From the president
Mandy Feuerman, a third-year student at Brandeis University, embodies our university’s commitment to community engagement and to creating a better world. Mandy is a 4.0 student, majoring in Political Science and English at Brandeis, whose research projects have focused on domestic extremism and federal election campaign finance. Mandy has pursued work in civic engagement and public policy through roles in a variety of local, state, and national political campaigns. On campus, she is a co-president of VoteDeis which supports student voter registration efforts, editor in chief of the Brandeis Journal of Politics, president of Brandeis Democrats, and a varsity member of the parliamentary debate club. I am confident that Mandy will make an exceptional contribution as a Newman Fellow.
Personal Statement
Growing up in a major swing state, I always understood the importance of elections, but it did not occur to me that I would want to be involved in politics myself until I was in high school. I started volunteering on campaigns in the 2020 election cycle, and once I came to college, I joined the Brandeis University Democrats. As the current president of the organization, I have organized canvasses, phone banks, letter-writing campaigns, and voter registration drives. I get to work with national organizations to connect with political campaigns around the country and figure out how my group can have the biggest impact. I have had jobs or internships on local, state-wide, and national campaigns, and these experiences have taught me even more about the importance of civic participation. I have directly seen the inequities in our electoral system––ranging from barriers to voting to our unfair campaign finance system––and how these problems directly affect voters. I believe in the power of institutions in creating and executing change, and I plan to spend my career pushing for democratic reform and voting rights legislation by working for or with the federal government.