Feature

In 1992 widespread anger caused by the humiliating treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearing by an all-male, all-white panel of lawmakers ushered in the “Year of the Woman.” According to Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), that year 29 women filed for U.S. Senate seats, and 11 won their primaries; 222 filed for U.S. House seats, and 106 won their primaries. 

Though that doesn’t seem like many today, these numbers had surpassed previous records by leaps and bounds and have had a long-lasting impact on our electoral politics. The 24 women who won election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in November 1992 was the largest number of women elected to the House in any single election. The U.S. Senate saw the first black woman elected and tripled the number of women overall in that chamber. 

As of August 2018, 107 women hold seats in the U.S. Congress, comprising 20 percent of the 535 members. Twenty-three women (23 percent) serve in the Senate, and 84 women (19 percent) serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Five women nonvoting delegates also represent American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands in the House. 

But there is still work to be done — the United States is far from having equal gender representation in local, state, or federal government. According to recent data compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the United States ranks 102nd in terms of women’s representation in government. For comparison’s sake, the United States’ neighbor to the south, Mexico, currently ranks ninth. 

The United States is poised for another seismic electoral shift. In this powerful #MeToo era, women are taking to the streets to protest what are seen as attacks against basic rights. They are also running for public office in unprecedented numbers, with a few high-profile women shining in the spotlight, such as New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated an incumbent congressman in her primary, and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, the first black woman nominated for governor by a major political party in the United States. 

According to CAWP’s most recent figures, there are 468 women running for the U.S. House and 51 running for the U.S. Senate as of this writing; these figures well outpace previous records. Moreover, an NBC analysis found more than 40 percent of Democratic House nominees are women, compared to less than 10 percent for Republicans. 

“It makes sense that there are more Democratic female first-time office seekers out there right now,” says Barbara Trish, professor of political science. “Given that Republicans dominate state and local offices — with Democrats taking a big hit over the last decade — the door is open for Democratic challengers to those incumbent-held Republican seats.”  

So it follows that there are extraordinary numbers of Democratic women throwing their hats in the ring for local, city, and statewide offices for the first time. And, of course, there are Grinnell College alumni among them; at least three have sailed through primaries and will know in November if they are victorious in the general election.  

Women seeing themselves as contenders

Kayla Koether ’12 seeks to represent the people of Iowa House District 55 in northeast Iowa as a progressive Democrat (kaylaforiowa.com), and is running against an incumbent Republican, Michael Bergan, in November. 

“I am running for the Iowa House of Representatives because, for years, I have been troubled by the trajectory of rural Iowa,” Koether says. “It’s become an expectation that young people will leave to pursue their vocations. It’s become more and more difficult to become a farmer or an entrepreneur here.

“For too long the rural exodus has been viewed as ‘inevitable’ and taken for granted by policymakers. But we rural dwellers are dedicated to our places, and we have a vision of strong rural communities. I want to bring that vision to the Iowa Statehouse,” she adds.

Koether says she thinks the reason for the groundswell of women running for public office across the United States is because we are at a crossroad in our country.

“Many people are feeling a call to duty. Those considering a run for public office realize — and have probably realized for some time — that we are nearing the edge of the cliff,” she says. “The need to step up and set a course toward progress on so many levels — economic stability for all, human relationships, health care access, environmental sustainability — hasn’t been so profound since the lead up to the Great Depression.” 

Liz Johnson ’88, co-founder of VoteRunLead (voterunlead.org), a nonprofit that trains women how to run for political office, has worked with several Grinnell College alums over the years, including Koether. According to the organization’s recent survey, which polled 750 potential female candidates, 56 percent of those candidates said they don’t think as many women run for office as men because no one has ever encouraged them to run. 

Johnson, who is currently a VoteRunLead board member, says this is changing — especially after the results of the 2016 presidential election. Women are no longer waiting for permission or encouragement to become civic leaders, she said. The number of women seeking training from VoteRunLead to run for public office across the country has exploded; the organization has trained more than 12,000 women to run for office since November 2016. 

“The 2016 election was a real wake-up call for women across the political spectrum,” Johnson says. “We are realizing we can no longer sit on the sidelines of our democracy and think it will represent us well. And communities are looking for women to run for office, especially local office. The leadership of women incorporates our life experiences, providing a perspective in policymaking that is more inclusive and brings more people to the table to solve complex problems.”  

Koether agrees with that sentiment.

“In the past, women in particular didn’t see themselves as candidates because they didn’t fit conventional expectations,” she says. “Now, they have seen that the stakes are too high and the system will not fix itself. They must step up so that we can reach our highest aspirations for a vibrant democracy.” 

Finding the courage to run

Laura Clymore Ellman ’87, a federal compliance assessor at Argonne National Laboratory, is running for Illinois State Senate in the 21st District (ellmanforillinois.com). Ellman, a Democrat who lives in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, hopes to unseat incumbent Republican Michael Connelly. Ellman is focused on helping the state of Illinois find its financial footing and fostering its economic growth. The state’s poor financial shape is among the worst in the nation.

She had never really seriously considered running for public office, citing a lack of experience, “but November 2016 happened,” and Ellman says she suddenly felt qualified. “At the time, it was more ‘why not?’ than ‘why?’ run,” she says. 

“I never thought it would be me, and I have never been overly politically active. It was just never one of those things I identified myself with.” By Thanksgiving she knew she would run.

“I decided to run for a lot of reasons. For nearly 20 years, out where I live, the ballots were pretty one-sided: uncontested races, all the same party,” she says.  “I’d be frustrated for that one election day, but it never really went beyond that. As I talk to more people, the more convinced I am that we need alternatives; we need to have contrasting opinions on where Illinois is going. Having the same band of people representing us is not in our best interest.” 

Grinnell College women up to the challenge

Ellman was not the only Grinnell College alum who decided to run for public office after the 2016 election. Erin Hennessy Gonnerman ’09, who has already won her race and is now a Two Rivers (Wisconsin) City Council member, did, too. “It was three weeks after Nov. 8, 2016, that I picked up my nomination papers to run for city council,” she says.

Gonnerman, a mechanical engineer at NextEra Energy, says she thinks Grinnell College female alumni are particularly well-suited to running for office.

