Recent Grads
Aidan Ely ’18
When I came to Hobart and William Smith Colleges I planned to go into political science. As I continued to take more classes, I branched out and took on a second major of American studies.
I studied abroad the spring of my junior year in Prague, Czech Republic, where my beliefs in American idealism were shattered. I encountered hundreds of new perceptions and ideas as I studied with professors that had grown up or been educated all across Europe. I then added international relations as a minor, and graduated having received the John Lydenberg Prize for American Studies Scholarship for my senior thesis on the Broadway musical Hamilton.
After graduating from HWS, I served in AmeriCorps with Legal Assistance of Western NY in Rochester, N.Y. There, I restructured their communication and development plan across the 14 counties that they serve, as well as managed outreach of a school-based program called Lawyers for Learning that pairs lawyers with children to act as mentors.
To get where I am now, Director of the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning Katie Flowers was a huge influence, but in the end it was the fact that I never gave up and that I made sure I applied to schools where my summer internship work or course work made sense. I also worked hard to stand out—I served with the Geneva Fire Department as a volunteer, I was a medic on and off campus, and I worked all four years of college.
I am currently a third-year law student at Quinnipiac School of Law, with a concentration in Health Law. I have achieved great things using the skills I honed at Hobart and William Smith including being published in the Connecticut Public Interest Journal and being awarded the Dean's Fellowship at Quinnipiac. When not in school and while I prepare for the BAR Exam in the summer of 2022, I have worked in the Veterans Clinic here at QU, serve as a fellow in the New Haven Superior Court, and am an Associate Editor on the Quinnipiac Health Law Journal.