Joëlle Andrea Simeu Juegouo, B.A., Class of 2020

Joëlle Andrea Simeu Juegouo of Media, Pennsylvania, majored in English with a special interest in legal studies and literature. She minored in Africana Studies and Poverty and Human Capability Studies. A QuestBridge Scholar, she was active in W&L’s student government, serving as chair of the Student Judicial Council during her senior year. In addition to her work as a peer counselor, she was a student representative to a wide range of committees and organizations, including the University Committee on Inclusiveness and Campus Climate, the Diversity & First-Gen Low Income Group, the Student Affairs Committee, and the Africana Studies Advisory Committee.

Joëlle also volunteered in the Lexington and Rockbridge County community, working each week at The Community Table, an organization dedicated to relieving hunger in the local area, and was a student representative to the Care Rockbridge Community Anti-Racism Effort.

A 2017 Summer Research Scholar at W&L, Joëlle worked under the direction of Professor Mohamed Kamara, chair of the Africana Studies Program, on a project titled “The Poetics and Politics of Space in the Works of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leopold Senghor.” She participated in the university’s Washington Term Program in 2018 when she was an intern at The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, a coalition that coordinates legislative advocacy for more than 200 national organizations. She also had a summer internship with the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty, working with the Center for New North Carolinians in Greensboro, North Carolina. During the summer of 2019, she interned for the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and public policy institute affiliated with the New York University School of Law. And in the winter of 2020, she worked as an intern for W&L’s Shenandoah magazine.

Joëlle was a 2019 winner of the G. Holbrook Barber Scholarship Award, awarded to a rising senior who manifests superior qualities of helpfulness and friendliness to fellow students, public spirit, scholarship and personal character.

Following graduation, Joëlle is scheduled to work for two years as a paralegal at Relman Colfax, PLLC, a national civil rights law firm in Washington, D.C., before pursuing a joint graduate program in law and English.

Sources: university file, personal information
Written by: Jeff Hanna, jhanna@wlu.edu
Updated: May 29, 2020