It’s all about making a difference in people’s lives for a pair of Bear Creek School graduates.

Semilore Sobande aims to make an impact in the advocacy, activism and human-rights realm, and Phoenix Moomaw is focused on making life easier for people on the technology front.

The students at the Redmond school will put their talents into action as they begin the next phases of their lives following commencement this Sunday. The cornerstone of Sobande’s studies will be international relations and law and sociology at Stanford University in California, and Moomaw will delve into computer science and business at Northeastern University in Boston.

SOBANDE

At Bear Creek, Sobande said she’s learned to think for herself and has become interested in solving problems.

“I have this obsession with fairness and I think it’s valuable to help people. It feels good helping people and there’s a lot of reward in that,” she said. “My mom was a social worker, so she also had a lot of influence on me.”

For her senior project, she and classmate Whitney Hom developed an awareness campaign on teen dating violence and made a presentation at the Sammamish Library on June 1.

“I thought that was really important to raise awareness for it,” said Sobande, who feels that people don’t talk about it or teach about it a lot, and she wanted to see what people are doing to combat the issue.

To show the full scope of the issue and what needs to be done to stop teen dating violence, Sobande and Hom conducted seven interviews with survivors, a high school counselor, people from domestic violence organizations, a victim advocate from the police and professor/doctor Erin Casey of the University of Washington-Tacoma Social Work program.

Sobande, who also received state and national recognition with the Bear Creek forensics team, is looking forward to continuing her advocacy at Stanford, a school she feels has a good practical balance of academic and social life.

Through Sobande’s work with her senior project and whatever else awaits her down the line, she’d like to make a difference in people’s lives, even in some small way.

“I think a lot of people go through unnecessary suffering that with a little thought and with a little more awareness and a little more effort wouldn’t exist anymore. I would like to be remembered as one of the people who tried to address that,” she said.

MOOMAW

During his years at Bear Creek, Moomaw has become a confident communicator through his involvement with the forensics team and as chapel team co-leader by guiding students through songs.

Moomaw was also driven to make his senior project a memorable one.

From 1976-1992, Moomaw’s grandfather — a pastor at Bel-Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles — corresponded with Ronald Reagan before and after his presidency (Reagan was a member of the church for a while and they kept in touch after he became president). Moomaw found the box of letters at his grandparents’ house when his family was helping them move and offered to not only scan them for the family to read, but also do his senior project on the men’s relationship.

Moomaw focused his project on how Reagan’s religious life affected his policies (“He believed that religion was the source of morality and he wanted a moral nation,” Moomaw said) and visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California to conduct research along with interviewing his grandfather.

Another upper-echelon figure — Apple Inc.’s chairman, cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs — indirectly had an influence on how Moomaw wants to leave his mark on the world.

When speaking of Jobs, Moomaw quoted Sir Christopher Wren, a famous architect in the 1600s and 1700s: “If you seek his monument, look around you.” Jobs was likened to Wren for his mastery of the technology field.

“Steve put out all of these fantastic products, that just without us really realizing it, changed how we live. So that is honestly how I would like to make my impact,” Moomaw said.”Make it easier to do the things that we do every day.”

Moomaw’s dream job would be working as a senior vice president at Apple, carrying on Jobs’ work and carving out a successful future for himself.

“I love their integration of hardware and software and just their whole design model and how that kind of pushes everything else,” he said. “The whole product should be well designed. I think I get a lot of that (mindset) from Bear Creek… the intentionality in what you’re creating and then putting that into every single aspect of what you’re doing.”

Moomaw said that Northeastern is an ideal spot for him to begin working toward his dream since the school has good relationships with companies that can give him a boost.