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When Abby Cooper was in fifth grade, she put a note in her class’s time capsule saying that she planned to become a lawyer.

Now a criminal justice major with a concentration in crime and mental health and a minor in legal studies, she plans to work as a paralegal after graduation while applying to law schools.

“I always wanted to help people, and I’d seen the parents of people in my friend group be wrongfully convicted,” says Cooper, who is from Dudley. “I was always advocating for change; I would never just complain about things and not do something about it.”

She has found lots of ways to do that.

At Shepherd Hill Regional High School, where she was senior class president, Cooper and her friends started a student group, A Better Hill, to educate their fellow students about racism and sexism. They worked with school administrators so that when students were disciplined for using a slur, they didn’t just get sent to detention, but also had to research the slur and write about what they had learned.

After a younger relative was diagnosed with autism, Cooper trained to become an applied behavioral technician at New Beginnings ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) in Southbridge, where she has been working with young children since she graduated from high school.

Here on campus, Cooper ran to represent the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences as a senator in the Student Government Association (���Ҵ�).��

Next, she ran to represent С����Ƶ as the student trustee on the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees, in part by starting an Instagram account to educate other students about how the SGA operates.

She won a competitive election.

“There are a lot of university system-wide issues I want to work on, like budget cuts (and) increasing tuition,” she says. “As a student trustee, you can actually have a say and affect what’s going on.”

Those financial issues are personal to Cooper, a first-generation college student from a low-income family who chose С����Ƶ because the university offered her the best financial aid package – and because her orientation leader was so welcoming.

In addition to advocating for others, Cooper has also learned the importance of caring for herself physically, mentally and spiritually. 

She’s a member of Rhythms of Africa, a new competitive dance team with students from UMass Dartmouth and С����Ƶ.

A Pentecostal Christian, Cooper often goes to meetings of the Youth Empowerment Ministry and Salvation Youth, both student groups. Along with counseling offered through the university Wellness Center, her faith got her through some tough times her junior year, she says.

“During college, you can get really lonely, because your friends are off doing all these things, and you don’t have a car to get home,” she says. “So I lean on the Bible and God’s presence a lot.”