Great Lakes

Beaver Island is the first place I ever smiled. I was born in June of 1998 and went up there for the first time that summer. My grandpa was an educational psychologist, and he spent that first vacation in our cabin doing little experiments, like showing me different toys to see my reactions, slowly drawing that smile out of me. Every summer afterward, I would go up to the cabin and look onto Lake Michigan through the expansive back windows. I had never visited an ocean before, so Lake Michigan always seemed incomprehensibly vast. My grandma would tell me stories about famous shipwrecks, and on nights when it would storm, you could hear the waves crashing from the living room. At night, we would sit around the firepit and look up at the stars as the Perseid meteor shower dazzled above us. Surrounding us, we could hear the lake lapping at the shore, and life felt very peaceful.

I love the Great Lakes. It’s interesting that one of the most wonderful parts of America’s nature is overlooked by a large swath of people. My friends from the coasts are genuinely surprised when I show them pictures of beaches on Beaver Island, marveling that it looks “just like an ocean.” Being from a “flyover state,” I was raised to appreciate things other people overlook, or even look down on. Simple things in life are sometimes just as nice as the “fancier” things. Growing up, the big event of the summer I would look forward to was our local Sweet Corn Festival; now, in DC, I can take the Metro to go see Van Gogh paintings for free. I now live in an apartment building where I can watch the sunset over the Capitol from my roof, but nothing beats the beauty of driving through cornfields at sunset back home. I really appreciate the adaptability my background has provided me. I feel equally at home in an upscale restaurant in the heart of our nation’s capital as I do in a cheap dive in rural America. This perspective from my upbringing, along with my background in research, has also allowed me to approach new situations and people with an open mind. I make up my own mind about stuff—and always remember that there are other worthwhile perspectives outside of conventional wisdom.

I think I also love the Great Lakes because they were one of my introductions to the nuances of administrative law. Growing up, I was aware of some of the issues plaguing the Great Lakes. Water levels would get too low, and sludge would form on the beaches. When I was in middle school and would take an inordinate amount of time in the shower, my dad would yell up to me jokingly that he just saw on the news that the water levels in Lake Michigan had dropped a couple of inches since I got in. But it wasn’t until I took a class on the Great Lakes in college that I really began to consider how the government and laws interact with these issues. The Great Lakes are interstate, economically important waters. All states and federal agencies might want the same thing, like the long-delayed project to prevent the invasive Asian carp from impacting the environment of the lakes. And yet the murky incentive structure created by federal laws and processes can delay or even prevent solutions from being implemented despite broad agreement. Now that I’ve spent more time thinking about the administration of laws, I understand how even well-thought out decisions can lead to deadlock over a technicality.

I’m interested in those areas of the law that might be considered “flyover issues.” I love listening to the debates at the Howard Institute about which policy might be better in areas such as the environment, healthcare, and foreign policy. But, for myself, I prefer focusing my attention on the structural and institutional procedures that have the possibility to make these policies a reality. When working on issues as president of my union, I love the feeling of being able to help a member work through a problem because I know the exact best way to navigate our management’s structure and the provisions of our contract to give them the best possible outcome. To me, this is even more engaging than debating the optimal cost of living adjustment or the specifics of our healthcare policy. I feel that my “flyover state” background is beneficial to this passion—I’ve learned to keep an open mind on a lot of things, to focus on process over agenda. When deciding whether to pursue law school, I spoke with a former member of the House Office of Legislative Counsel who described to me how he would write a bill on a topic and then write the amendments for the minority party attacking that same bill using his knowledge about the area of law and House procedure to advise an approach. I was excited to learn how law degrees can be used in this way— to focus on the procedures of legislatures and intended outcomes at a level that rises above specific policy debates. At Harvard, I want to focus not on the issues and topics that get the most attention, but rather add a voice to the processes and procedures that make the most impact