Ultimately, Harvard-Radcliffe won out and for the first time in her academic career, according to Bruzelius, she realized it wouldn't be alienating to be both female and intelligent.

"I was very excited to be in a place that was full of women who were just as smart as I was," she says.

Still, she says the novelty quickly wore off. With a "frustrating" English department that didn't yet offer the literature major that she hoped for and what she saw as relatively "blatant" discrimination against women students across the College, Bruzelius says she was unhappy with her undergraduate intellectual life at Harvard.

"What you had to do to be taken seriously was emulate some guy and I wasn't interested, so it was very alienating," she says.

In the meantime, Bruzelius, who was affiliated with Currier House, says she found her niche living in one of the Quad's Jordan dormitories.

It was there, amidst the "eccentric crew" of "hippie-ish" men and women, that Bruzelius says she learned to cook and bake bread and where she served as the informal housing chair, deciding each year's residents.

It was also there that she would meet her husband Peter W. Leight '73, a "scary" sight then, she remembers, with long hair and a thin build. Leight, now an assistant attorney general for Massachusetts, transferred into the House after a semester's leave of absence. The two moved off-campus for Bruzelius' junior and senior years. Now they have four children, ages 16, 12, 11 and 8.

After graduating magna cum laude, she and Leight traveled for a year in Europe, after which she began work at the Harvard-Radcliffe Parents Association while Leight attended Harvard Law School.

Her boss at the association, Thomas A. Dingman '67--now associate dean for human resources and the House system--says Bruzelius was well-regarded among the staff and largely overqualified for her position.

"People loved her bouncy spirit and knew she was enormously talented," he said.

But her work at the association didn't satisfy her artistic side, and once Leight had finished law school, Bruzelius turned to a field that would take advantage of her interest in clothing and color. (Indeed, Dingman remembers that even back then, Bruzelius was known for her colorful outfits.)

So at Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in Manhattan, Bruzelius trained as a fashion designer.

Along with a class that she says was largely composed of immigrants and older people looking to develop technical skills, Bruzelius there learned the basics of the industry and became proficient in knitting.

Trained on knitting machines, she began producing machine- and hand knit samples for producers, in addition to patterns for knitting magazines.

From there, Bruzelius progressed into the realm of private-label clothing--a niche she said proved to be out of her league.