“Don’t hesitate to run, especially for local offices that can be done while maintaining your full-time job,” she says. “It’s a good way to get involved in the government and help you decide if higher office is something you’d be interested in. City councils and village boards need people with diverse opinions and backgrounds, and they also just need people who are willing to do the work, put the time in, can think critically, and who care about the community.”

Though Grinnell College women may have the strong critical thinking and leadership skills it takes to make good political candidates, they still can face an uphill battle while running. One only need look to the Barbara Lee Foundation’s well-known 2014 report “Keys to Elected Office: The Essential Guide for Women” to see just how difficult it is for women seeking public office. 

The guide doesn’t hesitate to show female candidates the cold, hard reality of running. It points out that, when it comes to fundraising, women are often not included in the same well-connected donor circles as their male counterparts. According to the guide, women are judged on their looks, the way they dress, their families — and often have to be more qualified than their male opponents. “Women need to provide more evidence than men of expertise. The first way to relay that to voters is to make an excellent first impression — to hit the ground running and to maintain that momentum throughout the campaign,” the guide states.

But none of those factors has stopped Grinnell College women in the past. Rita Rawson ’90 was first elected in 2015 and is in her second term as alderman of the 5th Ward in Davenport, Iowa (voteritarawson.com). She is also the only woman of color on the city council. Rawson says the way women can win is by pinpointing important local issues that citizens feel have been ignored. Rawson has been successful in promoting urban revitalization.

“The older, core neighborhoods have been neglected for decades,” she says. “But after a lot of hard work, urban revitalization is now the council’s No. 1 goal. When I was running, I never had a thought of  ‘I can’t get this done.’ My goal was to always just get it done.”  

Her advice to alums currently running for office is to have a vision that you can articulate clearly. “Being yourself and being authentic to your voice and vision, as well as being honest to constituents, is critical.” 

Participating in our democracy effectively 

Kim MacDonald Butler ’83, a progressive Democrat who lives in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin, is not letting obstacles get in her way of making a difference in her rural community. She is running for Wisconsin State Assembly District 28 against Republican Gae Magnafici (votekimbutler.com). Previously, Butler was set to race against incumbent Republican Adam Jarchow, but he dropped out of the race after losing a special election for the state senate earlier this year.

“I stepped up to run against the incumbent, assuming I would lose, simply to get the issues of jobs, education, health care, and the environment inserted into the discussion. That he decided not to run for re-election is a happy accident,” she says. 

Butler initially decided to get politically involved after her children began high school. “Just voting and giving money every once in a while was not getting the results I wanted,” she says.

So in early 2016, Butler joined the Polk County Democrats; by late 2016 she was elected co-chair of the group. However, it was only after being chosen as a delegate to attend the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on behalf of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders that she was truly inspired to run for state assembly.

“There was something about Bernie Sanders that really touched me. Largely it was his focus and speaking on income inequality,” Butler says. “So when he said, ‘Go join your local Democratic party,’ I did. Then he said, ‘Go to your local caucus and make sure everything was fair,’ so I went and eventually moved up and was elected as a delegate for the national convention. It was a really eye-opening experience for me, seeing so many people so passionate about politics.”

For Butler, campaign training has been instrumental in giving her the tools she needs to run for office. The first major training camp she attended was Camp Wellstone, a weekend-long program targeted to grass-roots progressive candidates. “You learn all the things you need to know to be a candidate; how to raise money and win your race,” she says. 

After completing a couple of other training programs, she connected with Liz Johnson at a VoteRunLead training camp, which Butler attended to gain more knowledge about running as a female candidate. It was there she also re-connected with Koether, whom she had first met at Camp Wellstone.

Koether says that connecting with fellow Grinnell College graduates was the final push she needed to decide to run for state office.

“It was heartening to run into other Grinnellians, including Kim Butler and Liz Johnson, at the campaign trainings I attended as I was making the decision to run,” she says. “Feeling grounded and part of a supportive community was key in helping me find the courage to put my name on the ballot.”

She continues, “At one of those trainings, a woman told me that running for office is like ‘getting a Ph.D. in life,’ because you hear so many stories and see the world through so many different perspectives. Going out and talking with people in our communities — and helping people find ways to talk to each other — is exactly what I wanted to be doing during these troubled times."

Ellman adds that you should not let running for office scare you — you have more to contribute than you realize, she says, and the time is now. 

“A common belief is that those seeking office have loftier ideals than just normal folks. But maybe now OUR loftier ideals should push us to run,” she says. “If you have considered it but thought the barriers too high, think again. Once you get started and commit, those barriers become much more manageable.” 

Grinnell students have many opportunities to develop their entrepreneurial skills. Here are some of them:

• “Real Life Entrepreneurship” course. Entrepreneur Sanjay Khanna ’85 led a three-week short course at Grinnell on entrepreneurial thinking, strategies, and approaches in November.
• Innovation competition. Over the course of a weekend, student teams work to develop, validate, and build prototypes of their best entrepreneurial ideas. They compete for cash prizes and a scholarship to the University of Iowa’s Venture School.
• SPARK Community-Based Social Innovation Challenge. Students with a social entrepreneurial mindset can participate in SPARK, in which community partners identify specific challenges, and students develop 5–7 minute pitches to solve them. Pitch winners receive $15,000 and the chance to implement their ideas.
• Diverse paths of innovation and leadership. The alumni speaker series brings an array of alumni, including entrepreneurs, to talk about their work.

When Jeman Park ’20 and a few friends dreamed up EduPass, technology that helps schools keep tabs on students during unscheduled times of the day, he was just a senior at Minnesota’s Mounds View High School working on a side project. But his high school principal saw plenty of potential and asked him if he and his co-founders could build out the app they’d mapped out. The app could track if a student had spent her time talking with a civics teacher about an upcoming paper, studying in the library, or hanging out in the cafeteria, instead of sequestering them in an all-purpose study hall.

Park and his team were off and running.

For tech entrepreneurs showing such early promise, heading straight to business school might have seemed like the obvious next step. But for Park, Grinnell has proved to be a perfect fit. Though its financial aid was a consideration (“I didn’t want to be riddled with debt as an entrepreneur,” he says), he’s been even happier with the ways that Grinnell has helped strengthen his critical thinking skills and think expansively about the larger possibilities of EduPass into the big data era. 

