In her three years at Northeastern, Laura Mueller-Soppart has hardly spent any time in Boston. This week’s Campus Celeb has worked in the Midwest volunteering for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, in Costa Rica filming a documentary about sustainable development, in Washington DC working in the White House, and in Belgium writing speeches for a member of Parliament in the EU.
Mueller-Soppart, a junior political science and economics major from Chicago, started her globetrotting in 2007 after hearing Obama’s candidacy speech.
“From that moment on I knew I wanted to be able to do as much as I could to make sure young people had a stake in the upcoming elections,” Mueller-Soppart said. To do that, she travelled throughout the Midwest for almost two years with Students for Obama, doing whatever was necessary to encourage young people to vote.
Mueller-Soppart said that her time volunteering with the campaign “set the foundation” for the rest of her work experience, including working in the White House this past summer.
“Working in the Domestic Policy Council opened my eyes to the range of issues that we battle every day in our own backyards, and to many of the innovative solutions the government, private sector, and ordinary citizens are taking to be agents of change,” she said.
Before the White House, Mueller-Soppart worked at the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, writing about issues such as human rights and the economy. “As an EU-US dual citizen, I loved getting to witness the political processes of the EU and the White House back-to-back,” she said.
As if that wasn’t enough, Mueller-Soppart has also focused on helping save the environment in her co-op reviewing grants for the MacArthur Foundation in their Conservation and Sustainable Development program. In addition, she recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica, where she filmed a documentary and wrote a blog in order to bring more attention to ecological and social entrepreneurship issues: “We immersed ourselves in an incredible community, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, where its residents and visitors realize what an integral part each of them are in each other’s lives and in the natural system.”
When she’s not traveling through the United States and the rest of the world, Mueller-Soppart can be found manning the e-board of the International Relations Council as Vice President of Finance and producing the Northeastern Political Review as Managing Editor.
Although Mueller-Soppart isn’t exactly sure what she’ll be doing after graduation, you can expect big things from this world-travelling Campus Celeb.