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Also in this issue: Remembering Rebecca Folkman Investing to Make an Impact Labs, Lunch, and More
Commonwealth School Magazine Fall 2017
Four Commonwealth Alumni/ae Take on the
TECH WORLD
WHY I MADE IT
a
Untitled GEORGIA ADAMSON ’17
teacher of mine once told me a story of a man who dreamt he was a fly. In this form, he could explore his wife’s body at a larger and more intimate scale. Her rib cage became mountains and valleys as he crawled, her stomach an expanse of dunes. With every step, the little fly left a thin black trail. At the end of the dream, the man returned to his natural human state and admired the web of black lines he’d made on his wife’s sleeping body. My teacher had an anecdote for everything, but this story kept finding its way back to me. In the past, I struggled with how to produce “original” work. I remember arguing with Jean Segaloff one day that there was no “original” work, because no matter the viewer, a tree was still a tree, and a book still a book. The only thing one could do was to represent it differently. The little story of the man as a fly both cemented my argument and contradicted it. On one hand, the man had produced nothing “original” at all, just a few black lines that happened to trace his path. Yet on the other, he’d created a delicate image and found a new way to experience the body. The next time I went into life drawing, I tried to think less of recreating the model on paper, and more about the method I used. The lines made by the fly in the story made me think of a topographical map of the body; instead of using charcoal to shade values on the figure, I could use bolder colors to represent the different heights of planes and contours of muscle. I started by setting strict parameters of colors and shapes for myself, until those guidelines became too restrictive, and I found a new direction that interested me. As the year progressed, I found that the parameters of color and shape slowly became more relevant than the form of the model itself. For example, the contour of a hip bone connecting the thigh to the stomach could be abstracted into a simple organic shape that makes the viewer feel the weight of this connection. This drawing is an attempt to give direction to some of these ideas. On the easel, the drawing is about three feet taller and wider than me, turning me into the fly. The bold colors are similarly unrealistic, drawing attention to each segment as an independent object. I still see why I said that there’s no such thing as “original” work: the world does not change from viewer to viewer. But experience does. This experience of translating thought into concrete work keeps leaving me threads to follow and tie together. When those run out, maybe it will be time for a new story.
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FROM THE HEADMASTER IT IS A TRUISM that technology has transformed education. For one who remembers the challenges of editing papers on a typewriter, and the time required to search bibliographical indices (L’Année Philologique was the go-to for classicists) before hunting down journals in library stacks, I still marvel at the range of materials high-school students have at their disposal, and at the mechanical ease of writing and editing. Yet more change lies ahead: every June, at a conference for school heads at Stanford, I hear about the massive revolution that online learning, big data, and the approaching Singularity will bring to education. Though I’ve seen enough to reject Luddism, I remain unconvinced that radical individualization of learning is the way forward. Last spring Sherry Turkle of MIT spoke at a Commonwealth assembly. Once a proselyte for the great transformations online life would bring to our sense of ourselves and our lives, she has, as her recent book titles suggest (Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation), reversed course and now speaks passionately about the importance of maintaining the human connection. Turkle told me of a Williams College study that looked at the factors that most influenced students’ learning. The conclusion was that time they spent in the presence of professors—in the classroom, in conferences, and even in the dining hall—most strongly correlated to their learning: time with teachers proved more potent than time on screens. She suggested, therefore, that Commonwealth’s emphasis on close, face-to-face work between teachers and students and among students is, in fact, cutting edge. The revolution may not be as massive as the Silicon Valley prophets predict. Education of young people has a strong rhetorical requirement— students need to be motivated to do the work and taste its rewards—and connection with a teacher who knows them and likes them remains the most powerfully persuasive tool in the box. A visitor to Commonwealth today will see students sitting in the hallways working with teachers one-on-one. They will also see kids in pairs or small groups talking or studying together. These same students often hold smartphones in their hands, eyes locked onto an online syllabus or article (we hope), a blog, or a text message. We have new, powerful machines at our disposal, but as long as we continue to talk together, as long as most of our work takes place among people and is about people, the ideal of a liberal education, encouraging the development of thoughtful, generous adults, abides. As a school, we measure our success by the arc of the lives of our alumni/ae. We hope that the stories contained in this issue, including those set between San Jose and San Francisco, convey that we’ve done well. Bill Wharton Headmaster