“Recently, we went back to the drawing board to figure out what our true value was — for teachers, principals, and students. We realized we needed to understand their stories and perspectives to build something that was for all of them,” he says. “Grinnell has changed the way I think about problems and changed the way I think.”

He’s also taken advantage of more formal offerings by the College. Through the Center for Careers, Life, and Service, he’s learned how to network more effectively and land a mentor. He recently took a Learning from Alumni course from Doug Caulkins, professor emeritus of anthropology and former director of the Donald and Winifred Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership, gobbling up lessons from Grinnell entrepreneurs who have returned to campus to share their stories.

Caulkins says Park is anything but alone. “I’ve been teaching career and entrepreneurship courses for more than 15 years, and never has student interest in innovation and entrepreneurship been greater,” he says. Caulkins’ Creative Careers course alone has attracted 50 students, the largest at Grinnell.

As Park and his team of six continue to work on the app (it’s currently being tested with thousands of students at two high schools), he’s eager to use the lessons he’s learned so far to take the company as far as it will go. “It’s a roller coaster to try to turn an idea into reality,” he says. “But my dream is to work on EduPass after college.” 

Grinnellians have always had an entrepreneurial streak. J.B. Grinnell himself founded a church in New York and the town of Grinnell. (He also dreamed up “Grinnell University,” though the college that stands today sprang to life from Iowa College’s relocation.) Robert Noyce ’49 famously co-founded Intel, Nordahl Brue ’67 was the brains behind Bruegger’s Bagels, and Lucia McMillan Cleveland ’74 launched The Spice Hunter.

Today, young Grinnellians are as ambitious as their predecessors, building companies they hope will change the world — or at least their corner of it. In the stories that follow, we share the big visions, the tough failures, and the grit that it takes to build a business from the ground up.

1. Start: From side gig to solopreneur

As a student, Natz Soberanes ’13 seemed perfectly positioned to line up her dream job as counselor or a therapist. She majored in sociology. She was a great listener, and she was deeply empathetic.

But when a fellow Grinnellian introduced her to WordPress website software during her senior year, she quickly discovered both her talent and affinity for technology. That summer, Alexia Brue ’95 hired Soberanes to intern at the health website that Brue had co-founded, Well + Good. And in 2014, Soberanes’ aunt recommended her to a friend who needed a new website to promote her fledgling coaching business. 

Soon, through word of mouth, Soberanes had built a full-time business in a unique niche: women, often moms, who wanted a website to promote a new or growing business. It turned out that all those skills Soberanes had been burnishing to pursue a career in counseling helped her stand out in a crowded field of web designers. “A lot of my work is being able to empathize with others and understand where they’re coming from,” she says. “For example, a lot of women I was working with were nervous — they weren’t sure they had value to add because they were ‘just’ moms. But I’ve been able to connect with them and help them.”

While most business owners don’t think of their web designer as helpful coach, Soberanes does double duty in ways her clients love: She digs deep into their lives, learns about their priorities and passions, and translates those conversations into websites that truly represent her clients’ businesses and work. 

Still, she admits it hasn’t always been easy to run her own business. Her top-notch reviews ensure she always has a steady stream of clients (she has a perfect rating from more than 70 clients who have reviewed her on the hiring website PeoplePerHour), but the financial headaches are often just as constant. “Just because you send an invoice doesn’t mean that it’ll get paid,” she says. “Plus, unlike people who get a regular paycheck, I’m not guaranteed to make a certain amount on a certain day.”

That said, she’s thrilled with what she’s built so far. The business gives her the flexibility to travel — she splits her time between Mexico, Texas, and California. And today, she does work for women running businesses in construction and architecture, yoga and massage, and photography and fashion. They’re a diverse set of industries, but Soberanes brings their projects and larger business missions to life through their sites. “When you’re having long phone calls with clients where you talk about everything in their lives, not just ‘This is what I need on my site,’ you get to know the human aspect of them, and that helps the work,” she says.

2. Scale: Creating a company with millions of raving fans

Now, years after Grinnell opened Miller’s eyes to the injustices of the world, Grinnellians continue to feed her passion for righting the world’s wrongs. In return, she is helping students find their own paths to success, whether they choose law school or something else entirely. 

As to whether other alums should consider the Grinnellink program, Miller says, “Yes! Yes! Yes! I want to give two thumbs up to anybody who thinks the Grinnellink program may be something they want to think about.”

Although there are many internship opportunities available to college students, a Grinnellink internship provides Grinnell students the unique opportunity to develop and cultivate their professional networks, build on their academic backgrounds, develop professional skills and confidence, and foster career exploration with alumni or friends of Grinnell. 

In addition, any student who secures an unpaid 8–10 week, full-time Grinnellink internship is eligible to apply for grant funding to offset the costs of food, transportation, and housing during the internship. 

Thinking of hosting an intern but unsure whether your profession or organization would be the right fit? Interested in learning more? Contact Jovan Johnson, assistant director of employer engagement and internships, at johnson5[at]grinnell[dot]edu or 641-269-4782.

As one of just three full-time lawyers working at American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska, Amy Miller ’93 puts her boundless energy, empathy, and passion to use on a daily basis. She seems so entirely in her element that it’s hard to imagine there was a time when she balked at the thought of becoming a lawyer. 

An art history major from suburban Nebraska, when Miller first came to Grinnell she pictured herself in a profession that involved plenty of books and little cause to be the center of attention. But a series of experiences at Grinnell and an insightful adviser changed all that.

“I feel like a jellyfish that rode the wave and washed up in the most perfect ocean that I could have hoped for,” says Miller. Now, as a mentor with the Grinnellink internship program, she’s helping a new generation of Grinnell students find their own perfect ocean. 

Discovering her “right place”

When Miller was considering her options for college, she had a few criteria. She knew that she wanted to go to a smaller school in the Midwest with rigorous academics and that she was not interested in sports or a Greek system. She added Grinnell to her list because the promotional materials she received included student-written essays that were “sassy, funny, and quirky.” She decided to visit. 

