Isabel Zagazeta is a 3L J.D. candidate and Dean’s Fellow at Cooley Law School in Tampa, Florida. Originally from Canada, she earned her undergraduate degree at Wilfrid Laurier University before moving to Florida to study law at Cooley. She has earned book awards, served on Law Review, mentored incoming students, and was part of Cooley’s Moot Court team that recently won first place at the 2026 Robert Orseck Moot Court Competition. With a passion for legal writing and healthcare compliance, Isabel is building a strong foundation for a future in law at Cooley.
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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.
Professor Emeritus Kimberly O'Leary is spending her retirement traveling around the world with her husband, Paul. While traveling, Professor O'Leary has launched an oral history project called The Gen Jones Chronicles.
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.
Adriannette Williams fights for justice as a George Floyd Foundation founding board member, updates The Florida Bar handbook and is now the DEI connector for students and faculty at Lincoln Memorial Law School.
As a shareholder of Foster Swift Collins & Smith, PC and past president of the Detroit Bar Association, Paul Millenbach shares a piece of advice that has stuck with him since graduating from Cooley Law School over 30 years ago: Be prepared.
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.
From a young age, Jayson Thomas enjoyed strategy games—and with that passion went on to earn a BBA in management with minors in marketing and entrepreneurial studies from the University of Mississippi.
