Allegheny Town Hall: Center for Political Participation, Pre-law Track, and Law & Policy Program

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Hi everyone, we're just going to give everyone a moment. I can see the participants starting to file in so will give her one just a minute to log on. In the meantime if anyone wants to type into the chat box that should be available on your screen. Maybe your name where you're from. If you're comfortable doing that so we can see where people are joining us from today.

My name is Rachel Sloan. I am miss isn't director of admissions here at Allegheny. I'm joined by really two, you know experts in the area of law and policy and I'll let them introduce themselves in a minute. A couple housekeeping things. If at any point during the presentation you're having audio or video difficulties, usually if you just refresh your screen it should fix that, but we've been OK, so hopefully everyone will be able to watch without any interruption.

You can also use the closed caption Button on your screen, which is the two little season a black box if you're having audio issues, and it will transcribe everything going on in the presentation and then finally, if you guys have any questions during the presentation, feel free to submit them in the chat box. Please know that I am receiving them, even if they don't pop up right away on the screen. We have them and will release them so that Brian and Kristen can answer them throughout the presentation.

And so as people continue to log on, feel free to continue to type, you know where you're from into that chat box. And I'm going to let Brian and Kristen go ahead and introduce themselves and get started with the presentation. So Brian, if you want to start and then Christian you can, you can follow.

Great thank you Rachel. Hi everyone, I'm Brian Harward. I'm professor of political science and director of the Center for political participation in the law and policy program, and I'm really pleased to join you today and thank you all for telling us where you're viewing from. It's fun to see all the places represented. Let Christina reduce herself, and then I'll come back and start with the presentation.

Good afternoon everybody. My name is Kristen Black. I am associate director in the career education office and pre law advisor. I am very happy to be here with you this morning. Hope that we were able to answer all of your questions but please do feel free to pop anything in the chat or the questions box as you need through the presentation.

Great, thank you, so let's get started. This is so the law and policy program at Allegany is now in its so Christian 5th year, six year perhaps, and we have received a grant for four years to run the law and policy program from the Endeavour Foundation in New York. But the college is committed to maintaining the program even after that Grant has ended. And so if you come to Allegany, this program will be available to you.

And all the Kinks will have been worked out because we'll be well on our way. But when we started putting together this program, Kristen as the pre law advisor and I as a political science professor with an interest in law and policy issues was really interested in doing something broader than just a rather typical pre law advising and something broader than just a rather typical political science. Offerings in public policy or law. And so we thought to blend them altogether. But then.

Take it one step further and so that we developed a program as you see, here is one of the posters that we put together announcing the development of our program. But the purpose of it was to serve 3 related goals for every student at Allegheny in every student who's interested in law and policy, certainly. But ideally the same model, I think, would apply across campus, which is attending to students intellectual development. That is, the courses you're taking the interest you have, whether it's in chemistry or.

Arts or political science or philosophy? We're interested in that, and if you have an interest in issues of domestic or international law or domestic international public affairs, this is something that could buttress those interests. And then of course, civic learning each of you is probably committed to your communities and having an impact in those communities and doing good throughout the world. And again the law and policy program is meant to assist in those efforts. And then, of course a critical element which is.

Personal and professional development, which includes career education but also being mindful of who you are as a whole person. You're more than just your major and your minor. You're also interested in athletics. You're also interested in in public affairs, programming, and you're interested in becoming something or as a career goal, and so the idea of a law and policy program is to sit at the union there at the at that middle point where all three of those fears.

Combined in this Venn diagram, so long policy is designed to serve all three of these goals, so it's.

An integrative and collaborative set of learning experiences that you have around campus and in the summer time for internships or doing undergraduate research or presenting at conferences or attending lectures and workshops. All of those you can bring to bear to this law and policy program that you're developing yourself.

And with her, because it's law and policy specifically, we have an interest. Of course in how laws are implemented, how public policies emerge, get evaluated and changed, and so forth. So we have a particular focus. Of course, on international and domestic illegal affairs and public policy.

Now, the mechanism of the loan policy program, the core of it is a reflective portfolio that you develop throughout your four years at Allegheny, so you might come in and enroll in law and policy and there is no extra cost of doing so. It's entirely separable from your major or minor declaration, so you might come in with an interest in political science or history or English.

Ends in a minor in neuroscience or something like that, and then you would have this law and policy concentration in addition to that, and there's no coursework expected beyond that. These are things that you would be doing anyway. It's just we're asking you to be reflective about why you're doing that, and the idea is to pull all of that together in a portfolio reflective portfolio. So as you have these experiences interning, studying away, attending lectures, workshops, conferences, as I said.