“The minute I stepped on campus, a guy walked by wearing one of those long, floaty, Indian cotton skirts, and I thought ‘Yes, this is where I want to go!’” laughs Miller. “My parents were totally freaked out but I knew I was already in my right place.”

Before coming to Grinnell, Miller had not experienced much outside her “suburban bubble” in Nebraska. “My parents were more on the conservative side … they certainly weren’t taking me to protests or anything like that,” she jokes. 

But her undergraduate experience was to prove transformative. Grinnell, Miller says, “took my head and opened it up.”

A crisis of conscience 

When Miller was a first-year student, some of her Langan Hall floor mates invited her to volunteer with a group that helped out at a homeless shelter in Des Moines, Iowa, on weekends. It was unlike any experience she had had before. “It feels dumb to admit it, but I had not really had that face-to-face experience with people living in impoverished situations,” Miller says. 

Then, in her third year, she studied abroad with Grinnell-in-London. 

“That was my next crisis of conscience,” she says. Her first time in a big city, Miller saw things that shocked her. There were people sleeping on the streets and police hassling people who clearly didn’t speak English or understand what was happening. She recalls thinking, “Why are you hassling him? He’s trying to do the best he can!”

“I had kind of a meltdown,” she says. “I had met people at the homeless shelter in Des Moines, but they had a roof over their head and they had their own room. Wow. It sounds naïve, but I had no idea that was how the world worked.”

She talked to her Grinnell-in-London professor, the late Michael Cavanagh, trying to make sense of it all. After listening to her concerns, he suggested a career path she hadn’t considered: law school. She initially resisted. “I was a very shy person, and I couldn’t envision myself standing in court shouting ‘Objection!’”

Cavanagh insisted that she wouldn’t be happy unless she was actively making a difference. She relented. “I told myself I just wouldn’t be the courtroom type of lawyer.” 

Going back to Nebraska

Miller has now been “the courtroom type of lawyer” for nearly 20 years. She started working part time at ACLU of Nebraska in 1999 and came on full time in 2001. Miller has long since overcome her shyness. “People were being mean to my clients! And I realized no matter how shy I’m feeling, I’ve gotta figure out how to yell at somebody.”

After Grinnell, Miller returned to her home state to attend law school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She decided she should use her “gift of a good situation” to give back and right some of the ills in the world. “And then I thought, well, I should do that in Nebraska. Because we do suffer from brain drain, and somebody has to stay and fight. I guess I decided I would do that.”

Then, after a few years working at ACLU, Miller saw an appeal from Grinnell asking alumni if they would like to host student interns. “And I thought, ‘Uh, Cha! Yes, I would!’” Miller has been hosting a Grinnell intern each summer ever since. 

Practical help and a fresh perspective

Miller had never thought to take on an intern until she saw the call for volunteers, but she now sees interns as an invaluable asset to her office. “Grinnell students pick things up so fast, and they really are quite independent, because that’s how the College is training them,” she says. 

She also appreciates the more intangible benefits of mentoring Grinnell interns. Interns come back from court appalled at how the judge is treating people, or don’t understand why police seem to resist cultural sensitivity training. Seeing interns’ genuine reactions reminds Miller that certain things that seem commonplace to her aren’t so commonplace to those viewing them with fresh eyes.

“Having that fresh perspective keeps me in check so that I don’t allow injustices and inequities to seem like they’re just day-to-day business,” she says. 

Her interns also help her keep tabs on what is happening back at Grinnell. While much has changed, she can always find common ground. “It is restorative and charming to remember there is life continuing on campus even though I’m not there anymore,” says Miller. 

Taking interns seriously

Every year, Miller takes projects that she knows will require hours of in-depth research and sets them aside specifically for her Grinnell interns. She also tries to give each intern at least a couple of options to ensure that they can work on something they’re passionate about and get the most out of the experience. 

“It boggles my mind that there are internships that don’t fully embrace the opportunity that a talented, intelligent Grinnell student brings to the table,” says Miller. “I don’t need someone to go get me coffee — I can get my own coffee — but I do need help doing the substantive research that takes a lot of focus that I don’t have the time to do.”

This philosophy has served Miller — and her interns — well. Several bills have been introduced and passed into law in the Nebraska state legislature as a result of Grinnell intern reports. 

A success story

Nathan Calvin ’18 is the latest intern whose research has made a lasting difference. During his 2017 summer internship at ACLU, Calvin wrote a report focusing on the high cost of calling home from jail, as well as privacy issues surrounding attorney-client phone calls. A law prohibiting “excessive commissions and bonus payments” and guaranteeing free calls between attorneys and their clients passed with bipartisan support in April.

Of working with Miller, Calvin says, “It’s really hard to imagine anyone taking their intern having a good experience more seriously. She’s not just a great boss, she’s a great mentor and friend.”

He credits the internship with solidifying his resolve to go to law school and helping him to understand the sort of work he wants to spend his life doing. He wrote about the experience in his law school applications and asked Miller for letters of recommendation. He has now been accepted at Stanford Law School, but will defer admission for a year to work on artificial intelligence ethics issues at Oxford University’s Governance of AI Institute. 

Read more about internship opportunities at Is Grinnellink right for you?

Lisa Grant ’88 spent her third year in Tokyo, Japan, because she wanted to learn Japanese. “The skills I learned in communicating across cultures — resiliency and perseverance — continue to serve me well.”

Miriam Clayton ’15 had originally planned to find a Spanish immersion program, but thanks to her interest in social science, she was encouraged to look into the DIS Copenhagen program. “I liked it and honestly was more challenged by differences in culture than I had anticipated when imagining Western Europe. The biggest changes in my life came from the freedom and responsibility to plan and execute travel — I visited 12 different countries over the course of the semester, which did a lot to boost my sense of confidence and self-efficacy.”

Laurie Kauffman ’99 studied in Costa Rica on the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Tropical Field Studies Program. “I chose it because my Grinnell financial aid covered it, because it was Spanish-speaking, and because I could study monkeys. It was hugely influential for me. I made my research into a book chapter, I’m currently a biology professor and primatologist, and I’ve led several study abroad trips with my own students back to Costa Rica.” 

