Lately, Olivia Dinh has been doing a lot of scrapbooking. "I want something to carry all these pictures and trinkets, little slips of paper and note cards that I've had over the years of undergrad, and just put them down into one book," she said. "I want it all condensed in one place so that they don't get lost."

It's an impulse driven by a lifetime of bouncing around the globe. Born in southern Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, the 20-year-old political science major also lived in Singapore, Bangkok, and various places in the southern U.S. before relocating to Vietnam for most of her teenage years. Her family returned to the U.S. in 2020, where she did her senior year of high school in Orange County before enrolling at UCI in 2021.

"I've been lucky to stay here since," she said, and not just because "UC Irvine is a great university." She's also felt blessed to have a sense of stability in Orange County, which has the highest concentration of Vietnamese ethnics outside of Vietnam. "I've been enrolled in western education systems since first grade, and having lived abroad for half my life, I deeply appreciate how southern California blends the two halves of my identity so seamlessly."

Even at UCI, however, she hasn't quite stayed put. Last summer, she took advantage of the UCDC program. "Honestly, it's like the crème de la crème opportunity for political science majors," she said. There, she met UC Merced professor Andrew Shaver, who heads up the Political Violence Lab. She's currently working with him on a paper about the fall-out of natural disasters and how casualties and material costs are often severely misrepresented. "In a nutshell, small events are not picked up [by the media], but they actually add up to be even greater in terms of cost and casualties than these big events that are getting reported." Dinh will be a co-author when that paper is published this summer.

In the meantime, she's preparing to take the next step of her journey after graduating in June: USC Gould School of Law. Though she was accepted at NYU, one of the top law schools in the country, and even waitlisted at Harvard, she's keen to continue growing her network in southern California, where she's already been working in the law field, first for a private firm and now with the county.

It's a far cry from her first year of undergrad, when she initially got involved with moot court on campus. "It was so daunting to me when I looked at those court documents for the first time as a 16 year old. I was like, 'What are these sentences?' You know, they're words you understand, but they're not sentences I would speak," she recalled. "Looking back now, I can see how I've grown so much. Those briefs are now what I do at work: reading them, writing them, forming arguments, revising hundreds of pages of arguments to the judge for my boss. Everything's come full circle."

In her four years at UCI, she's also learned how to think critically, thanks in part to political science professors including Michael Tesler and Matthew N. Beckmann. Claire Jean Kim, who teaches in the departments of political science and Asian American studies, has also been instrumental in Dinh's education.

"She taught me about structural inequality between groups of people and how people of certain groups are pawned off for the benefit of others," said Dinh. "I learned how those structures are set in place in the first place, why things like racism, anti-Blackness, why those things are present today and how they've been rechanneled over time. Things get concealed anew—not necessarily dispelled."

Dinh's time at UCI informed her goal to become a civil rights litigator. "Eye-opening courses and conversations with brilliant professors really helped me figure out what type of lawyer I want to be," she said.

In a similar vein, poli sci professor Charles “Tony” Smith taught her that civil rights isn't a checkbox—it's an ongoing journey. "It's not a one-time goal where it's on your to-do list," she said. "It's something you have to work for to maintain consistently for a long time, and you must stay on those front lines. That’s what I want to roll up my sleeves for and make a lifelong career out of."

She already has well laid plans for her time after law school. "I do have my sights set on a judicial clerkship," she said. "Being in that position, you would be getting access to the court's point of view and how it decides which cases, how it looks at cases and critiques them. And I think that viewpoint is very valuable for somebody who wants to be a litigator, like me, to understand how to effectively speak to your audience, cater to the judge, cater to the jury."

As she looks ahead, she's reflecting on what she'll be leaving behind. "I don't need to say that I'll miss the weather, because I'm just gonna move to L.A.," she said with a laugh.

"I've been astronomically blessed to have received support from so many remarkable people in just a few short years at UCI," she said. In addition to her mentors, her network of peers has made her time in Irvine special. Her housemate Natalie Nguyen, for example, cooked for her and helped keep their house tidy when she was preoccupied studying for the LSAT.

"I feel happy, proud and so lucky for the company that I keep," she said. "I'm not going to get a centralized hub of the same amazing individuals ever again in my life."

—Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences