This is the sixth in a continuing weekly series of blog posts about the work of Marquette Law School’s Office of Student Affairs. The first, second, third, fourth, and fifth can be found at the included links.

The work and responsibilities of a student affairs team look different from university to university and even from law school to law school. Each is organized in a way that makes sense for a particular student body, curriculum, and school.

At Marquette Law School, the Office Student Affairs is responsible for, among other things, orientation programming, the Academic Success Program, registrar services, student organizations, wellness initiatives, disability services, social media, exam administration, and graduation planning; in other words, we cover ground from orientation to graduation. (Dean Kearney’s opening post to this series introduces you to the members of the office—including, well, me—who do this work, along with Associate Dean Nadelle Grossman, who oversees academic affairs and, as my boss, ultimately our whole operation.) Supporting students as they pursue a legal education is at the heart of what we do.

And, in this regard, we are hardly the only ones within Eckstein Hall to do so. So allow me to break from our “regular programming” to note the collaborative work of a number of colleagues—individuals and teams—all of whom support students in their challenges, work, and pursuits. That is to say, their work also directly involves our students’ affairs.

As her title alone implies, Associate Dean for Enrollment and Inclusion and Professor of Law Vada Waters Lindsey wears a seemingly endless array of hats—from overseeing our admissions process to serving as a tax law professor. She leads our inclusion work and also serves as chair of the faculty’s Diversity Committee. In this regard (or these regards) Dean Lindsey holds regular weekly office hours for all interested students, she invites them to have conversations about what they’re experiencing and learning, she listens, and she shares. She is a trusted collaborator and advisor to colleagues and students alike.

As for where to go next, there are a lot of possibilities. The Academic Success Program has a special place in my heart, but it’s not the only place where our students receive skill-building support—far from it. Director of Bar Preparation Katie Pagel and Writing Specialist Darek Ciemniewski (or “Dr. C,” as he is known to our students) stand at the ready to provide students with the individualized tools they need to succeed on everything from a first-year legal-writing assignment to a post-graduation bar exam for students who do not intend to practice in Wisconsin. Whenever I talk with a student who is taking one of Professor Pagel’s classes or working with Dr. C, there is never a shortage of praiseworthy adjectives used to describe the experience.

Keeping with colleagues who meet, as a matter of course and dedication, one-on-one with each of their students, it makes sense to turn next to the Law School’s esteemed Legal Writing Faculty. Each professor of legal writing brings a different style to the classroom, but all offer their students an education in one of the most important skills acquired in law school. In addition to their classroom instruction, they review drafts of students’ work, meet regularly for conferences with individual students, and get to know our students in a particularly close way. They are also often colleagues who notice and reach out when something is wrong, if someone has stopped showing up, or (it’s not all bad) if someone has shown great strides in his or her work.

The teaching librarians and staff of the Eckstein Law Library are a constant, student-focused presence in Eckstein Hall. Our library has no walls, after all. What this means is, among other things, that students always have a friendly face, right there across the Zilber Forum at the Circulation and Reference desks. You’ll also see members of the knowledgeable Law Library team teaching students core skills in Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research and Advanced Legal Research courses; serving as helpful, calming proctors for 1L final exams; and—if you venture across campus—you might even catch some of them at the Marquette Annex, bowling for their—our—winning team, Split Decisions.

When you need to find a lost computer file, when you cannot hear what presenters are saying in the Lubar Center, when a professor needs help setting up a recording, or—prepare yourself for this one—when your computer dies in the middle of an exam, who you gonna call? Why, the Law School’s Media and Technology Group, of course. Located in suite 218, this three-person team doesn’t just fix our tech problems. They also keep things running smoothly in the first place—things that I don’t quite understand and am all the more grateful to the Media and Tech team for not having to.

Marquette Law School’s nationally acclaimed Sports Law Program is more than a series of stellar courses, internships, events, and conferences. It’s a close and caring network of which participating students instantly become a part. The program’s invested leadership, faculty, and alumni help develop Marquette law students into future leaders in the field. But one of the most impressive things about the Sports Law Program is the way that students support and help develop other students. As it happens here, students, too, are in students’ affairs.

Much like the Office of Student Affairs, the Career Planning Center (CPC) and the Office of Public Service (OPS) both have their own programmatic initiatives and services. At our best, the Law School’s various administrative offices act as limbs of the same body, referring students appropriately or making a handoff when the other limb can help a student. It happens often that I talk with a student about deploying (or perhaps I should say employing) the services of the CPC or boosting her confidence in her professional skills by participating in a Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic hosted by OPS.

