To pin down Shauna Gilooly is quite the feat. It sounds cliché, but her time is money – and she spends it wisely. She may be at work as the Director of the Student Council for Undergraduate Research or she may be logging hours at the gym on any given Tuesday. She may be reading and studying Spanish texts or planning her next trip to Peru on Thursday night. She is never at a stand still, and she is never bored. She is always on the go; she is the kind of girl who is confident in her work and in her self, whether she is defending her thesis statement or putting on her favorite red lipstick before class. A few weeks after presenting her research at Harvard University, Shauna opened up her schedule for a few minutes to sit down and talk Spanish poetry, intersectionality and research. Introducing: Shauna Gilooly, Researcher in Red Lipstick.
Name: Shauna Gilooly
Year: Senior
Majors: International Affairs and Spanish
Photo By: Annie Grafe
Her Campus (HC): A lot of kids go through high school forced to learn Spanish and then once they graduate they give that up. You, on the other hand, speak Spanish efficiently and eloquently, and I even heard that you dream in Spanish on occasion. Why did you choose to continue to study the language?
Shauna Gilooly (SG): I was always a really good student and the only subject that really ever eluded me was Spanish. I had an incredible Spanish teacher in high school who taught me to love Spanish – not only the language, but the culture and literature that exists surrounding the language too. It was the only subject that I really struggled with so naturally it was the subject that I absolutely had to go out of my way to master.
HC: I’m sure you’ve become involved with a variety of organizations on campus during your undergraduate career here. What are some groups you have been a part of on campus that really characterize your undergraduate work here at FSU?
SG: Anyone who really knows me knows that I have spent pretty much all of my past three years doing research in some capacity or another. I am currently the Director of the Student Council for Undergraduate Research, a position for which I recently won an award for at the SGA Inauguration Ceremony, so obviously that is an organization that I am very heavily involved with.
HC: Where do you want your research and studies to take you? Do you have an end goal in sight right now?
SG: I definitely have been working toward a goal while I have been here. I am moving out to California in August and I’ll be starting my first year as a Ph.D candidate at the University of California Irvine’s Ph.D in Political Science program. I’m really passionate about studying social movements. That’s something that I’ve been working on for a while here with my research and I’m hoping to continue in that vein.
HC: What is one experience you’ve had this year that you wouldn’t exchange for anything?
SG: I fortunately have a really easy answer to that question! I had the opportunity to present my research at Harvard University earlier this semester, and that was absolutely an experience I wouldn’t trade for the world. It was so exciting to be in that room with so many other researchers, and to see what the next generation of leaders is going to look like, because, honestly, the brain power in that room could have powered an entire country.
HC: What was (and is) the ratio, would you say, of women scientists to men scientists, when you were at Harvard and just generally in the field of research?
SG: I would say that across certain disciplines it fluctuates. There is definitely a significantly larger amount of men in research, particularly in higher education, so people in masters and doctoral programs. For myself, personally, moving forward into a political science doctoral program, there is a higher proportion of men to women, and historically it has been so. We can see that just by looking at who sits in our Congress. Hopefully, I will be one of the people who can move toward changing that. Of course, there have been a multitude of incredible women scientists and researchers who have paved the way, but I think that there is definitely more progress to be made.
HC: Definitely. There is always room for progress. Who is one woman, either in research, in your life or in history in general, who really inspires you?
SG: I would say that one of the women that I think is really significant in higher education in general – she’s not a scientist, but she’s a scholar – is Kimberly Crenshaw. She was the woman who coined the term intersectionality in feminism, and that’s an idea that I’m really passionate about, because the whole idea of feminism is that it’s an empowerment movement, moving toward the concept of true equality, and I don’t think that concept can exist when we negate or deny the additional struggles that are placed on women of color and in the transgender community. It is my personal belief that if your brand of feminism isn’t intersectional, than it isn’t a true representation of what feminism should be.
HC: Intersectionality is definitely something that needs to become a more popular topic in the feminist world. If you had to choose one beauty product that made you feel fierce, empowered, or you’d grab as you were headed out the door, something that makes you feel awesome and you love?
SG: Definitely would say red lipstick. It’s my absolute go-to. It’s super fun and it’s a classic.