N EWS + NOTES
NEWS FRO M CAMPUS
NEW TRUSTEES JOIN BROOKS BOARD
Five dynamic trustees began their terms this summer.
KAMILAH BRISCOE ’96 is the director of the Office of Student Success at the City College of New York’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. She oversees academic advising for the school’s 2,800 undergraduate students, as well as several scholarship programs and academic support services. Briscoe has worked in higher education for more than 15 years, including four years at the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and six years at New York University’s Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy. JONATHAN GIBBONS ’92 joins the board as the current president of Brooks’s alumni association. He has been a member of the alumni board since 2001, serving as the head of the giving committee. He also serves as a class agent. Gibbons received his A.B. and his MBA from Harvard University, and most recently was a senior member of the investment team at High Vista Strategies, a Boston-based outsourced endowment firm. He previously worked at Goldman Sachs, Pilot House Associates and Adelphia Communications. At Brooks, Gibbons was president of the Phillips Brooks Society, dorm prefect and chapel prefect. He played football and hockey and rowed crew. ROBERT W. HUGHES P’16, P’19 has been a member of Akamai Technologies’s executive leadership team for more than a decade. Akamai is the leading cloud platform for business, operating in more than 70 countries and serving the largest amount of Web traffic in the world. Hughes oversees the company’s day-to-day global business operations and is responsible for all aspects of the Akamai customer service experience. Hughes’s two sons are currently students at Brooks: sixth-former Jack is student government president and co-captain of the 1st baseball team, and third-former Michael is happily settling in to life on campus. ZACHARY MCCABE ’15, the youngest member of the board, is a first-year student at Northeastern University. During his time at Brooks, McCabe was a quintessential campus leader: He served as senior prefect and was heavily involved in the school’s theater program, Model UN team and sustainability efforts. He was a summer intern for the school’s operations department in 2014, during which he assisted with the renovation of Ashburn Chapel. On his graduation, McCabe was awarded the Headmaster’s Prize; in 2014, he received the Leonard S. Perkins Prize for his outstanding contribution to the life of the school. ALBERT NASCIMENTO ’10 currently teaches English and coaches basketball at Salisbury School. At Brooks, Nascimento played soccer and basketball: He co-captained the boys 1st basketball team as a sixth-former and received the Andrew N. Navoni Sportsmanship Award. He spent his summers coaching and volunteering at the local Boys and Girls Club and at the YMCA in Somerville, Mass. He continued his basketball career at Middlebury College, where he was named to the conference Winter AllAcademic team three times.
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Third-formers Caitlin Peirce (left) and Jack Murphy enjoy a Saturday night block party at Brooks in October.
A New Student Activities Structure Flag football. A November semiformal dance. Open mic nights. A country-western festival. A holiday-season ugly sweater dance benefitting Toys for Tots. This fall, Brooks shifted its focus on weekend events, and the student body has responded enthusiastically. Beginning this year, four faculty and 17 students formed the Community Activities Board (CAB), a team charged with planning, publicizing and preparing weekend activities. Student Activities Coordinator Laura Hajdukiewicz, who is also a science teacher and day student advisor, says that the new model allows the CAB to plan events using a variety of perspectives, ideas, talents and energy. And, Hajdukiewicz says, creating a more formal way for students to be involved in planning weekend events has increased student attendance. Hajdukiewicz believes that Brooks’s commitment to vibrant and diverse weekend activities doesn’t just benefit the boarding students on campus; it also benefits day students who return to campus to socialize. “The boarders need to have a typical teenage experience of going with your friends somewhere — going to the movies, going to a dance, going to a football game,” she says. “But also, this is our day students’s high school. If we don’t have events that appeal to our day students, they’re spending their Saturday nights at home alone. We want to make sure that the day students have great Saturday nights, too.” “The kids are a really big part of this,” she continues. “They help hype the event, they help prepare for the event, they get their friends excited about the event. They’re the face of student activities, and because we have more kids involved in the planning, I think our entire student body has more invested in what we’re doing.”
B RO O KS BULLETIN