Each of those you can then bring to your portfolio, reflected portfolio and accrue a Series A number of points. And here we have it as 120 points over your four years. Now that's very easily done. Many students are able to do that within a couple of years, but what's really interesting is, though even the students who are really active and engaged in law and policy program, they may get there 120 points in the first couple years at Allegheny, but then they'll go back and determine which 120 points are they?

Going to want to keep within that portfolio who have they become overtime and that's a very revealing process for our students as they sort through and jettison some that they weren't necessarily that keen on and keep others. And that these were really formative experiences for me and guiding my interest in law school or grad school or akarere immediately after Allegheny. And then as that portfolio develops, you're working alongside with peer mentors from.

The office that I direct, which is the Center for political participation and they oversee that process, and they there's a guy. It's along this pathway that you're on, and then ultimately you submit that portfolio and.

Sit for an exit interview which is not evaluative in any way. It's meant to generate ideas and reflect back on your experience, so it's a way of Bookending the experience in the law and policy program.

And so now what I wanted to do is just give give you a sense of what it feels like a little bit, because this is sort of an awkward format, but I will show you some pictures of some things that we do, and as we go through I can just briefly comment on them. This is every summer at the end of the summer, international humanitarian law dialogues is held. It should Taqwa Institution not too far from our campus, about an hour or so away. I see some people from Buffalo. They're probably familiar with his Chicago institution.

But the this group all of the current prosecutors of any international war crimes tribunal happening in the world come to Chautauqua meet with our students for a conference on International Criminal law and the reason they do so is because of our affiliation with the Robert H Jackson Center. Allegheny is when the only the only institution liberal arts institution with an affiliation with an archive dedicated to a Supreme Court Justice. In this case, Robert H. Jackson. Some of you may know the legacy of Robert H Jackson He.

Associate justice on the US Supreme Court. But then he took a leave from the court to prosecute the Nazis after World War Two and Nuremberg and set up the entire apparatus for International Criminal Law. And, of course, here's a picture of Chief Justice John Roberts addressing crowd and event where Allegany students were invited to attend and eat lunch with him, which was really special.

Then of course, there's undergraduate research opportunities, and here we have Allegany Alumnus.

John Aldridge from Duke University, working with students who have presented research from the law and policy program and then we have regular occurring programming. We have something about Kristen, I would say once or twice a week that lawns policy students are involved with and this one was about freedom of the press, but there are many different top. Here's one about voter ID laws and then this is a field that you might have as an attendee. Lawl policy event, just a regular lecture where students are engaging with the speaker afterwards.

And having conversations with them, here's another speaker talking about the civil legal representation for the poor. Here's Brian Stevenson, a rather famous.

Basically lawyer who's worked with the Equal Justice Initiative again, here's a crowd of law and policy students. We have host these orientation events and here they are getting to know each other. So it's a Cohorted Group you come in and you meet with other law and policy students and you go through the program together and we host conferences. Here's one from a former ambassador for war crimes.

Again, another conference that we're hosting with Allegheny students and faculty all attending.

Going really quickly through these just want to give you a flavor of the kinds of things that we're interested in. Many of these, of course, are related to International Criminal Justice or International Criminal law, but that's not all of our program. We do have a track within law and policy for Global Affairs, and I wanted to reflect some of that international programming in what we do, but we also have short courses that we offer, and so as a regular set of our offerings, we have lectures on all kinds of topics. But then we focus in on particular policy issues each semester.

So one semester we did federal budgeting. Another semester we did immigration policy. Another semester we did future of energy policy. We've done education policy and here's some students from the education policy seminar, and so every every semester, we're focusing in on a policy issue. Now this semester we were supposed to be doing something with global health studies, but it wasn't related to the pandemic and the faculty in global Health Studies said if we're going to focus on global health, we're going to do pandemic. But we can't do it. So this semester, we're taking a.

A break from our short course offerings, but will return to it in the spring and certainly next fall. If some of you arrive, you can participate in that and then in before I turn it over to Christian. Just one last thing, which is we offer advising.

Our pre policy so many of you of course might be interested in law school and Kristen can talk to you about that. But another dimension of our programming within law and policy's pre policy advising, and I'm available to you to speak about that. And here is just one example of one of the schools we brought recently, the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs, to talk about pre policy we have another one coming from University of Baltimore next month, but those are regular offerings where we have the admissions program coordinator or a faculty member or adenan.

