Nafees Syed, Class of 2010
Nafees graduated magna cum laude in Government in 2010. She attended Yale Law School, where she was Co-Chair of the Moot Court Board, student government representative, Yale Law and Policy Review Notes Editor, and teaching fellow for four Yale College courses. She is currently an Associate at Boies, Schiller, & Flexner in New York City and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her research interests include information privacy and civil liberties.
At Harvard, Nafees wrote for The Harvard Crimson and interned both for the British Parliament and the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Immediately after her graduation, she served as a congressional staffer for the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee under Chairman John Conyers. There, she worked on BP oil spill legal issues and constitutional matters with the FBI. On behalf of the committee, she helped to successfully impeach Judge Thomas Porteous, Jr. at trial. Nafees also advised Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson on foreign policy, veterans’ affairs, and women’s issues.
As a writer, Nafees has reached millions of readers and spoken to several media outlets on legal issues and current events (CNN, Foreign Policy, The International Journal of the History of Sport, and The Huffington Post.) Click here to read her June 2018 op-ed in the New York Times. More recently, she has spoken at Columbia Law School on a panel on Faith and the Law and at Princeton University on Literary Arts.
Hannah Mullen, Class of 2015
Hannah Mullen is a student at Harvard Law School, where she is an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She has worked as a summer intern at the Department of Justice and as a summer associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson. She is especially interested in appellate and constitutional law. After graduating from law school, Hannah will clerk for Chief Judge Merrick Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. She graduated from Harvard College in 2015 with a Degree in Government.
Kellie Desrouchers, Class of 2013
One of the things that I appreciated the most about the Government Department at Harvard and my degree in general was the amazing staff that were so supportive of my interests that intersected with my focus on International Relations. Whether it was letting me count my Anthropology of Violence and Conflict class towards my degree requirements, helping me figure which classes to take my junior fall to prepare for my study abroad tutorials at Oxford University, or creating more small group section times in the early morning or evening to accommodate my rugby training schedule, the people in the Government Department truly made me feel valued and heard, despite how large our degree class was. As a first-generation college student, being supported by the teaching fellows, the professors and the staff of the Government Department was critical to my undergraduate success. After graduating in 2013, I moved from Cambridge, MA to New York City. This was a pretty big shift for me, as I was the first person in my family to live outside of Massachusetts. I became a trial preparation assistant and then was promoted to investigative analyst in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau in the New York County District Attorney’s Office. Though my main focus as an undergraduate was international conflict, the skills I learned from my Government classes played a large role in my job. The careful analysis of numerical data, being able to take a complex narrative and translate it into something accessible, and being highly organized helped me to excel in my role at the District Attorney’s Office. More importantly, the small group sophomore tutorial laid the groundwork for the interpersonal skills necessary to work as part of a prosecution team. I worked in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau for three years before applying to law school. I am currently a rising 2L at Boston University School of Law. This past summer I was a federal judicial intern in the Honorable Judge Ann Donnelly in the Eastern District of New York, as well as a part time research assistant for Professor Rossman and Clinical Professor Mann. My two research projects were on the history of misdemeanor courts in early America and the intersection of procedural due process and Title XI. Now that the compulsory first year curriculum has passed I am getting back into my academic passion of international relations, as well as writing an international-based “note” as a 2L editor for the Public Interest Law Journal. (I guess I had to write a “thesis” at some point!) My tentative topic is a comparative note on domestic violence jurisprudence in the US and the UK. I would encourage all Harvard undergraduates to take at least one Government class. Regardless of the subfield, a class in Government will teach you to develop a critical eye for history and politics, and enable you to participate in the great debates that capture our collective attention. We all need more informed citizens in this world and there’s no better place to start than here.