Alumni and Careers

What is your current job (position) and what are you currently up to?

Greetings from Quito! 

I'm Sam Caras, a class of 2015 graduate! After Bowdoin, I moved to Hyderabad, India, for a fellowship with the Aga Khan Development Network at the Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad. My decision to go to India was definitely influenced by my classes at Bowdoin (especially my Activist Voices in India class with Sara Dickey!). I then ended up staying with the organization and moving to Mombasa, Kenya, to work as a college counselor for four years at the Academy there. During this time, I completed an M.Ed. in international counseling psychology at Lehigh University. Now I'm in my third year working at a school in Quito, Ecuador (Academia Cotopaxi).

I can definitely see connections between my GSWS studies and what I do. In Kenya, I was very active in supporting LGBT+ students on campus and trying to educate staff on ways to support students, as well as starting discussions about what the laws in Kenya did and did not say about gender identity and sexuality. I was not always met with positive comments, but I like to think I helped some of my students who were struggling in such a conservative environment.

Now, in Ecuador, in addition to being the college counselor, I'm also the inclusion lead for the department and am in charge of the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on our campus. We started a staff inclusion team as well as a student inclusion club. Last year, our student club (in support of and alongside a trans student in the club) petitioned to turn some of the single-stall staff bathrooms into all-gender bathrooms, and we now have two all-gender student bathrooms on campus. We also held the first-ever "Inclusion Week," where we brought speakers to campus for a weeklong celebration of diversity and inclusion. Last year we had theme days around identity, gender, visible and invisible disabilities, and mental health. This year, we plan to add language, culture, and religion to the mix. And we will of course continue with gender and dive even deeper!

Our Inclusion Week was so powerful that we have been selected to present at the Inclusion Schools conference in February in Guayaquil and will be submitting a proposal to present at the AMISA conference in Guatemala in April. I loved my GSWS Classes at Bowdoin, and love that I can still bring what I learned into the work that I do!  

What is your current job (position)? And what are you currently up to?

After graduation, I have been teaching high school history for the most part back home in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. I teach courses in world history and women’s history, both of which are deeply influenced by my time as a GSWS major. My students analyze the origins of gender inequality in world history. My Women in History students get an introduction to the discipline of gender studies, with a particular focus on understanding and developing an intersectional feminist lens. They also assess the traditional periodization of women’s activism in the United States. I love seeing students become excited and engaged in the content and the work of history while developing reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. My Bowdoin education has no doubt bolstered my work in education over the past decade.

A couple of years ago I earned my M.Ed. from the University of Illinois, Chicago. I live in Oak Park with my husband (also a 2012 grad) and our puppy. We welcomed our first child in August, and he is such a joy.

I’m so happy to see how the department has expanded and evolved since my time there. I wish I could take all the new courses!

What is your current job (position) and what do you do specifically?

I'm currently in my first year at McGill medical school—does that seem like a world away from GWS? Far from it. Last year I worked at HIPS in Washington, DC, through a Global Health Corps fellowship. HIPS is a nonprofit that works with people of all genders, including transgender individuals, involved in sex work, drug use, or who are at the margins of access to care. Our aim was to provide compassionate harm-reduction services, advocacy, and community engagement that was respectful, nonjudgmental, and affirms and honors individual power and agency. The ideas about power and privilege, equality, and access so often discussed in GWS classes played a direct role in my capacity as a service provider and helped me shape my current role as a medical student at McGill. I lead "Sexperts," a peer education sex education initiative in high schools, and I use many of the critical-thinking skills when tasked with the goal of ensuring medicine is as accessible and gender-inclusive as possible.

What is your current job (position) and what do you do specifically?

I work together with the head coach to plan and facilitate practices every day, coach games, and actively recruit new players for the coming seasons. I am also a volunteer mentor for The Circle Program and am mentoring an eleven-year-old girl in my area. The GWS classes at Bowdoin were the highlight of my college experience. I not only learned a great deal about history, religion, and government, but I also learned how women and gender fit into each category. I now find myself constantly questioning and analyzing everyday experiences and occurrences through a gendered lens.

What do you do specifically?

Now I'm studying to work in advertising—an industry that would greatly benefit from men who understand women better. If you learn to understand what affects and motivates people’s beliefs, then what can't you do well? What change can’t you affect?

What is your current job (position) and what do you do specifically?

I work with a girls group in a community founded by Haitian migrant workers brought to the DR to cut sugar cane in the 1950s. I am constantly asking questions about power: How can these girls change gender relations in their community? How can they counteract the overwhelming racism directed at Dominicans of Haitian descent? How does my race, class, and position as a facilitator enable and constrain the group's work? I don't have the answers, but GWS taught me how to ask the questions that lead to the reflecting, investigating, and acting necessary to fight for social justice.

What is your current job (position) and what do you do specifically?

