently do excel when given the opportunities they deserve.

And what better people to lead this fight than the most driven and success-bound student leaders among us? Our generation, perhaps more than any other, is one that refuses to take no for an answer. If we can channel that determination and tenacity into righting the wrongs of America’s public education system, there is no doubt in my mind that we will get our way. And in doing so, we are making an important promise to our nation’s neediest children: where you’re born and how much money your parents make does not have to stop you from getting the education that you deserve.