When I creaked open the door to Pegram Residence Hall’s Graduate Resident apartment, the Frank Sinatra Christmas Pandora station and the beaming face of the third-year Divinity School student Kaitlyn Bowie greeted me.
The living room table is cluttered with stacks of books ranging from Tina Fey’s Bossypants to Sermons from the Duke Chapel and Saving Women. Her bookshelf houses boxes of DVDs and a bin containing a rainbow of nail polish. An orchid rests on the windowsill, adding color to the room. She offered everyone in the room–Pegram House Council member freshman Jordan Lucore, Pegram Resident Assistant senior Swetha Iruku and me–a clementine and asked me to explain the nature of this article.
“What, a campus celebrity?” Kaitlyn said. “Hailey, you left that out of your text earlier. I’m no celebrity.”
“You’re a celebrity in my heart,” Swetha said.
“Mine too,” said Jordan.
Katilyn’s celebrity status stems from the decided impact she makes on the lives of those around her.
“I desired to be connected with a wider university,” Kaitlyn said. “You are very siloed off as a grad student, and I wanted to engage with more of the campus.”
Her residents, including Jordan, have felt this impact.
“Kaitlyn is definitely the person I look up to the most at Duke,” Jordan said. “I would have never guessed she was in the Div School. She is an amazing person with a unique and inspiring outlook on life, with so much knowledge and interesting points of view to offer.”
This perspective is based on Kaitlyn’s desire to learn and to explore.
“I fell in love with the world,” she said. “I spent a summer in Brazil living with a group of orphans and that made me realize how vast the world is. I spent a summer nannying in Alaska and that made me realize the dynamics of having a family and wanting to be successful, which is why I’ve put off having children. I spent time in teaching Chicago and that made me realize I could never go back home because I craved other things.”
After graduating from Northwestern College in Iowa, Kaitlyn moved across the country and taught elementary school in inner city Houston.
“I really loved my students, but I find the education system to be a little bit life draining,” Kaitlyn said.
While in college, Kaitlyn had struggled with her faith, but in Houston, she decided to spend a year reading through the entire Bible increasingly immersed in the community of a local Methodist church.
“In that year, my heart changed,” she said. “God said he will take the people’s hearts of stone and turn them into hearts of flesh, and it’s like that’s what happened.”
In her summers off from teaching, Katilyn volunteered with the church. There, she found the ability to combine her love of psychology, sociology and theology.
“It allows me to connect with a whole person–heart, mind, body and soul,” Kaitlyn said. “You’re doing life with people.”
Katilyn decided to apply to Divinity Schools with the hopes of becoming a pastor; in part thanks to the encouragement she received from her community in Houston.
“I felt that click of, ‘Yes. I was made to do this,’” she said. “I got involved with shaping that community, and I had that sense because it didn’t feel like work. It was challenging and time consuming, but it didn’t feel like work.”
However, she says not everyone was supportive of her goals, citing others’ fixation on her gender.
“I just think it’s funny how many people seem to think that my brain is attached to my uterus,” she said.
She encourages other women not to limit their possibilities.
“Spend some time thinking about what you want to do versus what you think you are supposed to do,” she said. “Find a mentor who believes and supports them and be widely read, even outside of your discipline. I love memoirs of strong, powerful women–read Bossypants.”
And as the interview winds down, she reminds me that it’s okay not to have a plan right now.
“I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” Kaitlyn said. “There are things that I am called to do, but it feels much more seasonal for me than for other people. So don’t fear, even if you feel confused right now. We’ve all been there.”