As girls walk into Pavilion and take their seats, a certain buzz and excitement for the highly anticipated guest speaker fills the air, making this Monday’s community a little abnormal, and a lot more special. Meanwhile, outside, the speaker pulls into the Marymount driveway, feeling a different sort of excitement—a kind of reminiscent awe that overwhelms you when you visit your high school, wondering where the time went, how you got to where you are today. Since graduating, she has become a savvy businesswoman, successful author, Emmy-winning television star, renowned chef, and dedicated mother; yet she describes her teenage self as shy, insisting, “If you told me in high school that I would have the type of career I have today, I never would have believed you.”

This is Giada De Laurentiis, and she’s back at her alma mater for the first time, twenty-something years after her graduation.

“Memories definitely flood back when you first step foot back on this campus,” she explains.

Calling herself “a true Marymount girl,” she recounts memories of sharing lunch with her friends (her contribution to the lunch swap always being pasta, as a member of a big food-loving Italian family), rolling her skirt up above the knee after getting dropped off at school, and pulling pranks—the usual.

“My best friend and I were both on the track team, funny looking back because I was not the most athletic person at all. I was ultra-competitive, but she would still always beat me in races. To pull a fast one on her, I told her that I had been practicing all summer, and I swore that I could beat her in a race. I found a shortcut through the trees at UCLA as we were racing, and ended up [finishing] way before everyone else. My friend was so shocked that I won and confused about how I did it, and I held it over her for years. She just found out my secret a few years back – we still laugh about it today!”

Through her years at Marymount, Giada may have learned that she was not the best runner, but she also learned something far greater, something that has helped her navigate the difficulties of working in cooking, a heavily male-dominated industry: the importance of great female relationships and the support system they build. She claims that the all-girl environment at Marymount helps to prop girls up, empowering them to grow a certain confidence that is harder to develop in other high school settings.

Even as the wildly successful chef she is today, Giada still faces gender barriers, having to call on the confidence skills gained at Marymount, wondering, “Would this be different if I weren’t a woman?”

“I am female, short and petite, so I don’t look at all like the average chef. I chose a profession different from what a girl at the time would be expected to do because I was energized by the challenge of doing hard things. At le Cordon Bleu in Paris, I had to learn how to quickly and successfully wield knives, survive insanely long shifts on my feet, how to lift very heavy pots and do many other tasks the men in the industry didn’t think I could do,” Giada admits.

Yet she didn’t let these gender stereotypes dishearten her or hold her back in any way; as a matter of fact, she continues to twist them to her advantage. Making a name for herself with standout shows on the Food Network, many cookbooks and now a restaurant, ‘Giada’ on the Las Vegas Strip, Giada is not unfamiliar with success.

Reflecting on her experience of opening her Vegas restaurant, Giada spoke about the difficulties of being the first, and only woman to ever have a restaurant on the strip, telling us that she is still consistently reminded of her gender, as the male restaurateurs there often don’t know how to deal with, or even speak to her as an equal in their professional environment. She doesn’t view that as a disadvantage; instead, she says tries to think about how to talk to them differently, so they can regard her with the respect she deserves. From her experience, Giada asserts that “there will always be roadblocks, but hard work, perseverance, belief in yourself, and support from your girlfriends will get you through them.”

We can’t help but attest to the veracity this statement: the “roadblocks” we’ve gone through with our Marymount sisters thus far are probably not even close in magnitude to the ones that await us in the future, but the special bonds Giada speaks of are ones we are quite familiar with. Just as she says, the girls around us are the ones that know us the best, and the people we know will always be there, through thick and thin.

Reinforcing her belief in the power of the sisterhood at Marymount, Giada closes saying, “Stay connected to the girls around you, because you’ll still be telling stories and sharing your memories years from now. There are a lot of great times and young women here; hold on to them.”

Giada may have gone to Marymount years ahead of us, but it is safe to say that even twenty years later, many things—like her continued passion for the sisterhood here—just never change.