I attended the Women's Leadership Academy when I was a Freshman at UTC, and the experience was probably one of the more challenging yet rewarding experiences I have had in my time at UTC. I come from a small-minded town where gender roles are expected to be followed and everyone is extremely conservative. I was never encouraged to think on my own or to assess what I believed. I went to the Women's Leadership Academy and sat in on sessions about equality in the workplace and great women in history, and I was thoroughly excited because I agreed with everything that was being said and felt empowered. Later in the week they talked about what feminism meant to them, and I had always stayed away from that term because I didn't feel like it applied to me. Through deep discussions and dialogues during this retreat I realized that the stereotypes I had learned were not true and not what I believed. It was the first time I started to observe my political beliefs (beliefs that I had simply inherited from my parents and never thought twice about) and because of this, I started to find things out on my own and challenge those beliefs. It has truly shifted who I have become.