Student Spotlight: Adela Zhou ’27
Immigrant Rights Project (IRP) Co-Chair
IRP Café y Conversación, Co-Founder
Social Enterprise & Startup Law Group, Community Co-Chair
Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law, Staff Editor
How did you decide to pursue law?
When I was growing up, my mom and grandfather were both doctors, and they always approached their work with such kindness, intellectual curiosity, and a sense of responsibility toward their communities. Even as a kid, I understood that combination of qualities as what meaningful work looked like, so when I got to college, I started on the pre-med track and imagined myself following a similar path.
As I worked through the pre-med science and math courses though, I kept finding my interests drifting elsewhere: I had always been the student who left the library with stacks of books and spent lunch breaks reading. I began to feel less certain about wanting to be a doctor, and during that period I read Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which convinced me that building on my concrete strengths would lead to a more meaningful and sustainable career than chasing a vague interest in medicine. Once I took seriously the idea of choosing based on my real skills—reading closely, writing clearly, and analyzing problems—law became a natural field to explore.
From there, I interned at a boutique law firm in Silicon Valley working on start-up matters. I loved seeing the creativity, problem solving, and positive impact that the work involved. The following summer, I worked in the firm’s Budapest office, which added this whole international dimension to the work that made legal work feel even more engaging. Those experiences showed me that law could combine my interests with practical impact, so I let go of the pre-med track and committed to the humanities major I’d always been secretly drawn to.
You had a fashion label while an undergraduate student. How has that experience helped you in law school?
When I was in college, I started a small clothing label focused mostly on swimwear. It honestly began out of necessity—I could never find swimsuits that fit the way I wanted, so I made my own. I learned to draft patterns, sew samples, coordinate photoshoots, and collaborate with models, influencers, and photographers. Running the label became a nice counterbalance to academics. When I needed a break from reading, I could sketch or sew; when I needed a break from the creative and business side, I could return to classes, friends, and extracurriculars.
Running a small business taught me a lot about managing competing deadlines, communicating clearly, and taking responsibility for every part of a project. I even drafted a few independent contractor agreements—a first, intimidating, but exciting encounter with “law-ish” work. On a personal level, it was also rewarding to finally have clothing that fit as I imagined and to see the beautiful work of the teams that I collaborated with around the world.
One side effect of designing was how much it made me think about influence and originality. Even when I tried to create something distinctly mine, I realized I was drawing—consciously or not—from designers I admired. And when I noticed similar ideas appearing elsewhere, I began to reflect more on where inspiration ends and appropriation begins. Discovering that an entire area of law—intellectual property—grapples with these questions was exciting. While I’m no longer designing, I continue exploring that intersection through Fashion Law and Business with Professor Douglas Hand and as a staff editor on the Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law. It’s been meaningful to learn the legal foundations of the issues I once encountered from the designer side.
You’ve also been very involved in Café y Conversación at NYU Law and during your time as an undergraduate student. What has that experience been like? What keeps you engaged in participating after several years?
As an undergrad at Columbia University, I studied Comparative Literature with a focus on South American literature, which led me to co-host the Spanish conversation group, Café y Conversación, at Columbia’s Casa Hispánica. Sitting in that cozy lobby chatting with friends is one of my fondest college memories.
Volunteer teaching was another big part of my college experience—I worked with third graders in Harlem and taught a second-grade Spanish-only class as a Teach for IGNITE Fellow. Being able to speak Spanish helped me make a real impact in these roles.
At NYU Law, I continue to see how Spanish can deepen advocacy impact. When I got to law school, I joined the Immigrant Rights Project on campus and volunteered as a Friend of the Court to assist Spanish-speaking respondents in their deportation hearings. Around that time, classmates mentioned how much they wished for a space to practice Spanish to be more effective advocates and something clicked. The community I had loved in college could meet a real need here, too.
Since then, Maddy Evans ’27 and I have been running biweekly Café y Conversación sessions at the Changemaker Center, with the generous support of the Center. We’ve also held sessions over the summer and had a special end-of-year party with food from Los Tacos No. 1. The turnout has consistently exceeded our expectations, and it’s been great to see the little community that’s formed. Seeing how language practice can both deepen advocacy impact and create genuine connection is what keeps me engaged year after year.
Which Law School class or experience has had the biggest impact on you?
Law school as a whole has been an incredible time to challenge myself—I’ve grown so much as a thinker and person since coming to NYU Law. I’m lucky that all the professors I’ve had have been amazing, and the one class that has had the biggest impact on me so far is Corporations, which I took in my 1L spring with Marcel Kahan [George T. Lowy Professor of Law].
I came to law school straight from college, so I didn’t have any work experience. Also, my background in literature meant that I hadn’t studied finance or economics in depth. Corporations gave me the basic foundation to finally understand what attorneys meant when they talked about working in M&A, capital markets, or even shareholder activism.
More than just this basic knowledge on business and finance, however, I also gained a genuine appreciation for the Socratic method through Corporations. Though it can feel confusing or intimidating to be responsible for answering questions about the material, when the Socratic method works, it really does. That’s because following a line of questioning from start to finish makes an argument resonate in a way that a simple and conclusory explanation never could. Professor Kahan’s skill in guiding the class through that process made this realization clear to me.
What do you most like to do outside of class? Have you read any books or heard any podcasts lately that you would recommend?
Outside of class, I’m really into wellness—I love lifting weights at the gym, meditating in a sauna, doing breathwork in the cold-plunge, or journaling at a café. I also love to explore the city with friends and discover new cafés or restaurants.
Lately, I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter books—nostalgic fantasy is a nice brain break from being deep in the casebooks. I’m also researching algorithmic or AI bias through my research at the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. My work focuses on how algorithmic models used in high-stakes settings such as carceral sentencing, loan approval, and employment screening can produce biased or systemically flawed results. These issues often stem from the underlying data (which can reflect human prejudice or historical inequities), from models latching onto the wrong variables and turning mere correlations into causal signals, or from insufficient feedback loops that prevent the model from correcting itself over time. Because AI models are essentially large-scale algorithmic systems trained on massive datasets yet operating through opaque—or even inscrutable—processes, I’m looking at the methods AI scholars and practitioners are exploring to increase transparency and mitigate the systemic errors that lead to biased outputs. Two books I’d recommend to anyone interested in the topic are: Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem, which explores how AI can reflect and amplify human biases—for example, how it happened that early large language models associated “doctor” with “man” and “nurse” with “woman.” We often think of technology as objective but forget that it carries the imprint of human judgment, which leads me to the second recommendation: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which examines how human biases are generated in the first place.
This interview has been condensed and edited.