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Student Stories: John Healey
John Healey graduated Boston College with a chemistry degree and
enough self-awareness to know that he did not want to be a chemist.
“I really didn’t want to be in a laboratory working with
chemicals,” he says. “I wanted to use my background toward
a more positive end.”
After three years with the Peace Corps teaching science in Samoa,
Healey went back to school to find a different career path. Today,
as he nears graduation with joint MPA and MSES degrees from the School
of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, this 30-year-old
with eyes as blue as the South Pacific Ocean approaches his future
with clarity.
The future, for Healey, is water.
Once his Peace Corps tour of duty was behind him, Healey spent eight
months traveling through Asia, particularly in Thailand, where drinking
water is contaminated with arsenic from sandy aquifers and arsenic
ore waste piles. Long-term exposure to arsenic can lead to skin lesions
and cancer, as well as cardiovascular and neurological disease. “It
seemed like such an injustice, especially when this is a problem that’s
relatively cheap and easy to remediate,” says Healey. “Clean
water should be a fundamental human right.”
As Healey explored his educational options across the country, he
noticed that SPEA was especially welcoming to Peace Corps volunteers,
offering credit hours for service. The specialized joint degree Healey
crafted for himself—combining environ-mental policy with environmental
risk assessment, toxicology, and computer-based modeling—gave
him the perspective and tools he needed to focus his aspirations.
“I liked SPEA’s interdisciplinary approach to managing
problems. It’s not just the engineering, but also the economics,
the cost benefit analysis, the understanding that you have to work
with the resources the country has available.”
That interdisciplinary approach, Healey notes, makes the critical
difference between a quick fix and enduring improvement. “In
Samoa I noticed how organizations would come in with good intentions
and put a lot of money into resources without insuring that the Samoans
were even remotely interested in those resources. Sometimes people
won’t adopt a new method because it’s too foreign to them.
Maybe they don’t have the education or awareness to understand
that filters need to be changed. In India, UNESCO put in all these
pumping stations but there’s no control over how much people
are drawing from the wells and no control over the filters that are
installed in the wells. So here you’ve got all these new pumps
but no one knows how to sustain them.”
At this writing John Healey is several months from graduation. Clearly,
he has mined graduate school for all it is worth, taking an internship
with the EPA, serving as president of SPEA’s graduate student
association and the university-wide graduate and professional student
organization. Last summer he was funded by the U.S. State Department
to attend a workshop in Moscow and at Lake Baikal in Siberia where
the subject was management of the lake as a drinking water resource.
Those who know Healey are struck by his humility—indeed, he
was almost embarrassed to be the subject of a magazine profile, insisting
that he’s no different from any other SPEA student. But Jennifer
Forney, director of graduate student services, knows otherwise. “John
has such empathy for his fellow man,” she says. “He always
puts others before himself and that’s what draws people to him.
He is definitely going to live the mission of this school.”
Asked to imagine his dream job, Healey says he wants to be back
in Southeast Asia working on water quality. “I know I could
make better money in a private corporation, but I’m not
sure I’d have much of an impact on the larger population,”
he says with characteristic earnestness. “Working in less
developed countries challenges me in the ways I need to be challenged,
and encourages me to do a job that’s going to be of real
benefit.”
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