George Alemya Ayine is not only the pride of his family in being a first-generation college student but also a role model in his village in Bolgatanga, Ghana by becoming its first university graduate.

Ayine, a 29-year-old second-year student at Penn State Law-Dickinson is serving as an intern this spring at the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association. Studying law, let alone media law, was not his first career choice though.

After high school, he attended the University of Health and Allied Science in Ghana where he studied to become a physician assistant.

“When I started practicing, I realized that there was a lot of gaps in the health care sector,” he said. “Oftentimes, the policymakers don’t actually understand the implications of the policies they are making on the day-to-day practice of medicine.”

Drawing on his experience in student government leadership as well with Youth Alliance for Leadership and Development in Africa and the United Nations Youth Association, he and a few colleagues began a health care advocacy group to try to address their policy concerns.

It was that experience that led him down the path to pursue a law degree.

Ayine sat for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and scored well. He was accepted at seven other American law schools but felt Penn State was the right fit for him.

“The goal was to come to the U.S. given that the U.S. is one of the most advanced systems when it comes to anything in the world,” Ayine said. “I wanted to be a part of that.”

At Penn State Dickinson Law where he is taking classes exploring various areas of the law, he began researching internships and saw the listing for one at PNA that immediately caught his interest. He felt it paralleled the experience he had in the student leadership role he had in Ghana and

“I do not have any media background. This looked like a completely new environment that I will be going into,” he said. “I can draw back on my life experience to also be useful in it.”

Catie Gavenonis, PNA’s legislative counsel, said she and media law counsel Melissa Melewsky are thrilled to have George as PNA’s legal intern this semester.

“Our department believes that with his background in healthcare and in another country, George will add a fresh perspective to the legal and legislative issues PNA faces,” she said. “He has been honing his legal research and writing skills in law school and we are hoping to benefit from those skills and his general experience.”

Ayine said he is hoping his wife Hawa and two young children can join him in the United States. Once he completes law school, he intends to practice law in this country for a while in a field that marries his health care background with his law school degree. 

“I just want to build myself and position myself for the health care industry,” he said. “I want to be someone who would help policies in some way and I feel like the healthcare sector provide me that broad opportunity to do that.”

Meet the rest of the PNA legal team here.