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Hundreds of students have graduated from Penn with a major in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies since the program's inception (then known as the Women's Studies Program) in 1973. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the program, our graduates have gone on to excel in a wide variety of fields. 

See our Alumni spotlight below for profiles of recent graduates of our undergraduate major and graduate certificate program. If you are an alum who is interested in being featured, please contact GSWS Associate Director Gwendolyn Beetham at gbeetham@sas.upenn.edu. You can also visit our Instagram page for information about GSWS events and opportunities for alumni networking.

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Alumni Spotlight

GSWS was an incredibly special community with both warmth and academic rigor. The coursework enabled me to forge my own path, allowing me to approach studies in sociology, psychology, English, and biology through a gendered lens. The guidance I received from my thesis advisor, Demie Kurz, guided my choices in graduate school and she provided career mentorship long after graduation. GSWS became a small family within the a larger Upenn, one that I feel so lucky to have been a part of.  I felt prepared to take on graduate school in social work, fieldwork with diverse populations, and a career working with families and major philanthropists. 

Choosing to major in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies offered me a unique, interdisciplinary path through my undergraduate career that allowed me to pursue my interests and develop my passions, while still pursuing a premedical track. My courses highlighted gaps in women’s healthcare that I aimed to address in my future career, the importance of intersectionality on identity that I now consider every day in working with patients, and the key history necessary to understand the landscape of LGBTQ, women’s, and abortion rights. I then pursued medical school, where I quickly fell in love with obstetrics & gynecology, an almost obvious choice given this background. I remain deeply grateful for my GSWS education at Penn, which gave me the humanities-based framework I now bring to my role as a resident physician.

The GSWS program at Penn gave me the opportunity to dive into trans studies at a time when there weren't many formal opportunities to do so. I joined interdisciplinary reading groups, learned a variety of approaches to feminist methods, and taught my first-ever trans studies seminar with my co-organizer, Davy Knittle. GSWS gave me the space to pursue fields of research and teaching I couldn't find in other departments.