Dana Hall School Outcomes
Dana Hall loves to see a girl today be a leader tomorrow
A brief study of life after Dana Hall including stories about two recent graduates and several eye-opening facts
The Spark
Olivia Rabe ’11 First-year student University of Pennsylvania
t Dana Hall, Olivia was a member of A the fencing team, the yearbook staff, the Peer Education program, and Best Buddies, a program that promotes friendships with individuals who are physically or mentally disabled.
But maybe the most important thing she did was take AP biology.
“Our teacher talked about brain research—about how it’s the most exciting field right now, because we know so little about how the brain works. That set off a spark. “I got a summer internship to study Angelman Syndrome with my sister’s pediatric neurologists. She suffers from severe epilepsy, so the work means a lot to me as a student and as a sister.”
In the last two weeks of the spring term, in collaboration with faculty advisors, seniors at Dana Hall can design a senior project. It might be an intensive research project, a fulltime internship, a service initiative. Olivia decided to build on the work she’d done before. “I worked for two doctors in the pediatric neurology department at MGH, organizing a catalogue of epileptic brain surgery candidates based on factors such as lobes affected, MRI and EEG results, and completion of surgery. The goal was to better inform prospective surgery candidates about successful statistics. For me, it was also a chance to learn much, much more about epilepsy and brain surgery.”
Now she’s at Penn, and this is what’s next:
“I’m planning to major in cognitive neuroscience and minor in fine arts, then go to medical school to become either a pediatrician or a pediatric neurologist. It’s a lofty goal, but I’ve got a strong foundation.”
Selected matriculation, recent graduates: Bates
Dartmouth
Princeton
Bowdoin
Duke
Brandeis
Elon
Rhode Island School of Design
Brown
Emory
Smith
Carnegie Mellon
Tufts
Claremont McKenna
George Washington University
Colby
Harvard
Wake Forest
Connecticut College Johns Hopkins Middlebury Cornell New York University Oberlin
UC Berkeley Washington University in St. Louis Wesleyan
100% of Dana Hall students go on to attend a four-year college or university
A few women you might like to meet (and probably would, if you were here!): Latanya Sweeney ’77 is Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy at Carnegie Mellon.
Tomi Onatunde ’05 is in the materials science and engineering master’s program at Stanford.
Sharon Olds ’60 permanently Zoe Timms ’93 is Director of the altered the landscape of Women’s Education Project. contemporary poetry.
The Whole Wide World Courtney Caruso ’05 Washington University in St. Louis ’09 Fulbright Scholar, Italy, 2009–2010 First-year student, Harvard Law School
Courtney Caruso was an academic kid. At Dana Hall she took four years of Latin and five years of French. She was serious about the work of being a student. “Dana Hall pushed me to be more. The School says, ‘Let’s find all the ways you can thrive.’ I played varsity basketball and softball for four years—and that’s where I learned to be social and how to handle pressure. I traveled to South Africa on one of the School’s Spring Break trips—and that’s where I learned to love exploring other cultures. Those things are still with me today.”
When she came to college, she was prepared to do disciplined, high-level work. “My professors would always ask me, ‘Where did you learn to write like that?’ The answer was: sophomore English at Dana Hall. “I also knew how to cultivate relationships with professors, how to make good use of community resources, and how to work with people who didn’t think or act like me.”
At Washington University she double majored in history and psychology and minored in Italian. She studied in Italy twice, then applied for a Fulbright to do it again. “I’d fallen in love with Italy, and I wanted to go back on my own terms. I showed up with a couple of suitcases, one hundred percent on my own. That was an empowering experience.”
She lived in Padua and conducted research in the Venetian State Archives, examining the influence of the church on women in the Renaissance. “The woman I lived with had been a butcher in town for 40 years; I ate apricots and cherries off the trees in her garden. I love the value system there—the way they make time for laughter, friends, good food.”
And now: Harvard Law School. “I’m thinking about international criminal law. I know I’ll try to study abroad again. To be honest, I’m still figuring out what my life will look like. “But that’s another thing Dana Hall gives you: the ability to give yourself a lot of options. And the confidence to pursue the right one.”
Dana Hall is doing some serious trailblazing
Dana Hall School 45 Dana Road Wellesley, MA 02482-9010 781.235.3010 www.danahall.org