• Lawyer, M. Karl Hawkins, LLC
• Writer, Sad Fishe Games, LLC

What impact did UE have on your education? How did your classes prepare you for your career?

It was a great pleasure to take a UE undergraduate degree focusing primarily in science, decide last minute to turn it into a largely unrelated law degree despite little prior focus or knowledge, and throughout your post-graduate education have a notable advantage over fellow students that ostensibly prepared for law school for years. These were students who were unfamiliar with the close attention of faculty interested in challenging them. These were students who had never been tasked with performing serious, academic writing and struggled to manage their first memorandum of law – something no survivor of Evolutionary Ecology need to worry about. These were students who have never been challenged with the rigors of original research, as is expected in more than a few of UE’s Environmental Science classes. And these were students who had not yet been challenged to take competing and contradictory ideas and principles like those found throughout law and seek to reconcile them into something workable – an already familiar problem for students of this program.

The real power of this UE program - and the UE curriculum generally - is that it, simply put, produces prepared students: prepared to learn, prepared to cooperate, and prepared to take what was learned and put it into concrete action, whether it be activism, research, or something else entirely. It also gives you the opportunity to determine what comes next for you while being confident your skills can translate across fields you might not expect at the time. Not everyone comes out of undergrad able to say as much.