It might be easy to think that magical elves keep our building humming, the Student Success Program sandwiches coming, and the Zilber Forum configured and reconfigured again in a matter of minutes for various large-scale events. But the Law School’s facilities and events team and the Tory Hill Café’s catering team are behind much of it. This past Friday, I ran into a couple of students who asked if they could still come into Eckstein Hall to study over the weekend, despite there being an admissions event planned. I said, “Of course, this is your law school.” And as I reflect on that moment now, our students’ law school is a place where they want to be not least because of our law school’s facilities team.

Even our “centers,” which might be understood as substantially external facing, are deeply involved in student life. Barely 14 months ago, Dean Kearney welcomed former City of Milwaukee Municipal Court Presiding Judge Derek Mosley, L’95, back to the Law School, as director of the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. And former Milwaukee County Circuit Court Chief Judge Mary Triggiano took on the role of director of the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice at just the beginning of this academic year. Each, together with center colleagues, has infused joy, energy, and a wealth of community knowledge into the Law School. Each already is a force in the lives of our students, welcoming them to our Milwaukee community and introducing them to new people, stories, and skills.

I have saved for last an inclusive mention of all of our caring faculty members. Whether full-time or part-time, whether teaching doctrine or focusing on skills, these are the individuals with whom our students spend the most time. But even setting aside the classroom, it’s not at all uncommon to find a faculty member taking the time to attend a student organization’s event, stopping to talk with a table of students in the Zilber Forum, checking up on a student after something has or may have happened, and, yes, letting others know when they believe a student can use a resource or assistance. Those are among the moments and kindnesses that often stick with our graduates, long after they have moved on from Eckstein Hall.

None of us can (or would want to) do the work of supporting students alone. As I hope is plain to see, at Marquette Law School, in one way, or another, we are all concerned with and dedicated to our students’ affairs. As someone who works in the Law School’s Office of Student Affairs, I’m so grateful to be a part of a community where that is the case.

This is the fifth in a continuing series of weekly blog posts this semester about the work of Marquette Law School’s Office of Student Affairs. The opening post, like this one by Dean Joseph Kearney, can be found here; subsequent posts can be found here, here, and here.

Mentorship is a word that is heard a lot in the legal profession. Whatever else might be required for successful mentorship, it takes work to create an environment in which real relationships can form and appropriate counsel is offered and received.

Without doubting that there is much mentorship at the Law School, the Office of Student Affairs has assumed a particular portfolio in this sphere, with a good deal of the work being done by the student co-chairs of the Marquette Law Mentorship (MLM) Program. Under the leadership of Assistant Dean Anna Fodor, the office started the program in 2017, on the premise that if we should have a well-organized program, supported by the Office of Student Affairs and led each year by a pair of dedicated, skilled, and community-oriented upper-level students, the program would have a pretty good shot at succeeding.

So who better than this year’s MLM co-chairs, third-year students Isaiahs Luna and Courtney Tarnow, to describe the program and some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into it? Here’s an interview of sorts, lightly edited, with Isaiahs and Courtney. Permit me as dean to extend my deep and sincere thanks to them—and to all of our past MLM co-chairs—for the time and work they have put into building, growing, and sustaining this important program at Marquette Law School.

In your words, what is the Marquette Law Mentorship Program?

Isaiahs: The Marquette Law Mentorship Program is a community-focused mission to foster professional and personal relationships within the Law School. The program allows upperclassmen and women to provide unique guidance that is personal to the first-year law student. The pairings are based on interests in the law, hometowns, and extracurricular activities, just to name a few factors.

Courtney: The Marquette Law Mentorship Program is an initiative designed to connect first-year law students with their upper-level peers to provide guidance, support, and camaraderie during their law school journey. Mentors offer insights, advice, and encouragement to their mentees, helping them adjust to the demands of law school and integrate into the greater law school community.

Overall, MLM aims to foster a sense of community and collaboration among law students, while also providing valuable peer support to allow first-year students to thrive both academically and personally during their time at Marquette.

Can you please describe your role as a co-chair of MLM?

Courtney: As an MLM co-chair, my role involves overseeing and coordinating various aspects of the mentorship program to ensure that the program is a success. Throughout the summer and fall semester, I worked closely with both my co-chair, Isaiahs, and Dean Fodor to advertise the program, train mentors, pair mentors and mentees, and schedule our Kick-Off Event.

Isaiahs: As co-chair of the Mentorship Program, there is a collaborative effort between you, your co-chair, and Dean Fodor. With Dean Fodor, we scheduled the Kick-Off Event and provided training for mentors. This was to ensure that mentors could provide the best guidance for first-year law students. We advised the mentors of the various resources that Marquette Law has available to students, and we had the potential mentors examine hypothetical situations a mentor might come across.