In case of Baltimore, we have the Dean coming next month to talk to our students about who are interested in public affairs for graduate study, and then finally the question will why should I do this if I'm already interested in these things, what extra benefit is it? Well, I would say that for one thing, there's an instrumental value to it that when you apply for that job or when you go to grad school, you can demonstrate that well. I had this academically set of academic interests and I did quite well there. I've also really cultivated this particular focus and domestic or international law.

Public affairs, and I think that serves you quite well as a whole students or goal. Then, as I say here is for you to be able to develop a clear understanding of yourself as a whole person, not just a set of admission requirements or a set of courses that you've taken, but you've done a lot more when you've been at Alleghanian, we expect you to do a lot more, and here we are equipping you to think about it rather rigorously, so I'll turn it over to Christian.

OK, thank you Brian. That was a great overview of law and policy. I'm going to talk to you a little bit today about pre law advising and so it's important to note that pre law advising an prilog club exist separately from law and policy. But the two worked together very well as in everything that you would do for.

The pre law club or any event that I might hold as the pre law advisor such as a trip to a local law school would count for law and policy points and so we would do work very closely to think about our programming together. They just exist exist separately because not every student who wants to go into law school per say wants to partake in long policy program and vice versa us not every student in law and policy wants to necessarily go to law school. They might want to go to policy school or they might just be interested in the topics that are being covered. So there it does. But I do get a lot of questions about that.

You can certainly participate in anything in any combination that you want to, and we encourage you to take eggs. Much advantage of pre law advising. Pre law club law and policy mock trial. Anything like that that you might be interested in.

So pre law at Allegheny is not an official track that you have to do there. The only track that would exist like that Allegheny would be pre health and that is because they are very specific set of prerequisite courses that you have to take in order to make sure that you meet the requirements for entrance into medical school. Law school however is not like that. There are no course prerequisites. There are no major or minor requirements at all. So you can major in art you can major in biology you can major in.

Absolutely anything that you want to and apply for entrance into law school.

That being said, we have had students across the board in all majors applying to law school are most typical, probably our political science, English history philosophy. The ones that you would typically see, but we definitely encourage you to branch out an major in something that you love and major in something that might set you up if you know you want to practice environmental law, for example, a minor or major in Environmental Science definitely would suit you well. Going into law school. So the biggest criteria for entrance into law school would be your GPA and ultimately your L SAT score.

Which is again another reason why I encourage you to major and minor in something that you love, thinking that ultimately, if you're studying something you really enjoy studying, you might be performing better academically.

What law schools are really looking for in this case is?

A really strong set of ultimately what we call soft skills. So verbal reasoning, qualitative and quantitative reasoning, public speaking skills, strong reading and writing skills. All of those things are things that you're going to get just by being a student in the liberal arts, because Alleghenys really going to push you in those ways. Academically, you'll be doing research throughout your four years here, giving presentations, taking courses that have are notable for their strong academic rigor.

So our students are set up very, very well again, regardless of the major minor combination. By the time they graduate to be successful in law school.

So again, what we talked about, what they're looking for, primarily your GPA in your L SAT score. Those are the two most important factors when it comes to entrance into law school, but they're not the only important thing, and that's something that I talk about with students throughout your whole four years there. The national average for the GPA is about a 3.31 an the L SAT score ranges from 1:20 to 180, so the average sitting about 153.

Our students typically do score right around the national average for the L sat, and I've seen GPS range in our anywhere other things that they're looking for. Our leadership activities or work experience so I don't want you to overextend yourself by any means as a student joining a bunch of activities on cloud on campus but being involved at least one or two campus activity or holding a campus job is definitely going to benefit your application for law school. A strong personal statement which will work together very closely on when you get to application time.

Letters of recommendation from your faculty. You need two to three and they should be from faculty, so this is a really good point to talk about building relationships with your faculty. Connecting with your advisor, or making use of office hours. Other than that, you have strong letters of recommendation.

You can show an improvement in grades. Everybody has a bad semester or bad year, but if you can show recovery from that, that's helpful and the diverse background which exists well outside of just what you might think of racial and ethnic diversity. We're talking geographic diversity, you name it. There's a lot of different things that we can factor into. Diverse background.

OK so the pre law experience in Allegany is many things. As I said, pre law advising which you would work with me. There's also a number of other people. Professor Harvard can be of assistance. We have some other folks on campus who actually have their law degrees that you're welcome to talk to as well about their experiences in law school. We have some local alumni who are attorneys there helpful as well, so there's lots of ways that you can get sort of pre law advising law and policy program.

Pre law club. There is a mock trial team involvement in the Center for political participation, which again works in tandem with law and policy, but does exist separately in its own programming initiatives.

