Native North Carolinian Chelsea Miller is taking full advantage of UNC-Chapel Hill’s on-campus activities. A double Peace War and Defense/Religion major, Chelsea is extremely active in student political and financial issues. The Huntersville Junior has recently founded a UNC chapter of Network of Enlightened Women (NeW), a national organization for culturally conservative women.
HC: What was your motivation for founding UNC’s Network of Enlightened Women Chapter?
Chelsea: I really wanted to increase dialogue issues with a diversity of opinions. There is no group on campus saying that gender roles are natural or ‘you can stay home and raise your children.’ I think that it’s important to have a venue available for women on campus to discuss these things in a comfortable manner.
HC: Are there any issues that you are excited for the NeW to cover?
Chelsea: Mainly gender language and the difference between the sexes. You see a lot of gender language used all the time in UNC’s media: school newspapers, magazines, websites. A lot of people aren’t very familiar with gender language and what it is and how it should be interpreted.
HC: What are some of your other activities?
Chelsea: I was very involved with my friend Mary Cooper’s student body president campaign (she must have done a great job!), and I also helped my friend Ian Lee (Lee ran against Mary Cooper for SBP). So that was a very interesting time for me, but I’m still friends with both of them, haha. Luckily the conflict of interests didn’t take too much of a toll. I’m also the finance committee chair of the UNC Student Congress.
HC: What is one thing you’re you have done at UNC that put you out of your comfort zone?
Chelsea: Haha, well, freshman year I went out on Franklin Street with my friends. We didn’t know that the venue we went to was having a gay theme that night, so we were all pretty caught off guard. It was very different for me because I came from a small school where everyone was kind of sheltered in that department, so I had never even met a gay person. Looking back, it’s really funny to me because now I am completely comfortable with different groups of people. It really makes me appreciate that UNC has such a diverse student body.
HC: What are your plans for the summer?
Chelsea: I have applied for a couple different internships in D.C., so hopefully I will be spending my summer there.
Chelsea’s ambition and determination have assisted her in paving the way for conservative women on campus as well as allowing her unique opportunities such as her dual campaigning. She is very much aware of how unique UNC-Chapel Hill is, with all of its political and social opportunities, and aims to experience as many aspects of UNC as she can. Network of Enlightened Women will be holding its first interest meeting Monday March 21 at Caribou Coffee on West Franklin Strett at 7:30 p.m.