Kaasha Benjamin didn't exactly have Northwestern University figured out when she applied. She'd attended a political science summer program there — Junior Statesman of America — and came away knowing the campus had a nice atmosphere. She knew where the library was. That was about the extent of it.

She applied Early Decision mostly for the comfort of knowing.

What she didn't yet understand was the caliber of what she'd stepped into. It took a teacher to tell her.

Sue Settle had been watching Kaasha through her CHS years, and when the acceptance letter arrived, Settle made her case. There were other schools. There was better financial aid elsewhere. But Settle pushed, encouraged, and persuaded — and Kaasha went to Evanston. She has never once regretted it.

A member of the Class of 2008, Benjamin graduated from Northwestern in 2012 with a degree in political science, moved directly into the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and graduated in 2015. She sat for the Pennsylvania Bar, worked as in-house counsel for the Federal Home Loan Bank system in Pittsburgh, then relocated to Montgomery, Alabama, with her now-husband Greg Griffin — a fellow attorney she met at the end of law school. She sat for the Alabama Bar while studying evenings before the move, clerked briefly with the Supreme Court, worked as a public defender, spent a year in insurance defense, and has been with the Alabama Department of Transportation since 2018.

It's a resume built on motion, flexibility, and a willingness to start over in new rooms.

Her legal compass was set early. A neighbor across the street in Centralia — a local attorney in Sandoval — wasn't someone she talked to often, but she shadowed him for a couple of summer days before law school. She'd expected to avoid criminal defense. She ended up a public defender. Life, she'd tell you, has a sense of humor.

Today, Benjamin is also deeply involved in bar association work — state, local, and through the American Inns of Court — because she believes the law is bigger than any individual case. It's about the integrity of institutions. She's seen that tested in recent years in ways that have made the work feel urgent.

Back at Northwestern, she still shows up as an alumni interviewer, specifically seeking out students from rural communities and first-generation college families. She knows what it's like to walk onto that campus without fully understanding what you've walked into. She also knows that Centralia has sent at least one or two more students through those gates since she graduated — and she'd like that number to keep growing.

She comes by her roots honestly. Her mother, Vicky Benjamin, has worked in the CHS library since Kaasha was a freshman, and is still there — watching former students come back as teachers, working alongside the next generation of kids. Kaasha's twin sister and younger sister, Carissa, both walked those same halls. And there's a former exchange student who once lived with the Benjamin family, was present at both sisters' weddings, and whose parents the Benjamins are visiting in California in just a few weeks. That's not a school program. That's family.

When Kaasha talks about what Centralia gave her, she lands on the word grit. The diversity she experienced there — racial, economic, cultural — wasn't a demographic fact. It was integrated in ways she's noticed are harder to find elsewhere. You grew up knowing people across every kind of line, understanding that the kid next to you in English class was remarkable regardless of where they came from or what their family had.

That's a lesson, she'll tell you, that no graduate program teaches.

In Montgomery, she and Greg are raising three children — ages 2, 4, and 6 — who are, as she puts it, the reason they do everything now. Greg was recently appointed as a municipal judge. Their house is full, their schedules demanding, and the work meaningful in ways both of them chose deliberately.

The community that shaped Kaasha Benjamin is 600 miles behind her. But it travels with her everywhere she goes.