At Women's Mafia, I apply my major every day because I write on a daily basis for a primarily female audience. At Bowdoin, I read and wrote a lot and I do the same now. I had four years of practice that is being put to the test today. I took the time to write a story on domestic workers, and in this space I was able to highlight the mistreatment of women and show that change must take place now. I am doing my part and having fun at the same time.

What did you take away from your time at Bowdoin?

After graduating from Bowdoin, I conducted public health research investigating social factors that influence the development of childhood asthma, including family and community violence, socioeconomic stress, and environmental racism. Recognizing the connection between maternal and child health, we explored the influence of these prenatal exposures to the development of childhood asthma.

As a graduate student, my work has focused on social and economic factors influencing the health of low-income populations and communities of color across the life course. My health disparities work appreciates the intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, discrimination, and social policies. The GWS program helped me to recognize the diversity and inequalities within and between communities. With a gendered lens, I consider the ways in which programs and policies perpetuate or challenge various forms of oppression and/or empower communities. After my program I hope to work with a community-based organization to implement effective strategies to eliminate health disparities among low-income populations and communities of color, likely programs addressing women's social and sexual health.

What is your current job (position) and what are you currently up to?

So, I had the advantage of being a double major—philosophy and computer science.  (I had a minor in Gender and Women's Studies). But that should probably be noted, given my career path.

My current job title is product director at Nike, Inc., a digital product management role, specifically a management role responsible for one of Nike's B2B e-commerce websites.

Since job titles are meaningless to folks outside of the industry, it means I am basically a business person who talks to customers, looks at data, and works with designers to tell engineers/programmers what to build. (Or rather, I have a team of three product managers who do that.)

Examples: The Google Maps app on the iPhone is releasing Dark Mode support and Uber is launching in Colombia. In both cases, a product manager (PM, for short) at that company decided, "Hey, we should do this," and worked with folks to make that happen. For small things, PMs just tell an engineer, "Hey, move that button five pixels to the right," and it happens. For larger initiatives, they probably get inspired by something or someone, find a problem to solve, put together a business case supported by some sort of data, get vice presidents to agree that it's worth doing, and then work with engineers and operations people to do it.

Prior to product management (which I've been doing eight years now) I did a handful of tech-ish jobs in heavy industry, with cable companies, etc. Those jobs taught me what a product manager was and that I wanted to be one and then it was a bit of luck and a bit of interviewing skill that actually got me the job.

My GSWS background helps in my job with customer empathy and putting myself in other people's shoes, especially folks who aren't like me (a sadly rare thing in tech).

Immediately after college I moved to London and went to Birkbeck, University of London and got a master's in philosophy degree. My focus was in feminist philosophy of language and I certainly wouldn't have done my master's thesis on that without having done GSWS at Bowdoin!

What is your current job (position) and what do you do specifically?

I've always believed that it is not what you major in that matters, but that college is about learning to love learning, and finding mentors that teach and challenge you in order to become a thoughtful and engaged citizen. While at Bowdoin, I did an independent study on Bowdoin’s process of becoming coeducational in the 1970s. I also took courses on the LGBT movement, Gender and the Suburbs, Women in Horror Films, and other interesting topics.

After having such an incredible experience at Bowdoin I decided to stay in higher education and work at a university where I have the opportunity to speak with prospective students about the college application process and assist the university in finding students who are good matches for the school. Outside of work, I mentor a twelve-year-old girl from Brooklyn through a nonprofit organization called Girls Quest. The goal of the organization is to use New York City as a resource to guide and mentor girls through different stages of adolescence. My involvement in Girls Quest is a way to draw on my gender and women studies work with self-image and adolescent development in order to empower my mentee.

What did you take away from your time at Bowdoin?

Just after finishing my undergraduate degree in gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin, I moved into a summer internship in Boston for the summer of 2006. In Boston I worked with Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts as part of the Massachusetts Voter Action Project. This internship made sense for me because I was very involved as a volunteer and intern for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England while in college, and I was very interested in learning more about the political/administrative side of the organization. During that internship I spent some time making calls to gauge the number of pro-choice voters who lived in the surrounding area, and I also served as a volunteer for the Willie Mae Allen legislative campaign as part of the effort to get more pro-choice people in office.

After my internship with PPLM, I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, and started working for the Sexual Assault Victim Advocate Center (SAVA), a local nonprofit, as its development coordinator. In my position I did direct-service work, including advocacy and crisis intervention for sexual assault survivors and their loved ones, planned and executed three annual fundraisers, and I was also exposed to grant writing.

