King Hall Welcomes New KHOP Students

UC Davis School of Law welcomed 12 new students to the 2017 winter session of the King Hall Outreach Program on January 28. The winter session, which will continue on February 4, 11, and 18, will include presentations by Professor Aaron Tang, Assistant Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Kristen Mercado, Director of Financial Aid Shari King, Director of Admission and Outreach Joe Schneider, and Assistant Director of Admission Alexis Elston.

Also on the agenda are meetings with Dean Kevin R. Johnson, Senior Associate Dean Madhavi Sunder, and students Gorev Ahuja ‘17, Roza Patterson ‘18, and Juan Gamboa ’19.

"I was inspired to meet these young students, most the first in their families to go to college,” said Sunder. “They are each already quite accomplished. Now they are eager to pursue law school to further develop their knowledge and skills to help the communities that have supported and nurtured them."

Established in 2001, KHOP is a unique program that helps first-generation and economically disadvantaged college students prepare for the law school admissions process. KHOP was selected by the American Bar Association to receive the 2016 Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Award for Excellence in Pipeline Diversity. In fall 2016, six KHOP alumni started at King Hall, and the School of Law currently hosts 10 students who went through the program.

This year’s KHOP participants include students from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and San Francisco State University. They are a diverse group, including multiple first-generation college students and immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and El Salvador. Among their interests are immigration law, civil rights, business law, and public service.

Program participants include:

• Montserrat Garcia-Juarez: A junior at UC Davis majoring in Chicano/a Studies and Political Science, she serves as Co-Coordinator of Mujeres Ayudando la Raza (MAR). Having volunteered for the past three years at the UC Davis Immigration Law Clinic, and completed a one-semester internship with the UC Davis Immigration Law Clinic’s Unaccompanied/Undocumented Minors Project, it should come as no surprise that she intends to practice immigration law.
• Alexis Logan: A senior at San Francisco State University majoring in International Relations, she was a Willie Brown Fellow at the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs in San Francisco. Logan has been studying Japanese for eight years, and spent a semester abroad in Japan. As the second oldest of seven, she will be the first in her family to graduate from college.
• Calixtho Lopes: A senior at UC Berkeley majoring in Political Science, he is director/facilitator of Teach in Prison, a UC Berkeley student-led course that prepares student tutors to assist with GED course work at San Quentin State Prison. He is also the student director for the UC Berkeley Public Service Center’s East Bay Community Builders program. His interests are in local government and non-profit organizations advocating for issues centered on education, homelessness, and mass incarceration, and he aspires to be an attorney with a focus on public interest law.
• Katiuska Pimentel Vargas: A recent graduate from UC Santa Cruz majoring in Legal Studies and a native of Peru, she aspires to advocate for the rights of underserved communities. She worked as an outreach ambassador of Educators for Fair Consideration, an immigrant rights non-profit, supporting undocumented families’ access educational and legal resources. In 2016, she was a UCDC Presidential Public Service Fellow as well as the recipient of the Robert T. Matsui Congressional Fellowship.