Laura Ginn, JD'07
Laura Ginn was born and raised in California, earned an undergraduate degree in the UC system, and has always planned to build a career there. So when she applied to law schools, she applied only in California, along with Washington, D.C., until a letter from the dean at Indiana Law caught her eye.
"We're Tier One," Ginn notes, like the other schools she initially considered. But, as a self-admitted west coast snob, she knew nothing about Indiana except that it was "somewhere in the middle."
Still, she was intrigued by the beautiful Bloomington campus and IU's rich, historic collegiate tradition. Today, with two years of law school behind her, she has realized the power of following her gut feeling.
Ginn is a Student Affairs Fellow, an Admissions Fellow, and, in addition to her law degree, she's earning a certificate in Nonprofit Management from Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
She spent her first summer in Barcelona, Spain, studying European Union law and international contracts and her second summer as an associate with Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith in San Francisco.
She says her semester with the Family and Child Mediation Clinic, a course through which students perform certified mediations for family law cases, molded the professional skills that helped her succeed in San Francisco.
"Mediation is the present and the future of litigation, and to be familiar with the process, if nothing else, is to have a leg up," she says. "In the clinic, I didn't just have to spot issues, but address them with the parties and their attorneys and work to solve them. The experience really opens your eyes to the world and how law affects every person both negatively and positively."
She wants to put the management and legal skills she's earned to use back home for a philanthropic or educational institution, and she's confident Indiana can help her get there. "Having a small student body makes finding the right fit easier for me," she says of her search for jobs out west, "because the career center staff knows me and knows what I want."