Kayla Pace has lived at a hectic pace for the past three years. As a single mom involved in a six-year custody battle, she managed to hold down five jobs. She also worked multiple jobs while attending U.C Davis, despite driving back to the Valley each weekend to be with her son.
The accomplishment is all the more noteworthy because she is the first in her immediate family to attain a bachelor’s degree, let alone attend any sort of graduate school. Her father, along with all of her grandparents, never finished high school. Her mother, meanwhile, attended a year of bible college.
Still, she says becoming at attorney is a “lifelong passion.” She remembers as a child running away to the library where she would hide out among the law books “because my Mom wouldn’t look for me there.”
She is grateful for the help of Ty Kharazi, a 1996 SJCL grad and the founder of the Kharazi Book Scholarship. Kharazi was a 16-year-old college student in 1977, studying in the Los Angeles area on a scholarship from his home country of Iran. Six months after he arrived, so did the embassy takeover in Tehran. Ty found himself without finances and family. He managed to land a job at Jack in the Box where he worked all day and a job as a valet along the Sunset Strip at night. He eventually switched to working at McDonalds and tried to take at least one college course at night every semester. Ten years later, he achieved his Bachelor’s degree in Biology from CSU Bakersfield, followed by his Masters in Health Care Administration. Kharazi has established both the Kharazi Bar Study Support Scholarship to offset the cost of a bar review course and this book scholarship, recalling those two expenses were outside the very tight budget which he lived by during law school.
Kayla has cut back to just two jobs as she begins her journey through law school. She says “I have fought hard to get here and will fight even harder to stay here and prove myself as a top-rate student.”