Kirk Karver ’83 spent a year in Seville, Spain. “[It] changed my personal and professional life in profound ways. To start, I was a history major when I arrived in Spain, but ended up at Grinnell as a Spanish major. More significantly, I met my future wife during my year abroad, and we’re still facing life’s challenges together 37 years later! And professionally, as a career Air Force officer, I have used my Spanish for the bulk of my 30-year career, which has included multiyear assignments in Panama, Spain, and Uruguay, not to mention shorter work trips to another dozen Spanish-speaking countries. I think no other year has changed my life in so many meaningful ways!”

Élen Rhoades Kidd ’03 studied in Stockholm with The Swedish Program in the spring of 2002. “It was hands down one of the best decisions I’ve made. I chose the program because I wanted to study in English, but not be limited to an English-speaking country, and wanted to take courses in a range of subjects. I also have Swedish roots (maternal grandfather) and loved the idea of studying anywhere in Scandinavia. I wanted a small program and didn’t want to be surrounded by Grinnellians. I credit that semester with so much personal growth. 

“In 2005, I returned to study on my own and ended up reconnecting with The Swedish Program. As luck would have it, they were creating a new position for a recruiter, set to start right when I would be returning to the U.S. They offered it to me, and I accepted. I’ve now been working for The Swedish Program for almost 12 years and love my job. I visit colleges and talk with students about studying in Stockholm, travel to our site twice a year for orientation week with our new students, and now work in alumni relations as well. I love that I have been able to make Stockholm my second home and keep my Swedish skills (more or less) fluent.” 

Share your story

Did you study off campus? Where, when, and why? What did you get out of it? Any advice for students considering off-campus study? If you didn’t study off campus, why not? Please tell us about it.

Current students

Read about Thomas Aldrich's study abroad experience in his words. 

I was quite single-minded when I came to Grinnell. I intended to major in French and study abroad, which I did, although I chickened out from a full semester because I was married and didn’t want to be away from home that long. Instead, I did a summer program in Lyons, France, that included a homestay. 

Perhaps because of my own single-mindedness, it never occurred to me that someone would study abroad for reasons other than increasing their language skills. So I contacted students and alumni to learn why they chose their study abroad programs and what they got out of them. 

Jeanne Pinder ’75 has been steeped in journalism all her life. The Grinnell native honed her craft over the years with the Grinnell Herald-Register (which her grandfather bought and her family still owns), the Associated Press, the Des Moines Register, and The New York Times.

As a journalist and a student of the old Soviet Union, Pinder demonstrated an affinity for complex issues. As a Times editor, she dealt with heady topics like the fall of communism, the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and “a couple of Persian Gulf wars.” 

Pinder wrapped up a career in what could be called conventional journalism in 2009 when she volunteered for a buyout from the Times after two separate stints totaling 23 years. What she did after that could hardly be called retirement. Rather, she reinvented herself as an entrepreneur, took an even deeper dive into journalism, and dedicated herself to a question for which no one seemed to have any answers, namely, “What do things cost in health care?” 

Pinder’s business invention, aimed at demystifying the health care industry for the practical benefit of consumers, is an entirely different breed of journalistic cat. Called ClearHealthCosts (clearhealthcosts.com), it has become nationally recognized for its expertise in health care pricing. Its data-driven, consumer-savvy approach to web-based journalism has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Harvard Business Review, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among others. 

It would not exist had Pinder not answered a challenge to re-examine everything she knew about the information business.   

Remaking the model

Uncertain about what she wanted to do after leaving the Times, Pinder decided to join a class in entrepreneurial journalism taught by new-media guru Jeff Jarvis at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. 

“The theory of the class,” says Pinder, “was that if CUNY is a journalism school making little journalists, it is doing it for an industry where the revenue model is challenged, if not completely broken. We had a responsibility to think about that and do something about it.”

The charge, she says, was “how to make journalism that pays for itself.”

Denizens of a newsroom have been known to regard the subject of advertising revenue with varying degrees of contempt, but Pinder enjoyed a distinct advantage among journalists trying to imagine a new way of doing business. “I’d worked on the business side on the Herald-Register,” she says. “I’d sold advertising. I knew how important it is. I had more of a business background than a lot of journalists who had been only on the writing and editing side.”

During the run of the class, students had to come up with a business idea, design the model, refine it through a competitive analysis, and convince an expert panel of its efficacy. “At the end of the class, we had a Shark Tank-type pitch contest with a jury of New York City venture capitalists and Internet illuminati to judge us,” Pinder says. “I won 20,000 bucks.”

No sooner did Pinder invest her winnings into a startup devoted to pulling back the curtain on health care pricing than detractors began to surface. It was a sure sign that she was on to something.

“I had a constant chorus of people telling me it didn’t make any sense, it was stupid, it wasn’t doable,” Pinder says. “This was in 2011, so people were saying things like, ‘When the Affordable Care Act comes into effect everyone is going to be insured, so everything is only going to cost $20 and what you’re doing is completely irrelevant.’ Or, ‘Powerful forces will put you out of business because health cost transparency is in nobody’s interest,’ which is true, actually, but those powerful forces have failed to put us out of business so far.”

Undaunted by critics, Pinder forged ahead with funding by “angel” investors and with additional grants from the likes of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, the International Women’s Media Foundation (funded by the Ford Foundation), and the McCormick Foundation (via J-Lab at American University in Washington). “It wasn’t really enough to form the business and certainly not enough to dismantle the health care industrial complex, but enough to get a start,” she says. 

Secrets in plain sight

Pinder’s team of research journalists immediately began surveying cash or self-pay prices for a range of common — she calls them “shop-able” — medical procedures. “There are about 35 of them on the website,” Pinder says. “Not big complicated things, but things that are pretty much apples-to-apples — MRIs, cardio stress tests, Lasik, ultrasounds, an IUD, a vasectomy, a well-woman exam — fairly common things for which you would have discretion over where you wanted to go.”

Prices are plugged into a software tool called PriceCheck, also developed by Pinder’s team, that allows consumers to share, search, and compare what actual providers are charging for comparable medical services in specific locations. It allows consumers to shop for mammograms or teeth fillings with the same price intelligence they’re accustomed to having when buying cars, shoes, or any other consumer item. 

