Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. In the spirit of friendship and collaboration, Her Campus at U Mich was given the opportunity to partner with someone from another Her Campus chapter. I was lucky enough to get paired with Ariana Huckabey, the Editor-in-Chief of Her Campus at Lasell University
Logging onto my computer and seeing the familiar Zoom logo, I wasn’t sure what to expect. All I knew was that I had been paired to meet with a student from another Her Campus chapter and all she knew about me was that I was not good about checking my email. When my terrible wifi finally let me into the meeting, I finally got to meet Ariana and I’m so lucky to introduce her to everyone reading this piece.
Ariana Huckabey is now a senior, majoring in Business Management and Marketing at Lasell University in Newton, Massachusetts. Right now, she’s working for a firm that focuses on improving team building for other companies as an intern. She explained that she’s enjoying the process of actually getting to be part of a team that physically solves problems and makes changes. She described how right now she’s outsourcing an email platform while also doing graduate surveys. On top of her responsibilities for her internship, she’s also the Editor-in-Chief (!!) of Her Campus at Lasell University.
Before we got into anything of importance, we had the usual ice-breaker conversations: the COVID college experience (what it was like at Lasell, hybrid vs in-person, the dorm situation, etc.), my experiences running a sorority (TLDR; stressful), and skincare. As we became more comfortable with each other, we started to talk about her major and what she wants to do with it. She explained that she wants to utilize her degree within the field of herbal and alternative medicine. She emphasizes that there’s a way for more complicated pharmaceuticals (like vaccines, treatments, etc.,) to work in tangent with smaller things, like mint tea for headaches or raspberry tea for menstrual cramps. In other countries, alternative medicine is legalized and federally regulated which ensures that those practicing it are not only qualified but protected, however, this isn’t the case for the United States and has left this market accessible primarily to those with means.
Because a lot of treatments involving alternative medicine are seemingly kept out of low-income communities and she wants to use her degree to help create and market different products from alternative medicine that are made accessible to groups who might not have traditionally been exposed to it. When I asked her how she came to this career path, she explained that she was inspired by her mom. She grew up in New Haven, with her mom, who was, in Ariana’s words, a novice herbalist. She and her mom are very close, she explained, but after a while, she realized that her mom didn’t have as much information as she would have liked, which prompted her to start this journey for herself.
After getting the rundown of which teas can help you lucid dream (blue lotus, apparently) and which crystals have not worked for Ariana in the past (Amethyst) we ended up running out of time and had to end our call. I’m truly thankful for Her Campus for allowing me to meet Ariana and other women from different campuses across the country!