Head of School Bodie Brizendine welcomed 34 alumnae and one alumna parent as well as Upper School students and faculty to Career Day, a biennial Spence event. “This day will broaden your sense of the imagination about horizons and future possibilities,” Brizendine noted before thanking the Career Day Committee, including the Alum Office, 12 student members and Director of College Counseling Dana Boocock Crowell who spearheaded the effort. This day reminds us that “You are always a student at Spence,” Brizendine added before kicking off the morning.

Read the below excerpt from Christine Leahy ’95 on her impressions of the six panels.

“The girls have been talking about this since October,” said Donna Checkan, Physical Education teacher, as Upper School students moved eagerly through the hallways toward the first of two sessions they had elected to attend on Career Day. Alumnae in the fields of medicine, media, government and law, art and architecture, business, and engineering and computer science were on hand to take questions from students on topics from selecting a college major to balancing work with family.

In the government and law session, panelists debated the pros and cons of working for a large law firm. While Shena Elrington ’00 said she was eager to move on from her time at such a firm to follow her passion for public interest work, Gabriela P. Baron ’89 related that she loved her experience at a firm. Now, at Xerox Litigation Services, she asserted that she doesn’t hire anyone without big firm experience, “because of the rigor.” After the session, ninth-grader Sammy C. ’18 said she was inspired by the narratives of different career paths; she plans to be a senator.

Business panelists discussed how some jobs are for extroverts, such as entrepreneur Jen Ross ’04, co-founder and co-CEO of Be Mixed, who said she had spent the previous evening giving out samples of her zero-calorie cocktail mixer at an Equinox gym. Katherine Harman ’96, however, explained that she enjoys diving into analytics at her desk at the Ford Foundation, where she evaluates the track record of potential hires who will manage stock portfolios for the foundation’s endowment.

Despite her taste for introverted tasks, Harman also stressed that in each job she has held, she makes an effort to spend as much time with colleagues and superiors as her male colleagues. She noted that in a male-dominated field, men sometimes socialize with each other by default, leaving women out of important conversations such as how to negotiate a salary.

A similar topic was raised in the engineering and computer science panel. Ariel Segall ’98 said that while she rarely faced overt sexism, she has often been frustrated by “lowered expectations,” and it took her longer than male peers to find a serious mentor. Nonetheless, she eventually identified her professional niche, and as senior security architect at Akamai Technologies, she said she gets to make “a huge amount of mischief” by learning about computer security systems and then “smashing at their design.”

Gender was also discussed in the medicine sessions, where Celia Divino P’13, chief of general surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital, gave a sobering statistic on the subject. Women comprise about 55 percent of medical school classes, she said, but of the 20 percent of students who quit her general surgery program, 90 percent are women. Optimistically, Divino still encouraged students by saying that “your choice shouldn’t be driven by anything other than your love or passion for what you do.” She added that she had given birth to her daughter when she was a medical school resident.

Denise James-Manuel ’89, an attending physician at Jamaica Hospital, told students who sought her out after the presentation, “It’s important to have a support network—medical friends who will understand what you’re talking about.”

After the panel sessions, students gathered for a lunch reception with alumnae in the Drawing Room. Junior Tiarra H. ’16, relaxing on a couch by the windows, held several business cards in her hand, and remarked, “I’m so happy to have had this experience.”