One thing Transy is known for is its student’s nearly 100% acceptance rate into law school; when it comes to educating future lawyers, Transy is doing an incredible job. However, sophomore and pre-law student Jocelyn Lucero found a gap in the program: Transy lacks a club for pre-law students.
“At the beginning of first semester whenever we had the fair outside for all of the freshmen, I was just looking around and the pre-health booth was right next to us and I was like ‘Oh, I wonder if there is a pre-law booth’ because that’s what I was interested in doing. So I looked around and I walked around and I couldn’t find one.” said Lucero, who plans on going into Immigration or Human Rights law.
After looking around, Lucero asked some peers and also went to Michelle Thompson, the Acting Assistant Director of Campus and Community Engagement, to ask about starting up a pre-law club.
Thompson, who is in charge of helping students start clubs on campus, told Lucero that if she wanted to start a club she would have to wait six months after filling out the initial forms.
“I kind of just forgot about it,” Lucero said. “But then over break I stumbled upon this website which isn’t really just a club, it’s actually like an honorary and its national, and I saw that Transy was listed as one of its chapters. So I was like ‘Oh, I guess there is one!’ And I emailed her [Michelle Thompson] about that and she said ‘no they haven’t been active for two years.’ ”
The club, Phi Alpha Delta, a national law fraternity, turned out to have been on Transy’s campus once. Political science professor Dr. Don Dugi told Lucero that it had been a long time since the club was on campus, “But people graduate and forget about things and those are student led organizations so as soon as students graduate it just falls through,” Lucero said Dugi told her.
Dugi, who is the advisor of SGA, will also be the advisor for the fraternity, but the majority of the work to get the club up and running again falls on Lucero, who has had to fill out paperwork with the national level, but also with Transy, along with creating a constitution and mission statement.
In order for the club to be recognized at Transy again, it will need 20 members, which Lucero isn’t having too hard of a time recruiting.
“So far I have 12 students, and that was just from the TNotes post,” Lucero said.
Members of the fraternity will have to pay an initial fee of $100.00 to join, but it is money that can potentially be saved in other places.
“We get discounts for prep stuff for the LSAT, which prep books are really expensive, and I was also reading that we would get some fees waived for the LSAT and law school applications,” Lucero said. In addition to these discounts directly applying to pre-law students, Lucero said there are other helpful discounts for stores like Brooks Brothers, car rentals and also insurance that members can receive.
Lucero hopes that the group will more than anything be a place for students thinking about or studying to one day go to law school to have support through the process of taking the LSAT and also applying to law schools.
“I know I have a lot of questions,” Lucero said. “So I hope this will be a great way for students to get together and kind of maybe answer each others questions and bounce ideas off each other, just like a support group for us, because that’s going to be very stressful [applying to law school]. And then also, if it keeps going, seniors can give juniors and sophomores advice, like ‘Oh when I took it [the LSAT] there was this and you should make sure you study that.'”
For any questions or more information about joining Phi Alpha Delta email Jocelyn Lucero at jlucero19@transy.edu.
