“I wanted to give back, and I wanted to help communities like the one I’d come from,” Hall said.

Hall grew up in a lower-income Utah household with parents who faced significant disabilities. Those experiences shaped her desire to become a social worker. That was the plan. Languages, it seemed, would be the side plan. Little did she know how closely those two paths would become intertwined.

Hall has a rich cultural heritage. Her mother immigrated from Ukraine and met her father in the Russian House at BYU. Hall dreamed of someday speaking Russian with her Ukrainian relatives. She also studied Spanish and ASL, later using both during her mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chile and Texas.

“Languages came relatively easily to me because I was just so excited about learning them,” Hall said.

This enthusiasm led Hall to enroll in Russian during her first semester at BYU. The class was shockingly hard, and with limited funding, she worried she was getting sidetracked.

“I felt guilty enrolling in that class because I thought, wow, I need to keep my eyes on the professional ball,” Hall said. “What am I doing studying Russian? This is useless. But I wanted it so badly because it’s my mother’s native language.”

Despite her doubts, she took a leap of faith and stayed in the class.

Studying Russian opened doors she never expected. Hall earned a prestigious Boren Scholarship and, like her parents before her, moved into the Russian House to immerse herself in language and culture. She has been able to travel to Ukraine, where she met her grandparents for the first time, and participate in Study Abroad experiences in Latvia and Georgia.

During a seven-month internship with the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, Hall began to see how her language studies would interconnect with social work. This is where she experienced the “biggest miracle of my life.”

“When I went to Kazakhstan, I asked to have more interaction with refugees, and this led me to meet a woman who was in a desperate situation. She would soon be ordered to leave the country and forced to return to her birth country, where she would die. None of my efforts worked, and then, one day, I had a clear prompting to invite her to church. I hesitated because it didn’t seem appropriate, but the prompting was distinct,” Hall said. “She received a priesthood blessing while she was at church, and the person giving her the blessing suddenly realized he had a contact in Croatia that may be able to help, and that contact did help. I had already left Kazakhstan when the government officially ordered her to leave. That very day, she was approved for a humanitarian visa.”

Through her Russian-speaking internship, Hall’s desire to help vulnerable communities became a reality as she assisted refugees in obtaining documentation and services. As she did this, while observing the rule of law and court proceedings, she became inspired to pursue law school.

“Everything that I’ve done in life has been an unforeseeable opportunity that pushed me in a little different trajectory than I was expecting to go down, and I’m open to change,” Hall said. “BYU has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I started following a dream that I thought was totally useless, and I found a way to make it useful and to be doing good.”