Michael Piazza
Anthropology major, Class of 2019
Currently pursuing a law degree at CUNY School of Law, focusing on immigration law and labor law. At CUNY, Michael is a staff editor for the CUNY Law Review Journal, and the Program Director of the CUNY Law Labor Coalition, an organization that provides support to workers organizing their workplace and labor attorneys.
Michael’s Purchase experience in his own words:
“What I loved most about being an anthropology major at Purchase was being able to delve deeply into one topic during my Senior Project. Purchase provides each student with a Senior Project advisor, a professor who devotes time every week to give us guidance on our projects and encourages us to venture out into the communities we were studying and learn about them directly, through fieldwork. Topics ranged from local political movements, internet communities, and K-Pop fan clubs. At that time, I was interested in the stories of refugees as I was going through my own discovery of my grandparent’s experiences as refugees. My Senior Project allowed me to delve deeply into their past, learn from the surviving members of their community, and understand my own family’s history through narrative storytelling.
Being able to devote a full year into studying this topic remains one of the best academic experiences I have ever had. Aside from the vast subject matter knowledge and deeper understanding of my own family’s history and culture that I acquired through this project, I also gained indispensable skills which have been essential for my work in the legal field. Conducting trauma informed interviews, organizing narratives into an argument or thesis, and building collaborative relationships with clients, are just some of the many skills that I learned through my Senior Project that I still rely on heavily today.
Although becoming a lawyer isn’t something that I ever thought was in the cards for me, the transition from anthropology to law felt so natural to me. Likewise, I have many classmates who took a similar path as mine, and who were guided to become public interest attorneys by the humanitarian principles they learned as anthropology students. My goal to become a public interest attorney ultimately stems from the theoretical framework that I developed as an anthropology student, and my connection to movements for underrepresented communities. Today, as I try to bring compassion to an unapologetic legal system, I am still guided by the humanitarian ideas that I was first introduced to as an anthropology student.”