Of course, the most fun aspect of our role as co-chairs is to make the pairings. Courtney and I reserved a seminar room and, working from the forms that the students submitted, paired all the students who had signed up to participate in the program. It was a long process (around 12 hours), but we wanted to make sure everyone’s pairing was as perfect as it could be.

Community-building organizations must be energizing for you to enjoy the process and make them a success. Despite the long hours, we left that day even more excited for the program to get underway.

When matching mentors with mentees, what qualities or interests did you prioritize?

Isaiahs: Before anything else, I always checked if the mentor/mentee requested a certain characteristic or quality about their potential mentor/mentee in their form (for example, a 1L might request that their mentor be a person of color with a similar background). Next, I wanted to make sure out-of-staters were paired together (say, California mentors with California mentees) so they could begin to find a new community in Wisconsin right away. Then, I focused on the type of law the student was interested in. This was followed by taking into consideration any student organizations the first-year student wanted to be a part of.

Courtney: There were several qualities and interests that we prioritized while matching mentors and mentees to ensure there would be successful and meaningful connections. As Isaiahs mentioned, to start, we looked at the specific mentor and mentee requests. For example, some students requested not to be paired with someone specific because they already knew them well, or some students requested that their mentor be from out of state because they were also from out of state. After we paired up everyone who had made specific requests, we typically looked at interests such as area of law, student organizations, and other non-academic interests.

What was the hardest part about the matching process?

Courtney: The hardest part of the matching process was trying to balance and to work with the various information we had, to ensure everyone had the best match possible. In some instances, based on how much a student had provided, we had very little information to work with. That made it somewhat difficult to ensure that we were making a good pairing.

Isaiahs: I completely agree. The hardest part about the matching process really was the lack of diversity in some answers. To provide an example, there were many people who listed transactional law as the type of law they wanted to practice, but they did not provide any other information about their interests or background. So when all the transactional-law-interested mentees were paired up, we had a tough time pairing up transactional-law-interested mentors who had not provided additional information, beyond their interest in that practice. For students interested in participating in the future, we especially encourage them to share some further information about what makes them unique—from a random hobby to their major in college.

What do you hope mentees get out of MLM?

Isaiahs: At a minimum, a connection—whether professional or social. I think a connection is important to start law school. I continue to keep in contact with my mentor, who’s now graduated, and she continues to guide me throughout law school. More importantly, she has become a friend for life.

Courtney: The one thing I hope that every mentee gets out of their participation with MLM is a stronger sense of belonging and connection within the law school community. One of my favorite things about Marquette is that we have such a strong, collaborative community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, and I hope that through MLM, mentees are able to feel like they truly belong here, right from the start.

What do you hope mentors get out of MLM?

Courtney: I hope that mentors will, first and foremost, experience personal satisfaction from their participation in MLM. Additionally, I think being a mentor is a great way to develop leadership and communication skills, expand your personal network, and contribute to enhancing the law school community.

How do you think the law school community, as a whole, benefits from the program?

Isaiahs: A sense of community. Given how interconnected the Milwaukee legal market is, it is important we establish a positive community from the first chance we have—and that starts at law school.

Courtney: The law school community as a whole benefits from MLM in a few significant ways. First, MLM cultivates a culture of support and collaboration within the Law School by facilitating relationships between students. Second, MLM promotes networking and relationship building. Mentors and mentees can develop meaningful connections beyond the mentorship relationship and allow for a network among current and future legal professionals. Third, MLM helps promote professional development for both mentors and mentees.

What has been your favorite part of serving as an MLM co-chair?

 Courtney: My favorite part about serving as an MLM co-chair has been the successful matches. There is nothing that makes me happier than seeing mentors and mentees together at school, getting dinner together, going to bar review, etc.

Isaiahs: I have to agree with Courtney. It’s the successful matches. When people come up to me and say, “Hey, I really loved my [mentor/mentee],” it brings me so much joy.

Any parting thoughts as you prepare to graduate?

Isaiahs: I cannot thank Dean Fodor enough for her belief in me. I look back to my 1L year, and I look back with joy and awe at all the opportunities I have come across. And, truly, it starts with Dean Fodor. Her unwavering support throughout my time here will never be forgotten. I would not be where I am without her (I almost transferred back to California), and I only wish to give back to the Marquette Law community as much I received. I am grateful.

Courtney: As I prepare to graduate, I’ve reflected a lot on my time at Marquette, both for undergrad and law school. Marquette has provided me with so many amazing experiences, and I can’t thank Dean Fodor enough for giving me the opportunity to participate in MLM, as a mentee, mentor, and now as co-chair. This process was so challenging but also so rewarding, and I am grateful to have been a part of it.