First-generation law student B. Alvarez aims to be a community-minded lawyer in everything she does

When B. Alvarez received the 2019 Hispanic Lawyers Scholarship Fund of Illinois, she brought her grandpa to the awards dinner—and he spent all night taking pictures of the event. “He said, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be in a building this nice again,’” says Alvarez. “And I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m going to have a really great job. You’re going to be in buildings like this all the time.’”

Alvarez’s personal history constantly shapes her goal of becoming a community-minded lawyer. Here she talks about three experiences that have influenced her law career so far.

Eyes Open 

As a senior at Oberlin College, Alvarez says a semester in a border studies program in Tucson, Arizona, opened her eyes to the history of United States and Latin American relations. She learned about Operation Streamline, a Homeland Security process in which 20 or more people are shackled together for their criminal proceedings and quickly tried one by one. “People meet their attorneys an hour before the proceeding,” says Alvarez. “There’s a need for attorneys who want to do that work. And I was like, ‘I want to help fill that need.’”