Taylor Wieringa ’18

Biography

Taylor Wieringa ’18 was born and raised in west Michigan. Many of Mx. Wieringa’s extended family are located around Milwaukee, which helped encourage them to explore college and university options in Wisconsin as they approached high school graduation.

In 2014, Mx. Wieringa began attending Carthage College and became regularly engaged in different clubs on campus, such as Tea Club, Carthage Pokémon League, and Carthage’s LGBTQ+ focused group now known as the LGBT Student Association.

Following graduation in 2018, they moved to Tokyo, Japan to work as an English second language instructor at an English conversation school in Akihabara. There, Mx. Wieringa worked with a range of individuals learning English in Japan, with clients ranging from ages 14 to 84.

In late 2020, they returned to Michigan and worked as an English language learner (ELL) paraprofessional with their local high school. Mx. Wieringa assisted an assortment of middle school and high school English learners with classroom and academic English comprehension.

Mx. Wieringa was later accepted into Grand Valley State University’s College of Student Affairs Leadership (CSAL) master’s program. They worked as a graduate assistant in the Disability Support Resource Office as a learning skill specialist for a year, assisting students with strengthening their study skills, time management, writing, and stress management. They were also an intern at GVSU’s Milton E. Ford LGBT Resource Center and assisted in planning, prepping, and facilitating the center’s programs like Wear the Rainbow, Queer the Air, Queerpooloza, and Lavender Graduation.