When I first started at UIUC, I had plans to follow the pre-medicine track so that I could pursue a career as a psychiatrist. I had taken some GWS courses to fulfill general education requirements, and really enjoyed those classes. One day, was sitting in a biochemistry class and realized that I was miserable pursuing a STEM career. It was then that I decided to pursue GWS as a major, and I have never looked back. Gender and Women's Studies has changed my outlook on the world around me and has helped me become both more compassionate and more critical of my surroundings and of the society I live in. I could never thank my professors enough for their dedication to my learning and success.
I took GWS100 as my first class in the department, and we had an assignment in which we had to write a paper about how we individually "do gender." For me, this felt like a difficult assignment because I had always identified myself as female but did not really know how I performed the female gender. As I was thinking about the assignment, realized that throughout my life, I had never questioned my gender identity because everyone told me that I was a woman. I never felt like a female growing up, but I also knew that I was not a male. Until I was exposed to gender as a social construct and a spectrum, I did not know that I could identify as something other than what I was assigned at birth. This challenged the perception that I had of my own gender and led to my coming-out as non-binary.
Future Plans
I plan on attending graduate school for Clinical Mental Health Counseling, but first I am taking a gap year to study for the GRE and take a break from higher education.