Maegan Bogetti
BA 2022 Global Studies, Environmental & Sustainability Studies Additional Major, Gender Studies Minor
Maegan Bogetti first became interested in the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program as a freshman when she took Professor Abigail Owen’s course about the social and political aspects of water, The Politics of Water: Global Controversies, Past and Present. The course brought environmental and social justice issues to her attention, which she was able to connect back to things she was seeing in the news and things she was passionate about from her primary major, global studies. It was the first course where she saw an overlap in subjects that interested her, like environmentalism, feminism, and social justice issues, and became curious about this overlap. Bogetti decided to declare a minor in environmental and sustainability studies because of this and ended up pursuing a research project the summer after her freshman year, where she dove deeper into the niche she had found for herself and looked into ecofeminsm, distrust in political movements, second wave feminism, civil rights movements, and intersectional environmentalism. During her junior year, the environmental and sustainability studies became an official additional major at CMU, and she became the first student at the university to declare the new major.
Bogetti likes how customizable the program is. It allowed her to find what is intriguing to her and gave her space to discover what she wanted to study within environmental studies. She also greatly appreciated the opportunity to match her passions to internships, go to unique events, create a curriculum personalized to her interests because of the program, and take classes that she otherwise would not have taken. Two classes which stand out to Bogetti include Professor Gideon Kossoff’s Ecoliteracy Seminar and Professor Richard Stafford’s Jobs and Communities Left Behind. Prior to taking the ecoliteracy seminar, she had never taken an art or design course in college before, and she gained valuable insight to how different disciplines work together to tackle environmental injustice. Professor Stafford’s class, which looks at technological changes and how they have impacted environmental issues and communities in the area, gave Bogetti the opportunity to conduct research on her parents’ hometown. These courses have pushed her outside her primary discipline and gave her different perspectives and skills that she otherwise would not have been exposed to. She wants to encourage other students to take courses that are outside of their comfort zone. Though the idea of going into new spaces where everyone is super talented was daunting to her at first, her experiences have all been very rewarding, and she has felt supported by her faculty and peers. “Feel comfortable trying something new. The program gives you the rare chance to do that, so take advantage of it.”
Over the summer of 2022, Bogetti participated in the Yale Conservation Scholars - Early Leadership Initiative (YCS-ELI), a summer program at Yale University “for undergraduates who are traditionally underrepresented in the conservation field and who are interested in careers in the sector.”¹ Through the program, she completed a nine-week internship with the Green Village Initiative, “a non-profit in Bridgeport, Connecticut whose mission is to grow food, knowledge, leadership and community, through urban gardening and farming, to create a more just food system in Bridgeport.”² She has since continued working for Green Village Initiative while starting a new role at the Breathe Project in Pittsburgh. Bogetti would like to continue serving the nonprofit world on community-focused issues. She is very excited about the future of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program at CMU and hopes to see the university continue to make major changes like the addition of the major. She would love to see CMU divest from fossil fuels and get an ecologist into its faculty. “Even though it's great we have the work we're already doing, it's important to keep pushing CMU.”
bogetti encourages everyone to sign the petition for CMU to divest from fossil fuels.
¹ “Yale Conservation Scholars - Early Leadership Initiative,” Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, https://conservationscholars.yale.edu/.
² “Our Mission,” Green Village Initiative, https://www.gogvi.org/our-mission.