Jeremy Kelleher
Project RAISE has brought Jeremy together with students from other disciplines at UMass Amherst to build an interactive ecology curriculum for incarcerated youth.
Jeremy Kelleher
I really wanted to come to a college that had a lot of kids in it, just somewhere where I could meet tons of new people everywhere that I went. My major is computer science and I'm focusing in software engineering. I was a part of the iCons program. It's a team-based learning program where we're inviting students from the natural sciences as well as from the computer science school to kind of be in the same classroom and try to solve global problems together. And Project RAISE was advertised in iCons. We're building a ecology curriculum for incarcerated youth. I think one of the most important parts of Project RAISE is that a lot of the students that were kind of building the curriculum for haven't been engaged by the curriculums that have been in their schools. So we're building a textbook as well as student activities and assessments that are all going to be completed on an iPad and giving the students and giving these kids access to a very interactive curriculum has been a really fantastic thing. I thought initially that I would want to be in San Francisco, like the tech hub of the world. But UMass has made me really think about being here on the East Coast. I really want to be at the juncture between health and computer science. And the East Coast is really a mecca for health. I'm a part of the Hillel House on campus, which is a great place for me to kind of congregate with Jews like me. And it's really great to just be with a community of people that I really identify with. UMass is so inviting to all of its students and to new students. That what makes me really proud of UMass is our ability to balance everyone that's on campus and just be inclusive of everyone's beliefs as well as ideas and backgrounds. I'm Jeremy Kelleher, class of 2018. I stand for diversity and I stand for UMass.