I worked at SAVA for two years, and being there really gave me a place to feel like I was a part of something greater. I found that working to change laws, which was much of what I did at PPLM, was not really for me; I wanted to make an impact with individuals. My work at SAVA allowed me to do this, and it also opened up the opportunity for me to learn more about sexual violence education and prevention. I became actively involved in the Supergirls Running Empowerment Program each summer, where I was paired with a girl (ages ranged from six-twelve) and trained to run a 5K race. In addition to training for the race, the Supergirls met a few times a week to explore issues surrounding body image, self-esteem, stereotypes, etc. I really enjoyed my experience with Supergirls and realized how powerful working with youth can be.

After working for a couple years at SAVA, I am currently in my first semester of graduate school at Colorado State University. I am pursuing my master’s in education in counseling and career development, with the goal of becoming a school counselor. Before I was a GWS major at Bowdoin I was an English major with an education minor, and I thought I wanted to become a teacher. I realized, though, that my passion was really for GWS. As a school counselor, hopefully at the junior high school level, I will have the opportunity to work with students and encourage gender equality in my work. I just finished writing a paper for one of my classes in which I touched upon gender identity formation for young adolescents and found some pretty upsetting information about how ingrained gender stereotypes already are at this age. I believe that helping individual students become healthier and feel okay with being themselves outside of gender stereotypes is a way to initiate social change. As individuals move further from the gender stereotypes and misogyny that permeate our culture and instead begin to feel more confident with their individual selves I believe we will move toward a society that values and supports the success of all genders.

How has your major impacted your life/career?

Since my first GWS class I have not stopped talking about gender issues and pointing out how they affect society. Sometimes this means I have to stand up when others do not want to, but that’s okay. Being a GWS major helped me come to a better place with myself and feel confident to spread the message to all people in an effort to make all genders reach their fullest potential.

What is your current job (position) and what are you currently up to?

I currently teach kindergarten and first grade at a public school in NYC and use my training from GSWS classes all the time when I am talking with children about gender and different family structures, as well as evaluating picture books to ensure that they represent a variety of non-stereotypical gender expressions and family structures.

I also co-authored an article about using picture books to talk with children about gender in the journal of Bank Street College, where I did my teaching degree. Taking a Journey to the Land of All: Using Children’s Literature to Explore Gender Identity and Expression with Young Children.

I loved the classes I took in the department and almost wish I had done a double major in the department instead of a minor, but by the time I realized I loved the classes, it was a bit too late!

What did you take away from your time at Bowdoin?

I graduated from Bowdoin in 2003 with a double major in what was then women's Studies and history and a minor in art history. Bowdoin's GWS program taught me how to critically reflect on perceptions of women in society.

I remember walking home after my Feminist Methodology class with Professor Scanlon and realizing that there is not one black-and-white answer for how I want to be perceived as a woman. Some days I want to be smart. Other days I like feeling mysterious. Professor Fletcher's Modernism and the Nude class introduced me to the artistic representation of women while Professor Ghodsee's Women and World Development lectures made me want to jump out of my seat and fight my beliefs with actions. These defining classes and all the other ones that informed my abilities to speak and think confidently continue to drive my current passions and make me grateful for my liberal arts background.

As I delve more into disaster research with school and work, I find myself immediately drawn into studying the unique circumstances facing women during the stages of a disaster. I feel like Bowdoin helped me uncover the power of women, my professors gave me the knowledge to form my own opinions, and my classmates inspired me to be any woman I want.

What have you been doing since graduating from Bowdoin?

After a few years working in an administrative position in higher ed, I applied to graduate school, and I finished my PhD in sociology (with a focus on gender and sexuality studies) in 2017. After that, I was in a tenure-track position in the sociology/anthropology department at SUNY-Farmingdale, teaching a 4/4 course load, publishing articles, and securing a book contract for my dissertation book.

I left my faculty position and started in my current role as a teaching consultant at the University of Minnesota in early 2020, just before the pandemic. In the last couple of years, I finished my book, Queering the Midwest: Forging LGBT Community, which came out a few days ago from NYU Press. I'd be happy to talk with Bowdoin students about my academic path—why I took some time before applying to graduate school, and why I ultimately left a coveted tenure-track faculty position in favor of something seemingly less prestigious. 

On a personal note, my partner Mel (Race) Forstie ’00 and I have been together for more than twenty years now. We met at Bowdoin, of course, in a sociology class we took together. We were married in 2010, when it was legal in Massachusetts but not yet nationwide. We've lived in many places on the East Coast and here in the Midwest: Brunswick, Lewiston, Portland, in Maine; Evanston, Illinois; rural Wisconsin and Iowa; Long Island, and now Minneapolis. We have a five-year-old, Kai, who started kindergarten this year, and we live in South Minneapolis, not far from George Floyd Square. We love our neighborhood and our neighborhood school especially, and we feel like we're just starting to get to know our community a little better finally (because the pandemic has affected so many things).

One last exciting update is that my book has been featured in a number of conversations, one upcoming at Oberlin, and one this past spring in Autostraddle.