LAW STUDENT CHRONICLES | BY CHRIS GARCIA, PH.D.
STEM Ph.D. To Law Degree A Different Perspective
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aw school appears to be a prestigious mystery, reserved for the select few who seem to have always been preparing themselves for this intellectual summit. The traditional student is a high-achieving political science major wielding impeccable grades and the gift of persuasion. While there are many such students, students with a diversity of learned and lived experience is a departure from this perceived reality. The last few decades have seen students with increasingly diverse perspectives entering the study of law, benefiting the profession by pro-
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THE DOCKET
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ducing individuals with well-rounded points of view. I am a departure from the traditional student, with a path that can be described as creative, arriving at the doors of the University of Colorado Law School. Within three days of graduating high school, I was on my way to northern California to confront a wildfire scorching the Klamath National Forest as a wildland firefighter on a U.S. Forest Service hotshot crew. I spent two years working with a crew of 23 people cutting line around the nation’s largest wildfires. It’s a job
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that requires constant vigilance, working what seem to be endless days in the most extreme temperatures and terrain. The physical labor is tedious and highly focused, but the lens through which a plan develops to battle the fire must be wide. The common axiom, “you can’t see the forest for the trees” encapsulates this, perhaps with a somewhat ironic certainty. So, while firefighting is different from a legal career, there are similarities between legal intricacies and a section of fireline – critical in their own part, but of penultimate importance to that for which they are deployed. After working for a few years, I decided that attending college was the best option moving forward. I committed to university life, choosing to major in chemistry. Long, hard days were now spent wrestling with multi-variate calculus theorems and organic chemistry mechanisms. Developing an understanding of chemistry was engaging but being accepted into professors’ research labs is where the learning came alive. Conducting chemical reactions supplanted reading about them and I developed a desire to apply knowledge and ingrained concepts. I began to understand the ability to absorb information is important but developing the capability to apply what has been learned is paramount, a sentiment freighted with new veracity as I make my first attempts at interpreting and applying legal theory. Nine days after graduating with my bachelor’s degree in chemistry I left my home state of California behind, arriving on the East Coast to begin my doctoral program at Virginia Tech specializing in medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. When the first week of the semester finally arrived, it was an experience I was in many ways unprepared for. It was a week filled with preliminary entrance exams. Although each admitted student came with the required transcripts, our knowledge in those documented areas was still subject to investigation. These tests would determine the magnitude of