Another data set on the site (hospitals.clearhealthcosts.com) collects prices for bigger-ticket items —knee arthroscopy, childbirth, ear tube surgery — from various web sources. Because these prices are collected and categorized in a different way from other prices, the site displays it in a separate data set. 

Helping consumers access real prices is a service that, to date, has been provided by no one in the health care industry — unless you count a handful of companies that match up provider and patient and take a nontransparent cut of the transaction for providing this service. Citing her own commitment to being a careful consumer, Pinder says the inability of otherwise intelligent people to understand their own medical costs makes even less sense in a health care sector that accounts for nearly 20 percent of the U.S. economy.     

“We receive these medical bills and explanations of benefits that are completely incomprehensible,” Pinder says. “People have no idea what they mean, why they’re being charged these amounts, or what the insurance company is paying. Nobody seemed to know what anything costs. It’s like a secret hiding in plain sight. I thought, why can’t we understand this? It should be pretty straightforward, right? Well, ha!”

The power of agency

“Coming from The New York Times and coming at this problem as journalists, we take a very different approach from what the current incumbents in the health care marketplace have,” Pinder says. “We like finding stuff out and telling people about it. That’s not necessarily high on the agenda of people in the health care marketplace. They have other agendas. 

“We are giving people agency in the marketplace, and that’s a very powerful thing.” 

Just how powerful is revealed by the numbers on ClearHealthCosts’ website. Pinder and her team of journalists and tech experts, with the help of data supplied by web users, have uncovered disconcerting price disparities in comparable procedures across the board. For example, a vasectomy that costs $150 in Stamford, Conn., can cost as much as $17,000 in Oakland, Calif. An MRI costing more than $6,000 through one provider in San Francisco can be bought for $300 at another provider only a few miles away. Furthermore, nobody in the industry seems interested in advertising the difference. 

“There is massive confusion in the marketplace,” Pinder says. “We know it’s true that people who are insured are frequently being asked to pay more than people who are uninsured. It’s a whole new thing for many people because it used to be that having insurance gave you access to a lower price and no additional out-of-pocket. Well, guess what?”

We could guess that in many cases one might do better as a price-negotiating cash customer even if one has insurance, and, Pinder asserts, we would be correct. The actual prices, at least those that can be found out through real customers or that are supplied by willing providers, prove it. 

“Insurance companies don’t profit by price transparency,” Pinder says. “They profit by keeping all of this stuff a secret, because if you’re not sure what you’re going to have to pay, then you’re inclined to buy more insurance. 

“What we do here is completely separate from any insurance question, because insurance companies won’t tell us what they pay,” she says. “If you’re an insured person, they won’t even tell you. So we do the cash or self-pay price and the Medicare price because those things are fundamentally knowable.” 

Beyond that, members of the community share what they were charged, what insurance paid and what they paid, often sending in their bills and statements as proof. This is a compelling back-check on the cash prices, revealing the hidden secrets in the marketplace and helping community members make decisions. For example, Pinder explains, an insurer might pay $400 to Provider A for an MRI, but $2,400 to Provider B for the same MRI in the same metro area. 

Actionable information

As experienced users of health care are aware, charges for services depend largely on how services are coded. Most of the searchable prices on Pinder’s site are based on the five-digit Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System, or HCPCS. Medicare reimbursements are shown for the same procedures, because, Pinder says, “Medicare is kind of a yardstick; it’s the closest thing to a fixed or benchmark price in the marketplace.”

Medicare prices also vary according to geographic location. And while we might be temporarily distracted by the fact that Medicare pays $570 for an MRI in California but only $387 in Iowa, ClearHealthCosts is less about fixing everything that’s wrong with the health care machine and more about helping consumers deal directly with factual realities. 

“When we write our blog posts, we don’t just point at the problem, we also tell you what to do about it,” Pinder says. “We do data journalism, but we also tell you anecdotes, like what has happened to people, why are they getting charged, and what should you do about it to protect yourself.

“One of the things that we’ve learned is that people are really upset about this issue,” Pinder says. “They don’t want to read any more stories about partisan bickering in Washington. They don’t want to read news stories about Obamacare rates. They don’t want to read stories about insurance companies whining that they’ve been poorly treated. They want actionable information. They want to talk about it, and they want to make a difference. 

“Some people want us to think that it’s only uninsured people who care about this, but nothing could be further from the truth,” she says. “Insured people really care about this, both high-deductible and not.”

Media partners and crowdsourcing

Pinder’s business aims at building a critical mass of pricing data specific to as many regions of the country as possible. Consistent with its entrepreneurial origins, it is a for-profit endeavor; so to seek viability on a national scale, Pinder ultimately hit on a strategy of partnering with big media organizations to do crowdsourcing on their sites. ClearHealthCosts now has its price-checking software tool placed on public radio and other media websites in markets like New York, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.  

“Our partners pay us to build and customize this tool for them,” Pinder says. “We do the survey and prepopulate the database with information so that their communities can share and search for things while they’re in their pajamas at 3 o’clock in the morning. We also consult with them on how to generate more traffic and how to write great stories out of this information.”

It’s a mutually beneficial proposition. For its role in the partnership, KQED in San Francisco won the Society for Professional Journalists prize for innovation in journalism. WHYY in Philadelphia won the Pennsylvania Public Service Award for broadcasters. While the middle part of the country isn’t nearly as well represented by media partners as coastal urban areas, in five years Pinder envisions more partnerships, more price transparency, and a bigger, broader version of ClearHealthCosts.  

“We don’t have a partnership, say, in Iowa right now,” Pinder says. “We would love to have one. I would say there are six or eight partnerships that are nearing fruition in other states. Non-media partnerships are really attractive, too, but our sweet spot is media. They get it. They understand what we’re doing. We’re not compromised by anybody. We don’t pull any punches. We can’t. We’re all about full-on transparency. Journalists really get that.”

Half-truths versus the internet

What consumers understand is that they will always need health care and that genuine advocates in the medical marketplace are few and far between. As long as buyers have choices in services and providers, the kind of journalism produced by Pinder’s organization can only gain relevance.

“The topic of money will be in every conversation about health care where there’s a discretionary element,” Pinder says. “It has to be, because there’s no way a system can continue like this, charging some people $6,000 for an MRI and some people $300. The Internet doesn’t like it when people lie and keep secrets. And the healthcare marketplace is full of half-truths and secrets about who gets paid what. 

