And she found just what she was looking for, though it took a little hard work. "It's true that you can come here and do anything," she says. "But you can't always easily figure out what the anything is."
When Roeder started law school she had a background in economics and in consulting work, and she thought of Yale Law School as a professional school in a broad sense: "a launching pad for a wide range of professional leadership roles."
But she surprised herself by particularly enjoying courses with a large black letter law component (meaning studies of bodies of written law), such as Property, Tax, Trusts and Estates, and Land Use. In part, Roeder enjoyed studying the policy implications of these bodies of law. "While we typically associate courses on Con Law with politics and policy, a myriad of incentives and policy decisions are built into or created by things like trusts and estates law and the tax code."
When it came time to write her first major paper, Roeder turned her attention to the question of how the Law School could help students explore a wider range of job opportunities. Her premise: "There has to be a universe of job opportunities between working at the ACLU and working in a giant corporate firm, where people find a sense of meeting their own needs and a sense of contributing to a broader community." She developed a number of recommendations for helping students find unconventional jobs, and has since been helping the Career Development Office implement some of her ideas.
She also found just such a job herself. After graduation, she secured a job as a senior real estate planner for Trinity Church, working on a massive development project in downtown New York City--a project that will include a strong civic component.
"I may well end up in a more traditional legal position after a few years," Roeder muses, but she feels prepared for almost any possibility. "There are a lot of fields that incorporate legal thinking and legal understanding."