April Farris and her husband, Ben, are shown during a trip to Comanche Trail Park during the Festival of Lights in December. April, a Big Spring native, is currently in her second year at Harvard Law School. (Courtesy photo)

The daughter of Dr. David and Ann Ward has traded the plains of West Texas for the hustle and bustle of Boston as a second-year student at Harvard Law School.

Moving from rural Big Spring to cosmopolitan Boston brought on quite a case of culture shock, she admitted.

“It’s about as different as you can get,” Farris said. “Boston is a nice city and a really fun environment, but the culture here is very different.

“You meet a lot of amazing people ... but at the same time, it’s not as friendly place as West Texas,” she added. “That, and it’s freezing cold six months out of the year.”

Farris was accepted to Harvard Law School after graduating with honors from Abilene Christian University in 2006.

“Basically I was interested in a lot of political issues and a knew the best way to be effective in that field was to go to a great institution, get a good education and go and do great things,” she said. “So, yes, I guess you can say I aimed high.”

Making the grade at such a prestigious institution has required Farris’ maximum effort.

“In college (at Abilene Christian University), I thought if I had more than two or three hours of homework a week, that was rough,” she said. “Here, I basically have to study five or six hours a night ... the library is definitely my second home, now.”

Studying even crowded into her honeymoon.

“I married  Ben in December 2006, which was two weeks before my first law school finals,” she said. “So I ended up taking my books with me to Cancun.”

But the experience has been second to none, she quickly added.

Farris, an avowed conservative, admits she’s in the minority at Harvard. But it’s a vocal minority, she added.

“I think this experience made me more confident in some of the ideas I held before I came up here,” she said. “It’s a very, very different world up here. You talk with people with very different perspectives (and) there’s a very healthy level of dialog here at Harvard, but they need more conservatives up here.”

And she hopes to support conservative causes once she graduates from law school.

“I want to do work in litigation or have an appellate practice,” she said. “Eventually, I want to do that sort of work for non-profit agencies that support issues such as religious liberty or right to life.”

Contact Staff Writer Steve Reagan at 263-7331, ext. 234 or by e-mail at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it