Aspiring Lawyer Excels In School, Community BALTIMORE, MD (wypr) - BODY:

Like many other new law school graduates, Alicia Wilson is spending the summer studying for the bar exam.

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IC: Will the bar review matter? Will I even feel the pain? I think I will [laughs] I think it has a stinging effect..

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Alicia is 25 years old and lives with her parents, Josephine and Thomas, in Northeast Baltimore. On this muggy summer evening, the Wilson's are blasting the air conditioner and fans around the house. Alicia's parents talk about being teachers, Jehovah Witnesses, and their daughter's desire to become a lawyer. Josephine recounts how Alicia, as a child, used to broker arguments between her two older brothers.

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IC: Sometimes, they didn't agree with her but sometimes they thought she as the baby sister couldn't tell them what to do. But then they'de realize the intelligent way she would tell them that it made sense. So they would take her idea and that helped solve a lot of problems between her two brothers. [Alicia laughs and responds] I think being an arbitrator within the family has helped a great deal. Also I'm 4-foot-11, I'm not a very imposing individual but I've always tried to use my voice as well as my position of being smaller to kind of champion causes that are unpopular.

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When Alicia was 15, the Baltimore City Law Links program helped her get an internship at the Public Justice Center. She continued to work there every summer until she was 20.

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IC: Having that experience made me want to go into the law. I was really passionate about issues we were confronting tenant advocacy, workers' rights. I was working with some of the most accomplished attorneys I've ever met in my life. People who really took the time to work on behalf of others and to give a voice to many who were voiceless.

The late Walter Sondheim, Jr. also influenced Alicia's decision to enter a career of public service. As a UMBC undergraduate, she got to know Sondheim through a public affairs scholars program created in his honor. She talks about her relationship with Sondheim during a study break from her bar review class downtown.

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IC: What I learned from Walter is that you have to serve, and you have to do what's right, and it doesn't matter if it's the popular thing of the day. But that these issues live and breathe even if someone's not going to champion them. But you need to champion them because it matters to someone.

Back home, Josephine and Thomas Wilson reminisce about their daughter's successes:
High school valedictorian, one of Ebony Magazine's top 50 black high school seniors in the country, first UMBC student ever to be named Maryland's recipient of the prestigious national Harry S. Truman award for public service.

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IC: And she won a Cadillac, it was an old Cadillac, for having perfect attendance at Mervo what year was that Cadillac? An 82. But it ran well [laughing].

The list goes on. Alicia explains her successes and what she hopes to be doing in the future.

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IC: I've always thought that if greatness is possible, than being average isn't enough.

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IC: I want to be a judge, not for the position or the title but for the good you can do as a decision-maker in the lives of individuals. So I hope 20 years from now, that I'm sitting on the bench.

Alicia Wilson will be clerking this fall in the juvenile division of Baltimore City Circuit Court, and then practicing family law and commercial litigation at a local firm.

I'm Stephanie Marudas, reporting in North East Baltimore, for 88.1 WYPR.

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