Alumni Profiles

B.A., Political Science and Peace & Conflict Studies (double major), 2006

J.D. candidate

University of North Carolina School of Law

Chapel Hill, N.C. 

To watch an interview with Will, click here.

Will Johnson is an agent of social justice. He wasn’t one while he was in high school, but his years at Guilford College transformed him into someone who lives to be involved, to be an agent for change.  

“My first semester at Guilford was a defining time for me,” he says, “the most powerful time of my life. I had been really shy in high school, really closed. But everything clicked so well for me as a freshman at Guilford that I knew the college was the place where I could thrive, blossom, get involved.” 

Will says that in that first year, he met people with similar values, all wanting to get involved, wanting to take the lessons of the classroom into the nonacademic world. It was quite a year: “In fact, three of the professors from my first semester are still people who have had the biggest impact on my life.” Equally as important, he adds: “It was in that year that I learned not only about important issues, problems in the world, but also that we are not powerless! Do you know how life-changing that realization is? I learned to use tools to heal, to repair, to move forward in life and to make changes in the world. Wow. My life has never been the same.” 

In the couple of years since he graduated from Guilford College, Will has been working with migrant farmers, doing legal aid work. Over the past year, he worked out of Raleigh, N.C., with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a worldwide initiative that works “for peace and justice across the country and around the world.” Will was placed with Legal Aid of North Carolina, a statewide program providing free legal services in civil matters to low-income people. 

“The work in North Carolina is so satisfying,” Will says. His main areas of work have been with the Farmworker Unit of Legal Aid of North Carolina — established to defend the civil/legal rights of migrant and seasonal farmworkers in North Carolina — and the Battered Immigrant Project. 

Will minored in Latin America studies at Guilford College, and he took classes in Spanish. He even studied in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the fall semester of his senior year. “If you ask people who know me to describe me, they’ll likely say he’s the guy who fell in love with Mexico, where he learned to shape the concept of social engagement into real work,” he says with a big smile, adding that, “and I really did fall in love with the country.” 

In fact, right after graduating from Guilford, Will went to Mexico to work, and he ended up spending six months in Mexico City at Casa de los Amigos, the home of the Mexico City Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). After that stint, he moved to New York City, working in Spanish Harlem for a year. But North Carolina has his heart, and it’s most likely to become his home as he practices immigrant advocacy law. 

“I do plan to stay in North Carolina,” he says. “I have traveled around, and I’ve discovered that it’s tough to build community relationships and then leave them — I’d like to create a community that I can stick with. Having gone to college in North Carolina, having worked in Raleigh and now going to law school here … it just makes sense to stay here. Also, of course, I still have friends from Guilford College here.” He adds that the UNC law school is a great launching pad, and that the need for his kind of assistance is “palpable” in the region: “This definitely will get me more engaged as an agent of social justice.” 

Will also was accepted to the law schools at Temple University and American University, but he chose UNC, certainly a competitive institution. “My experiences at Guilford College really helped set me apart from the competition,” Will says. “I did OK on the LSAT, and my Personal Statement [about social justice in the Latino community] was fine. But what mattered most was that I had acquired the record — community work, volunteer abroad work, Jesuit Volunteer work — to back up my Statement. And a great letter of recommendation from a Guilford College professor also helped.” 

Will says that Guilford College “definitely is a place for active students. My friends from here are engaged in wonderful, meaningful things, because the college gives you so many opportunities to take leadership roles, to volunteer, to become seriously involved. The support and encouragement are all over campus; it’s up to you.”