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Juliana Ward ’24, an Environmental Studies (ENVS) major and economics minor, is a member of the second to last cohort of students to earn their B.S. degrees in Environmental Studies from the Rubenstein School. The program migrated to the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) in the fall of 2022. The ENVS program curriculum spans the social and natural sciences with courses taught by Rubenstein School, CAS, and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty. The program is the perfect home for Juliana, whose interests and passions lie in government and policy as well as the environment. 

Juliana put those passions to work when she served as a senator in the Student Government Association. “I was able to learn about sectors of the university I didn’t know about before, as well as all the processes that have to come before action,” she said. She was on the Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity as well as a committee focused on Title IX. She’s also a proud member of Rubenstein’s IDEA Committee. “We created the inclusive excellence action plan and are taking steps to execute it. It’s been a great way to get experience with policy and enforcement.”

Juliana’s studies as an ENVS major allowed her to deeply pursue he interests. “I took a course in the Political Economy of Race, which was crazy because I’d considered myself pretty well-versed in racial issues,” Juliana explained. “That class was so eye-opening: we looked to history and learned about the factors that led us to this current moment using data.”

Other courses Juliana especially enjoyed were Economics of Sustainability and Energy and Climate Law. “Professor Prescott, my Energy and Climate Law professor, is awesome. He’s a lawyer and a veteran, so he has so much experience he’s able to draw upon. He’s done work with tribal relations for the government and he’s diligent about bringing that into the curriculum. On the IDEA committee, we’re always talking about how to incorporate diverse thinking into the classroom, so to see him integrate it so seamlessly is a great example of how that work can be done.”

Juliana used internships and other extracurricular programs to help narrow her area of academic and career interest. She interned with the Richmond, Vermont town planner, and in the summer of 2023, she was a scholar in Congressman Jamie Raskin’s Democracy Summer program. “We had different guest speakers each session, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Becca Balint to professors and experts in their fields. We discussed and learned about topics like voting rights and reproductive rights which was a great way to get a broad scope of the issues,” Juliana explained.

Another component of the Democracy Summer program was completing a state-specific voting analysis. Juliana was assigned Alaska, and she delved into the issues that cause barriers to voting access and prepared a report to share her findings. “I used what I found in my research to make social media graphics about voting in Alaska, which could be used this election season,” Juliana said.

Juliana’s eagerness to be involved in her community and to continue her learning outside the classroom led her to an internship with ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain’s development office. “That internship was one of my favorite experiences at ����̽̽ because ECHO is such a staple of the community. Every time I told somebody I was interning there, they would immediately say, ‘Oh! I love that place! I take my kids there!’ or ‘I used to go there all the time as a kid!’ It was really special to represent a place that’s so well-known and beloved,” Juliana recollected.

She tackled a wide scope of responsibilities in her role at ECHO, but her primary task was grant-writing. “Grant writing can seem very scary from the outside, but once I was actually there doing it, I realized I could handle it,” Juliana said. She also did some social media management and content creation, and even had some viral success with a video she made.

But perhaps the most exciting and challenging element of the internship was a project that Juliana designed herself. The director of development gave her the freedom and responsibility of choice, and Juliana took this opportunity to focus on her passion of community-building. She interviewed more than twenty-five of her coworkers to build out their staff profiles and biographies on the ECHO website. “I asked everybody the same general questions about where they’re from, what their job is, and some silly questions, like ‘Do you believe in Champ?’ I enjoyed that project because I got to know my colleagues in other departments as well as the organization.”

Juliana cared deeply about community-building and inclusive excellence before she came to ����̽̽ and she’s diligently sought out opportunities to demonstrate that care and further build her knowledge and skills. One unexpected opportunity that brought her closer to this passion was the Field Studies in Costa Rica program, a study abroad semester on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula.

“Costa Rica was amazing and life changing,” Juliana said. “I never planned on studying abroad because I was on the swim team, but I read some promotional material for the program and applied on a whim. I got in, retired from swimming, and while I wasn’t expecting to do that, I was so glad that I put myself out there and made a change by taking a risk.”

The Costa Rica program educates students about ecology in one of the most biodiverse places on the planet but also focuses strongly on service learning. Juliana greatly enjoyed and learned from that experience. She met and shadowed a local woman who was part of a larger cooking group. One of Juliana’s fondest memories of Costa Rica was when the group got together and cooked a massive feast for the community that included the students and even people who were just walking down the street nearby. “Of course there’s community here in Vermont, but I’ve never invited a neighbor off the street to come eat with me,” Juliana quipped. “Costa Rica has very high happiness rates, and I think that’s primarily because of their community building—that’s definitely something I took home with me, and I see how I put it in practice at ECHO, wanting to help build the community there.”

After graduating in May 2024, Juliana will continue her studies at Indiana University’s Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She’ll be working toward a masters in public policy, and will spend her second year of graduate school in the D.C. Accelerator program working on a year-long internship in Washington D.C. Her advice for students is to build strong bonds with professors and to seize opportunities, even if they aren’t what you had in mind or planned for. “The more you commit to the process and the work, the more you realize that college is an opportunity to grow as a person. It’s not just what you have to do to reach ‘the next step in your life,’ it is your life,” Juliana said.

all photos courtesy of Juliana Ward