Lansing alum shares journey from debate team to law school

While Lansing alum Sean O’Neil’s current office in Washington D.C. is a ways away from his hometown, he said that he’ll never forget all that his experience in Lansing and in Tompkins County taught him to bring him to where he is now.

O’Neil grew up in Lansing, spending his elementary, middle and high school days in the school district.

“The school is great altogether, great teachers,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed all the sort of social studies programs. Things like that were things I enjoyed the most.”

O’Neil was involved in a wide array of activities, but what really started to point him down his current career path was his time on the local Model UN, a simulation of the United Nations General Assembly where students perform an ambassador role while debating different topics. There, his interest in debating, especially the relationship building that comes along with it, began to grow.

His history at Model UN later led O’Neil to the Cornell International Summer Debate Camp (tinyurl.com/2y63afj8), which he attended in his junior and senior years of high school. The camp brings together teens from around the world to learn all about debate.

“My mom works at the ILR School at Cornell, and the Cornell debate program is housed within the ILR School,” O’Neil said. “She knew Sam Nelson, who runs the camp. And he mentioned, ‘You should mention this to your son. I know you’ve told me he does Model UN. This might be something that interests him.’ And [I] wasn’t doing much else that summer, so got signed up.”

It was a decision O’Neil was immediately happy he made, as he explained.

“I loved it,” he said. “We have Model UN, but that’s a little bit different; it’s a little bit slower, less competition based. So, [it was] sort of fun to have the way of thinking and argument thinking like that, and competing, I thought, was a really good time. And it was interesting as well to meet all sorts of different people from different places. The camp brings in … students from all over the world. So, you get to meet a lot of people from different perspectives and talk to not just students, but also all the counselors are from all over the place. You get a broader perspective than you’d get normally.”

While at the debate camp, O’Neil got plenty of experience debating, and he carried that experience with him to George Washington University, where he attended college. There, he joined the school’s Debate & Literary Society, of which he later became president.

“For me, it was natural to join there,” O’Neil said. “Sam Nelson told me at the camp [that] he knew the coach here at GW, Paul Hayes, who to get into contact with and how to get to be part of the team. And then, I just loved it. You get to do a lot of travel, visit all sorts different colleges. I got to do some international travel through the program as well and just get to have a lot of fun, meet a lot of interesting people and get into situations you wouldn’t think you’d be able to get into as an undergrad at college, debating in front of ambassadors and things like that.”

George Washington’s program allowed O’Neil to work with institutions in Washington D.C. like the French Embassy and various think tanks. He explained that while there were plenty of fun, interesting competitions at the debate club, “it was less about focusing on debate as a means of competition, but more debate as a means of engaging with issues.”

“You get to get in situations where you’re talking to actual decision-makers about policy,” he said. “You’re not just sort of debating in front of other college kids; you’re debating in front of people who, maybe they hear this argument and they’re like, ‘It’s not a bad idea, [I’ll] include that in my diplomatic efforts.’ All that I found really rewarding, getting to engage with actual policymakers as an undergraduate on the issues of the day.”

Not long after he graduated from George Washington, O’Neil started working in his current position as a legislative assistant at Washington D.C.’s National Grange. He plans to work there for about a year before attending Harvard Law School in fall 2023. O’Neil said that debate is “law adjacent in terms of thinking,” and he was also inspired by his time at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Military Commissions Defense Organization, which he described in an email as “the system that is trying the cases of certain prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay,” in his undergrad years.

“Working for that team for a year was super interesting for me,” he told Tompkins Weekly. “It may be a little bit of a trick working through one of the most interesting legal cases that’s going on anywhere in the world; that’s not all law is. Maybe I’ve been fooled a little bit into thinking law is super interesting all the time. But we’ll see in a few years if that’s actually the case.”

For now, O’Neil doesn’t have a concrete practice area in mind, so he’s looking to just get his feet wet, he said. Meanwhile, he’ll enjoy working for the National Grange, remembering fondly his time in Lansing that led him to this point.

“I think Lansing was really just an optimal place to grow up in,” he said. “I loved growing up there, small community, really everybody knows each other, helps each other out. The schools were phenomenal. My understanding is after I graduated, they’ve gotten plenty of good national recognition. Great teachers, really interesting, engaging teachers, and then [there’s its] proximity to an international institution like Cornell, which, for rural America, you don’t get as much opportunity to engage with all sorts of different things that Cornell brings.”

Lansing at Large appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.