At Across the Aisle™, a commitment to service is at the heart of what unites our Answer the Call™ student Ambassadors. Recently, alum Daphne Nwobike was featured by the University of Virginia School of Law in recognition of that commitment.
Nwobike graduated from the Answer the Call Ambassador Program in 2026 and is now a student at the University of Virginia School of Law.
In the feature, she shares more about her experience serving her community and what inspired her to become a lawyer.
Read the full article below.
Service Shaped First-Year Student’s Path to Law School
Daphne Nwobike ‘29 Sees Service as ‘Way To Remember Our Shared Humanity’
By Melissa Castro Wyatt, University of Virginia Law
When Daphne Nwobike arrived at The University of the South four years ago, she wasn’t sure how she would fit into the tiny liberal arts school, commonly known as Sewanee, perched atop the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee.
By the time she left this past May, her classmates had chosen her to speak on their behalf.
Nwobike, who will enter the University of Virginia School of Law this fall, delivered the graduation speech as the school’s Algernon Sydney Sullivan award winner, an honor reflecting a college career that prioritized service to others.
Among other service projects during her time at Sewanee, she devoted eight hours a week to community-engaged service as a Bonner Leader, a national service and civic engagement program. Ultimately, she logged more than 800 hours at a food pantry, a women’s shelter and a middle school, and in Sewanee’s historically Black neighborhood. That adds up to 100 eight-hour workdays — or about five months of full-time work.
All of that doesn’t even count the time spent working at Miriam’s Kitchen in Washington, D.C., near Hyattsville, Maryland, where her family settled when she was 10 after moving from Nigeria to build a new life in the United States.
“Service is the purest way to see others,” she said in her commencement remarks. “We don’t serve to save anyone. We serve to be present with another person’s reality long enough that it becomes real to us, too.”
Finding Community Through Service
Nwobike spent the first decade of her life in Nigeria before her family started over in the United States. Her dad, who had worked in procurement in Africa, took a job in a Hyattsville tire store. Her mom, a teacher by training, worked at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. The entire family — including three children — piled into a spare room in a relative’s home while the Nwobikes built a new life in the United States.
By seventh grade, when she was named Student of the Week at her middle school, Nwobike realized she had the academic chops to succeed in her new home.
Her senior year, she was selected as a Posse Foundation Scholar, which provided her with a full scholarship to attend Sewanee. The Posse Foundation identifies and trains promising high school leaders who might otherwise slip through the admissions process. The foundation then provides pre-collegiate training and places cohorts of scholars in groups, or “posses,” at partner institutions.
“Getting Posse and seeing that this committee of admissions officers were able to see that I have a bright future ahead of me — for them to be willing to invest money in a college education for me — that’s when I knew I could really do it,” Nwobike said.
In her new college environment, she drew on lessons from her parents, who had both extended themselves far outside their comfort zones to provide for their family in a new country.
“I definitely credit my parents for putting that fire under me to be like, ‘There’s no other option — you have to succeed.’”
Still, there were social challenges she hadn’t anticipated amid disruptions to the cohesiveness of communities everywhere by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nwobike’s response was to get involved and to “love the people around me,” she said.
“I began to see service as one of the most effective and meaningful ways to remember our shared humanity,” she said in her graduation speech. “Loving your neighbor is the most radical thing you can do in a world that has forgotten how.”
In addition to her Bonner experiences, her service work took her to Selma, where she led students on a civil rights immersion trip; to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward; and back to Washington, where she did case work for people experiencing homelessness. Through a grantmaking project, she helped distribute $40,000 to organizations addressing needs including food security, housing access and dental care.
Collectively, these experiences shaped what she wanted to do with her life.
Law as Another Way To Serve
As Nwobike explored government and social justice issues, she saw law as another way to turn empathy into action.
As a freshman, she created and led Sewanee’s Multicultural Pre-Law Society, helping connect fellow college students with mentors and information about the LSAT, law school admissions and legal careers.
She also grappled with politics and public policy issues as a research intern at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and the Congress, and as a campus ambassador for Across the Aisle, a nonpartisan nonprofit civics education group.
Ultimately, she decided on law school during her junior year, after helping a Venezuelan asylee apply for permanent residency while she volunteered at an immigration clinic.
“It made me feel like I had a sense of agency, like I could do something to help instead of just talking about immigration with my peers,” Nwobike said. “And if I was able to get this done as a college student, while working with a Spanish-speaking client, then I felt like I could definitely do this as a profession. The passion is there, the heart is there and I feel like the skills are there. So I was like, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’”
A list of Nwobike’s activities and leadership positions at Sewanee would risk burying Nwobike behind a wall of text. But for her, it wasn’t about building her resume as much as honoring her parents’ sacrifice.
“I know how much we left behind just to be here, so I’ve been approaching life with the attitude of: Take every chance you get and do your best with whatever you have,” she said. “Because I feel incredibly grateful to be in the U.S. and to have this opportunity to get an education.”
By the end of her senior year, Sewanee’s students and faculty recognized Nwobike with the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award, which recognizes outstanding character, service and leadership — and designates the winner as the graduation speaker.
Her mom cried throughout graduation day, according to Nwobike.
“She couldn’t even believe that I was speaking at my college graduation,” Nwobike said. “She was really overwhelmed with joy and gratitude, too.”
Nwobike is attending UVA Law on a scholarship endowed by Double Hoo Robert Byron ’76, a 1973 College of Arts & Sciences graduate and member of the UVA Board of Visitors.
The Law School appealed to Nwobike in part, she said, because of the community vibe she encountered during the admissions process.
She’s already signed up for the Law School’s Community Fellows Program.
“I got more meaning out of my time at Sewanee because I was doing service,” Nwobike said. “That’s something I hope to continue at UVA, whether it’s by volunteering at local organizations in the area, or helping build a sense of community within our class.”
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