Hometown: Fresno, California
Undergraduate: Indiana University, Bloomington
Major: English

Heather Thomas may call herself “an accidental journalist,” but she’s one law student with a drive that’s anything but accidental.

A native of South Bend, Indiana (Go, Notre Dame!), Heather moved to Fresno three years ago to work as a copy editor and page designer with the Fresno Bee. While she never intended to move this far west – assuming she’d end up in Chicago, Indianapolis or New York – the lure of California’s mountains, oceans and desert proved inescapable.

During seven years in newspaper work, she covered school board meetings, criminal court proceedings and features, and slugged countless headlines. Her innate drive is perhaps best evidenced by her follow-through while covering an accident story. “I actually tracked police down at the hospital after they slipped away at the scene. I don't know if they expected a reporter standing there, knocking on their car window, notebook in hand, asking for information!” Exhibit B may be the playful teasing she received by colleagues for the bruises on her arm from the year she played tackle football with the National Women's Football Association. She is a violinist who enjoys tackling a Tchaikovsky or Beethoven symphony. And she finally beat the last stage in Rad Racer – the classic 8-bit Nintendo game from the 80’s.

Heather’s “a-ha” moment for law is really what she calls “eight years of moments!” While flipping through a friends’ LSAT study booklet, she found the word problems riveting and decided to research the profession. The work of public interest lawyers particularly struck her – “winning rights where there were none, giving voice to the segments traditionally without one,” she says.

But before heading to law school, she accepted an internship as a legal research and writing intern with Central California Legal Services in Fresno, which specializes in farm worker assistance. “Suddenly, I was thrown into a world where every word had a far more precise meaning than I had ever assigned to it,” she says. And when I would hear that my extremely minuscule contribution to a larger writ helped get it heard by the judge, I was flooded with pride.”

Heather’s journey to Pacific McGeorge involved many factors – geography among the top – and also the fact that Pacific McGeorge is also “a respected school, with a good percentage of graduates going into government work or public interest work, two areas I'd like to end up in.” Eventually, Heather would like to represent a nonprofit whose mission she believes in a position she knows is many years down the line. But if her persistence to get the story or to finish Rad Racer is any indication, she is a woman who believes the future is “only limited if a person is unwilling to try new things.”