For the past year and a half, I've worked at the Women's Funding Network, an international network of grantmaking organizations that focus on women and girls issues. I make my contribution in the Finance Department, which often doesn't feel like it has much impact on the world, but I try to remind myself that there are many ways to take a stand for gender equality. Every day I am surrounded by intelligent, passionate, and funny women who give their all to everything they do. I am part of an organization that strives to live out its mission and values, not only in the work that it does for our members, but also in the day to day at the office. It's a great complement to my coursework in the Master in Nonprofit Administration program at the University of San Francisco.

Before this, I earned a Master's degree in Women and Gender Studies from San Francisco State University. In my thesis, I critically examine representations of queer Asian American adolescents in two contemporary novels, particularly as they come to terms with their emerging sexuality, negotiate sexual encounters, and form conceptions of their own sexual identities -- processes that, as I demonstrate, are fundamentally mediated through racial-ethnic identity and gender. I was undoubtedly influenced by my time working at the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality, researching ways in which television provides viewers with ideas that guide how girls/women and boys/men think, feel, and behave in romantic and sexual relationships and later supporting a phenomenological study of female adolescent oral intercourse in order to understand why girls are engaging in this behavior, especially whether and how they are evaluating the associated health risks.

Before this still, I studied Cultural Anthropology, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. It might be hard to see at the moment, but one day I will look back and, finding that thread joining these experiences together, I will say, "Ah, it all makes sense now."