In her first year at UMass, Claire Healy had a grand vision. What if there was an international, multilingual magazine that could create community among young people across borders? The magazine would publish poets, writers, artists, and journalists and its audience would experience a diverse collective of perspectives, artwork, and languages. The first issue of Claire’s dream magazine, The Open, will be published this summer. She produced it on a focused foundation of four years of coursework, internships, study abroad, and extracurricular work.
Claire traces her interest in global social justice to her childhood among the international community in Cambridge, Mass. “Growing up, the conversations my friends and I were having were often about social justice and human rights,” she says.
Beginning with her first semester at UMass, she took advantage of every opportunity to expand her education beyond the classroom: she was both a political science and a legal studies research assistant; she participated in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences internship program in Washington, DC, and remained in the capital for a summer internship; she wrote for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian and was an Amherst Media news anchor; she worked as a communications assistant for Commonwealth Honors College; she attended a journalism bootcamp.
