Corrylee Drozda (’16) Receives Department of Justice Attorney General’s Honors Fellowship
Drozda, the third Immigrants’ Rights Clinic alum to receive this honor, will clerk for the San Antonio Immigration Court.
Corrylee Drozda, a 3L with Boston University School of Law, has been awarded a fellowship with the prestigious Department of Justice Attorney General’s Honors Program. As part of the Honors Program, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which has jurisdiction over immigration courts nationwide, selects graduating attorneys from across the country. Drozda will spend two years clerking in San Antonio, Texas. Selection criteria for the Honors Program includes a “demonstrated commitment to government service, academic achievement, leadership, legal aid and clinical experience, and extracurricular activities that relate to the work of Justice and the relevant component.”
Drozda is the third member of the BU Law community to be awarded the fellowship in recent years. Kate Lebeaux (’15) is currently a fellow working in Boston’s Immigration Court, and Michelle Martínez (’14), a former BU Law Public Service Fellow, was awarded the DOJ fellowship to clerk for New York City’s Immigration Court. All three have credited BU Law’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic (IRC) with providing them the experience and background necessary to achieve this honor.
A graduate of Miami University of Ohio, where she majored in International Studies and Spanish, Drozda has always been interested in social justice and working with people from other cultures. After graduation, she completed a year of service with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to get a sense of how those interests could be applied through the law. She was placed with Catholic Migration Services in New York City, helping to provide immigration legal services to residents of Queens and Brooklyn. “When I first started President Obama had just announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program,” she says, “so many of the people I helped were undocumented youth just hoping to go to college and pursue their goals. It was a really rewarding experience.”
When it came to choosing a law school, BU Law’s clinical and experiential opportunities were a big differentiator. “Of the types of law schools I was looking at, there weren’t many that offered both an international law concentration and a clinic devoted to immigration law,” she says. “It also seemed like BU Law had a strong and growing commitment to public interest law.”
Now in her final semester, Drozda is working as a research assistant with the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and appreciating her last months as a law student. “I participated in the IRC in my second year and it was by far the most significant experience of my law school career,” she says. “Sarah Sherman-Stokes [clinical instructor] and Laila Hlass [clinical associate professor of law and director of the IRC] have a ton of experience in the field and been great mentors. The combination of academic and practical experiences has made the clinic a really important experience for me.”
Outside the clinic, Drozda took advantage of BU Law’s pro bono spring break trips in her first year, traveling to Harlingen, Texas, to work with the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project. She is also on the International Law Journal and a member of the Immigration Law and Policy Society, serving as vice president in her 2L year. She spent both summers in school interning with the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago, Illinois, writing affidavits and interviewing clients to help them submit U Visa applications.
Looking forward to her fellowship, Drozda is confident she is well prepared to practice. “The clinic and my summer internships really helped me develop and build experience in immigration law,” she says. “I was given the opportunity to act as the lead, with supervision of course, on many different types of cases and responsibilities that an immigration attorney has to be familiar with, from client interviewing and counseling, written briefs and motions, to court appearances. These experiences have helped me develop my professional identity. I’ve figured out what works for my personality and leadership style and how to integrate that into my practice.”