Jeremy Hedlund

Age: 21

Year: Junior

Major: Women and Gender Studies

Jeremy Hedlund is an ASUO senator who founded the UO chapter of the Student Labor Action Project. In 2012, he traveled to Washington, D.C. to protest student debt outside of Sallie Mae, where he was arrested along with several others. His ironic jail cell: A former classroom in an old high school.

How do you want to change the world?

I just really want to be in a society where people deserve a better shot at life. I think that everyone should be able to provide for their family, if they have one, have health care, have a good job and not worry about anything. I think people should be aware, engaged and critical. People need to be more aware and awake of the outside world. Basically just have a decent life.

What is the most significant memory you have at the UO?

It has to be a tie. The first time I took a women and gender studies class I took 101. I’m really not that into school or academics. I haven’t been for a really long time. But that is because I have never felt like what I was supposed to be learning in the classroom really related to anything that I really care about. Women and gender studies was the first time in a long time that I actually had an academic class to shift the way that I live. It shifted my behaviors and changed the way that I looked at the world. And the second is all of the opportunities I have had here at the UO most specifically the protest of Sally May in Washington D.C.