Law Student Chronicles

LAW STUDENT CHRONICLES | BY CHRIS GARCIA, PH.D.

STEM Ph.D. To Law Degree

A Different Perspective

Law 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 producing 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 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

required courses. Scoring below the demarcation of acceptance meant additional classes, classes in which it was no longer the professor’s responsibility to ensure students were maintaining the pace. We were now attempting to achieve the highest degree possible and become their colleagues, a feat which seemed daunting in the kindest characterization. However, classes were a footnote, conducting and publishing original research was the true academic marathon.

Sixty to seventy-hour work weeks were spent stooping over a fume hood monitoring reactions and sitting behind a computer analyzing data. A common saying arose, this time posed as a question from my boss Dr. Santos, “Where’s my compound?” A simple, four-syllable phrase which, depending on the current state of success, was able to impart both elation and fear. My work focused on the development of new therapeutics for metabolic diseases. This meant it was funded and highly scrutinized by pharmaceutical investors with constant impending deadlines. To advance through such a program and successfully defend a dissertation requires the ability to reason through known literature and use critical analysis to apply it to the current situation in a prompt manner. Key is the ability to hypothesize a myriad of problems and suggest potential solutions before there is any inclination that they may ever materialize. Dr. Santos’s saying was then replaced with, “please give me the facts of…,” bringing with it similar conflicting emotions. It was not acceptable that you simply read the assigned cases, it required identifying the correct issue and how the holding may affect future outcomes. Multiple professors made clear that the true goal of our classes is to impart the skill of applying what has occurred to what is never expected to occur.

I entered my Ph.D. program with lofty ideals, hoping to take part in the next medicinal chemistry breakthrough. Following its completion, I was going to move into the pharmaceutical landscape, developing new therapeutics. However, during the program, and due to my funding sources, I was introduced to a world which integrated science with business. I discovered the necessary bedmate of any scientific breakthrough which promulgated an economic enterprise: law. Following this epiphany and further championed by Dr. Santos, I began to spend my limited free time studying for the LSAT. While applying for my doctoral dissertation, I was in many ways preemptively signing commitments to the law school I now

attend, navigating another new beginning. Taken as separate endeavors, my path may seem an unfocused undertaking of a career student, but each graduation stage has marked the addition of applicable knowledge.

I believe that a varied background is equally as important to the study and practice of law as a traditional one. One is not superior to the other, they simply impart a different lens in which to view legal problems. For it is the variability of people’s learned and lived experiences that provides the linchpin connecting the legal needs of a community. The political science major may be more steepedin the legislative process, however the parent of two starting a new career will be able to effortlessly multitask, having excellent time management skills. A traditional student may be unfazed by the jargon that freely flows in class discussions, but the ex-grade schoolteacher is accustomed to clearly comporting themself in front of large groups. The reality is you won’t find two identical students and no one is better prepared than anyone else in every way. The forest may not be ablaze around me, but bearing the weight of a client’s expectations as I construct legal fireline around their life’s work will require similar determination and dedication. My workdays no longer necessitate a lab coat or specialized glassware, but nonetheless require the application of my cumulative knowledge in new and imaginative ways. So, when considering what background may be applicable to the study of law, I believe Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best, “The life of law has not been logic, it is experience.”

I believe that a varied background is equally as important to the study and practice of law as a traditional one.

CHRISTOPHER GARCIA completed his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Virginia Tech specializing in medicinal chemistry and drug discovery developing novel therapeutics for metabolic diseases. He is now pursuing his J.D. at the University of Colorado Law School hoping to utilize his scientific background in a career in intellectual property law.