Sky Alland Scholarship
The 2025 Recipient
Service-Driven Leader Wins UVA’s Prestigious Sky Alland Scholarship
Charlottesville, VA—Resident Adviser and Meriwether Lewis Fellow Phillip Bonsu has won the University of Virginia’s prestigious Sky Alland Scholarship.
The award, which covers the next academic year’s full tuition and fees, recognizes a rising fourth-year (UVA parlance for a rising college senior) who demonstrates leadership, achievement, enterprising spirit, humility and devotion to the University.
Phillip Bonsu is a pre-med student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in data science and global studies, with a concentration in global public health. He is organizing a trip to Ghana for 12 students for a health care internship this summer.
Among his many involvements, Bonsu is a part of the Meriwether Lewis Institute for Citizen Leadership, a multiyear fellowship that prepares students for a lifetime of leadership at the University and beyond. He and 24 other Meriwether Lewis Institute Fellows are working to repurpose 3,000 acres of land at Morven Farms into a University sustainability lab and community center. Bonsu is also chapter secretary of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.
The merit-based Sky Alland Scholarship is one of UVA’s most competitive undergraduate scholarships. A student nominating committee led by current Sky Alland scholar Carson Breus and consisting of 4th-year leaders reviewed a large pool of nominations to select six finalists who represented an array of undergraduate studies and activities. The scholarship’s selection committee, which consists of UVA alumni, several of whom are also past Sky Alland award recipients, then chose Bonsu.
“Phillip has led positive change within the University and beyond. He’s been a role model, and he inspires those around him,” said Ruth Haile, chair of the Sky Alland Scholarship Endowment. “The health care industry ultimately will be the beneficiary of his selfless and compassionate leadership. Phillip represents the ideals of the Sky Alland Scholarship and we are delighted he is the 2025-2026 scholarship recipient.”
The scholarship is named for J. Schuyler Alland, a 1979 graduate of UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce and an entrepreneur who built a successful national marketing research company before his tragic death in 1992.
For further information, contact alumni-scholarships@virginia.edu.
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”