06/07/2026
Congratulations to our July graduates!
As part of our Volunteer Profile series, Chidera spoke with Simona Obeng, the Community & Leadership Impact Coordinator, about how her experience with volunteering comes from a place of giving back.
What motivated you to volunteer?
The honest answer is that motivation was never really the question, it was a sense of responsibility.
I arrived at the University having been shaped, at every significant turn, by the generosity of people who did not have to stop for me but did. Mentors who answered emails they had no obligation to answer. Advisers who made time when their schedules did not. Professionals who opened rooms I did not yet know existed. That accumulation of unsolicited grace left a mark with me, hence my determination to give back.
At Cambridge, this translated into concrete involvement, as a volunteer with the CB Mentoring Programme, a member of the Executive Committee of the Wolfson College Students' Association, and through various initiatives across the College and University. There was no single catalysing moment. It was an ongoing awareness that institutions of this calibre become genuinely great not through their architecture or their rankings, but through what the people within them choose to do beyond themselves. Volunteering, for me, is an intentional act of stewardship. It is the decision to treat the time and the platform you have been given as something larger than your own advancement.
Life at Cambridge is busy – why choose to give your free time to volunteering?
Postgraduate life at Cambridge is, by any honest account, undeniably demanding and intense – to borrow the famous phrase from my faculty. The academic expectations are significant, the intellectual community is stimulating to the point of being occasionally overwhelming, and the pressure to perform is constant. I understand why, in this environment, anything beyond the immediate demands of study can feel like an unaffordable luxury.
I do not, however, see volunteering as separate from my academic journey; I see it as complementary to it.
Volunteering grounds me in something the Library cannot always provide: genuine human connection and the reminder that knowledge divorced from application is incomplete.
I engage regularly with people at different stages of their journeys: some navigating the pressures of postgraduate study for the first time, others working through questions of professional identity and direction. It is meaningful because it reinforces my belief that excellence pursued in isolation eventually becomes hollow, but excellence pursued in community becomes something worth building on.
I have come to realise that mentoring requires a particular quality of attention. You cannot advise someone well if you have not first listened to them properly, and this knowledge has made me a more patient and more considered communicator. I am slower to assume I know what someone needs, and quicker to ask.
What skills or experiences have you gained through volunteering that you think might help you in your future career?
The competencies I have developed through volunteering map directly onto the demands of a career in international commercial legal practice, and I say that not as a polished observation for the purpose of this reflection, but because I have felt the connection in practice.
More broadly, volunteering has confirmed something I had always suspected: that leadership in the legal profession, genuinely excellent leadership, is not primarily a technical achievement. It is an exercise in empathy, representation, and institutional care. Those qualities are not separate from the work. They are what make the work matter.
Ultimately, volunteering at Cambridge has been less about adding to my résumé and more about shaping my character. It has reminded me that true success is measured not only by achievement, but by contribution.
Learn more
This article is part of an ongoing series of profiles of Wolfson student volunteers.
To learn more about how you can get involved, visit our Volunteering at Wolfson page.
Image: Chidera at the 2026 Wolfson Entrepreneurship Competition
