Recent graduate Roosevelt Ettienne ’22 sat down with theGrio for an interview about his journey to Fordham Law, his time as Student Bar Association president, and what he has planned next.
“Do what it takes to succeed,” Roosevelt Ettienne tells theGrio. “I’ve grown up with a single mother. She worked. And at a young age, I understood that sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to make ends meet. And I always have that instilled in me.”
After Ettienne’s mother immigrated from Haiti, he was the first member of his family born in the United States. He became interested in law after observing how employers sometimes treated workers, including his mother.
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Ettienne’s mother’s strong work ethic ultimately led her to become a nurse. He followed her lead, working full-time as a supervisor at a Starbucks near midtown Manhattan to pay his way through undergraduate school at John Jay College.
Open and personable, Ettienne has a big smile and an even bigger personality. Those traits helped him strike up conversations with lawyers who came in for coffee. During one of those conversations, he learned about the specialty of employment law and decided that would be his career choice.
“That’s where I fell in love with the idea of going to law school to advocate for minorities who got taken advantage of, cause their employers know they need this job to take care of their family, many of them being single parents,” Ettienne says.