We do do visits to local law schools. Typically Pittsburgh will do apetina Duquesne law school visit will sit in law classes if we can excuse me. Will sometimes hold no lumni dinner will bring back attorneys.

Around the area and you can sit and talk with them about their career and their experience in law school internships every summer at the Robert H. Jackson Center. They usually accept between one and three Allegheny students. I would say every summer, hopefully.

Law school admissions representatives host representatives hosted on campus. So in addition to going to visit, law schools will bring law schools to the college so you can sit and meet with their admissions teams to talk about entrance requirements and whether schools offer an A ton more. We do a lot, just as long policy does, and as they said, anything through law and policy is exceptional preparation for law school.

Don't make a quick trip through here, just as Professor Hardware did. Some examples of some things that we have done. This was a trip that we took to Pitla Retore the law school and met with two of the admissions representatives from law school. We typically are always meeting with Allie and Charmaine, who are listed on this flyer.

Every year, Duquesne University hosts special event. This year we went down and we were able to sit and have lunch with and then listen to Rajmohan Gandhi, who is the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi talk about his grandfathers life and legacy as an attorney was incredibly interesting. We got to go last year. I think it was to listen to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor speak some of our students actually got to shake her hand. That was really special.

So there's lots of different events that they host that we're always invited to as a school that partners with them very closely.

Ship

OK, here we have a couple of pictures from different events. The first is the annual pre law dinner that I was mentioning. These are all alumni from Allegany who are attorneys in different specialties. They came back, they had dinner with the students and then they moved to a panel format where they answer questions from the crowd of students. Next to that is was then Dean of the law school, Ken Gormley. He is now actually the president of Duquesne.

Yes, sorry Duquesne University and is still a wonderful partner and advocate for Allegheny students. The students got to sit and meet with him and have lunch. That was really amazing and the bottom there we got to attend Supreme Moot court session at the University of Pittsburgh. There was a gentleman who was preparing to make an argument in front of the Supreme Court and this was sort of his practice session where the faculty and judges in the area. I got to listen to his argument and give him feedback on that before he actually went into the Supreme Court to make that.

And I think this is my last slide. Here. Is employment something we talk a little bit about? Definitely with students. There are some jobs that are considered JD required an would require bar passage for you to take the bar exam after you finish your law degree. That would be, you know, being attorney or judge some political careers, some public service careers, and corporate careers. There are also jobs that are considered JD advantage which a lot of students don't.

Know about, they don't require you to have taken or passed the bar exam or to hold a specific license. Jurors who be an attorney practicing attorney but having a law degree in a JD is just an excellent terminal degree to have and can lead you in a lot of different directions. So as I mentioned, we have some faculty on campus who have their JD a lot of the people who work in law school admissions have their JD there also jobs in consulting or investment banking that are also really great so.

Even if you think I'm interested in law, but I don't know that I want to be a practicing attorney or I don't know if I want to sit for the bar exam. There are things that you can do with your law degree or careers that you can transfer that to that are really applicable or might be of interest to you. In addition to policy. That's why we created law and policy in Part 2.

Because policy may be of another interest area to you.

Great thank you Rachel. Should we open it up for questions? Is that the idea?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm so if anyone has any questions we haven't had any come in yet, but I'm sure they were soaking in all the wonderful information that you guys shared. If anyone would like to ask a question to our panelists and you can just type into the chat box on your screen and I will see the question an I'll put it up publicly for everyone to see. One question that maybe I can start us off with is you guys talked a lot about experiential opportunities a little bit about research, which is a really big piece of alleghenys identity.

So could you guys maybe talk about if you've worked specifically with students on any particular research projects, whether it's related to like their senior composition or something more experiential throughout their four years here, and maybe elaborate a little bit on what it's like to get involved with research, but maybe particular how it might really helping their interest in law and policy or pre law something like that.

Yeah, great Christian. Do you mind if I take that I have?

The I want to go back to a slide that we had up earlier, which is here. So as perhaps many of you know, Allegheny has a.

Has, as Rachel identified a national reputation for undergraduate research number one in the country identified by the council in undergraduate research for those opportunities, and it's something that doesn't just happen to you at the end of your time at Allegany. Something that you're you're really being directed towards all along, and so we term that we use is we scaffold you're learning so that when it comes time to do your independent research project, your senior comprehensive project is called a comp here.

But it's time to do that. You've been equipped to do that, and these these smaller steps along the way build up towards this larger project, and one of the things that you ought to be aware of, which is we have summer funding available for students to engage. It's called the across program. It's run by the undergraduate research scholarly and creative activities program on campus. Well funded, and it's really the principle office working with students.

