Flexibility, opportunities have driven Corrie Osborne ’17 toward her goals

Corrie Osborne ’17 of Mequon, Wisconsin, knew she wanted to study law, but she had many possible directions she could have chosen to go. She received several offers and scholarships to attend various schools such as Washington University with a full ride scholarship and a stipend, Vanderbilt and University of Michigan with generous scholarships and Duke University.

She has chosen to study law at the University of Chicago Law School with a partial scholarship.

“I don’t know exactly what I want to do yet; I want to pick my direction after my first year of law school to see where my talents are,” she says. “But I would love the chance to clerk for the Supreme Court at some point during my career and I hope to eventually go on to hold a clerkship for a year or so and then do judicial work.”

At Ripon College, she majored in English and economics and minored in biology. She has been involved with the cycling team, “which has helped me stay focused on goal-setting and accomplishing hard tasks before me,” was treasurer of YAL, and is president of Campus Christian Fellowship.

“My student leadership has helped me learn how to lead groups of people and work in a team to accomplish goals,” Osborne says. “I am also a member of the launching of the Presidential Leadership Program, which was very helpful as I got the opportunity as a sophomore to meet with President (Zach) Messitte, and meet with members of the Board of trustees and the different deans of Ripon.”

She also has been a student tutor and a Collaborative Learning Center mentor, and she says both of those positions have helped her “learn how to work with people where they are at, and teach them how to accomplish their own personal goals.”

She says attending Ripon has given her opportunities to take classes in numerous fields. “I have taken courses in something like 10 different areas of study, and as an English/economics major, I have done an independent study in biology for fun, which was very easy for me to get given the small size and my ability to connect to the professors in all of these different areas. Additionally, I was able to take a lot of courses in areas I enjoyed, which definitely has helped me in the long run.”

One of these areas is organic chemistry. She says she has taken every organic chemistry class Ripon offers, and this is something she believes she wouldn’t have been able to do at any other school.

“I am only a biology minor and have not taken any other chemistry courses at Ripon, and I had to get special permission,” she says. “I ended up splitting Organic Chemistry II into two years since I couldn’t take the lab and class the same year. Ripon’s flexible professors definitely helped make this happen.”

She says this broad focus has allowed her to make connections between disciplines that she would not have been able to make otherwise. “I have learned how to examine an issue from many angles instead of focusing on a narrow portion of it,” she says. “All in all, I think the people I have met here and the leadership positions and the classes I have taken all have challenged me to grow as a person.”

Posted May 11, 2017 in Student.

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