Under Oath

This episode is about Gavin Nicholson, the Legislative Director at the Texas House of Representatives for Representative Carl Sherman. Gavin Nicholson is also a current law student at the University of North Texas at Dallas and in the past has been a campaign manager as well. In this episode, he discusses his work as a campaign manager while being in school, his experience as a 1L, and much more!

In this episode, Kavya has a conversation with the pre-law advisor, Dr.Kirby. She is currently the pre-law advisor at UTD and the Director of Moot Court. Dr. Kirby graduated from SMU in 1983 with her JD and then did her PHD in political science in 2015. Dr.Kirby talks about the law school application process, gives some insider info into law school admissions and stats, and also gives pre-law students advice on the legal career path!

This episode features Judge Elizabeth Emmanuel who is a Judge for the Fulton County Magistrate Court. In this episode she discusses working as a law clerk at the Georgia Criminal Court of Appeals and about the process of becoming a judge while working as one in todays world.

In this episode, host Kavya talks to Sufia Khalid, a legal fellow who works in the criminal defense divison of the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America (CCLMA). As a legal fellow, Khalid drafts documents for federal and appellate courts. In the past, she has worked closely with the CLCMA directors on cases of national security and terrorism.

Noorhan Chahal is a UTD alumna who, after graduating in Summer 2021, decided to take a gap year. Listen as she discusses why this was the right decision for her, and the work she’s currently doing as a paralegal with alliantgroup, a national tax consulting services firm.

Season 2 Episode 1 (Back to school with Veda and Kavya): Veda Tsai is a senior interdisciplinary studies major at UTD and is involved in various pre-law extracurriculars such as Mock Trial, Moot Court Mediation and the Archer Fellowship in the spring while maintaining a very high gpa. Veda is someone that any pre-law student would look up to as a mentor and in this episode she mentors our sophomore Economics major host Kavya Venugopalan.  We discussed her experience in each of these but also how she manages to maintain her gpa, study tips, mental health tips, what made her pursue law and what she wants to do post grad!

The 8th episode of under oath features Natalie Ossenfort, the program coordinator for the Innocence project at UTD and has been doing so for the past 10 years. This episode will discuss her pov of working through different cases in depth with The innocence project.In the innocence project, she helps students with wrongful conviction and helps them evaluate the causes and effects and also helps supervise student investigations of inmates claims of innocence. She is also working as a director at Alliance for Justice which Provides advocacy capacity building and rules-based training to nonprofit organizations doing good work to impact public policy in Texas (and elsewhere). For her undergrad, she attended Trinity University and graduated in 2004 with her B.A. in political science and then graduated from Texas Wesleyan Law School in 2007 with her J.D

This episode features Nancy Fairbank and Brooke E. Lopez who are current law students at Harvard Law school and UNT school of Law. Nancy is the founder of Dear Future Colleague while Brooke is the founder of the Lone Star Parity Project. Dear Future Colleague is a Nonprofit which works to provide mentorship and support underrepresented law school applicants. Lone Star Parity Project is an organization that promotes women and femmes in Texas politics. They both talk about their extra-curricular at UTD, what made them go into law school and what made them start their projects.

If you liked Aisha Noor’s part 1 episode on her journey into corporate law, In the second and final part of the series she discusses her life as a law student in the university of chicago school of law and goes into talking about her experience as a muslim-american in law. She also gives more of her amazing insight to pre-law students like us who want to go into her field.

This episode features utd alumni Aisha Noor, who is an associate attorney at Kirkland and Ellis. She graduated from UTD in 2012 with her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and her master’s in public affairs in 2013. At UTD she was involved in various extracurriculars from the Innocence Project to the Archer Fellowship Program, where she worked as a curatorial intern at the Supreme Court. After her master’s, she went on to pursue a JD at the University of Chicago Law School and graduated in 2017.