Meet 2024 DYA Award recipient Jill Applegate ’16
Jill Applegate is a Skadden Fellow at the Neighborhood Defender Service. She earned two bachelor's degrees from K-State in modern languages and political science in 2016. Additionally, Applegate earned a juris doctor from the University of Texas at Austin.
Applegate was recently announced as a recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Young Alumni Award.
The award, which was established in 2012, recognizes two Kansas State University graduates who are using the leadership and service experience they acquired at K-State to excel in their professions and contribute to their communities.
Applegate recently shared with At K-State some of her thoughts about her career, her K-State experience and advice for students:
What are some of the things you learned during your time at K-State?
I first became interested in learning about immigration when I went to a movie showing at the K-State Student Union for extra credit in a Spanish class I was taking. The movie was called Voces Inocentes and it was about children growing up during the Salvadoran civil war. I decided to write my research paper that semester on what happened to the children who had grown up during that war and learned about how historical events like the war shaped current patterns of migration to the United States. From there, I took every opportunity I could to learn more about the realities of migration. Luckily, I was able to view migration from many different perspectives through my classes at K-State, and found that it is an issue that implicates policy, sociology, history, and my own humanity. I even had the privilege of learning about migration from immigrant farm workers themselves while working as a research assistant for Alisa Garni in the sociology department, which was an invaluable opportunity to put names and faces to what I was learning in the classroom. This combination of my classes, research, and own personal and professional development directly informed the work I am doing today.
How has your K-State experience impacted your career or made a difference in your life?
K-State is where I determined that my career would somehow involve working with immigration issues. As an undergraduate research assistant, I did lengthy interviews with immigrant farm workers and became intimately aware of the issues they were facing in their communities. These issues ranged from immigration-related legal issues, to setting up a bank account with an International Taxpayer ID Number, to seeking affordable medical care. After graduation, when I looked back on those conversations, I realized I wanted the skills and education to be able to directly assist people facing those issues, which is how I ended up in law school. Now I'm lucky enough to work at an organization where I can not only offer legal services to my immigrant clients, but refer them directly to in-house social workers and attorneys that specialize in other areas of law. This holistic model of legal and social services helps me rest assured that my clients—who are facing all of the same issues I witnessed among farm workers in Kansas—can have all of their needs met under one roof.
On a different note, K-State is also where I met some of my closest friends to this day who offer me so much inspiration, guidance and compassion. I am forever grateful that K-State brought them into my life.
What are your career goals for the future?
In the next decade or so, I would love to continue working in direct services and thinking creatively about what advocacy can look like for my clients. I'd also like to gain experience outside of the immigration court sphere by working on some immigration-related litigation in federal courts. Long term, my dream right now is to go back into academia as clinical faculty member at a law school. I was lucky enough to have fantastic, hands-on educational experiences, both at K-State with Professor Garni and in my clinical classes at law school. I would love to offer the same experiences to students at some point.
What advice would you offer to other young K-State alumni?
When I graduated from K-State, I did not know that I wanted to go to law school. I only knew that I wanted to work with immigration issues in some capacity, and in my head I tossed around careers in policy, social work, academia, or law. It took me about a year and a half after I graduated to realize that law was the path that, for now, most aligned with the work I felt motivated to do. And it wasn't until half way through law school that I learned the job I am doing now even existed. If you, like me, are someone for whom it is overwhelming to try and envision what your entire professional life will look like, start by thinking about the issues out there in the world that you find most interesting. Then, think about the type of work you could do for the next couple of years that would allow you to explore those interests. You will probably be surprised by the opportunities and insights that meet you when you have curiosity and an open mind.