In 1971, Hopkins, an all boys university, opened its doors to women for the first time. Gail McGovern was one of the 30 women accepted into that first coed undergraduate class.
Since then she has worked as a CEO at Fidelity Investments, been profiled by Fortune Magazine as one of the most powerful women in the business world and is now the CEO of the American Red Cross.
"Hopkins admitted girls because they thought they would be attracted to Humanities, but almost all of them went on to medical school," said McGovern, who graduated in 1974 with a degree in quantitative sciences.
When she matriculated in 1971, McGovern was a sophomore transfer from Boston University, because at the time, Hopkins only accepted sophomore and junior girls into their first class of women.
"Professors thought it would be great to have women [at Hopkins], but the men were very against it," McGovern said.
"They were "creeped out by us," she said, and they would not sit next to the girls in class, she recalled.
"At the time, there were only 1,900 students [at Hopkins], so girls stuck out like sore thumbs ... The school wasn't ready for us."
McGovern said that her female classmates, all of whom lived together in AMRII's Clark House, were seasoned hard workers, though they were not a close-knit group.
"All of my friends were guys," she said.
"I'd go out on the weekends with platonic guy friends."
She said she eventually started acting more like a guy, going to tons of sporting events and spending her time exploring and practically living in the network of underground tunnels that connect Hopkins buildings.
"I loved it," she said. "A big piece of my heart is with Hopkins."
McGovern credited her experience at Hopkins as the reason for her later-life career successes.
"It taught me how to maneuver in an all-male world," she said.
And maneuver she did. McGovern moved to Philadelphia, started working at AT&T after graduation and "fell in love with work".
She loved programming, but soon got bored and moved on to sales, climbing up the corporate ladder. She worked for 24 years at AT&T and earned her MBA from Columbia University.?
Eventually McGovern took the position of CEO of Fidelity Investments, where she remained for four years until "corporate America started collapsing."
It was during her tenure there that Fortune Magazine profiled her.
McGovern went on to teach business at Harvard for the next six years, until the American Red Cross offered her he position of CEO, a job that she currently holds and loves.
"Leading because you have power is not as good as leading through experience," McGovern said.
In the first 15 years of her career, McGovern worked on a variety of all-male leadership teams.
According to her, living on the male-dominated Hopkins campus of the 1970s made her "direct, decisive and rough around the edges," which prepared her for the male-dominated corporate world.
McGovern, who has served on the Hopkins Board of Trustees since 1992 and whose daughter is a Hopkins sophomore, said that she has been blown away by the changes to the campus, calling everything from the food to Hodson Hall "phenomenal."
She approves of the greater gender equality that exists on campus today, calling it a "much healthier environment."
"Girls, from an academic perspective, kick butt," McGovern said.
She takes encouragement from the fact that in today's workplace, high-ranking women are becoming more common.
"I don't want my daughter to be in a world where she has to break glass ceilings," McGovern said.