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The Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Magazine Issue 13 Fall 2017 Editor Melody Komyerov Design Jeanne Abboud Photography Rusty Crump Kathleen Dooher Sara Press ‘92 Assistant Editor Sasha Watson ’92 Class Notes Editor Carly Reed Advisor Janetta Stringfellow Contributing Writers Georgia Adamson ’18 Mara Dale Eugene Flood ’73 Jonathan Sapers ‘79 Sasha Watson ‘92 CM is published twice a year by Commonwealth School, 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02116, and distributed without charge to alumni/ae, current and former parents, and other members of the Commonwealth community. Opinions expressed in CM are those of the authors and subjects, and do not necessarily represent the views of the School or its faculty and students. We welcome your comments and news at info@commschool.org. Letters and notes may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar. Correction: Images accompanying the description of Cole Granof’s Capstone project in the last issue of CM were from the games “Earthbound” and “VVVVVV,” and were mistakenly attributed to Cole. These were images Cole used as examples in his presentation. Our apologies for the misattribution. Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle.
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CONTENTS
Commonwealth School Magazine Fall 2017
Why I Made It Untitled by Georgia Adamson ’18
1
From the Headmaster
2
News Labs, Lunch, and More
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Our Network out West: Four Commonwealth Alumni/ae Take on the Tech World by Jonathan Sapers ’79
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History of a Friendship: Amy Merrill ’64 and Ellen Elias-Bursa´c ’70 In Tune Through the Decades by Mara Dale
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In Memoriam: Rebecca Folkman A Commonwealth teacher—with love and an edge— from 1982 to 2012
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Staff Profile: Carrie Healy Building the Commonwealth Community, one student at a time by Sasha Watson ’92
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CWSAA Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association
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Class Notes
31
Alumnus Perspective: Investing to Make an Impact by Eugene Flood ’73
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18
35
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23 On the cover: Johanna (Voolich) Wright ’93 and Mike Jacobson ’71 (front cover) and Matt Kraning ’04 and David Lorsch ’88 (back cover). Four Commonwealth graduates compare notes about their careers in Silicon Valley. Photo by Sara Press ’92.
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News OF COMMONWEALTH
Labs, Lunch, and More
Heather Pierce
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New Flavors in the Lunch Room
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ver the summer, Heather Pierce, our new chef manager from FLIK Independent School Dining, stepped into Commonwealth’s basement kitchen. Heather tackled her workspace before the school year began, updating both the kitchen and the service area, and was ready, in September, to begin serving locally sourced, homemade meals. Supporting Heather is cook Paulina Martinez, who has worked in Commonwealth’s kitchen for the past two decades. Heather has placed a whiteboard just outside the kitchen, where she welcomes comments, telling students at announcements, “Let me know what you like and don’t like—I’ll take your suggestions!” Students have responded with requests (“Could we have bigger bowls for salad?”), praise (“Love, love, love the cauliflower!”), and suggestions (“Even more vegetarian options, please,” to which Heather replied, “Suggestions?” before a list of ideas filled the board). Recent meals have included an Indian feast including tandoori chicken, roasted chickpea salad, curried lentil soup, and shahi paneer, while other days have seen menus of “deconstructed” beef or lentil stew; quinoa with roasted butternut squash; mango simmered black beans; and chicken tenders or tofu with red pepper coulis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, lines to the lunch room now often stretch to the second-floor landing, with many fewer students availing themselves of Copley Square and Newbury Street’s lunch options. All seem to agree that the food is worth the wait.
