It wasn’t until Dec. 5 she was finally notified of her ?acceptance.
She was one of 28 students to win the Skadden Fellowship, a prestigious award providing law students the opportunity to provide legal services to the poor and ?underprivileged.
The fellowship was established in 1988 and provides recent law school grads a salary and benefits for two years.
During those two years, graduates work on their own independent project under a law firm, providing services to those who couldn’t get them on their own.
Students begin to think about the organization they may want to work with about a year before actually applying, Ingelhart said.
Students come up with a project and present it to nonprofits to try and convince them to host it.
Ingelhart decided to focus her project on helping LGBT youth with juvenile and criminal records.
Ingelhart said she has always been interested in civil rights and gender issues.
Her first class at IU was a gender studies class and she worked as a research assistant at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
“I really liked doing stuff on the ground with people,” she said.
She decided to work on her project under Lambda Legal Education and Defense Fund in Chicago.
After finding a host, she sent in her project to the Skadden Fellowship board.
After progressing through the initial round, about 100 applicants are scheduled for an interview with a law firm.
After that round, only about 50 make it through. The board meets in early December to look at the last 50 applicants and choose 28 to award the fellowship.
“It was a nail-biting experience dragged out over a couple of months,” Ingelhart said.
Ingelhart will be working with LGBT youth who have been incarcerated or have other juvenile records.
“There are a lot of re-entry issues, barriers to housing, education, employment and health care,” she said. “There are some legal fixes to that.”
Ingelhart said she also wants to help these teens gets parts of the records expunged before they are 18.
Many of the youth in these groups do not have the money to afford the fees of that process, but Ingelhart said she wants to help them get those waived.
“LGBTQ are a minority group, and like any minority group, they are more likely to be homeless and have lower income,” she said. “LGBTQ have remarkably higher incarceration rates. There is a lot of need in that ?population.”
Ingelhart also said she hopes to set in motion policy change in Illinois, where she said the juvenile code is more arcane than other states.
“My passion for public service was solidified in my time at Indiana University,” she said.
“I strongly believe that the first step on the road to serving my target community is developing public knowledge of the problems that face them.”
