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Today I am speaking with a college professor who found a fun way to help other people design their own homes using Lego building blocks.
For the past 14 years, Colleen Law has worked as a professor at Liberty University teaching mostly graduate students in public and mental health. She loves her work, but supplements that income in two novel ways.
First, she helps graduate students complete a master’s or doctorate dissertation in less than a year. Second, she builds model homes for people using Lego building blocks.
Colleen works with graduate students who had to step away from school when life interfered with their plans. Most universities have a specific time requirement to complete work for a graduate degree. If a student misses the deadline, their previous investment is forfeited and they have to start over.
Her love for Legos started decades earlier when Colleen was 16 years old. She would build things with her two younger brothers. She has since expanded her hobby into a lucrative business building homes for others.
Sometimes they are models of dream homes clients would love to own, or they are recreations of places they lived in the past. Colleen has even made Lego duplicates of homes for realtors to give their clients after closing.
She also built an old western saloon for a model railroad enthusiast. It took her four months to research and build the structure that was four feet tall by two and a half feet deep. It required nearly 6,000 Legos.
More remarkably, many of Colleen’s designs were created without blueprints. This year, she started designing kits for people to construct their own Lego buildings.
Colleen has contacts all over the world who help her source Legos in bulk. She’s even considering submitting designs as part of the Lego Corporation’s designer program where submitted plans are voted on, and the winning designs turned into official kits.
It’s a lucrative venture for sure. In her first year of business designing Lego homes, Colleen made $47,000.
Colleen may design and lay out the framework for the homes, but she will hire teenagers on the autism spectrum as well as veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to help finish the projects.
Because of the intricacy of her designs, Colleen has to source Lego blocks of specific sizes, shapes and colors. She said there are more than 100,000 different Lego pieces on the market around the world today.
For her dissertation business, Colleen most often focuses on the soft sciences for which she has a working knowledge. She does not write the dissertation for students, rather she coaches them on a process to complete it in whatever time limit remains.
Almost all of her coaching sessions are done online with students from around the country. University retention officers refer students under a time crunch to Colleen, who may help them narrow the topic of their paper or develop a framework to write it.
The reason Colleen won’t write the papers is because the graduate students have to defend their dissertations before a panel of experts. Students need to know the topic inside and out, and that can only be done when they research and write the thesis themselves. However, she will edit papers for clarity, grammar and spelling, if needed.
Colleen most often works with doctoral candidates ranging in age from 40 to 60, and master’s students between 27 and 40. To help spark the creative process, she offers group coaching to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas.
The dissertation business is near and dear to her heart. When Coleen was in the third year of her doctorate program, she returned home one day to discover her husband and all three sons had been killed by a drunk driver. For the next 10 years, she was in and out of hospitals trying to cope with the situation.
Today, she is happier than she has ever been and has more energy than most people her age.
People can learn more about Colleen’s Lego business by visiting www.custombrickhomes.com. For help with a dissertation project, people can email her at colleen.e.law@icloud.com.
That’s all I have for this week’s show. If you’d like help in identifying a purpose for your life or to get help planning your next steps, I’m offering a complimentary brainstorming session to members of the Forward From 50 Facebook community. For details, connect with me on Facebook or visit www.forwardfrom50.com.
I’ll have another inspirational interview on the next episode of the Forward From 50 podcast. Thanks for listening. If you like this show, please consider leaving a review wherever you download the episodes.
After closing his business and enduring several painful years of uncertainty regarding what to do with his life, Greg founded Forward From 50 to help men and women over 50 to live more purposeful lives by pursuing things they are passionate about. A Wisconsin native, Greg currently lives in Arizona.