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News OF COMMONWEALTH
New Physics Lab
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n the final phase of Commonwealth’s three-year renovation, a new physics laboratory has come to the building. Thanks to the generosity of a challenge gift from the Edward E. Ford Foundation, we surpassed our fundraising goal and raised over $100,000 to fund the building of the lab and tools
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used in it. We are grateful to the students, alumni/ae, parents, faculty, and friends who donated to make the lab possible. Physics teachers can now integrate experiments and demonstrations into class time, using, for instance, a variety of new sensors to measure position, velocity, and acceleration with greater precision in mechanics classes. The
Physics II class, meanwhile, has worked with a new Van de Graaff generator, an electrostatic generator that allows for experimentation with static electricity. The robotics team, too, enjoys the lab, with a dedicated space to house gears, wheels, and motors, where students can come to work on projects.
Alisha Elliott ’01 is now director of development. A Commonwealth alumna and graduate of Brandeis University, Alisha has worked in development for over a decade at Facing History and Ourselves, Berklee College of Music, Horizons for Homeless Children, and, most recently, as associate director of development in the regional office of the Anti-Defamation League. And, as president of Commonwealth’s Alumni/ae Association, she has maintained a deep, strong connection with the school. Katherine Athey
Peter Blandino
Alisha Elliott ’01
NEW FACES Salvador Jiménez-Flores
Melody Komyerov
Sophia Meas
AT COMMONWEALTH
Salvador Jiménez-Flores joins us in the art department, teaching the drawing and painting, life drawing, and printmaking classes. He just finished a two year-long artist residency at the Harvard Ceramics Program, Office of the Arts at Harvard University. He is also a visiting professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Resident Teaching Artist at Urbano Project. Jiménez-Flores holds an MFA from Kendall College of Art and Design and his BAS from Robert Morris University in Chicago, IL. His work can be seen on his website, salvadorjimenezflores.com.
Melody Komyerov serves as Commonwealth’s director of strategic communications and marketing. Melody is a graduate of Brown University, where she earned degrees in Biology and East Asian Studies, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received an MA in Journalism and Mass Communication. She is herself an accomplished photographer and has contributed to several books including, America 24/7 and A Day in the Life of the American Woman; her work can be seen at melodyko.com. Sophia Meas has joined us as our new director of college
Stephanie Poynter
John Wolff
Katherine Athey has joined our Business Office as our new bookkeeper. Katie came to us from Crosby Benefits Systems, where she served for seven years in a variety of capacities, including information systems team administrator and data analyst. She has a BA in Anthropology from the University of West Florida and an MA in History from Southern New Hampshire University. Over five years living in Frankfurt, Germany, Katie worked in a number of roles at the American Consulate and also served as a teaching assistant at Frankfurt International School. Peter Blandino is teaching Latin classes this Fall while Don Conolly is on sabbatical leave. Peter is a PhD student at Boston University, with six years’ experience teaching and researching in the classics. Peter earned his BA, Summa Cum Laude, in Classics and Classical Languages at University of Massachusetts, Boston, and his M.A., Summa Cum Laude, in Classical Studies at B.U.
counseling. Sophia holds a BA in Political Science from UCLA and an MEd from Harvard University. She worked for ten years in Harvard’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid as a senior admissions and financial aid officer before moving in 2013 to the college advising profession as director of college counseling at CATS Academy Boston.
Stephanie Poynter is our front office manager. Stephanie came to us after seven years as head of administration at Simply Interactive, a Boston tech startup. She has a BA in Hospitality Management from Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has worked in the hotel industry, both at Hyatt Hotels in Vancouver, BC, and at Delta Hotels and Resorts at Whistler, BC. Stephanie has also served as co-chair of the Parent Teacher Association at our neighbor school, the Kingsley Montessori School. John Wolff joins us as a teacher of mathematics and science. John, a 2007 graduate of Roxbury Latin School, earned his BS in Chemistry at Yale University. He taught chemistry for four years to upper school students at King’s Academy in Madaba, Jordan, and over the last two years has taught chemistry and biology at Carlucci American International School of Lisbon in Sintra, Portugal. His non-teaching experience includes coaching cross country, assisting with drama programs, and leading community service and exchange trips to the West Bank.
