Samantha Cane

Samantha describes herself as living in the aftermath. As an out-of-state student, she took the necessary steps to become self-supporting in order to become a California resident and not leave the burden of her education on her mother. “The academic and personal achievements I embody (and continue to strive for) now can only be understood through my ambitious, demanding journey for financial independence while I remained determined to pursue an education in a rigorous academic climate during my sophomore year. I live with the consequences of my actions, and I ask myself what does it mean to live in the aftermath of a goal that consumed your entire life for a year? I found that the answer is simple: the more I continue to invest in myself, the more I will achieve.”

For most of her life, Samantha never had a long-term plan because she hadn’t found her niche. She liked reading so much, that she found a way to extend her hobby into a fulfilling practice: argumentative writing and literary analysis. As a literature undergraduate, she realizes her goals are to utilize her reading comprehension and analytical inquisition to propose arguments and decipher law. She likes the challenge of understanding written law and procedures because it will allow her to help people who are often disadvantaged by its complexity. “In my community service internship, it’s common to see that people do not know how to navigate the legal system. Not only are many unfamiliar with the procedures for pre/post-hearings, but they don’t know how to advocate for themselves. For the specific department that I work in, the petitioner must describe their circumstances and prove why they need a protective order. It’s jarring how significantly a life can change based on what details they choose to put in their declaration. Time and time again, if I hadn’t intervened and approached the litigant with proper follow-up questions, or simply hadn’t been there to clear up confusions, then these peoples’ lives would have changed drastically, some for the worse. I hope that I can continue to be an important resource for the people in my career.”

As a literature major, Samantha has taken careful consideration of remarkable works that feature unreliable narrators, misleading plots, and double-edged meanings that confound interpretations with every reader. She said, “I’ve taken even further consideration in the role of translation and everything that is lost because of it. There’s no party that doesn’t misconstrue truth, whether it be the author, reader, or character. Alternatively, truth is constructed and has the capacity to be interpreted. Beyond fiction, I found this contention of truth most interesting in law. To have a career in law requires a fundamental understanding of interpretation and approach to truth and language as symbiotic.”