Tongyao Su ’19 had a friend at Muhlenberg who approached her one day and said, “I bought one of your mugs!” The friend had found a mug online decorated with one of the floral paintings Su had shared on her Instagram account.
“I was like, ‘What? I don’t sell any mugs,’” recalls Su, an international student from China who studied studio art and psychology at Muhlenberg. “It turns out that the store was using my floral painting without my permission, and that my art was in all sorts of places that it was not supposed to be.”
She tried to remove the infringing links, but more and more kept popping up, “an endless game of Whac-A-Mole,” Su says. After graduation, she trained as a paralegal, hoping to learn more about intellectual property law and what recourse was available to her. She quickly realized that she needed more schooling to really understand this, so she chose the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, one of the top IP law programs in the country.
“Muhlenberg [taught] me about interdisciplinary thinking and how my knowledge can transfer.”
— Tongyao Su ’19
“Without a Muhlenberg degree, I would not have picked [law] up,” Su says. “Muhlenberg [taught] me about interdisciplinary thinking and how my knowledge can transfer.”
She’s found that her art background comes in handy when she needs to do trademark or copyright analysis, comparing two different works. Her psychology background has carried her through law school, helping her stay steady in a stressful environment. And the hands-on experiences she had at Muhlenberg — conducting undergraduate research with Associate Professor of Psychology Kenneth Michniewicz, exhibiting her artwork — still feature prominently on her CV.
After Su completes her J.D., she is planning to head to the University of Washington for its top-ranked law librarianship program. She realized in law school that “I enjoy writing my briefs, but I don’t like arguing with people,” she says. She also became friends with the librarian, who has exhibited the art she has made as a law student in the library, and she is pursuing law librarianship as a pathway to stay in academia. She describes her entry into higher ed, her time at Muhlenberg, as the best four years of her life.
“I met my mentors there in both fields, and we are still in touch,” she says. “I feel capable of stepping into areas that I never thought I could do.”
