Cecilia Cheng ’18

I came to law school with a very specific interest in antitrust law. I really wanted to go to a school where I could benefit from the flexibility of the curriculum, and at Yale, we have very few requirements. I really appreciated the opportunity to tailor my coursework according to, what I felt, will be most relevant to my future career. And I also felt like I went to a very large undergraduate institution, and I think that I wanted a much smaller law school community, which I found to be one of the best parts of being in law school, was getting to know all of my classmates really well and feeling connected to the school's administration, and to all of my friends who are here.

I'm involved in a couple of student organizations this year, but my biggest time commitments are serving on the board of Yale Law Women, and on the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal on Regulation. The goal of Yale Law Women is to advance the status of women in the legal profession and within the law school. And through that, I was able to meet a lot of wonderful women, who were at the law school, and to really feel like I'm helping everyone else with their transitioning, and to feel like I'm contributing to the law school community. I also think that, as part of the Yale Law Journal and as part of the Yale Journal on Regulation, I was really able to engage with legal scholarship, and scholarship within the realm of the regulatory world. I feel a lot more familiar with that area as well.

I'm part of the open governance clinic, and this is a fairly new clinic, but it's very interdisciplinary. The goal of the clinic is to help lawmakers and policy makers leverage the tools that are available in the digital age, and to harness the technological innovations to better inform their decision-making. This year, I'm on a clinic team with somebody from the School of Management and somebody from the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Because it's so interdisciplinary, it's really opened my eyes to a lot of the different graduate schools, and to the various types of talents that are available across the grad's student network.

Like with any law school, we have a very diverse student body, and every person I know here approaches the law from a very different perspective, and it's been really rewarding in classes getting to understand the different angles at which they're thinking about the law. And in particular, I think something that really surprised me about coming here, and something that I love about the student body, is that, for the most part, I think students are very willing to admit when they don't know something, and to acknowledge that there are blind spots in their education that they want to understand. People are very, very intellectually curious, and that's something that I very much respect about my classmates, and something that I found really valuable to my education.