As the International Women’s Day approaches on March 8, the leaders of the Kalamazoo College Professional Club (PWC) are reflecting on a successful term of student empowerment identifying women to explore their future career goals.
Open to all diplomas, the PWC unites students who are seeking to succeed in a variety of professional spaces, especially those where women remain under -represented.
“With academic diversity at a liberal arts school like K, you have the ability to follow many different passions,” said PWC co-president Alexa Wonacott ’25, who doubles Business and Spanish degrees. “I think our club is delightful because you are working with biology students, psyche students and more, and we all have something in common for which we want to work within ourselves. I think it is wonderful that he offers all these different paths, yet you still find a group of people with whom you have something in common.”
The latest PWC events have included LinkedIn and Résumé writing workshops. They have also included conversations with Amy Macmillan, who is L. Lee Stryker’s associate professor in K, and her daughter, Lindsay, a former vice president at Goldman Sachs, and the current chairman, author, author coach and creative leadership expert. Lindsay’s discussions, for example, included elements about how to bring creativity to the corporate world.
PWC Grace Westerhuis’ member ’26 and co-president Bailey Callaway ’25 noticed that they were particularly inspired by Lindsay’s message about how to fail to fail, and they said their group experiences as a whole were useful.
“I thought it was important for me to practice my professional skills and try networking,” Westerhuis said. “Then, I really liked to connect with other students who identify women, learning about their diplomas and working together to create this environment where we all are supporting each other and understanding our career and future.”
“As a big business, I have noticed that there are always only a few chosen students who identify women inside any of my courses because we are choosing a mostly male field,” Callaway said. “I felt like it was very important to promote an environment where he was accepting women in our school, where we could have our own supported and raised ideas.”
All three students said the PWC has helped them to understand how they plan to continue when they get into their careers as women in life after K. Callaway, for example, wants to work in hospital or healthcare administration.
“I’ve been surrounded by health care all my life, but I’m not definitely the type of person to get to the clinical side,” she said. “I liked to follow the business, especially in K, so I want to help people, but maybe more in the background being an administrator.”
Westerhuis, as a young man, still has some time to understand what she wants to do, though she has enjoyed pursuing ethics and business development.
“I’m looking to find a route of counseling I like, maybe in B in B, so I would like to give advice on how to practice good business ethics because I think our world needs it now,” she said. “I also like to travel, so anything that can lead me to another place sounds great.”
Like Westerhuis, Wonacott enjoyed her study out of experience and likes to travel.
“I hope to return abroad after graduation,” she said. “I have recently applied for a program that would take me back to Spain to teach for about a year. After that, I would like to work in international business.
International Women’s Day can trace its roots until February 28, 1909, when the Socialist Party of America now distributed it organized the first national day of women. In 1910, a German woman named Clara Zetkin proposed the idea of a global day of international women so that people around the world could celebrate at the same time. In 1975, the United Nations – which they had called the International Women’s Year – celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8 for the first time. Since then, the UN has encouraged more places to embrace the holiday and its intention to celebrate “acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of their countries and communities”, according to the KB website.
Involvement in the workplace and decision -making power remain the main issues of discussing International Women’s Day in 2025. In 2024, a global S&P analysis of more than 1,100 companies showed that women hold about 25.1% of high management or leadership roles. This figure has increased slightly by 24% in 2022 and 23% in 2021, although representation remains clearly low, especially with women with color holding only about 7% of all C-suite positions in large corporations. Women also hold only about 29% of all revenue generation management roles in the US and 24.9% of business board positions.
Wonacott, Westerhuis and Callaway agree that it is important for PWC to present role models when helping other women learn how to succeed in business, despite such chances. They point to alumna such as Michelle Fanroy ’88, who occasionally visits business classes in K. She is the deputy chairman of the Alumni Association’s commitment board, a member of the trusted Kalamazoo college board, and the founder and president of Access One Consulting, which provides leadership development, modeling programs and planning programs and planning programs and planning of corporations.
Wonacott added that the influence of the group increases when students are able to engage one in one with topics presented at each meeting.
“If one can come to our career workshop and let it feel good about their word or their LinkedIn profile, it feels successful to me in the sense that we are making sure everyone feels like they have received a lot of a meeting,” she said.
Callaway emphasized that International Women’s Day is a chance for PWC to highlight and amplify important stories on campus, around the country and around the world.
“We throw a lot about the word celebrating a lot, but I feel like this is a good word to describe what it is,” she said. “This is what we try to do as a campus organization is simply the uplift, support and promotion of women.”