Emma Schlenker needed something to do with her hands.

A year earlier — her first as a student in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Law — the Phoenix native had begun to experience hearing loss. Before being formally diagnosed, Schlenker started rewatching her class lectures to better absorb their demanding, detailed material. Even after receiving her hearing aids, she maintained the routine.

But as anyone who knows her could attest, Schlenker isn’t one to sit still or let her hands idle. Unfortunately, she’d reached the end of the line with her walking desk. And a brief foray into embroidery left her wanting to stick a needle in her eye.

Eventually, Schlenker would trial another unfamiliar hobby — whittling — and find herself carving out a Husker-themed icon of the law: the gavel. Roughly four weeks and a few dozen hours later, she had crafted a scarlet handle topped by a corncob-shaped mallet still sheathed in its husk.

“I decided it was going to figure out what it wanted to be along the way,” said Schlenker, who dressed as an ear of corn for her first Halloween in the state. “And I love the fact that we’re the Cornhuskers. I love that the law school is on the agriculture campus.

“I just started carving it until it looked like something that seemed interesting. And then I was like, ‘This looks like it could be corn.’”

Schlenker whittled the two-piece gavel from the wood of Nebraska’s state tree, the eastern cottonwood, after social media helped her locate someone looking to rid their yard of its branches. The second-year student may not have known exactly what she was doing — “I messed up a lot” — but she did already have a recipient in mind: Molly Brummond, the assistant dean for student development in the College of Law.

“I think it is silly and lighthearted,” Schlenker said of the gavel. “But Dean Brummond has also been very supportive of me and the process that I’ve gone through in law school. And I hope she knows, too, that I appreciate her, and that I wanted her to have it.

“She said that it has a place of honor next to her candy bowl. And that is my favorite thing about her office, so that seems like a pretty high honor to me.”

The fact that Schlenker even knows an assistant dean well enough to gift her the gavel speaks to the close-knit culture of the college, she said. That same culture has freed her to explore all of the avenues branching from the intersection of technology, law and government, which has emerged as a signature of the college and the focus of her career aspirations. This summer, Schlenker will intern with the Secretary of State back in Arizona, where she got a “crash course in law and democracy” while working for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office and Elections Department in 2020.

In the meantime, she’s continuing to whittle away the hours of lecture review and finals prep with eastern cottonwood in hand. Though the activity may have begun as a way of channeling her tendency to fidget, Schlenker said it’s since revealed itself as something more, the hobby figuring out what it wanted to be.

“It’s fun,” she said. “It’s not (producing) the same type of pressure that a lot of the other parts of my life are right now. With law school, there’s insane pressure to do everything perfectly and get great grades and do all this stuff.

“I think that it’s helping retrain my brain to not overthink things as much. Working with my hands and not having this pressure of (creating) some incredible art piece — it can just be a corncob gavel — I think doing that while engaging with my studies has allowed me to find a lot of balance, mentally.”

Time (and finals grades) will tell, but Schlenker feels that her newfound hobby — in its simplicity, its repetition — might even be helping her grapple with the “deep, analytical, academic thought” inherent to upper-level law school.

“It’s opened up a whole new door for me,” she said, “to sit here and woodwork while I do schoolwork.”