Adrienne Sheide: Wearing Pink and Speaking Up
As a freshman, Adrienne Scheide nearly always wore a classic pink beret which made her something of a campus celebrity. Her classmates, hoping to catch a glimpse of her signature pink attire, even tracked her location on Twitter and Fizz’s predecessor app, YikYak.
“It was a lot,” she laughed.
When she graduated, however, Scheide donned the traditional black mortarboard as she delivered the undergraduate speech at the School of Education and Social Policy convocation.
“Speak up even when your voice shakes,” she told graduates.
Her style not only celebrates her favorite color—can you guess it?—but also honors her LGBTQ+ identity.
“I very much identify with some aspects of queer culture that have a lot to do with fashion and femininity, ‘high femme’ in particular,” she said. “It's just something for me to do to uplift me, no matter what, in a day. Even if people have their opinions about [my style or] my identity, I just don't care. I'd rather radically be myself."
Scheide’s fashion sense is just the most visible aspect of what she brought to the Northwestern community. She graduated in June 2025 as a Human Development in Context and psychology double major and spent her time at Northwestern drawing on her personal experiences to support others in need.
She made an impact across the entire Northwestern campus through the two support communities she founded while a student.
“People were so incredibly welcoming of me and supportive, when that wasn't necessarily how I grew up,” she said. “I just want people to know how incredibly thankful I am for it.”
But Scheide’s relationship with Northwestern as simple as “just U-Rah-Rah, Northwestern,” she said.
“There are a lot of great things about this place, but there are also students who were not offered help when they needed it,” she said. “To have community, we need people to step up, even when there's not an instruction manual of exactly what to do.”
Scheide worked to make the community stronger by providing support and creating two organizations based on times when she felt she needed allies.
As a freshman, grappling with her own experience as a survivor of sexual assault, she founded the Solidarity and Survivorship Collective (SSC) in the fall of 2023. Housed under NU College Feminists and Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators, or SHAPE, the group is designed to create an approachable and safe community for survivors and allies.
“Some things—as well intentioned as they are—will inevitably be a bit overwhelming,” she said. “For example, the Title IX pamphlet is pages and pages. To be in that situation [of reporting] and being confronted with that is very scary. So [we hosted] events that were meant to be fun. People can come and not feel pressured to talk about their experiences, but it's there if they want it in a way that's not scary.”
Scheide, who grew up in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, also inspired by the “really strange” phenomenon of moving to campus from a small town. Rural and Small Towns NU partners with the Small Town and Rural Students College Network to run events and help students navigate new experiences, such as using public transportation.
She also drew on her own life experience to create her research project, “When Home Becomes a Hospital Room: The Intersection of Caregiver Expectations, Lived Experience, and Child Interactions during Extended Hospital Stays.” Her research, which was inspired by a friend’s battle with cancer and his long periods in the hospital, won third place in the Social and Behavioral Sciences division at the 2025 Undergraduate Research and Arts Expo.
“There's very little research that describes the experiences of children and caregivers with any sort of hospitalization longer than two weeks,” she said.
The award was an honor, but more than that, the recognition made her even more grateful that her participants had shared their stories with her. During the project, she viewed herself as just a messenger to uplift those going through this hardship. Her friend passed away during her freshman year.
“It's these families’ stories and it's their children's stories, especially those who are no longer with us,” she said. “The award definitely means a lot, but it means a lot because I wanted to push myself to do it right.”
Scheide is now getting certified to become a registered behavioral technician to work with children with autism. Since graduating, she has officially become a registered behavioral tech and will be pursuing her master's in counseling with a specialization in children and adolescents.
Most importantly, though, she will carry forward her spirit of kindness and encourages her peers to do the same.
“In the future, as we all go on to the next phase of our lives, do not underestimate how much a kind word can mean to someone,” she said. “It can make a world of difference.”