Hot Bench: Katelyn Brunson ’27

Interviewed by: Andrew Moore ’28 — cwb5ex@virginia.edu

Hello, and thank you for being willing to be interviewed for Hot Bench, since it is the most exclusive interview to get in the school, including recruiting.

Of course.

First, would you mind introducing yourself, telling us where you are from, and how you got to be here?

Yeah, of course. I am from Fort Myers, Florida. My path to get here was a little bit—I guess—unique. I finished my math degree at the University of Florida, and what led me to law school was figuring out what the right career is for me. To me, that was something where I feel like I could better the community and use my time in the service of helping others.

So, have you deployed the math in law school? I know there are lots of numbers here.

No, I have not used my math skills, unfortunately. There have been times that I have been, let us say, poked fun at, in classes that have some mathy elements in it, but that is about it.

As an accountant, I can relate. But I am surprised people would make fun of math. I think math is potentially more impressive than words.

Well, in torts, when there is a kind of cost-benefit analysis, like a balancing act, the math there is very hand-wavy, so the poking fun was almost like poking fun at the law and how its math is really pretty far from the math I am more comfortable with.

What math are you most comfortable with? Do you have a favorite?

What is my favorite part of math? My favorite field is combinatorics, which, if I say what that means, makes me sound a lot less cool. It is the math of counting, but it has a lot of cool, both real-world effects, as well as fun, you know, theoretical problems to wrap your head around, so it is pretty interesting.

When you are not doing math or law, what are you doing for fun?

I spend a lot of my time at the gym. I think it is really good to have hobbies that can totally put your mind off the stresses of law school or life, and the gym kind of allows me to do that. Other than that I really like baking, hanging out with my cats and friends, and drawing. Again, I enjoy anything to try to take my mind off of the assignments that I have to do.

I am a little surprised. I mean, you can see math and everything. Is it difficult to turn the math thinking off? I am thinking in the gym, you would be counting your reps, or in baking, you would be measuring and counting.

Yeah, in a way, it can actually. At least when I think about it at the gym, I use percentages to try to think about the percent I am done with the set. It can actually be helpful because then I think, “Okay, I am 65 percent of the way done, like, that is so easy, 75 percent of the way done.” I would not necessarily qualify that as using overly advanced math skills. It is more just a predisposition to kind of define what I am doing in numbers.

Well, I think that whether it is advanced or not is very relative; probably to some people, it would be quite advanced to calculate percentages. Do you often draw the other hobbies? Are you drawing your cats or drawing the things you bake?

No, I cannot really say with exact specificity one specific thing that I draw, but it does not tend to be those other things. I mostly like to draw people, and I like using just photography of people as kind of my inspiration

Now, Law Weekly is looking for a cartoonist. Is that a position of interest?

Unfortunately, if you saw my art style, it is not as cartoonish as maybe even I would like it to be; it seems to take itself a bit too seriously. And I speak about it as, like, something that I do not have control over, even though I do, but it is hard to change how I draw. So I am acting as if it is completely outside of my control.

That is fair enough. Well, if we turn to more serious cartoons, maybe we will be in touch then. But I think that is all the questions I have, so I appreciate you making the time.

Thank you so much.