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Four Commonwealth Alumni/ae Take on the 8 CM Fall 2017
by Jonathan Sapers ’79 Photos by Sara Press ’92
TECH WORLD CM Fall 2017 9
PROFILE:
David Lorsch ’88 Vice president of strategy and business development, Strava, Inc
“WE’RE TRYING TO BUILD SOMETHING THAT MOTIVATES PEOPLE NOT JUST WITH COMPETITION BUT WITH THEIR OWN PERSONAL PROGRESS.” 10 CM Fall 2017
TECH WORLD
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ne thing is clear: David Lorsch ’88, vice president of strategy and business development at Strava, Inc., a social media platform for athletes, did not earn his sports credentials at Commonwealth. He does, though, trace his approach to his work back to high school: “There’s an analytical way of thinking and breaking down problems that I learned at Commonwealth.” Lorsch became interested in athletics in his thirties, taking a break from his work in private equity, at Calera Capital, a middle market private equity firm in San Francisco. He ran his first marathon, then moved on to triathlons, and a light went off in his head: “As I became very interested in running and cycling and endurance sports,” he says, “I saw an interesting business opportunity there.” In the course of his 17 years at Calera, where he ultimately served as managing director, he served on the boards of companies in fields including financial services, manufacturing, and media companies. So when he encountered a company called Competitor Group, which, in addition to owning several racing-related magazines, owns races and provides online registering services for them, he saw it as a good moment to test his hunch. “After being on the board at Competitor Group for a little while, I decided that this area was really interesting,” he remembers. “I’d spent quite a while as an investor and I was ready to do something entrepreneurial and help build a business.” Around that time, he was introduced to one of the founders of Strava, Michael Horvath, who, like Lorsch, had graduated from Harvard (though a few years earlier) and, also like Lorsch, had had a midlife inclination to reinvent himself. After founding a business that went public, Horvath and co-founder Mark Gainey thought about what to do next. Both founders had been on the crew team at Harvard, and they wondered how
to recreate that camaraderie, especially when teammates no longer lived in the dorm next door. So they came up with a way to use burgeoning GPS tracking technology to make a social media site and app focused on sharing athletic achievement. The site and app allow individual members to post times and progress and allow friends to comment on and praise their efforts. Friends give “kudos,” which Lorsch describes as Strava’s version of Facebook “likes.” “The idea was that if you went out for a ride, there was early GPS technology that would allow you to track it. We built a platform that allowed you to get recognition and motivation from your friends.” Strava has grown in popularity and in complexity as GPS and other measurement technologies have grown. The site and app started with cycling, but soon added the other two legs of a triathlon: running and swimming. Today the list of exercise activities has grown to 31, including skating, CrossFit, rock climbing, stand-up paddling, and yoga. Lorsch says that before Strava adds a category, the company learns about both the exercise and ways the athletes who do it mark their achievements. “You can’t just say, hey, tomorrow we’re going to add skiing—it doesn’t work that way,” he says. “There’s specificity to what people measure in various sports. If you don’t understand that, you’re not going to build something that actually serves the athlete. And if you’re not serving the athlete, they’re not going to use it.” So far it appears the site has done its homework well. According to Lorsch, Strava has tens of millions of members all over the globe, many of whom are subscribers who pay for Strava’s premium service. The site has even begun to attract significant numbers of professionals (whose pages get designated as such). Some of these pros use Strava as a way to connect to their fans, others as a way
to keep track of their peers, according to an account in the New York Times. Lorsch says that this year more than a third of the Tour de France participants and one fifth of Boston Marathon runners shared their races on Strava. One signature Strava innovation has been to create a way for users to designate any stretch of road as a competitive course, the Times reported. The user who completes the course in the fastest time is given King or Queen of the Mountain status. Sometimes even the professionals join in, dislodging the weekend warriors. Although the site offers users many opportunities to satisfy their need for competition, Lorsch says the aim is to motivate people to keep at it, even if they don’t become King or Queen. “We’re trying to build something that motivates people not just with competition but with their own personal progress. We give people a lot of recognition by saying, ‘You’re doing better than you did last week, and other people are seeing that.’” And Lorsch says “the Social Network for Athletes,” as Strava bills itself, takes the social aspect of the platform seriously. “It’s not just about sharing how fast or how far you went, but telling a story about your athletic ability. So I go out there, and it’s a beautiful day and I’m taking pictures and adding those to my activity. It’s about sharing that day and that experience with my friends.” According to one account, users have even figured out ways to use the GPS technology to create artworks by way of their routes. So far Lorsch has done his best to make good on the company’s earliest goal: to create community around athletics. “We think there are probably 700 million people in the world who are active in athletics and would benefit from being able to connect with and be inspired by other athletes,” he says. “Our mission is to motivate and inspire people all around the world. So we still have a tremendous growth opportunity ahead of us.”
