Naseam Jabberi
Naseam is a J.D. candidate who hopes to pursue a legal career that focuses on human rights.
Naseam Jabberi started looking into her options for law school when she was still at Florida State University and narrowed her focus to the Washington D.C. region because of an interest in human rights law.
Naseam applied to The University of Baltimore School of Law and scholarship offers inspired her to take a tour.
"When I really looked into UBalt, it just felt like the best fit for me. I really liked how their clinical programs work here and I felt a really big sense of community when I came and did a tour here that I didn't feel at some of the other schools that I had gotten into."
Naseam is far more than a J.D. candidate at UBalt; she is also staff editor for UBalt Law Forum, vice president for the International Law Society, fundraising coordinator for the Student Bar Association and secretary of the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association.
"Coming from out of state, I was really worried about not meeting new people, not making those friends and those connections, but I think not just UBalt, but also the law school in general, really strives to get people together and get close and really come out of your shell," she says. "It kind of transforms you as a person."
Helping her pursue her interest in human rights law, Naseam is doing an externship through UBalt with Human Rights First in Washington, D.C.
"Their focus in the department I'm working in is to almost right the wrongs that people face in other countries, helping them get asylum in America after they face so much injustice where they are," she says. "I would like to do work in that field. I am a daughter of refugees. My parents came here from Iran after having to escape the country. I feel like it's very close to home for me."
Eventually Naseamwants to work with people that face similar injustices and work to prevent those injustices in the future for others.
The UBalt School of Law offers an Immigrants' Rights Clinic Fellowship in which she hopes to participate. She's already taken classes on immigration law and international law, and received the director's award in the law school's Center for International and Comparative Law in spring 2020.
"You see that there are nations that aren't following those accountability standards and so there are people that are unfortunately in those places that are facing these violations, so how is the international community coming together to solve the crises that people are in simply because of where they're from?" Naseam questions. "I took those two classes together last semester and I think it was a good way of seeing how the international community plays out and how we're almost working to fix those issues."