As I experience my first New England mud season, I am reflecting back on my first seven months at UNH Law and have much to celebrate along with the arrival of spring. The year has been filled with accomplishments from faculty, students, and alumni. Our rise in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, to No. 85, was greater than any other school in the Top 100. Our IP program continues to be recognized as a national leader, at No. 6 in the US. And we are being recognized across the country for our innovative and effective program of legal education — for example, preLaw Magazine ranked us No. 3 in the U.S. for practical legal education.
I am proud of these rankings. But mostly I am proud of our 91.8 percent employment rate, our 94.1 percent bar pass rate, and our innovative and close-knit community.
Many of you helped with our employment rate by hiring grads, serving as residency/externship supervisors, and mentoring our students. Excluding law-school funded jobs, we have the second highest employment rate of all law schools in New England, second only to Harvard. Thanks to so many of you who helped.
The promise of becoming part of a University is becoming a reality for our students and faculty, and we have the opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary projects at the cutting edge of legal education. For example, we are developing a program focused on bioinnovation, involving health law, intellectual property, and social justice. We are training the next generation of lawyers who will work alongside entrepreneurs and scientists at the forefront of advanced regenerative manufacturing of tissue. This is the type of project we envisioned when we merged.
The newsletter will be distributed 4 times a year. Our goal is to keep you in the know about the school and about each other. We recognize that there have been gaps in our communications over the past few years, but I am committed to keeping you informed and getting to meet as many of you as possible. We hope that you’ll share your good news, be it personal or professional. As the newsletter develops, we welcome suggestions for ideas to make this interesting and relevant to you.
We have ambitious plans for alumni events for the upcoming year. We’ll be in DC, New York, Hartford, Seattle, Dallas, and Japan and plan to have more events in the fall. Please come if you are living or working near an event. We are also planning reunion weekend for the 14th and 15th of September. Friday night will feature an all-grad cocktail party. We hope you’ll come (and, for our early alumni, we hope you will share memories of past events, when they were held in “The Bird” or in Dean Viles’s backyard).
It has been great meeting many of you over the past few months. I look forward to hearing from and meeting with many more of you over this upcoming year.
Happy spring from Concord,
Dean Megan Carpenter
