Widener Law Commonwealth's Podcast

Widener Law Commonwealth produces this podcast in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Its best material comes from students talking to other students. The 'Cafecito with LALSA' conversations show this most clearly. They are numbered installments in which members of campus student organizations sit down together and talk with the ease of classmates. In the OUTLaw episode, Molly Sanders, a 3L, talks about the weight placed on Law Review, the message that missing it closes doors, and how hard it is to give yourself credit. Another voice in that conversation says the pressure to say the right thing can stop people from asking questions at all. The episode with the school's mothers argues that parents are making law school work at every stage, from new babies to children old enough to say they miss them. Faith comes up there too, with one speaker crediting her belief for the hope that carried her through. In the APALSA and BLSA installment, the parting advice is plain: start strong in the first year, and give yourself and others grace. Grace here is not an excuse to coast. It means learning from a setback, moving on and doing better. The show also steps outside peer conversation. LALSA president Kimberly Diaz introduces Professor Steven A. Ramirez for a recorded Zoom discussion of issues around the November election, and immigration and birthright citizenship are part of what gets aired. Val Hawkins, in an episode whose title announces a new host, covers the practical side: building a strong application, what admissions officers look for, and making law school affordable through scholarships and financial aid. The standout advice from that episode is to set a budget before starting. Student loans are presented as 'good debt', closer to a mortgage than a vacation charged to a credit card, as long as the borrower manages them responsibly and graduates. In an alumni interview, Student Bar Association president Gabriela Romeo, a 3L, talks with Prince Holloway, who finished at Widener in 2008 and went back to his hometown of Philadelphia to practice. His route into law was unglamorous: in 2005 he could not find a job, and his old football coach, a criminal defense attorney, told him his grades were good enough to give it a shot. The school's own framing is never far away. Episodes open with a production credit and often close with a short promotional note about its centers of legal scholarship. The conversations between those bookends are unscripted and loose, and they sometimes lose the thread mid-sentence before finding it again. For a first listen, the budgeting advice in the applications and aid episode is the most immediately useful, while the Cafecito installments give a fuller sense of what the years inside actually feel like.