Tracy E. Nowski

Tracy E. Nowski ’07 owes a lot to her experience on the speech and debate team in high school. She discovered a love of public speaking that stays with her to this day. “I’m not me if I’m not speaking,” says Nowski.

Second, she got her first glimpse at the difficulties faced by women in the public sphere. “I remember at world championships judges telling me it was cute that I was trying,” Nowski says.

It’s just those kinds of attitudes that Nowski is fighting against. Since coming to Harvard, Nowski has merged a love of public speaking with a commitment to women’s empowerment in nearly everything she does.

She recently spent a summer in Australia, talking with schools about how to create public speaking programs for girls. A highlight of the trip involved a speech she gave to girls about the history of feminism, which ended in a standing ovation and one girl coming up to her and saying, “I never thought feminism was cool, but I do now.” In these travels and others, she estimates that she’s spoken to a total of 5,500 girls.

As a women, gender, and sexuality studies concentrator, she is writing her thesis on the campaigns of female gubernatorial candidates. Nowski also serves on the national board of Strong Women, Strong Girls, a mentoring program dedicated to empowering girls, and is a peer educator at the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. She also finds time to participate on the Committee on House Life and Committee on Undergraduate Education. Most recently, she traded in two weeks’ worth of sleep to manage the Petersen-Sundquist UC presidential campaign.

“There would be no victory without Tracy Nowski,” says UC President-elect Ryan A. Petersen ’08, who praises her organization and “ability to immediately command respect.”

Caring and responsible, she also has a green thumb. Blockmate Emily K. Vasiliauskas ’07 puts it bluntly: “She is obsessed with houseplants.” There’s an old wives tale that speaking to plants helps them thrive, so maybe that explains why Nowski, public speaker extraordinaire, has helped her plants grow. After all, it worked for 5,500 girls.