William & Mary

Interviewee: Stephanie Murphy

Interviewer:  Carmen Bolt

Interview Date: January 17, 2019

Duration:  00:17:44

 ____________________________________________________________________

Carmen:               All right here we are. My name is Carmen Bolt. I'm the oral historian at William and Mary. It's currently around 12 o'clock PM on January 17th, 2019. I'm sitting with congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, class of 2000 in her office on Capitol Hill. So if you could just start by quickly restating your name and stating your place of birth and your date of birth.

Stephanie:            Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, born September 16th, 1978 in Saigon, Vietnam.

Carmen:               Great. And what years did you attend William and Mary?

Stephanie:            I attended William married from '96 to 2000.

Carmen:               Wonderful. So can you tell me a little bit just briefly about where and how you were raised?

Stephanie:            I was born in Vietnam and my family and I escaped communist Vietnam when I was about six months old. And we escaped by boat and when we got to international waters we ran out of fuel. And so a U.S. Navy ship rescued my family. They provided us with food, fuel, and water, gave us what we needed to make it to a Malaysian refugee camp. And from there a Lutheran church in Fredericksburg, Virginia sponsored my family and relocated us to Fredericksburg. I grew up in Fredericksburg and then moved to Northern Virginia for high school where I applied for college and went to William and Mary.

Carmen:               Sure and how did you decide on William and Mary, what was that process like?

Stephanie:            I had applied to both UVA and William and Mary and had received comparable academic scholarships and financial aid packages. And so it was down to those two schools and I went to visit William and Mary on one of those rare, really beautiful weather days. It was sunny, clear blue skies. And the campus just felt like home. And I met with some of the professors and I talked about the opportunity to do a Monroe project because I was a Monroe scholar. And I just sort of knew that this, that William and Mary was the right place for me.

Carmen:               Great, and did you know what you wanted to study going into it or did you decide that once you got there?

Stephanie:            I did know that I wanted to study economics and international relations, East Asia. So those were my double majors. I had been given advice I think when I was applying for schools that I should pick a technical skill in, to, in addition to the international relations piece. And so that's why I chose economics and it has actually served me really well, has given me a framework for how to think about the world. And I've used sort of that education all along the way in my various different careers.

Carmen:               Wonderful. Were there any professors or advisors or mentors that were particularly impactful during your time at William and Mary?

Stephanie:            Yeah Professor Rogers was my econ honors thesis advisor. And I remember my senior year he had been appointed as the chief economist for the department of labor. And he would work in D.C. during the week but be back on the weekends to continue to advise his honors thesis students. And he'd always go for a run late on Friday evening and I knew that if I was in the computer lab he would swing through to see which honors thesis students were there and help us with you know whatever you know regression modeling or just basically help us work on our thesis. So my Friday nights were in that, spent in that computer lab working on my thesis waiting for him to come through in his running clothes basically to work on my thesis with him.

Carmen:               Wonderful. So Friday nights spent working on honors thesis. What favorite memories do you have of your time at William and Mary, things you did for fun, what was most enjoyable about William and Mary to you?

Stephanie:            You know I think like I mentioned my first visit to William and Mary was like a beautiful clear blue sky, sunny day. And then when I got to the college it rained an awful lot. And so some of my favorite memories are when we would have those really beautiful days you know like an unusually warm fall day or that first day of spring where you know we were finally coming out of winter and being in the sunken gardens. I was a part of Chi Omega and you know a lot of great memories with being a part of that sorority, too.

Carmen:               Sure, wonderful. So if we're switching gears and thinking about difficult moments or harder times at William and Mary are there any in particular that have stayed with you or stand out thinking back?

Stephanie:            Harder moments, well I think writing my thesis was probably one of the hardest things. I'm not naturally a computer scientist and, or I wasn't doing computer science and I had to code the regression models. And it, that was just, that's why I spent Friday nights in the computer lab. It was just really hard. But you know it was worth it. I got to graduate with honors, economics honors.

Carmen:               Cool. And were there any ways in particular you felt supported or alternately not supported during your time at William and Mary?

Stephanie:            I felt incredibly supported at William and Mary, both the professors and my fellow classmates and my sorority sisters and just my friends. William and Mary is just a really special place because it is this very tight-knit small community and it was a great place to go to college.

Carmen:               Terrific. So if I could ask what the experience of, or I should say, part of the focus of this interview or most of the focus is really on 100 years of co-education and what that experience has been like for women. Also we focused over the past year on increasing diverse voices in the historic record because the record at William and Mary is very white, very male, very cis. So we focused last year on 50 years of African-Americans in residence. And I'd like to ask about race relations and gender relations on campus at any given point in time because I want to see how that's changed and what's developed over time at William and Mary. So during your time there, do you mind reflecting a little bit on the experience of being a Vietnamese American woman on campus?

Stephanie:            I guess the late '90s the college wasn't that diverse thinking back on it. I had the real honor of being a convocation speaker this fall. And I remember standing up there and looking out at the student body and thinking how much it had changed in the time that I had gone to school there. But I don't really remember anything, feeling all that different. Just because the community was so welcoming. I can't think of a moment where it played a negative role.

Carmen:               Great. So you mentioned you were going to school in the late '90s. How did you see the nationwide, worldwide, even statewide socio-political climate or things that were occurring at that time play out on campus?

Stephanie:            Well I remember that was Bill Clinton, one of those campaigns was while I was there. It might have been my freshman year. And you know for me it was the first time really engaging in political debate on the freshman hall with other classmates who had clearly formed their own political opinion. And I didn't really have that kind of political, you know political mindset. And I remember that campaign, talking about those issues and debate, debating the different perspectives. I'm trying to think of what else was going on that, in those years.

