Next year, Daily Lobo beat reporter Shin Thant Hlaing will be headed to one of the best law programs in the country after graduating from the University of New Mexico with a degree in political science. If you’d asked her a year ago about what her plans were after UNM, law school wouldn’t even have been in the conversation.
“I wanted to either become a researcher or a policy advisor,” Hlaing said. “My mind was going in a lot of different places, but what drew me to law was when the earthquake happened in Myanmar.”
In early 2025, Myanmar suffered a massive earthquake that ravaged the country and surrounding Thailand and China. Hlaing says she’d always wanted her work to be public-facing, and seeing how some development organizations came to the aid of Myanmar, her home country — Hlaing is an international student — made her realize that she wanted to focus on public infrastructure development.
Hlaing said she selected the University of New Mexico for college based on the possibility of earning the Fred Harris Congressional Internship and the International Amigo Scholarship, which grants international students the opportunity to attend UNM while paying in-state tuition rates; ultimately, she would come to be selected for both. The latter, she said, had a symbolic meaning too.
“I think that the sentiment of wanting to welcome people who are not from the state of New Mexico is a very positive thing in my view,” she said.
The University’s location in a minority-majority state also created, for her, a “community of welcoming.”
With her international student status, Hlaing said she was limited in how much she could work, but that the Daily Lobo provided flexibility in the variety of pitches and coverage opportunities, as well as an opportunity to be involved at the University and beyond.
“I think that working at the Daily Lobo as an international student is what allowed me to really integrate myself into New Mexico,” she said. “Because if you think about it, I’m sometimes covering things like the New Mexico state legislature, I’m covering things that go on in the city. I think that by covering things for the (Daily) Lobo, I’m able to step outside the school, outside the bubble, and I’m able to, in a small way, give back to the community that’s around me.”
Hlaing has written for every desk at the Lobo, something she says has supplied her with countless new perspectives and fun experiences. For one story that never made it to print, she attended a screening at the Lobo Theater of a film on Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse and intellectual property law, now a potential career focus for her, along with corporate and international law.
This fall, Hlaing will begin courses at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio. She likens law, specifically mediation and legal advocacy, to journalism in the way that they both operate on a system of trust and seek to make information accessible to everyone.
“You have to uphold a certain set of ethics to maintain that type of trust,” she said. “With journalism, you have to make sure that you don’t misquote things, or you don’t phrase things in a misleading way. You have to upload corrections in a timely way. If you did do something wrong, like with lawyers and with mediators, it’s when you communicate with the client.”
Elliott Wood is the editor-in-chief at the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at editorinchief@dailylobo.com or on X @DailyLobo
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