Elaine Chao

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, born in 1953 in Taipei, Taiwan, China, and originally from Jiading, Shanghai, moved to the United States with her parents in 1961 at the age of 8. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, majoring in Economics, with a record of four straight A's. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. He graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, majoring in Economics, with a record of four years of straight A's. After graduating, she worked for two years at Formosa Shipping Company, which was headed by her father, Seok-Seong Cho, and received a master's degree from Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration in 1799. She also studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, and Columbia University. She later became a senior accountant at Citibank. He was a White House Scholar from 1983 to 1984, and Vice President of International Finance at Commerzbank from 1984 to 1986.

In 1986, he left business for politics and became Deputy Administrator of the Shipping Administration at the Department of Transportation; in 1988, he became Chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission; in 1989, he became Deputy Secretary of Transportation; and in December 1991, he became the twelfth Captain of the U.S. Peace Corps. After leaving office, she was recruited to become president of the United Way, a position she resigned from in 1996 to help her husband's campaign for the U.S. Senate.

On January 11, 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Chao to be Secretary of Labor, which was approved by the Senate on January 29 of the same year. She is the first Chinese-American in U.S. history to serve in the Cabinet and the first Asian-American woman in the Cabinet.

Zhao was one of the nation's Six Outstanding Women of 1986 and one of the Ten Outstanding Young Women of America in 1987. She received the Alumni Achievement Award from Harvard University in 1993. In 2008, she received the "Outstanding New American" award from the U.S. Federal Immigration Service.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (émily Dickinson), a famous American poet, is considered one of the pioneers of twentieth-century modernist poetry, along with Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass. Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, she died in 1886 and studied at Mount Holyoke College. Literary history refers to her as the "Nymph of Amherst" because of her lifelong solitude, and Dickinson left behind more than 1,800 poems***, but only seven of them were transcribed from letters by her friends and published during her lifetime. Her poems are formally original, mostly using the traditional metrical form of 17th-century English religious hymns, but with many variations, such as the use of many short dashes in the stanzas, which both replace punctuation and create abrupt ups and downs in the rhythm of the normal iambic meter. Most of her poems are half-rhymed.

It was not until the emergence of modernist poetry in the United States that Dickinson became widely recognized in the literary world as a pioneer of modernist poetry, and her study became a hot topic of modern American literary criticism. In 1890, 115 of Dickinson's poems were published, followed by two collections of poems and two collections of letters, and in 1914, more poems were published, establishing her place in literary history as a poetess; in 1950, Harvard University bought the rights to all of Dickinson's poetry.

She is best known for her poems such as "Cloudy Darkness," "Escape," "Hope," "Compensation," "The Battlefield," "Angels," "It's the Day the Birds Came Back," and "The Magic Book.

Other Notable Alumni

Alice McLellan Birney, co-founder of the NPTA (National Parent-Teacher Association)****

Frances Perkins, the first female staffer in the White House

Dr. Virginia Apgar, developer of the Apgar scale (the Apgar scale is a method of measurement that is used to assess the effectiveness of a child's learning environment). (The Apgar Scale is a rapid tool for assessing the health of newborns and has wide clinical applications)

Virginia Hamilton Adair, poet

Florence Schorske Wald, dean of the School of Nursing at Yale University

Ella Tambussi Grasso (Class of 1940), first woman governor of the United States; recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation's highest honors, awarded by the President of the United States for outstanding contributions in the fields of science, culture, sports, and social activities

Gloria Johnson-Powell. First African-American woman to receive a tenure-track professorship at Harvard Univerisity School of Medicine

Jean Picker Firstenberg, President Emeritus of the Motion Picture Association of America

Nita M. Lowey, New York State Assemblywoman

Julia Phillips, the first female director to win an Academy Award

Nancy J. Vickers, President, Bryn Mawr College

Elaine Tuttle Hansen, President, Bates College

Wendy Wasserstein. Playwright; recipient of the Tony Award (established by the American Theatre Association and considered the highest honor in American drama and musical theater), the Playwrights Guild Award, and the Pulitzer Prize

Nancy Novograd, Editor-in-Chief, Traveler's Delight Magazine

Barbara J. Desoer, President, Credit Division, U.S. Bancorp; selected by Forbes Magazine as one of the "World's Most Powerful People" in 2009. Forbes Magazine's "World's Most Powerful Women"

Pamela Maffei McCarthy, Associate Editor, The New Yorker

Robin Chemers Neustein, Chief of Staff and Shareholder, Goldman Sachs

Nancy Gustafson, Hollywood Movie Director, The New York Times

Barbara J. Desoer, President, Credit Department, Bank of America. Gustafson, Hollywood movie star

Priscilla Painton, editor-in-chief, Simon & Schuster Book Publishing (the largest book publisher in the U.S.); former editor-in-chief, Time magazine

Lynn Pasquerella, current president, Mount Holyoke College

Robin Chemers Neustein, chief of staff and shareholder, Goldman Sachs

Nancy Nancy Gustafson, former president, Mount Holyoke College College)

Holly Metcalf, first U.S. Olympic champion in the women's rowing event

Janet V. Lustgarten, co-founder and president of Kx Systems (Wall Street's largest big data provider)

Lan Cao, novelist

Mary Mazzio, documentary filmmaker

Suzan-Lori Parks, playwright; winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Genius Award (one of the nation's top prizes in the field of intersectionality)

Kavita Ramdas, president of the Women in the World Foundation

Mona Sutphen, former U.S. White House chief of staff<

Heather Harde, President, TechCrunch (a heavyweight blogging outlet focusing on the Internet and entrepreneurship, and a bellwether for the U.S. Internet industry)

Sonali Gulati, Documentary Filmmaker

Kat Calvin, Founder, Black Girls Hack (an African American women's software development Coalition)

Jennifer Rochlis Zumbado, Head of NASA's Space Lab

Divya Mathur, Vice President and Chief Financial Analyst, Analysis Group, a leading global provider of economic, healthcare, and financial consulting services

Erica Lutes, Executive Director, Fulbright Program (one of the world's foremost educational exchange programs between governments)

Katherine Sandoz, Artist

Erin Ennis, Vice President, USCBC (U.S.-China Business National Committee)

Divya Mathur. Chief Biologist, Pfizer (Pfizer, the world's largest R&D-based biopharmaceutical company)