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PROFILE:
Johanna (Voolich) Wright ’93
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Vice president of product management, YouTubeSt
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hen Johanna (Voolich) Wright ’93, started out at Google in 2005, she realized she’d been in a similar environment before: “The demographic makeup of the people at Commonwealth and Google is very similar,” she says. “Google is a very intellectual place. We’ve got a lot of Ph.D.’s and we’ve got lots of people from different countries. Having already experienced an environment like that really helped me when I landed.” Not long before, she had arrived in Los Angeles unsure of her future. She had worked for Internet companies in New York, but the bottom seemed to have fallen out of that business in 2001. “So it was time to leave New York,” she says. “It wasn’t really my choice, but it ended up working out.” Wright attended business school at UCLA and by the time she finished, she had begun to see how her previous profession in user interface challenges of Internet applications might become a viable possibility for her again. One relatively new Internet company seemed to have “cracked the nut” with its very interactive Google maps. “I was so excited,” she says. “I wanted to work at that company.” Wright moved to Silicon Valley to work at Google and was immediately offered a lifechanging work choice she didn’t know how to make. “The options were to do something called universal search that you probably see today and think is pretty normal,” she says, referring to Google’s expansion, in 2007, of search results to include not just websites but also everything from maps to images to videos. “The other project was about displaying premium content on Google Search. As a newly-minted MBA I really had no idea how to evaluate those projects.”
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TECH WORLD
She did, however, know how to network. She contacted a fellow UCLA Business School grad who was in charge of a portion of Google’s advertising team (as it happens, Susan Wojcicki, who is now CEO of YouTube). Wojcicki was incredulous. “She said, ‘Are you crazy? Obviously you should do universal search because that’s what we’re trying to do in our business,’” Wright recalls. “I think there’s a corporate lesson there.” When choosing what to work on, pick “something that’s going to be important to the business if you succeed.” Her choice, in this case, fit the bill. So Wright helped to build the team that eventually launched one of Google’s central products, and she says that the ideas she worked on at the time continue to be important beyond the confines of search, further confirming Wojcicki’s advice. “Search is an area that’s very hot with artificial intelligence and machine learning,” she says. “And search is one of the major applications of algorithmic systems in technology, techniques that are widely useful in other areas.” Those areas include self-driving cars, speech recognition, and of course, YouTube recommendations. During her time at Google, Wright also learned important lessons about managing creative people. She says she was impressed by the company’s strict separation of church and state: “The search team doesn’t work on revenue or ads, so we were free to focus on what would make a better user experience.” Now vice president of product management at YouTube, she continues to refine her understanding of the best ways to manage people. “In managing creative people, as well as smart and motivated people, one thing that seems to work is to set goals and boundaries but let people run with the details,” she says. “This approach can be freeing for everybody. In a management role it means you don’t have to do everything yourself, and if you’re working on a project it means you won’t be micromanaged and you’ll have the freedom to think for yourself.” Wright’s work at YouTube builds on what she did at Google, refining how
the company’s systems respond to video searches and suggest videos. The work involves testing and retesting estimations of what users will want based on what they have searched for in the past. She also works on YouTube Kids, Virtual Reality, and emerging markets. Math, not computers, was what turned Wright on at Commonwealth, although it didn’t start there. “My mom is a math
tone you set as a leader or a manager at work,” she says. “It’s important for the people who work on my team to feel comfortable and to feel like they’re in an environment where they are both going to be challenged and be supported and feel safe,” she says. That also means making sure that the boundaries of work and the balance of life and work don’t limit the breadth
“IN MANAGING CREATIVE PEOPLE, AS WELL AS SMART AND MOTIVATED PEOPLE, ONE THING THAT SEEMS TO WORK IS TO SET GOALS AND BOUNDARIES BUT LET PEOPLE RUN WITH THE DETAILS.”
