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Yungmoon Chang earned her law degree at night while employed as a structural engineer in L.A. Her plan was, she says, “to dip my toe in the water and not lose ground in my engineering job.”
Chang had worked as an engineer for 4½ years and realized she “didn’t really love it.” So, acting on a lifelong desire to go to law school, she enrolled in Loyola Law School’s evening classes — yet stayed at her full-time job. After a year, she switched to a job in law. “The best part of evening classes is the camaraderie,” Chang says. “Students have jobs, families. They are all in. They really want it.”
Law students must complete 40 hours of pro bono work, and volunteer work was also a requirement for her engineering studies. She traveled to Haiti in 2010 to perform engineering assessments after the earthquake.
Chang plans on a career in patent litigation. She won two awards in the Scott Moot Court competition, Best Advocate and Top 10 Brief, and went on to win Top Oralist in a regional American Bar Association competition. The latter competition is a challenge to the students’ smarts, prep, and agile thinking. “There’s always one judge who will ask what you think you can’t answer,” she says.