“It’s really ripe for some completely crazy thing like somebody telling you that an MRI could be $500 or it could be $2,400. Do you want the $2,400 one? Do you want the $6,000 one? Then you should have that. But if you want the $500 one, then you should have that, too.” 

What about quality? Measuring it is difficult, owning it more so

Questions about quality are sure to arise when price discrepancies are significant. Jeanne Pinder tells why ClearHealthCosts is not in the business of quality assessment:

“We’re not medical professionals. We’re not doctors. The medical profession needs to do that, or somebody other than us,” Pinder says. “My partners and I were invited to a state radiology association to tell them about our project. So we went through our presentation and one guy said, ‘You didn’t say anything about quality,’ and we asked, ‘Well, what’s a good quality MRI?’ 

“There were about 25 radiologists in the room. One of them said, ‘It’s the machine. It has to be the best machine.’ Another guy said, ‘Well if it’s a great machine and it’s not maintained or calibrated, then it’s not a good MRI.’ Another person said, ‘It’s the technologist who arranges the body parts and takes the pictures, because if they’re no good, then the MRI’s no good.’ 

“Another person said, ‘No, it’s the radiologist who interprets it.’ So they’re having a big argument about it and finally one guy says, ‘The worst MRI is the one that doesn’t get taken because the patient believes that she can’t afford it.’ And they all shut up. 

“If somebody shows me a good quality metric, I will incorporate it in a heartbeat,” Pinder says. “But there aren’t any good quality metrics now. There are a lot of efforts to assess quality, from the federal government, from the states, from insurance companies, from hospital chains, from trade groups. There are a million different quality metric efforts, none of them very effective or consumer friendly. But it’s not on us to fix the entire health care marketplace. Somebody should have done that a long time ago.” 

If you were asked to name a major Haitian cultural hub, you’d be forgiven for not shouting “Waterloo!” But when Fredo Rivera ’06, who grew up in Miami, first came to Grinnell, what he found surprised him. “Oddly enough, my foundation with Caribbean art is rooted here,” he says. Iowa, it turns out, has one of the largest concentrations of Haitian art in the world. And after returning to Grinnell as an art history professor, Rivera is making sure his own students can take full advantage. 

A fortunate fluke

On a frosty winter morning in 2002, Rivera’s first-year roommate ran into their dorm room in Loose Hall, pelting him with a snowball. Far from being angry, Rivera was delighted — it was his first time seeing snow. “I ran outside to play in like half an inch of snow,” he laughs. “I don’t even know how he managed to get enough to make a snowball!”

Rivera’s decision to study at Grinnell “was a fluke,” he admits. Neither of his older siblings had left Miami for school. Originally Rivera was only looking at large universities on the East Coast, but then a little college in the Midwest described as “weird and dorky” caught his eye. That fall, he was off to Iowa.

Rivera arrived at Grinnell eager to explore his interests in art, history, sociology, and political science. He settled on an art history major with an Africana studies concentration and found himself increasingly drawn to Caribbean art. There was just one problem: none of the art history faculty at the time had any expertise in Caribbean art. They were all Europeanists, specializing in Western art. 

Luckily, Rivera still found ways to engage in his chosen subject. “I was very blessed to have faculty members willing to go out of their way to do independent guided readings,” he says. Jenny Anger, professor of art history, led Rivera in independent study and introduced him to David Campbell, Henry R. Luce Professor of Nations and the Global Environment, who has a large personal Caribbean art collection. 

Beyond campus, Rivera discovered that he had stumbled upon what might be one of the best locations to study Haitian art. The Waterloo Center for the Arts in Waterloo, Iowa, has the world’s largest public collection of Haitian art, and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, has another impressive collection — including many works by Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, a fellow Miami resident. 

“It’s quite peculiar that we have these collections in Iowa, and wonderful as well,” says Rivera. While it was his Puerto Rican roots that had initially drawn Rivera to Caribbean art, at Grinnell he became increasingly interested in Haitian art, delving into the relationship between Haitian and African American art in his senior thesis. 

His love of Caribbean art cemented and his curiosity about Haitian art piqued, Rivera returned to the East Coast after graduating from Grinnell to further his art history studies at Duke University. In 2010, while Rivera was spending a year in Miami as a research affiliate at the University of Miami School of Architecture, he paid Duval-Carrié a visit in his Miami studio. Rivera learned that Duval-Carrié, whose work so impressed him as an undergraduate, was collaborating with Duke’s Haiti Lab at the time. “I told him about my discovery of his work in Iowa, and by the end of the conversation we just very much intellectually clicked,” says Rivera. Duval-Carrié invited Rivera to begin work on a major exhibition project exploring the role of photography in Haiti, From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography at the NSU Art Museum–Ft. Lauderdale. Duval-Carrié and Rivera have been working together ever since.

There and back again

In 2016, Rivera found himself at a crossroads. His time as visiting assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University had come to an end, and he was weighing the pros and cons of remaining in academia. He loved teaching, and he loved his research, but he was also unsure if the academic landscape was right for a queer artist and scholar such as himself. “I was like: you know what? I don’t think academia is somewhere where I can thrive and just be myself. I think there’s so much pressure to perform in a certain way and to conform in a certain way,” he says.  

He was contemplating his options, considering working on some of his art projects independently, when he got a nudge from Anger, his senior thesis adviser at Grinnell. There was a position opening in the art history department, and she encouraged him to apply. Rivera decided to go for it. While he was still unsure how he felt about academia as a whole, he knew “Grinnell would be a perfect place to figure that out.” Of course, once he got the job, he was faced with a new problem: how to fit everything he wanted to accomplish at Grinnell into his new two-year position.

Rivera was intent on not only investing in the aspects of the department that he loved the most, but also expanding its offerings for students. He could give students what he hadn’t had — access to a Caribbeanist art historian on campus — as well as offering classes on architecture and urbanism. To this end, he had two priorities. First, he wanted to teach the exhibition seminar, a class that gives students hands-on experience curating an art exhibition for the Faulconer Gallery. Second, he wanted to give students the opportunity to work with Edouard Duval-Carrié.

