When Roberts was in high school, he would sometimes catch a train up to Poughkeepsie to see his sister, who was at Vassar College on a scholarship. “It was cool. Nobody was fighting. People were happy, friendly, interesting. It seemed like a different world. So, I said, ‘I can do this,’” recalled Roberts.

During his freshman year in high school, an African-American man came to his class who had gone to school at Cornell, played basketball, and worked on Wall Street. At the time, Roberts had heard of Wall Street, but he had never met anyone who worked there.

“He talked about making $100,000 a year. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but it was a nice round large figure. The man put up a graph of how much a high school grad made versus a college grad. That was all I needed to see. It was big enough,” said Roberts.

He started preparing for college by looking at the highest paying professions. “In my research, chemical engineering was the highest paying salary I could find. Chemical engineers were making $56,000 a year at the time. That seemed incredible to me. ‘Four years of school, 56 grand?’ Done.”

Roberts attended Johns Hopkins University on a scholarship, where he majored in chemical engineering. During a Heat Transfer II class, “A guy who had gone to Hopkins came to class. He wrote $ 256,000 on the board and said this is the average salary of a patent attorney in the United States. I raised my hand. ‘Are you saying that if you go to law school for three years after studying what we study now, I can make $256,000? … Sign me up.”

Roberts earned his Juris Doctor from Duke School of Law and joined a law firm in San Diego as a patent attorney. After failing the California bar twice, he decided to move to North Carolina, where his mother had settled.

He took a job at a small firm in Jacksonville, NC. The day after Roberts was sworn in as a lawyer, he handled his first criminal trial – an attempted murder case involving a Marine-involved shooting. “From there, I was pretty hooked.”

Roberts said making the leap from chemical engineering to the law was not as much of a stretch as it might seem. “It’s challenging in a different way than, say, engineering or math. It’s puzzle solving, reading individuals, reading people. You had to read the jury and remember different aspects of their lives to give them something to latch onto in your argument that would help them remember why they should acquit your client.”