Carmen:               Yeah so during that period of time I mean just some big things that happened in national news, I mean we're seeing the AIDS crisis unfold, the Oklahoma City bombings, there was a Chicago heat wave that killed many, you mentioned the Clinton administration, there was O.J. Simpson trial. And then you actually like bridged Y2K, the Y2K fear.

Stephanie:            Oh that's right.

Carmen:               So I don't know if anything like that stands out as something that struck campus particularly.

Stephanie:            Well so in the late '90s everybody is just now getting e-mail access and we would still go to the computer lab to check your e-mail, but you didn't rely on it so much so you'd go every couple of days to check your e-mail. And thinking back on that, that's kind of astounding to me because I don't know that I go a couple hours without checking my e-mail these days. And I remember because we were just beginning to start that technological revolution or that we saw in the 2000s, the prospect of Y2K loomed really large. Everybody, there were all kinds of you know theories that disaster was imminent. I remember taking a class on, it was a sort of a religious, it was based on the Bible, but basically the end of days, a study on the end of days that fall. Because it was so present on people's minds of what would happen when we shifted into the new millennium.

Carmen:               Wow, that's wild to even think about but you survived it, everyone survived Y2K so that's

Stephanie:            It was almost like a let down right because it was, there was so much build-up and then we were all alive in 2000 without you know

Carmen:               Going right back to classes and spring semester. Well so I have just a couple more questions for you, I know you are very busy so we can transition to your time post William and Mary. Would you mind just talking about how William and Mary your experience there has played out in your life and specifically your professional trajectory, where you went following William and Mary and how you landed where you currently are?

Stephanie:            So when I was at William and Mary I did an internship with the Scowcroft Group working for General Scowcroft. And he had been the national security advisor for George H.W. Bush and in that capacity I developed relationships with people in his office that I still, to this day, or I still consider them mentors and they still help me with my career. And it was a taste for me of what it was like to work in international relations and kind of see the world more globally. But I'll never forget he was my commencement speaker. So after having done an internship with him during my sophomore, summer of my sophomore year, my senior year during, he was the graduation speaker. And I'll never forget he talked about the importance of public service in his graduation speech. And he said that the future of this great nation laid in the hands that were at the helm of state. And that was why it was important to have good people in public service. And as somebody who is a refugee who, and an immigrant to this country, I was so grateful for all of the opportunities that I had received. And I remember sitting there in the audience thinking to myself oh I've made the wrong choice because I was planning to go work for Deloitte Consulting and I had accepted the offer in the fall. I had known all of my spring semester that I was going into business consulting. And I remember sitting there at graduation thinking oh my gosh, did I make the wrong decision. And I think that speech and that idea of public service and the importance of it sort of stuck with me while I worked at Deloitte. And I worked for Deloitte for two years and 9/11 happened just a little over a year after we all graduated that spring. And it deeply affected me. I remember spending days just with my roommate, a classmate, and her sorority sister, we were living together here in Northern Virginia. We were all just glued to the TV and also our phones waiting to hear from classmates that were missing in New York. And it made such a deep impression on me and those words that he spoke at my graduation made me decide to leave the private sector and go back to grad school and to go seek a career in public service. And so that's how I ended up at Georgetown and then in the office of the secretary of defense working on national security issues. And it was incredibly gratifying. I only, I loved my job in OSD policy and I left the job because my husband got a chance to run his own business in Florida and there really wasn't an opportunity for me to continue to do that in Florida, so I went back to the private sector. But I think you know we moved to Florida, I'm working in the private sector, and 2016 comes along and I'm still the patriotic person who's committed to public service that I was when I left Deloitte to go work at the department. And I'm hearing in the 2016 election you know rhetoric that doesn't comport with America. I know I'm seeing dysfunction in government and then the Pulse nightclub shooting happens and it became another one of those moments where I thought to myself you know he's right, it matters who's in public service, like and so I got into this race, four months out from a November election. I decide to challenge a 24-year Republican incumbent because I really believe that you had to change the kinds of people you were sending to Washington in order to change the way Washington works and have it serve the people better. And I ended up winning in November and that kind of leads us to today. But you know William and Mary gave me the skill set and I think also the passion for public service that has kind of carried me in through my career.

Carmen:               Wonderful. Time for one more question? Okay so I've mentioned a couple times on this end before the interview that this oral history interview is part of this whole initiative to celebrate and commemorate 100 years of co-education, 100 years of women as students at William and Mary which is incredible and amazing and still so short in the grand scheme of William and Mary's history. So I'm, well in addition to that actually, you are the first Vietnamese American woman to be serving or to be elected to Congress. And so given these themes and given just the climate that we're in at this moment in United States history, do you mind telling me what you believe to be the value and contribution of women maybe at a school like William and Mary but also at large?

Stephanie:            I think the value and contribution of women is innumerable, you know whether it's from the aspect of being moms and sisters and wives and you know just being a part of the community. But I found that the voices of women in the halls of the Pentagon or here in Congress or in at the board room have been incredibly important in ensuring that those organizations reflect different perspectives. And particularly here in Congress I think it's really exciting that this 2018 our, what is it the 216th Congress, or I'm sorry the 116th Congress, has so many women, a historic number of women have joined Congress. And I do believe that in a democracy where it is supposed to be representative government, that our elected officials should represent the diversity of this country. And so there's a gender diversity there but there's also racial diversity. And it's really exciting to see our government kind of begin to start to look like our country.

Carmen:               Sure, absolutely. Well thank you for answering all of that. Is there anything else you'd like to add at this time for this interview? Well thanks again I appreciate it so much.

Stephanie:            Thank you so much, I appreciate it.

00:17:44               [End of recording.]