Dinosaurs and Lawyers by Karina

Dinosaurs and Lawyers by Karina - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

I’ve had many professional goals throughout my life. As a six year-old and a fan of dinosaurs, I was set on becoming a paleontologist. I wanted to dig up the best, biggest dinosaurs and get to name the new species I’d find. But in elementary school I developed a great love for books, and things took a literary turn; from the ages of nine to seventeen or so I wanted to write the great American novel. Since I’ve been in college, my plans have changed again, and then again, and for much of the past four years I’ve had no idea what I wanted to do. I majored in linguistics, and toyed with the idea of graduate school. Today, though, a month after graduating college, I am more sure of my future plans than I have ever been: I will be starting law school in the fall, at The University of Texas at Austin, and I plan afterward to work in my capacity as a lawyer to promote and protect the rights of immigrant and other vulnerable communities in Texas.

This may sound abrupt, and overly ambitious (it does to me), but my passion for immigrant rights has been developing over the course of my life through both my personal and academic experiences. I was born and raised in the Houston area, but it’s a section of the U.S.-Mexico border – the land that encompasses Del Rio, Texas and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, where my mother is from – that serves as my second home, a symbolic, if not actual, birthplace. The significance of the border in my own life has helped me to better understand the border as a force that affects millions of others, and in my college classes I learned about the ways that border policies systematically affect both border communities and migrants. Through volunteer work at a local refugee shelter I’ve gained a more thorough understanding of how competing narratives of migration in policy and in public discourse have the power to shape people’s lives. My evolving understanding of migration was what first led me to consider the law as a profession.

After law school I plan to work at an immigration-focused legal aid organization, and later on in my career I hope to find work at an organization geared toward legal reform. Again, this sounds much too ambitious to me, but it satisfies my conviction that, as someone lucky enough to be getting a quality education, I have a responsibility to try to understand the social and economic inequalities that have left others behind, and to work to remedy those inequalities. It also satisfies my mother, who has been pushing the law school idea since I was eleven.

I don’t know that the work I will do will change the world in a big way, but I do know that the changes I will make in individual lives will make all the difference for them. To keep a family together, or to help someone claim asylum and escape a dangerous situation, is as meaningful an impact as I can think of. My experiences in and out of school have shown me that the path to understanding complex problems requires both study and action, and in law school I will be taking the classes and clinics that will teach me how to be an effective advocate for different communities. This training will bring me closer to my overall dream today: to be an effective advocate for social justice.

In my spare time, though, I’ll probably still be thinking about how cool dinosaurs are.