Press
Read about what our fellows, both in the current and past cohorts, have been accomplishing:
By Griffin Jones and Valeria Escobar, November 11, 2019, 3:10 AM
Like many on Columbia’s campus last Friday morning, Violet Krejcie was working hard at learning something new. Her current area of study? High fives.
Violet is the six-month-old daughter of Jessica Krejcie, GS ’20, president of the Columbia University Family Student Network, an independent student-parent-run organization dedicated to helping student-parents across the 14 graduate schools and four undergraduate schools at Columbia. The two were attending a town hall for student-parents at the University as part of the newly launched Childcare Affordability Initiative, an ad hoc subcommittee formed by the Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate that is looking into ways Columbia can improve its support for student-parents.
Student-parents are not a highly visible demographic on campus, in part because they have to dedicate so much time to their children who may not be on campus often outside of classes. But particularly at the School of General Studies, they form a much larger population of the student body than one may assume—a 2015 CUFSN survey of 157 General Studies students found about 50 percent of respondents had children under five, and 20 percent held full-time jobs. Additionally, according to Krejcie, CUFSN has over one thousand students on its mailing list.
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New York, Nov. 7, 2018
Meher Dev ’19 LL.M., a human rights lawyer dedicated to expanding women’s and minorities’ rights and clinical legal education in India, was named the recipient of the 2018 Baker McKenzie scholarship. The scholarship, established in June 2015, awards $50,000 to an LL.M. student who demonstrates academic success and financial need.
“We are delighted about awarding this year’s Baker McKenzie Scholarship to Meher Dev,” said Constanze Ulmer-Eilfort, Executive Committee member and Global Chair of Diversity and Inclusion at Baker McKenzie. “We are honored to provide an opportunity to such a bright and dedicated candidate, who has demonstrated an inspiring passion for advancing diversity and inclusion in the legal profession. Meher's consistent efforts to advocate for women and minorities, mentor students in human rights law, and advance these initiatives through the creation of legal education clinics in her home country make her an exemplar of the very reasons for developing this scholarship program.”
Dev’s vocation as a human rights champion sprang from her experiences growing up as a member of the Sikh community in India. Throughout her childhood, Dev heard stories from her grandparents who came to India as refugees about the injustices Sikhs faced during the partition of India and the Sikh genocide. From a young age, Dev felt she was at a disadvantage because she was a girl who belonged to a religious minority and also witnessed women around her being discriminated against because of their gender and minority status.
“Despite growing up in much more stable times than my grandparents did, I felt vulnerable for being a girl. I saw that women and girls around me faced sexual harassment at their schools and their workplaces and I felt a similar vulnerability due to lack of access to legal remedies,” Dev says.
“I reminded myself of the courage and efforts with which my family accessed education and achieved economic stability that gave me opportunities to live in a better world and help fellow members of society. I decided to overcome the adversities I faced and to help women and minority communities by bridging the lacking access to law by becoming a human rights lawyer and by building capacity for human rights lawyers to represent voices of women and minorities.”
Supported by a merit scholarship, Dev pursued her dream of becoming a women’s rights lawyer at Jindal Global Law School in Sonepat, India. As a law student, she founded an organization with like-minded peers called Women and Law Society that provided pro bono legal assistance to women who worked at the law school or lived in the surrounding rural area. The group’s work included undertaking socio-legal awareness drives and developing policies on equal pay and sexual harassment.
After graduating in 2014, Dev—who speaks five languages—continued her advocacy in the private sector and worked with a corporate law firm to advise nonprofit clients and to expand the firm’s pro bono practice. She then became an advocate for the chamber of Indira Jaising, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India and a former member of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Expert Committee.
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