Summer Herrmann graduated from UW Madison in 2021 with a BA in Sociology and Gender & Women’s Studies. Post graduation, Summer did a variety of jobs, including as an Administrative Accounting Assistant for an elevator company and a Supporting Educator/Continued Care Coordinator for a school. Currently, Summer works as an Overnight Shelter Advocate at DAIS (Domestic Abuse Intervention Services) and at the RCC Sexual Violence Resource Center as a Youth Advisory Board Facilitator. Summer is also a registered doula with Harambee Village Doula Collective!
How does Gender and Women’s Studies/LGBTQ+ studies matter in the day-to-day of your professional life?
I use the skills I learned in GWS to parse through information related to current global events and to be able to recognize them through a more decolonized and feminist/queer lens. I also utilize the skills and knowledge I have gained to approach the clients and residents at DAIS and the RCC in a trauma informed way. I value the discussions, critical thinking, theory, and knowledge I gained through my undergrad and through the GWS department; these are skills that I carry with me in my work.
Do you have advice for students who may share your interests and may want to pursue a similar graduate degree and/or career?
Many nonprofits have job openings fairly frequently, and you just need to keep an eye on their job boards to see when a position opens. Madison has so many non-profits as well, you just need to find one or somewhere you can get behind their message and goals. I originally saw my position at DAIS when I was in college but elected to not apply as it wouldn’t fit in my life at the time, but they had another opening post-graduation so I went for it. Also, GWS is highly interdisciplinary and you can pursue many different fields of work, so don’t limit yourself to one organization or type of work you want to do, go out and explore different options and use that experience to build up and inform your next steps.
This is something I learned from an HR rep from a previous job- you can write a pretty decent cover letter using Chat GPT. Cover letters were the most daunting task in applying for positions for me personally, but it makes it really nice to have a good base and you can go through and edit and add bits as needed. You can copy the position description and your resume into it and it pairs things together pretty nicely. I would NOT recommend using Chat GPT for any academic writings though, and AI as a whole does have negative environmental impacts which is still highly debated, so I would say to use it sparingly. It does come through in a pinch though.
What do you remember fondly from the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies? Favorite class? Instructor?
Kate Phelps and Cabell Gathman! I took feminist theory and then the Framing Fatness class with Phelps, and with Gathman, I took LGBTQ studies and then the pregnancy and parenting in a social context class. The classroom discussions and content were phenomenal. Also, the readings themselves were really impactful for me- although it felt like I was reading for 8+ hours per day among all of my classes, I could feel my consciousness expanding trying to parse through them.
What, if anything, do you wish you could tell your undergraduate self?
Change is hard and hurts sometimes, but it is worth it. Growth is inevitable and the more you fight it the more pain it will cause. Also, I probably would have given myself a warning about Covid and to take my study abroad a year earlier so it wouldn’t get canceled.