Karice Rhule, '16

“The first thing I do when I wake up is check the Wall Street Journal. It’s
ridiculous how excited I get about business law.”

Hometown: St. Catherine, Jamaica
Undergrad: Colgate University
College major: International Relations
Law School activities: Black Law Students Association, Student Admissions Committee

Karice Rhule almost didn’t make it to the Skype appointment for her Law School admissions interview.

The Jamaica native, who was living in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at the time, was headed to her apartment for the video chat when her tire blew out, leaving shreds of rubber all over the road.

“I have never seen a tire look so bad,” she said, laughing at the memory.

Desperate and determined—and worried that nobody would believe an excuse as clichéd as “my car broke down”—Karice left her car in a parking lot, called a cab, and raced home. She made it with several minutes to spare, and the rest, as they say, is history. Not long after, the acceptance email arrived.

“It changed my life,” she said.

Karice, who earned an MBA in 2010 from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, is drawn to transactional work. During her MBA program, she interned as a wealth management advisor at Merrill Lynch, and after her first year of law school, she interned in the legal department at Microsoft.

“The first thing I do when I wake up is check the Wall Street Journal,” she said. “It’s ridiculous how excited I get about business law.”

Karice, who grew up on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, moved to the United States to attend Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, when she was 18. Despite having lived in warmer climates, she has adapted to northern winters—and even took a glass-half-full view of the record-breaking “polar vortex” cold during her 1L year.

“It worked out really well,” she said, “because what was I going to do except study?”

Although she misses her family in Jamaica—her parents and two of her siblings live there, though a sister recently moved to Evanston—she plans to build her law career in the States. And the Law School, she said, is exactly the right place to start.

“The main thing that drew me was the focus on law and economics,” she said. “But, also, I’ve always known that I’m at my best when I have to meet rigorous standards, and that’s true here.”

Advice for 1Ls:

“Don’t abandon the way you’ve always studied,” she said. “I made that mistake during my first quarter. People told me things like, ‘There’s a best time to start outlining’ or ‘There’s a best time to take a first practice test.’ But what worked for other people was sometimes the opposite for me. There’s not a one-size-fits-all. 1L is hard enough without figuring out a whole new way of studying.”