Andrea Herrera ’27

Andrea Herrera ’27 has wanted to be a lawyer since she was a child translating her parents’ appointments with immigration attorneys in Houston, Texas.

“I felt like a lot of the interactions were transactional and hard on kids and on families,” she explains. “My goal has always been to try to make things better.”

At Wesleyan, she’s getting a head start on helping others, not only through her classes—she has completed the requirements for the Human Rights Advocacy minor—but also in her role as vice chair of the Wesleyan Student Assembly’s (WSA) academic affairs committee. In that position, she regularly meets with administrators and President Michael S. Roth ’78; she credits them with fostering a culture of engagement on campus.

“We work a lot on trying to make Wesleyan more equitable,” she says. “The school is willing to make changes to make student life better.”

Herrera loved the sense of community she experienced at Wesleyan when she visited as a high schooler; the first-generation college student is attending the university on a scholarship from QuestBridge, an organization that supports low-income students in college. Wesleyan has partnered with QuestBridge since 2008, providing comprehensive, need-based financial aid to hundreds of students—between 30 and 40 each year—from rural towns and major urban centers.

In addition to her Human Rights Advocacy minor, Herrera is double majoring in government and American Studies. She points to classes on contemporary politics, with Professor Laura Grappo, and credible fear proceedings in asylum cases, with former postdoctoral fellow Valentina Ramia, as particularly influential.

After Wesleyan, Herrera plans to attend law school and hopes to work in immigration law. As part of her minor, she has twice traveled to Mexico for fact-finding missions on disappeared people, or missing people for whom the state may bear some responsibility. She also worked on asylum cases as part of an internship with a law firm last summer. Last year, she won the Peter Morgenstern-Clarren ’03 Social Justice Award.

“I definitely want a job that helps people directly,” she says. “My dream is to have a pro bono immigration firm.”

In addition to her work on the Student Assembly, Herrera is the founder of the Wesleyan Student of Color Pre-Law Society; president of the Latin American Student Organization; and president of the Womxn of Color Collective.

“Wesleyan was the right choice for me,” she says. “The sense of community here—whether the mentoring relationships or people who have similar interests as me—that’s something I’ve really enjoyed.”