Judicial extern by day; advisor to at-risk teens by night
By Maria Iacobo
Lawrence Cisneros ’14 may not look like a super hero, but he could be taken for one. Walking across the USC campus last week, he’s spotted by dozens of teenagers who swarm and greet him enthusiastically, his identity no secret to them.
By day, Cisneros is a judicial extern at the Superior Court of California in downtown Los Angeles and, like Spiderman and Superman, keeps busy with a completely different job at night, although not a crime-fighting one. Cisneros is a Residential Advisor with Upward Bound. The program brings more than 70 students from the lowest performing high schools in the county and provides them with a taste of a “real” college experience including intensive college preparatory classes and dormitory living at USC. Many of these students have difficult home lives and easily could join gangs, so the opportunity to see how their lives can flourish with a college degree is vital.
Growing up in San Diego as a first generation Mexican-American on his mother’s side, Cisneros participated in a program similar to Upward Bound in high school and found it enormously helpful for him to prepare for college.
“It gets you motivated and in the mindset to go to college,” Cisneros says. “Just knowing where these students come from and the stories they tell you, I’ve wanted to cry a few times. You can see how hard they work. I relate to them in a lot of ways, and I can talk with them about that. We talk about the countries our families came from and speaking different languages.”
Cisneros sees some of himself in the students. When he decided to become a lawyer, he knew he needed to improve his writing skills, and he concentrated on this during his last two years of college. Now, he shares the value of having those skills and how to achieve them tutoring his students.
“Their hardest class is speech,” he says. “I help them prepare speeches about themselves and structure their sentences.”
Cisneros came to USC Law knowing that he wanted to become a criminal defense attorney. Proud of his heritage and fluent in Spanish, Cisneros says he relates to “the underdog.”
“It’s the side I’ve always felt strongest toward,” he says. “I was the youngest and smallest person on varsity teams [in high school] and I was always going up against some bigger entity. I’d [say] ‘bring it on.’”
Cisneros chose USC Law over other schools because of its stellar alumni network and the opportunity to meet practicing attorneys in Los Angeles where he plans to practice. As a 1L, Cisneros learned about a diversity initiative designed to introduce minorities to professional opportunities in the court system. Interviewing with a judge who is a USC graduate – Judge Georgina Torres Rizk – put him in good standing; hard work won him the job.
Cisneros rides his bike from the USC campus after having roused his charges for breakfast. From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Cisneros writes memos, conducts research and attends trial. Many times the judge discusses the trial with him afterwards and points out the positive attributes or the mistakes made by both attorneys.
The skills displayed by public defenders in court have impressed Cisneros and cemented his desire to join their ranks. He’s especially pleased to see how well they perform because of a “perceived bias” that because they defend individuals who cannot afford an attorney they are not as competent as private attorneys.
“They’re awesome,” he says. “It’s really cool to see them in court versus what people say about them.”
Cisneros says he thinks he’s successfully conveyed positive attributes to some of his students by his conduct and appearance; he dresses in a suit and tie for court and maintains a long day between his two full-time jobs. After work, he tutors students and goes over their homework as well as participates in recreational activities such as soccer and football.
“My students sense something very different” about me compared to the other advisors who are undergraduate students, he says.
Appearance matters to Cisneros. He says that his students will have a few strikes against them when they go to college and lead lives away from their tough neighborhoods. That’s why he went to each of his students to make sure they knew how to give a proper handshake.
“It seems like a small thing, but when they go to school they are going to come up against some people who judge them differently,” Cisneros says. “They already come from a certain place, speak in a certain way, look a certain way and then they can’t give a proper handshake? That’s not going to give a very good first impression despite whatever they say after that. I want to make sure that even if you come from a certain place, talk a certain way, look a certain way, you can overcome a lot of that just by the way you present yourself. The first impression – at least for me – is how someone shakes my hand.”
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