The road from mediocre high school student to seminary to The University of Tulsa’s College of Law was full of twists and turns and learning curves for Chad Thurman.
Ultimately, however, he is proud of the achievements he has reached, including now working as an associate attorney at Frederic Dorwart, Lawyers PLLC in Tulsa.
“In high school, I wasn’t the best student,” Thurman said. “I don’t think any of this was really on my radar at all. I graduated with a pretty low GPA from high school, and it took some life changes that ultimately led to my path to seminary to gain a love for learning.
“Throughout my seminary experience and into law school, I just kind of kept building this love for learning, and that, I think, is what really helped me to find success and to find the place that I am now working for a law firm here in Tulsa.”
Thurman encourages people to find their passion and follow it.
“You never know where it will lead you,” Thurman said. “In high school, I never imagined that I would be a lawyer, and here I am, really enjoying it and loving it, and I think it comes from that passion for a love for learning.”
Thurman attended five years of Catholic seminary – undergraduate and graduate studies – before moving to Tulsa to teach at Bishop Kelley High School, where he also coached junior varsity baseball.
From there, he decided to enroll as a UTulsa Law student in 2021, graduating in 2024.
He said there are a lot of similarities between seminary and law school. “A lot of people say that the underlying theme of law school was thinking like a lawyer,” Thurman said. “I think studying philosophy really helped give me a foundation in that there’s a lot of logical thinking.”
Thurman thoroughly enjoyed his time at UTulsa.
“I made some really good friends while I was there,” he said. “I think I really did learn how to think like a lawyer. I had some tremendous support from different professors, and it was a really collegial environment.”
Thurman appreciated his constitutional law courses. “In a lot of ways, those have the most philosophical kind of questions to them, because the constitutional law classes really go toward the makeup of our country and some of the political philosophy behind that,” he said.
His wife, Megan Thurman, is a member of the Golden Hurricane family, too. She received her bachelor’s degree from UTulsa in 2016 followed by her MBA in 2020.
During his final year of law school, Thurman was named executive editor of the Tulsa Law Review. He played a key role in rebuilding the organization by helping to restore critical institutional knowledge that had been lost during the pandemic, said Professor Gwendolyn Savitz, TLR’s faculty adviser.
In addition, he revived Tulsa Law Review’s annual symposium after years of dormancy, working alongside the symposium editor.
“Their efforts were a resounding success, reestablishing an important forum for legal scholarship and discussion and building the foundation for this year’s symposium,” Savitz added. “The amount of work that these dual roles required was evident in the decision this year to appoint an additional symposium editor – further proof of the extraordinary impact Chad had on the organization.”