There is an unspoken campus hierarchy that every college student internalizes within their first 24 hours on campus. Freshmen move in tight, slightly anxious clusters, clutching their phones with a PDF of a campus map.
Posts published by “Breona Pizzuta”
Every woman at a tech school knows this exact scenario: you walk into your first lab or capstone meeting, pull up a chair, look around the room, and realize immediately that you are the only woman in the room.
For the past three years, my fall weekends followed a rigidly responsible script. Spontaneity had to be penciled into my calendar at least two weeks in advance.
September at a tech school comes with an unmistakable shift in atmosphere. Suddenly, lecture hall attire swaps from oversized hoodies to fancy blazers, library printers churn out stacks of resumes, and the air is thick with elevator pitches practiced under breath.
Earlier this week, sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by markers, crayons, and colored pencils, my roommate and I took part in, what some would call, a sacred college tradition — drafting the Senior Year Bucket List.
Stepping onto a tech school campus in the fall always brings a familiar mix of energy and quiet reality. Between the smell of fresh syllabus packets, the late-night coding sessions, and lecture halls where you might still count the women in the room on one hand, being here requires a specific kind of resilience.
There is a distinct, unwritten ritual to the first day of classes. You wake up five minutes before your alarm, agonizing over an outfit that says “effortlessly put together” rather than “I just finished track and field lift five minutes ago.”
At the beginning of this school year, I had a plan. I knew what I wanted my schedule to look like, how productive I was going to be, and who I thought I’d become by the end of it.
Walking into a classroom where you’re one of the only women, if not the only one, can feel intimidating before the lecture even begins.
In a groundbreaking move that has left absolutely no one surprised, the university has officially announced the launch of His Stevens, a long-overdue counterpart to Her Stevens that aims to spotlight the deeply underrepresented voices of men everywhere, especially at a school where they make up roughly 70% of the population and 112% of the volume in every lecture hall.