To do independent research projects, and they could be of any type they could be in the Sciences that can be in the humanities and the social Sciences. It could be related to your comp are not related to your comp, but it's time during the summer where you're paid to do research. And that's a really good opportunity to kind of opportunity that typically want only gets in Graduate School, but it's part of what it means to be a scholar. And at Allegheny we start you off with those opportunities right away. If you want them.

And each of those, if it has bearing on law and policy, could be brought into your law and policy portfolio. So for example, these students here the two women in front of the poster that was a research project that they did that was connected to their comp. But it was only one chapter of their larger research project, and so these students then presented at a conference that we hosted a couple years ago about education policy and they ended up doing comps. One, I think both in psychology one might have been in political science and psychology is a double major.

But it was directed on the Comp, was on education broadly, but this particular chapter was on education policy specifically, and they presented their research at our conference, and so there's a way of blending this where things are able to disturb your interest overtime.

And we just have a question come in, I've just put it up in the chat here, does a law and policy program sponsor study abroad, opportune iti's?

So the the college they enter the office for international education is the primary unit that overseas our international study away programs. But the law and policy program just this past Christian remind me was it last last winter. So the pandemic is thrown my timing off. It was a year ago. Basically we took students students to Rwanda.

For two weeks, so we there are dimensions of study away for law and policy, but the program itself typically doesn't sponsor study away programs, but students in law and policy use their study away experiences for law and policy points so. But the one exception would be the trip that we sent students on to Rwanda. That was the one time we did do that.

It's a great question.

Great.

We have about 2 minutes and so if anyone has any last minute questions, now would be the time to send them in. Or if you think of questions later you can just email the admissions at allegheny.edu account and will get you connected with any resources to help answer those questions you have. As a final note, maybe I'm going to put professor Howard and Kristen on the on the spot, but could you maybe give what you might advise students to think about right now that are going through the college search process or.

And really, why Alex should be something they can consider.

Kristen, you go first.

Sure, so as I mentioned at the beginning, I also serve as associate director in the career education office and because of that we're consistently hearing from on campus recruiters or reading research about what employers are looking for in graduates and the skills that employers are looking for the most are usually at the top adaptability and flexibility.

And then coming down right strong second below. That is usually reading, writing and public speaking ability, and so we hear over and over and over again that our students leaving Allegany College, regardless of whether you're going straight into a graduate level program or a law school program or straight into the workforce, that these students are very well prepared because of the experiences that they've had at Allegheny, both in the classroom and outside of the classroom are have these skills.

Strong skills in especially adaptability and flexibility. And so we are really producing group of students who are more than prepared to enter into the real world. The work working world or Graduate School upon graduation and I know that that's a lot of what students coming in now we're looking for is what is the end result? What is this going to get me an that's really one of the things that we that we cherish about Alinea is that they're preparing you very well for your post.

Post college life experiences.

Great.

I don't have much to add to that, but I can take this. I can take this question that just came in with about FBI CIA. We have had students go into both the FBI and the CIA. We there's a fact a student former student now who's at the CIA who just came to campus last fall to talk to students about thinking about careers in the CIA. I've had several students go into the FBI specifically.

An and only I think.

Two of them actually went to law school 1st and then went to the FBI, but most of them went straight into the FBI.

And you know, it's curious about those students there. They have to be kind of circumspect about taking questions from former professors and the students about what they're doing. But there really exciting job opportunities available there and our students are well prepared and do well in those in those job contexts. But just to add to what Christian just said, if I might, which is, I think one of the things I would encourage each of you to be thinking about is not set, not limit yourself in terms of.

Not only the what you're thinking about in terms of your future, but limit yourself in terms of what you think about in terms of a major. And so as you enter the college search process, or perhaps you're far along in the college search process. Look for places that are going to challenge you and extend you and broaden your expectations of yourself, and I think Allegany will do that for you.

Great, alright? So we are just overtime and I know some of the participants on this session might also be waiting to go to some of our other sessions today, so I'm going to collect all the questions that we didn't get to and we will make sure someone reaches out to you with those answers. So don't fear if we didn't get to it Live Today and so I just wanted to extend.

A really big thank you to burning Christian for taking some time out of there Saturday to meet with us and to who's the session. This recording will be posted on the allegating efficient website so you can refer back to it if you want to hear something great information or look over some of those slides. Again with that I'm going to say thank you and closeout the event and so have a great day everyone.

Bye.

Thank you.

Hi thanks.