It’s an early morning in late April, and CNN anchors Poppy Harlow and Pamela Brown are packing their bags for the day and saying goodbye to their husbands and kids. Instead of heading to a bustling New York television studio or a government building in the heart of Washington, DC, as they have for most of their careers, both women are going to school.

With backpacks stuffed to the brim and stacks of assigned reading for the train rides to campus, Harlow makes her way to Yale, where she will soon finish her year-long Master’s of Law program, while Brown journeys to George Washington University for her respective part -time Master’s course. Although the two had spent their lives surrounded by the law—from growing up in households of lawyers to routinely reporting on Supreme Court decisions on primetime—it wasn’t until last year that either actually considered attending law school.

“I always sort of wanted a law degree, but I didn’t know how to make it work because I only really thought of the traditional JD, the full three-year beast,” Harlow says. “But then someone brought up this program to me, and it sort of fell in my lap as something I should try.” With two kids under the age of seven at home, the longtime anchor wondering if she would have the time or energy to take on something so ambitious, but then she thought back to her interview with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg three years earlier. “I figured, well, she did it with a toddler and while her husband had cancer, so I’m just going to try,” Harlow recalls. “I decided I should just apply, even if I probably wouldn’t get in.”

A few months later, she was pleasantly surprised to receive acceptance to