The legal internship Allie Riggs ’26 wanted didn’t exist.
It would have been easy to move on. Instead, she opened a spreadsheet, researched organizations across Indiana, and started reaching out to legal professionals one by one. Some never responded. Others told her no.
She kept asking.
Eventually, she connected with Eli Lilly and Company’s chief legal officer on LinkedIn. The internship she hoped to land still didn’t exist, but she made her case anyway.
The executive forwarded her message to a colleague with a simple directive: make it work.
Soon after, Allie secured a legal internship at Lilly, creating an opportunity where none had existed before.
That experience reinforced a lesson she learned through the Lacy School of Business Executive Career Mentor Program and from her mentor, Randy Brown.
“You never know until you ask.”
It’s advice Allie has carried far beyond her search for an internship.
Long before she arrived at Butler University, Allie’s worldview had been shaped by living abroad. Her family moved from Indiana to Shanghai, China, when she was 10 years old before later relocating to Cork, Ireland. Immersed in different cultures and surrounded by people with vastly different experiences, she developed an early fascination with how economics, policy, business and culture influence one another.
“I always assumed my career would have an international focus,” Allie says. “Living abroad made me realize how connected everything really is.”
When it came time to choose a major, that curiosity led her to International Business. At the same time, she knew law school was in her future. Rather than choosing one path over the other, she decided to pursue both.
“I knew I was interested in law, but I also wanted to understand how businesses operate and how the global economy works,” she says.
At LSB, Allie didn’t have to choose between her interest in business and her plans for law school. Her business education became part of what she will bring to the legal profession.
As she moved through courses in accounting, finance, economics, business law and supply chain management, she began to see connections between disciplines that are often treated separately. The more she learned, the more she realized that many of the questions that interested her most existed at the intersection of business, policy and law.
That mindset extended into the classroom, too.
At Butler, her professors knew her by name and expected her to contribute. Class discussions weren’t optional. Students were challenged to speak up, defend ideas and engage with different perspectives on a daily basis.
“Having spent the last three years at LSB, talking in every single class, probably every single day, I think takes that fear out of it,” she says.
Now, as a first-year student at the University of Cincinnati Donald P. Klekamp College of Law, Allie recognizes how valuable that experience has been.
That mindset extended beyond the classroom, too.
When Butler’s Pre-Law Society lost momentum following the COVID-19 pandemic, Allie volunteered to help rebuild it. She eventually served as president for two years, helping create opportunities for students to connect with law schools, legal professionals and one another.
Her leadership wasn’t limited to pre-law initiatives. Throughout all three years of college, she also served as a YoungLife leader, mentoring local high school students and building relationships that extended far beyond campus.
One of the students she mentored is now a Butler freshman.
Watching her begin her own college journey has become one of Allie’s most meaningful experiences because it represents something she never had herself: a role model who had already navigated the path ahead.
That desire to understand experiences beyond her own would later influence one of her most significant academic accomplishments.
When Allie’s family moved to Cork in summer 2024, the experience brought back a question she had first encountered during a house-hunting trip with her father. Despite having a substantial budget, they had struggled to find available homes, and during one showing, a realtor casually mentioned that Brexit had changed the housing market.
The comment stayed with her. That fall, as she began working on her Honors thesis, she found herself returning to those same questions.
What exactly had changed? What role had Brexit played? How had COVID-19 affected housing availability? Why was supply so limited?
Under the guidance of faculty advisors Dr. Ronia Hawash and Dr. Kuhelika De, both associate professors of economics, Allie spent months researching how major global events affected housing prices in the Republic of Ireland.
The result was her thesis, International Spillover: How External, Global Events Such as Brexit and COVID-19 Have Impacted Housing Prices Within the Republic of Ireland, which was later published in Butler’s Digital Commons repository.
“I had the opportunity to take something from my own life and explore it in a deeper way,” she says. “That’s what made the research meaningful.”
In many ways, the project reflected the same pattern that defined her time at the Lacy School of Business. A personal experience became a question. A question became an opportunity. An opportunity became something larger than she initially imagined.
Today, Allie is pursuing her Juris Doctor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law with plans to build a career in corporate law. While her business education continues to shape the way she approaches legal studies, one of the biggest advantages she carried with her wasn’t tied to any single class.
It was confidence.
Looking back, it’s easy to trace a line through Allie’s Butler experience. A childhood spent abroad sparked an interest in international business. An interest in law led to a business education. A mentor’s advice led her to pursue an internship that didn’t exist. A question overheard during a house-hunting trip in Ireland became published research.
Each experience built on the one before it.
And each began the same way: with the willingness to ask a question.
As Allie likes to remind herself, “Where you’re standing now was once the goal.”
For her, the destination was never the whole story. The real value came from being willing to ask what might be possible – and then creating a path toward the answer.