Connections with collections

Rivera’s desire to teach the exhibition seminar came from personal experience. He had taken the class himself as a student at Grinnell. “I think it was a profound experience that followed me to this day,” he says. “I would say that it is not only a highlight of what we do in our department, it is also unique among our peer institutions. This is the reason we go to Grinnell — to have this very hands-on, intensive experience.”

“We were blessed to hire [Rivera] whose research and curatorial interests on the Caribbean complemented my passion for writing and talking about visual culture in Latin America and the Caribbean,” says Abdiel Lopez ’18, a sociology major who participated in the exhibition seminar.

As the first exhibition seminar student in Grinnell’s history to come back as a professor and teach the class, Rivera felt compelled to take the class further than ever before. He knew that he wanted to build the student exhibition around Haitian art; but to do this, he would have to introduce a new element to the course. While the exhibition seminar historically pulls on work from  Faulconer Gallery’s own collection, Rivera wanted his students to look outside the Faulconer offerings to build a full exhibition of Haitian art centered around Duval-Carrié’s pieces. So, Rivera’s seminar students were treated to yet another first for the class: course-embedded travel to museums in Miami and Iowa. 

To kick off the semester, the class visited five different institutions in Miami, got a behind-the-scenes look at an exhibition installation, and met with Duval-Carrié in his studio. Then, over fall break, the students spent three days traveling throughout Iowa. They were able to go into the vaults at Waterloo Center for the Arts to select works that they wanted to borrow for their exhibition. Rivera let the students have full control over which artworks they chose. “I think the teamwork really formed at that point, and that’s when they started meeting outside of the class of their own accord.”

“The opportunity to meet museum professionals gave us essential experience in approaching a project of this scale,” says Ellen Taylor ’18, an art history major. “It was especially interesting to observe the approaches of institutions, and how their different resources, needs, and goals affected the process of exhibition.”

Over the course of the semester, Rivera also assigned the students readings on Haitian art and museology, and they debated the cultural politics of displaying the art respectfully. Some of these readings were the very same papers he had read in his exhibition seminar — bringing them back and assigning them as coursework in his own class after having to find them himself as a student was “very surreal,” he reflects. 

“I am 100 percent sure that we would not have received this wealth of knowledge in a typical art history seminar,” says Lopez, “mainly because we were able to not only talk to professionals who’ve been in the business for a while, but also because we designed this exhibition from beginning to end while reading about Haiti along the way.”

Rivera found himself blown away by the passion and dedication his students applied to their work. “I think the thing that most impressed me is I came into the classroom proposing doing an exhibition on Haitian art with an idea of what the exhibition would be, but as the students engaged with the course material, they took the exhibition to a place that I never thought was possible. I see this as the students’ exhibition — I merely provided connections with collections and a broad idea.” 

Rivera’s students also identified and contacted guest speakers (including a vodou priest), helped design the catalog, and assisted in installing the exhibition. Giving the students such a sense of ownership of their work seems to have paid off — several of Rivera’s students have now expressed an interest in furthering their studies as curators themselves. “This particular exhibition seminar on Haiti has completely altered my professional track,” says Lopez. 

Iowa: hybridity embedded in green

Rivera’s influence on student opportunities has not been limited to the art history department. Inspired by their “Haiti: History Embedded in Amber” art project at Duke’s Haiti Lab, Rivera invited Duval-Carrié to Grinnell to teach a short course as a visiting artist last fall. The course became a collaborative endeavor that stretched across departments, producing a piece of art to be installed in the new Humanities and Social Science Complex on campus this fall. 

The installation is made up of 35 green-tinted epoxy resin blocks set into a metal grid and lit from behind. Poured in a series of six liquid layers, the resin blocks encase archival images depicting historic scenes from Haiti to Grinnell, focusing on histories of freedom and abolition. Each layer also contains three-dimensional objects such as keys, plastic figures, beads, and sequins to highlight or complement the images and their meanings. The green tint of the blocks is indicative of Iowa cornfields and represents the intertwined agricultural history of Haiti and the United States. Presented together, the resin blocks represent a “collage of histories,” says Duval-Carrié. Two of the students enrolled in the short course are creating a website that will accompany the installation with narratives explaining the visuals of each block. 

Duval-Carrié tried to maximize the creative freedom of contributors while also encouraging them to think deeply about historical and cultural themes. “I gave them the theme and the color and the format,” Duval-Carrié explains, “but the rest is theirs.” While just five students enrolled in the short course, anyone who took an interest — or even who, as I discovered, happened to be in the room at resin-pouring time — was enthusiastically encouraged to join in. 

Most of the students and faculty members who contributed to Duval-Carrié’s art project were not art majors themselves, instead drawn to this unique opportunity to tell a visual story. Doug Hess ’91, assistant professor of political science, brought his first-year tutorial class on the Haitian Revolution to create blocks. Timothy Dobe, associate professor of religious studies, came with a student activist group to contribute; and Sarah Purcell ’92, L.F. Parker Professor of History, recruited students from her own department. A student in Rivera’s exhibition seminar, inspired by Duval-Carrié’s work, also joined in to help with many of the blocks. While participants were new to the medium, all were enthusiastic about this fresh way to explore themes usually confined to the more traditional linear structures of essays and research papers. 

The final product is a hybrid exploration of Iowa, the United States, and Haiti amassed by a group of disparate people. Given a new medium and free reign, Grinnellians produced a collage of layered histories as vibrant, disparate, unique, thoughtful, and bold as the individuals who created it. While Rivera once had to go out of his way to find resources to study Caribbean art at Grinnell, now he has come back to give his own students direct, hands-on experience — balancing intellectual rigor with creative freedom.

As Rivera and I wrap up our conversation, he sips the last of his piña colada. He has a Liberal Arts in Prison class on architecture to prepare for and more readings to assign his art history students before he leaves for the weekend to perform in the Wigwood drag festival in Miami. Attending Grinnell may have been a fluke, but it gave Rivera access to the resources he needed to be his own kind of student. Now, he’s returned to be his own kind of professor — connecting students to the subject he loves without feeling that he has to lose a part of himself in the process. He, in turn, is helping students to find their own unique expression.