Driven by her curiosity, Yesenia Jimenez has not shied away from following her interests. She knew she wanted to attend law school since childhood. As the daughter of Mexican immigrant parents, she witnessed firsthand how the immigration system affected her family and felt called to help her community navigate its complexities.

Jimenez is a first-generation college graduate from Harvard University, where she studied Government and Romance Languages. She served as a Peer Advising Fellow and as a Pedagogy Fellow, developing resources to help students from underrepresented backgrounds succeed in college. She also interned at the Public Defender’s Service for the District of Columbia where she worked as an intern investigator for a summer. Jimenez wrote her honors thesis on the perceptions of political cooperation between the Black and Latinx communities in Detroit. “The experience inspired me to merge my passion for community-oriented advocacy and research,” she says.

After graduating, Jimenez received a fellowship to research criminal and migration policy in Paris, where she had studied abroad. While she developed her research skills, she wrestled with the tension of working in an abstract space, one where she could not make a direct impact on migrant communities. She returned a year later to work at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, serving unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody. ”I witnessed the significant impact of regulatory noncompliance that institutional actors can have when it goes unchecked,” she says.

Jimenez started law school at Wayne State University Law School, where she realized her initial plan to work in immigration law that made her pursue law school had evolved. Jimenez wanted to take her experience from working day-to-day with a myriad of legal and regulatory issues and apply it to oversight. This led her to clerk for the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee for Congressional Oversight during her 1L summer. She worked on multiple investigations during her time on the Hill, but the highlight was working on the hearing covering the policy compliance and safety issues due to the United Network of Organ Sharing’s (UNOS) oversight over the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). The experience changed her trajectory and motivated her to return to D.C. to work in public service.

As Jimenez considered options for a transfer, Vanderbilt stood out to her for several reasons: the school’s Law and Government Program, community-oriented approach, and national presence and pipeline to D.C.

Her 2L year “felt like a 1.5 year,” as she learned her way around the school and became acquainted with the Vanderbilt community. Jimenez met several times with Professor Ganesh Sitaraman, who taught her Regulatory State course, about careers in administrative law and the government agencies and departments that aligned with her interests. She found herself immersed in classes that furthered her interest in constitutional law and constitutional history, such as Professor Daniel Sharfstein’s Federal Indian Law course and Professor Francesca Procaccini’s Judicial Review Seminar.

She clerked with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Division of Enforcement during her 2L summer, working on cases involving securities and investor fraud. Their robust internship program offered her opportunities to meet with people working on different issues in the Commission. She met with members of the litigation team and the Fraud Against Minority Groups Initiative to learn more about their work and the paths they pursued to do the work they do now. She found opportunities to sit on the closed commission meetings insightful; “I was able to see the different perspectives and discussions had.”

Jimenez describes her third year as “phenomenal,” because she has been able to take full advantage of the courses and experiential opportunities available. She is a student attorney in the First Amendment Clinic and a fellow in the Academic Success Fellows Program, offering peer mentorship for students. She is also a fellow in the Cal Turner Program on Moral Leadership, a program that brings together students from the various graduate schools to discuss moral and ethical dilemmas in our professions. As a research assistant for Professor and Associate Dean Lisa Bressman, Jimenez has helped with multiple papers.

Jimenez is looking forward to graduating and beginning her clerkship with Judge Diana Saldaña, a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Laredo. “As a Latina myself, I am excited to clerk for Judge Saldaña, one of the few Latina judges serving on the federal bench who has a long career in public service,” she says. Additional clerkships pique her interest. She is a part of The Appellate Project, a mentorship program for underrepresented students who are interested in appellate work, through which she’s been paired with a Vanderbilt alum and trial attorney at the Department of Justice. As a first-generation law student, she is grateful to be a part of a network of students and mentors from similar backgrounds who have navigated this path and can offer guidance.

“If there’s a theme in my varied history, it’s that I like to follow the thread,” she explains. “Whatever interest comes up, I tend to follow it all the way, because there’s so much out there.”