Getting to truly know the community that surrounds any individual is an important to becoming an active citizen, yet it is not an issue that is typically addressed in the average classroom.

However students of Woman’s Studies 187H, a class taught by Professor Alexandria Deschamps, got the chance to immerse themselves in their community and discover the people around them. The project: to interview a diverse member of their community and present them in a creative way.

“We were supposed to speak to people within the University community that we thought were diverse,” freshman Biology major Emily Katzman explained. “We needed to talked to someone that was not the traditional white Christian individual.”

The twenty-six person class went out and interviewed a variety of different women on their life experiences, the obstacles that they had faced, what it was like to be from another culture yet living at UMass and any possible advice that they could give to future generations of women.

“We worked well together as a class on the assignment. It was a lot of work, a lot of confusion and a lot of choices to be made,” junior astronomy major Stephanie Molak explained. “It was nice that 26 different people from different backgrounds came together and it came to this conclusion.”

Following the interviews each class member took pictures of their subject and mounted them on a giant board next to information about that particular person. A sub-section of the class also put the information online so that it would be accessible to anyone that may be interested in reading about the project or seeing the results of the class.

“Everything that you see [at this exhibit] we will put online,” senior computer science major Jeremy Caron explained. “Eventually it will all be linked through the woman’s studies website.”