Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Undergraduate: University of Southern California
Major: Philosophy

After a brief career in hedge funds, a casual drink with a former law colleague led Joanna Armstrong to quench her latent thirst for law.

Armstrong recalls a very quiet early life. Initially from Corvallis, Oregon, the family moved to the rural town of Battle Ground, Washington, before high school. If horticulture, agriculture and auto shop were her interests, Joanna would have been well-positioned. In that environment, she hadn’t even heard of AP classes. “We weren’t expected to read, think critically or write papers in high school,” she says. “I had to learn all that my first year at USC and catch up to everyone else.”

Since struggling to find a balance between her big dreams and small beginnings, she is mapping a path to holistic success. At USC, she formed her own official campus group dedicated to upholding Buddhist values. A vegetarian since she was three, Joanna is also committed to lifelong health, nutrition and exercise, and even took up running – “one exercise I swore I’d never do!” For her first half marathon, she “was somehow able to go from a total anti-runner to a half marathon finisher in five weeks. That was pretty cool!” She ran six more that first year, including a 10k mud run at the Camp Pendleton military training base. Joanna has also picked up snowboarding, surfing, rappelling, kayaking and white-water rafting, and is constantly searching for new experiences.

Her path to law school began at a law firm where she worked for three years, followed by a stint with a hedge fund, trading in the markets. After a few years, her true passion for law was reignited over a cocktail with a partner from her previous job. “He saw how miserable I was. He asked why in the world I wasn’t applying to law school. It slapped me out of my daze, and the next week I started looking into law schools,” she says.

Joanna didn’t seriously consider Pacific McGeorge until Legal Scholars Day where the presentations, facilities, administrators and professors impressed her. What really grabbed her attention was “the sense of flexibility and openness to new ideas and different career paths.” The visit left her impressed that Pacific McGeorge was “less like a cookie cutter factory and willing to help students craft their education and career to their needs.” This becomes an important consideration as she concurrently pursues a Masters in dispute resolution from Pepperdine during summer breaks, a program she hopes to have approved as a joint degree. Regarding future law careers, Joanna is keeping her options open – but so long as those options lead in the direction of defending human rights and civil liberties here and abroad, everything will be zen.