HILLTOWNS — After getting a master’s degree in social work and spending two years with the Allegheny Department of Human Services, in Pennsylvania, where she helped homeless people with housing concerns, Megan Bassler felt she wasn’t doing enough and took off for law school. 

“I wanted to help people … on a larger scale, rather than just put a Band-Aid on the problem,” she said. 

And the meager pay that social workers receive wasn’t doing much to make up for it, she added. 

So Bassler, who graduated from Berne-Knox-Westerlo in 2010, got a law degree from Albany Law School, where she was a lead article editor for the school’s science and technology journal, and graduated magna cum laude.

She took the state bar exam in July and found out in October that she passed, at which point she was able to become an associate attorney at The Towne Law Firm, in Albany, having spent two years as a clerk there while she was working toward her qualifications. 

Working for a general-practice firm, Bassler takes on several different types of cases, including business law, estate planning , and construction law, among many others.

She acknowledges that it’s a divergence from her original interest in housing issues, but said, “I think if you’re in private practice, or you work for a legal aid or whatnot … ultimately you need to put your client’s best interest forward and you’re still helping them at the end of the day.”

All the while, she gets to explore different areas of the law while learning the ins-and-outs, “which is really interesting,” she said. 

Being back in the Capital Region is good, too, and Bassler said she intends to remain here, having fulfilled her desire to experience big-city living, in Pittsburgh, which she said didn’t fit with her personality. 

After she had graduated from the State University of New York at Oswego, where she got her bachelor’s degree, she “really wanted to just live in a city.”

“I was like … ‘I’m not moving back to a small town where I’m not near anything,’” she said. “And so I left, and it wasn’t a difficult transition — I really loved my time in the city — but then I did have a sense of, ‘I need to come back [home].’”

“I love this area,” she said. “I love where I’m from. I think it’s just a beautiful, calming place to live, and sometimes a city’s a little stressful for my personality.”

Bassler said she encourages any student who is thinking about moving to a new area, and is perhaps wavering between doing it and not, to just go for it. 

“The worst thing to happen is you come back if you don’t like it,” she said. “You never know.”

And leaving a place, of course, doesn’t negate the values and the relationships that a person has built up there.

“I think being from a smaller community, or a smaller school, you do make really good connections, and you always do have a sense of community,” Bassler said. “I think that’s helped me. You always have somewhere to come back to and I have really fond memories of growing up where I’m from, and a sense of pride in the community … and I think that’s been really beneficial.”