For the better part of a year, Carol Nigut, a Master of Legal Studies student at the James E. Rogers College of Law, resisted the urge to explore a Juris Doctor program.

"I don't want to work that hard," Nigut told her professors for much of 2025, shrugging off the idea that she would try to become an attorney.

Reluctance might be a theme for Nigut's past – but resistance to hard work is not. Her comment belies what she's already accomplished in a life that's demanded resilience and fostered a hunger to learn. It also panned out to be untrue.

Nigut, who will graduate with a Master of Legal Studies in May, is now weighing at least one offer, with a scholarship, from a Juris Doctor program in San Diego, and she hopes for more. At 73 years old and retired from careers in airlines, employee assistance counseling and real estate, Nigut is finding new purpose in pursuing yet another career in the law.

"It's taken me a long time to come into my own, and I think a lot of that had to do with being buffeted by life," Nigut said. "There's something in me that impels me to keep moving forward over and over again. Being in law school feels as if it's where I should have been all along."

Developing an interest in human behavior

Nigut grew up in the north suburbs of Chicago, in Skokie, Illinois. The only girl with three brothers, she spent her early years riding her bike along the shoreline of Lake Michigan to escape her male-dominated home life.

Sending Nigut to college wasn't a priority for her parents. So, restless after high school, Nigut hitchhiked through Europe for nearly a year, and eventually applied to be a flight attendant. After flying international trips for nearly two years, Nigut was furloughed. 

She immediately enrolled in undergraduate classes hoping to fulfill her sidelined desire to get her degree. But a family change prevented her from continuing, and she returned to flight attendant work, this time with Hughes Airwest. Nigut tried to find time to attend college, but she was transferred first to Las Vegas and then to Denver, making it untenable.

While living in Colorado, Nigut developed a keen interest in studying alcoholism and addiction. She closely followed the flight attendant union's progress to develop an employee assistance program whose aim was to help flight attendants with chemical dependency problems rather than firing them. 

Knowing of Nigut's interest, a union leader asked if she would be willing to be trained as a peer counselor for the program. Nigut relished the opportunity. 

"I started getting really interested in human behavior and the interface of human and organizational behavior," said Nigut, who continued volunteering with the union's counseling programs while working as a flight attendant.

After transferring to the Chicago area, Nigut's life was stable enough to begin working toward a degree in applied behavioral sciences while she continued flying. In 1984, at the age of 32, she graduated with her Bachelor of Arts from National Louis University. 

With her dream of attending college complete – for now – Nigut made employee assistance counseling her career's focus. She went on to lead a similar program for a major rail freight company for the better part of a decade.

Nigut was later recruited to run a dual-diagnosis treatment program in a private psychiatric hospital in the Chicago area. But she became disillusioned with the hospital leaders' focus on profit over patient care and eventually left the chemical dependency field all together.

Reinvention in the desert

In search of new purpose, Nigut, an avid runner and health nut, became a personal trainer and yoga instructor. 

In the spring of 2014, Nigut visited her closest brother, who lives in Tubac, just south of Tucson. She fell in love with the Sonoran Desert while relaxing on the patio of El Charro. Six months later, she was living in Tucson.

Nigut didn't have a clear idea of what she'd do for work, but a Realtor friend told her she'd be good at real estate. 

Nigut was skeptical but ultimately took the leap and earned her license after just six months in Tucson. She spent a decade working in Pima County real estate, becoming a top-producing agent.

Acting her way into right thinking

By 2024, Nigut had grown tired of the constant grind of commission-based work. She had always had an interest in justice and fairness, she said, which drove her work in counseling. But the demands of life had made a career in the law seem impossible.

The idea of being a paralegal was interesting and seemed more in reach. It could also likely come with a steady, more predictable paycheck, Nigut thought. She enrolled in Pima Community College's paralegal program, where she discovered an insatiable hunger to learn about the law.

Paralegal work was important, she learned, but the duties were more clerical than her interest or skills. Attending a U of A College of Law's Legal Paraprofessional Summit, she learned about Arizona's legal paraprofessional license, which allows holders to provide limited legal services to clients, and that the college's Master of Legal Studies program offers a concentration leading to the certification. 

"I immediately knew that was what I wanted to do," she said.

Starting the MLS program, Nigut brought a deep interest in restorative justice, especially overturning wrongful convictions. This spring, Nigut has been working with Joseph M. Livermore Professor Emeritus of Law Andy Silverman in the college's Civil Rights Restoration Clinic, assisting eligible clients with criminal convictions through the process of restoring their civil rights. So far, she has filed motions with the court on behalf of three of her clients.

When professors encouraged Nigut to consider a Juris Doctor, reluctance was her first and familiar response. In retrospect, Nigut now recognizes that it was "a cover" for insecurities she had developed and surmounted during an unpredictable life.

"Sometimes you think your way into right acting, but sometimes you have to act your way into right thinking," she said. "When I actually started talking to people about the J.D. program as something I might be capable of, it made it very real, and I realized that I want it more than anything else at this point in my life."

Nigut has a 3.75 average and scored in the 95th percentile of JD Next, a law school admissions test developed by the U of A College of Law and accepted by many law schools across the country. She's hoping for offers from other Juris Doctor programs but is excited to have one from California Western School of Law in San Diego, where her nephew went to law school. 

Nigut, who will be 77 when she finishes her Juris Doctor, brushes off people who tell her she is inspiring – she's just doing what works for her.

"When I was 70, I realized that I might only have 10 or 15 years left in this world and I want to do something meaningful to contribute to it," Nigut said. "Retiring has given me the freedom, for the first time in my life, to be a student pursuing what I've waited a lifetime for, and I'm loving it."