When Karina Eileraas graduated from Wesleyan University in 1993, she was a committed feminist and political activist with a strong interest in international human rights. It makes sense that she would find a home in the first class admitted to the PhD-granting program in Women's Studies at UCLA. What's surprising is the rather circuitous path she took to get here.

Imagine: Her first job was with Andersen Consulting, where she found herself putting in "long hours sitting in front of a computer-something sort of foreign to the way my mind works." Looking for a change after a year at Andersen, she asked herself "which experiences on my resume have I really loved doing."

College and writing were the two answers, so she enrolled in a PhD program in French at Northwestern University. But after completing all of her coursework, she found herself "wanting to do something more politically engaged."

Perhaps law would suit her, she thought, taking a job as legal assistant with the Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin. On the positive side, she contributed to an American Bar Association book about international women's human rights. On the down side, she soon found herself providing legal support to causes she either didn't endorse politically or didn't feel passionate about.

So Karina went back to consulting, at Ernst and Young, "but I knew I wasn't there to stay. I was basically figuring out what I wanted to do in life."

About that time, Francoise Lionnet, her mentor at Northwestern, wrote to say she had resettled as Chair of the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA and would help Karina find a home at the university if that should ever appeal to her.

It did. Except for her time at Northwestern, Karina says, she "lived in a state of emergency, careerwise," during her first few years out of college. "In every job experience I felt that I wasn't being true to myself, and I was on a quest to find out what that truth was going to be."

What made the search so difficult is that Karina has always loved many things. Starting at Wesleyan as a pre-med student and then changing her mind, Karina "considered every major on the books" before settling on three: international politics, women's studies, and French. The first two helped her answer some of the questions that the politically activist environment at Wesleyan had raised in her mind, and the last made use of French language skills going back into childhood, and her love of French culture and theory.

Women's studies was her favorite field because of its blend of theory and practice. But until recently, PhD programs were rare. In fact, the UCLA's Women's Studies Department took its first PhD students last fall, just in time for Karina.

At UCLA, she seems to have found her heart's desire. For one thing, "I'm finally studying what I really love to study," she says. "It's not a parenthesis or an add-on; women's studies is the main thing." And she's come to understand that a career in the academy can meet her need for political activism: "You're exposing people to knowledge that is not only empowering, but that also changes their mind-sets in some ways, or at least forces people to confront the beliefs they hold and to envision ways in which they might make a difference in the world."

Karina spent most of her first year at UCLA "taking a lot of classes," presenting papers at conferences, and trying to figure out how to get around Los Angeles without a car. In particular, lack of transportation is making it difficult for her to find work as volunteer advocate for rape victims who are seeking help in hospital emergency rooms-a cause she adopted in Chicago and intends to pursue here.

In terms of her studies, she's on a fast track. With her work toward the MA already completed at Northwestern, Karina is preparing her dissertation proposal on Algerian women novelists. This interest was sparked at Wesleyan, where Karina earned high honors for a thesis on nationalism and sexuality in the Algerian revolution of 1954 to 1962.

For her PhD, she plans to explore "the ways in which women of the Middle East and Asia have been looked at by the 'Oriental' colonizing gaze." Writers like Assia Djebar subvert that gaze in their works, "playing with the critical space between images," Karina says. Rather than simply rejecting Orientalist depictions as 'false,' Djebar and other Algerian writers "employ those fantasies in their autobiographies in order to create powerful counter-memories of Algerian history and female sexuality."

Her guide on the road to dissertation will be Professor Lionnet, who describes Karina as "a true intellectual with a penetrating intelligence" who balances that force with "a highly developed social conscience. She's fluent in French, she's a superb writer, she's a perfect interdisciplinary person," says Professor Lionnet. "Her interests match perfectly with what is available here."

Karina seems to agree. "The most interesting thing is that since I made the decision to come to UCLA, I haven't asked anymore of the agonizing career questions," she says. "I've found vital ways to combine what I really love with professional ambitions."

Published in Spring 2001, Graduate Quarterly