Features
Julianne Nigro’s passion for social justice has flourished at the University. By the end of her freshman year, she was on the executive boards of the Women’s Caucus and the campus chapter of Amnesty International.
“I really feel like I awoke to a lot of issues that I really care about,” says Nigro, a political science and women’s studies major from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., of the interests that she first began exploring in high school. “I was able to put them into context by understanding them on a deeper, theoretical level.”
Before graduate school, she will spend the next year in Pennsylvania at a residential organic farm for adults with developmental disabilities, an internship affiliated with AmeriCorps. Law school may be down the road.
Wherever her path leads, Nigro knows she will continue to work toward equal rights. Her involvement in multiple organizations—she serves as president of the Undergraduate Council for Gender and Women’s Studies, vice president of the Women’s Caucus, and she helped develop safe spaces on campus for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students through the University’s Safe Zone program—helped her recognize that.
“I definitely want to do activism,” she says. “It’s just a matter of figuring out the best way for me to do that.”
