Alumni Memories

What are women's studies alumni doing now?

The following quotes were taken from former students who shared their experiences and memories through a mailed questionnaire.

The Impact of Women's Studies...

What I loved about women's studies is that it relates to anything and everything.
-Katherine Madison Burnett ('02)

Women's Studies really opens your mind and eyes to see society in a completely alternative way. I would encourage everyone to take a couple of classes.
-Shauna L. Krikorian ('99)

Women's Studies really challenged me to think critically about power-the social structures that maintain and protect it as well as the role of gender, race and class within a social structure.
-Michelle R. Travis ('92)

As director of Sexual Assault Services Organization, I use my skills in theorizing women's oppression almost daily as I work to help others understand sexual violence. I am also working to lead this agency toward seeing how sexual violence is interlinked with all other forms of oppression.
-Dawn M. Haney ('05)

Before taking these courses [women's studies], I never realized how prejudiced (albeit unintentional) my attitudes were. Now I have a new perspective that allows me to step away from my own life and really listen to the experiences of others.
-Elizabeth A. Bryant('05)

The Women's Studies program at UGA changed my life.
-Jennifer Becker ('97)

My Women's Studies teacher taught me more about this world than almost anyone since. The lessons she taught me I still carry with me today and they have shaped my feminist consciousness and the way I view the world. Basically, the Women's Studies program at UGA gave me a vision that I am now living and will continue to follow for the rest of my life!
-Becky Winkler ('99)

My Women's Studies professors and teachers stick out so much more in my mind that any others. Even if they don't know it they impacted my life greatly and I appreciate them so much.
-Hope Trice ('01)

Women's Studies provided a lens in which to view my personal and professional beliefs, thoughts, and actions. It allowed me to connect with, deconstruct, and reconstruct images, beliefs, and practices about myself as a woman in midlife. It provided a vehicle for me to dance with my shadow, including negative internalized stereotypes about women's power and place.
-Harriet Cohen ('01)

It gave me a framework and a language to talk about the social, political, and economic realities that I worked to change. It helped me "to come to voice" - to give credence to what I'd known before but was unable to articulate. The critical framework I built as a result of what I learned in my Women's Studies classes carries me to this day. It has affected what I value in life.
-Tosh Anderson ('93)

It generated in me a fierce desire to continue learning and teaching about women's issues in order to make my students realize their complexity. Words have a hard time saying it all. It gave me understanding, confidence in my own opinions and decisions, a higher degree of freedom from social pressures, and it taught me to be a critical thinker, a better writer, and a lover of diversity.
-Megan Blaiser ('98)

I cherish all of the help the Women's Studies program gave me.
-Heidi Owens ('98)

The Women's Studies Classroom...

I had many valuable experiences in the program. Perhaps the most valuable aspect was feeling challenged by my professors and encouraged to speak up. That was not my experience in a lot of other classes.
-Michelle R. Travis

My instructors were uniformly excellent and challenging. And they represented to many fields--law, biology, sociology, folklore, gay and lesbian studies, child development, art--I was consistenly stimulated and excited in their classes.
-Katherine Madison Burnett ('02)

Having classes with so many intelligent women in other disciplines and seeing how we all were supportive of one another was very encouraging.
-Elizabeth A. Bryant ('05)

The Women's Studies program and the people provided a safe place to exchange ideas, be challenged, and to try to make sense of the contradictions and injustices I saw in the world around me. I felt more comfortable in these classes where people respected each other.
-Tosh Anderson ('93)

The multicultural perspectives on women was both thought-provoking and empowering.
-Laura Couch ('99)

The discussion with classmates of different ages and from different backgrounds was quite exciting and fired us up for the rest of the quarter.
-Patricia Thruston ('89)

The strength of the program lies in the diversity of its participants, both students and professors. Each student came from a different perspective. My professors were true teachers, offering their own life experiences to facilitate the learning experience. The willingness of both professors and students to disagree shows the diversity of Women's Studies as a whole and reflects well on the caliber of the program at UGA.
-Kathy Hudson Pate ('92)

The kind of people that participated in these classes and the ideas that were expressed opened my eyes to an entirely new world for me. Being around such empowered women teaching such incredible material was amazing. I became a sponge and couldn't read enough.
-Jennifer Becker ('97)

The courses I took to fulfill the certificate requirements remain the most challenging classes of my academic career. The program offered me an opportunity to develop both as a scholar and as a person.
-Kathy Hudson Pate ('92)

I remember just being so inspired, moved, and challenged by the other students in the classes. It was always a place of mutual trust intent on breaking down hierarchies and barriers between students and between students and professors.
-Tosh Anderson ('93)

Ah Ha! moments...
It was incredible, once I had my first ah-ha moment, to watch in each class as various people visibly experienced theirs as well.
-Becky Winkler ('00)

I felt like I could feel my brain growing with every class;what graduate school was supposed to be like but this was the only place I really found such energy and such dramatically different and difficult ideas.
-Anonymous

The courses/faculty were challenging, paradigm shifting/shattering, and stimulating.
-Harriet Cohen ('01)

Seeing the light bulbs go off over students in that class was so satisfying. Even if they didn't completely agree with the teachings and the politics of the writers we were studying, at least they were analyzing the issues from a new perspective.
-Jennifer Becker ('97)

Most of my memories involve groups of women making discoveries about their contemporary world and their own behaviors. These were moments filled with emotion, revelation, and sometimes anger.
-Megan Blaiser ('98)

In WS classes students do the kind of rigorous self-exploration that is linked with the questioning of the way things are from historical, anthropological, sociological, literature, or scientific perspectives. My fondest memory is how it opened me up to a world of critical understanding.
-Tosh Anderson ('93)

(from the online history compiled by Beth Yash, A.B. in Women's Studies 2002)