Student Spotlight: Carlo Rodes '09
I was not one of those kids who grew up dreaming about the day they would be able to attend the University of Notre Dame, let alone their law school. In fact, leaving sunny southern California to move to South Bend, Indiana, is about the last thing this Los Angeles native was dreaming about. After graduating from college I took two years off to manage a bar and subsequently work for the American Cancer Society. I didn’t even know I wanted to go to law school until about a year and a few months before my first day here. However, coming to law school at Notre Dame might have been the best decision I ever made.
Until I went to college, I had always attended smaller Catholic private schools. I enjoyed the sense of community and the mutual respect that seemed to be fostered in such environments. Though I would never go back on my decision to attend Berkeley, I never felt like part of the campus community. It was missing the intimacy that I was used to. This became even more obvious after my first few weeks here at ND.
I was reminded of what it was like to have professors who were actually interested in getting to know you. I was amazed at how wrong Scott Turow’s “One L” was about how law students interacted with each other. There are few egos here at the law school. I have never once encountered a student who was not willing to help another for fear of damaging his or her own ranking. That might be either because this school does not rank its students or the students here would simply rather help than hurt their peers. In any event, it has made law school all the more painless. Study groups are plenty and outlines and study guides flow like water from student to student. This type of support was present even during the crucial and tremendously stressful interview season that occurs during the beginning of the second year. Despite everyone chasing after the same jobs with the same firms, there was never a sense of animosity—only one of cooperation.
Currently, I am an article editor for the Notre Dame Law Review, a research assistant for a professor, and am in the midst of planning my wedding to my beautiful fiancée Amy who I met here and is a 2L as well. At the end of this school year, Amy and I are on our way to summer associate positions with two Los Angeles law firms where we will hopefully be given offers for permanent employment. Life is certainly busy in law school, and at times can be downright miserable, but with the supportive community of peers, professors, and friends that Notre Dame has to offer, I could not imagine myself anywhere else.
—Carlo Rodes, Class of 09
