Beauty queen and law student? Why not?

 She is none other than Atty. Anna Theresa Licaros.

She is definitely our #goals: proving that beauty is not just superficial, but also intellectual.

To start, she speaks very well — not just with her fancy smile, her glamorous diction, but more importantly, with the content of what she says. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of the Philippines – Diliman with a Bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Communication. She later studied law in the same university, during which she competed in Binibining Pilipinas.

Yes, she was a law student.

She is empowering. When asked during the pageant why she joined Binibining Pilipinas when she can just study law, she answered with full confidence that she believes she can have both. Well, why not? “I think that law students can do whatever they put their minds into and it is not necessarily just codal or reading the law, but they can also join a beauty pageant and do very very well,” she added.

Mind you, that was not yet the Q&A proper. That was just a warm-up.

During the Q&A, she was asked to choose between the crown and her lovelife. Quite a difficult question, but she handled it with surprising ease and excellence.

Well, being the strong, independent woman that she was, she chose the crown. She said that it is “a once in a lifetime opportunity”. She believes that she “will be able to reach out and touch more people to be of greater service should [she] achieve the crown”. “I am very confident that lovelife will be there once the crown is no longer in my head and I have passed it on,” she added.

Of course, the natural response of the audience is a grand applause.

She won the pageant. She represented the Philippines in the Miss Universe competition where she won Miss Photogenic.

Two years after, she graduated salutatorian of her batch in UP Law. She took the 2009 Bar Examination where she emerged victorious again, earning her “Atty.” on 2010. She is also a passer of the Philippine Foreign Service Examinations, considered as one of the toughest examinations administered in the Philippines. She was one of the nine examinees who passed.

She continues to inspire law students to pursue their dreams.

[Photo credits: pinay.com]