BY ANDREA SAENZ
Fresh off winning a record-breaking number of Skadden Fellowships in December, Harvard students continue to show their dominance in collecting post-graduate public interest fellowships. Under the direction of the fellowship office and Director Judy Murciano, HLS students and alumni picked up four more fellowships in January that will fund a year’s worth of work on immigration, lending, civil rights, and environmental issues.
Two of the winners will be seeing a lot of each other. Veena Iyer ’05 and Lea Weems ’05 both received Equal Justice Works fellowships and will work at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago. Iyer, formerly on the board of the Legal Aid Bureau and currently a federal district clerk, will work in the immigration unit, while Weems, formerly an Ames Moot Court finalist and currently a clerk for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, will work in predatory lending. The two were also together on last year’s editorial board of the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Review.
Additionally, Angela Chan ’05 was awarded a Soros Fellowship to work at the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus. Chan, also clerking, is a former Truman Scholar and co-chair of APALSA. Zoe Segal-Reichlin, 3L, was awarded a Lindsay Fellowship from the National Lawyer’s Committee on Civil Rights, which only awards one fellowship a year. Segal-Reichlin will join the organization’s Environmental Justice Project, and will spend time in Mississippi and Louisiana working on environmental problems in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Segal-Reichlin offered her advice for future fellowship-seekers: “I would say, a) start early if you are thinking about applying to fellowships, because it is a very time-consuming process, and b) summers can make a difference. I worked in Mississippi my first summer, and I know that that was an important factor in getting my job for next year.”
Both Chan and Segal-Reichlin were also editors for the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Review, leading one to wonder what fellowship-attracting ingredients are in the soda in the CR-CL mini-fridge.