My roommate’s name is Brooke Damboise, and she is a senior Exercise Science major with a minor in fitness at Lasell University. At twenty years old, she is going to be graduating in May 2022 in just three years. For two out of her three years at Lasell, she has been a Blue Key Society (BKS) Student Ambassador who works for the Admissions office and gives tours to prospective students. She is also a two-sport athlete and has been on the Lasell women’s basketball team for three years and the track-and-field team for two years.
Hannah: Do you think it’s important to celebrate International Women’s Day?
Brooke: I don’t think we should have to. It’s nice to have those reminders, but the goal with
everything is to get to the point where there’s equality without those being necessary.
Hannah: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Brooke: Success is whatever you want it to be.
Hannah: Do you consider yourself to be a powerful woman?
Brooke: Not yet. I think I’m a strong woman, but powerful is a different term. You’re not
powerful until you influence others.
Hannah: Who are your female role models?
Brooke: Megan Rapinoe, because she’s a f*cking icon. She is 100% her, and she fights for
what she believes in at what could be the expense of her career. She doesn’t care, she’s
still here. And she’s still a really fucking good soccer player.
Along those same lines, Maya Moore. She’s one of the best basketball players of all time
and she stopped playing about five years ago because a black man got wrongly
convicted of a crime. She quit basketball to go fight for him, even though she didn’t know
him. She proved he didn’t commit the crime, got him out of prison, and now they’re
married. She’s the reason I wore #23.
Hannah: Do you have any other female role models?
Brooke: Karen Damboise, my mom. She’s an icon; she’s a very strong woman who taught me not
to take sh*t from anyone. She’s always been my most supportive person.
Hannah: What’s one quality you don’t think women get recognized for enough?
Brooke: Their strength. In the mental sense, women are expected to be able to do a lot of
different things, whereas men are the ones that get recognized for their accomplishments.
At this point in time, women are expected to have both kids and a career in order to be
viewed as “successful”. If men actually choose to be good fathers, they’re celebrated. It’s
just expected of women.
In the physical sense of the word, men are such p*ssies. If they’re sick, they stay home
and whine about it. Women go to work and go through their daily lives with pain that
they’re fine with. Yet, somehow men still think that we’re weak.
Women in Sports
Hannah: What is like being a woman in sports?
Brooke: Women play sports because they enjoy it, but there are still clearly inequalities between
women’s and men’s sports. These are evident in how we are treated as teams by athletics
and also in how we are treated by other students on campus.
Hannah: What are some of the inequalities you see when it comes to athletics?
Brooke: The obvious one is that we don’t have as many fans show up to our games. In general, I
also feel like women’s sports just aren’t as respected. We put in just as much work as the
men’s teams do, yet we don’t get nearly the same amount of recognition. For example, we
had the first game in all doubleheaders for this season, and the second game in any
doubleheader is the one that is projected to have the most fans and viewership. This felt
like athletics telling us that we aren’t as important as the guys so we had to play our
game first.
I feel like the athletics department has made some attempts to make things more equal,
like looking into getting the women’s basketball team a game after the men’s team got one
last year [during the covid no-seasons]. However, these steps were only taken after the
team met with Title IX and brought it up ourselves, something the men never would have
had to do.
Hannah: What do you like about being a woman in sports?
Brooke: I like playing sports. I love the game, but I don’t necessarily like or love the other sh*t
that comes with it.
Women in STEM
Hannah: What do you like about your major [exercise science]?
Brooke: I do like that even though it’s a male-dominated major, there are actually more girls in
my classes and in the major as a whole. Without saying girl power, [Brooke hates that
term, she feels like the term shouldn’t need to exist in order for there to be equality] girl
power. There are a lot of female voices that are heard and respected, so it’s really cool
that there are a lot of girls in this major who are looking to go into diverse careers. I
would say that my major is one of the more equal ones on campus, and a lot of the
students are athletes, so we’re all able to talk to each other without the comparison that
comes from other majors. Our major is definitely a little community, and I don’t think I
can say that for a lot of the other majors here [at Lasell].
Hannah: What do you like about being in the three-year program?
Brooke: Exercise science as a major is very much a path, but it is a vague major. In order to do
anything with the degree, you have to go somewhere else afterward. Being able to
accelerate is a great perk because, for me, I’ll be getting out of school in five years
as opposed to six years.
However, it does suck being the guinea pig for this program. I and two others were
the first people to ever do the three-year program for exercise science, and even though
it was difficult, it did end up working out. Plus, the money I’ll be saving by graduating in
three years and then going into graduate school here at Lasell is awesome. There was
some overlap between the credits I had to take as an undergraduate and the one I’ll be
taking as a graduate student, so that’s a big whoop!
I also feel like the program wasn’t too much extra work. However, my view of this
the program could definitely be a little skewed because of Covid-19 and the online courses I
had to end up taking. Having hybrid courses definitely made my life a little easier
because I only had one in-person class per week (along with a bunch of asynchronous
courses), which made it seem like I had less work to do even though I was still in a bunch
of classes.
International Women’s Day exists to celebrate the women in our lives that we love and look up to. I hope you enjoyed getting to learn more about my roommate and best friend Brooke from this International Women’s Day interview. Thank you to Brooke for letting me interview you :)