When Reda Taleb (McLean Class, 2015) talks about “giving back,” she isn’t just reciting a slogan — she’s living by example. The daughter of immigrants from Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, Taleb’s parents, along with her six older siblings, laid roots in Dearborn’s south end, an area known for its pollution-emitting factory smoke stacks and community of Arab Americans seeking the “American Dream.”
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As a Psychology major, Jacob Goss started looking into careers in the mental health field. Yet, the more he investigated the field, the more he had reservations, especially after getting a regular dose of the day-to-day from his girlfriend Jessica Meyerson, a licensed school counselor. The one takeaway he heard loud and clear was that you can't help someone who doesn’t want to help themself.
Since he was a kid, Cooley Dean’s Fellow Thomas Gildner knew that a legal career was something he might like to do as a career. Easy to understand since his father was an attorney.
As hard as it was to leave family and friends in Los Angeles, California to attend Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, Adriana Burga knew it was the right decision. She also knew it wasn’t going to be forever since she planned to return to her home state but knew in her heart that she needed to be in a place where she could “settle down for a little bit and take a break from big city life” for law school.
If you were to ask Darrin Robinson at age 14 where he saw himself professionally, he would have said firmly that it would be in the field of medicine. But that plan got derailed when he accepted a position in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Student Mechanical Engineer serving at the U.S. Navy’s Naval Underwater Warfare Center.
Sumayya Saleh’s Syrian parents, Bilal and Abida Saleh, immigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s, seeking opportunity after their families had been forced to flee oppression in Syria. When her parents arrived in the United States, they married in Tennessee, had two daughters, Layla and Aamena, then moved to Florida and had twin girls, Maryam and Sumayya. The children learned their parents’ heritage and their story of oppression and immigration, and experienced firsthand what injustice looked like in this country. It would certainly inform their lives growing up, but it turned into a passion when it became personal.
Cooley Law School student Mya Hurwitz never really thought about what she wanted to do as a career as she was growing up, but she absolutely understood that her parents expected her to be a doctor or a lawyer. It’s almost cliché in many families, and Hurwitz was no different as she began her career journey.
All her life, Sarah Tanner was never one to get herself pigeonholed into one way of thinking. In fact, she always had a healthy love for debate.
When Cooley Law School student Kyndal Midkiff was younger, her mother worked in a small law firm in Palm Harbor, Florida, with an “amazing attorney.” She thought it was a cool environment and was impressed by how the attorney interacted with his clients and how appreciative and thankful those clients were with his care.
“It was just a feeling,” said Cooley Law School student Courtney Yonker, when she tried to explain how she ended up going to law school and why she chose Cooley Law School. At first the thought of law school was scary, but then she remembered that her father, Marc Yonker, not only got through law school, but has loved his career ever since. “It’s just like what you see in the movies when everyone talks about law school, it’s like this nightmare,” explained Yonker. “I used to hear everyone talk about the cold calling in class, and, oh my gosh, it seemed so terrifying. But then I thought of my dad who went to law school – he went to Cooley’s Lansing campus – and he had such a great experience.”