teacher, and my brother’s a math major, so it’s kind of the family business,” she says. Wright remembers Commonwealth as a welcoming place: “I went from feeling awkward and socially inept in junior high to just all of a sudden having a lot of friends and fitting in and feeling comfortable,” she remembers. “And I think that put me in a good state of mind to learn a lot of things.” It’s an environment she has tried to recreate as a manager. “Think about the
of people’s thinking: “A lot of my job is figuring out what we should do,” she says. “And you don’t have to be at my level for that to be true. It’s very hard to come to that through 100 percent linear thinking, and you can’t really always do non-linear thinking when you’re at work. So it’s important to have space. Space in your brain to think.” All of which makes the distance between Commonwealth Avenue and Silicon Valley seem not so far at all.
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PROFILE:
Matt Kraning ’04 Co-founder and chief technology officer, Qadium, IncSt
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att Kraning ’04 was pursuing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford in 2011 when he got the job offer that changed his life. It’s what led to his co-founding and becoming chief technology officer of Qadium, Inc., a Silicon Valley company that helps businesses and government entities protect themselves against Internet threats, and it started with a call from a friend: “He said, ‘There’s something really cool going on in D.C. You should come.’” Though Kraning had no idea what the job entailed, he went. In Washington, he met with the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was recruiting talented young academics to help with the agency’s first major data assembly effort since the Vietnam War. In addition to Kraning, five other graduate students were “plucked out of academia” to work on a project that would use data to get a better handle on how to decrease casualties, an explanation that goes as far as the Pentagon will allow. The Pentagon does allow Kraning to show two pictures from the experience. One is of a small windowless office made from repurposed cargo containers. It was located somewhere in Kabul, and Kraning and his cohort shuttled through it during their alternating four-month stints in that country. The other is of Kraning in sunglasses in a Black Hawk helicopter, transporting a large duffle bag’s worth of disk drives across Afghanistan. The Black Hawk photo is indicative of the kinds of solutions Kraning and his companions came up with during their time in Afghanistan. “Your main job is to solve problems,” Kraning says. “Sometimes it’s something sophisticated, but most of the time, it’s an outsidethe-box insight that has a reasonable implementation but isn’t obvious to most people.”
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The helicopter trip turned out to be one of those: an improvised solution to moving data around the country. It was about “bandwidth and latency,” Kraning explains. “Bandwidth is how much information you can pass from one place to another. Latency is, if I send you a small bit of information at point A, how quickly does it reach point B?” As Kraning explains it, the best latency result would be to send data over a fiber or satellite link—nearly instantaneous transfer, but limited capacity—while the world’s best bandwidth would be a 747 filled with SD cards (the tiny drives that fit in digital cameras). The latter would carry an entire Internet’s worth of data, but it would take hours for any data to reach the destination, not to mention the preparatory logistical headaches required to set up and operate such a vehicle. The Black Hawk was a situational compromise; something between satellite and a 747’s worth of bandwidth, and readily available from a nearby air base, it carried Kraning and a “double deck” of disk drives. Matt and his cohort’s resourcefulness pleased their superiors, and a month after his arrival, some of his work hung on the wall of the office of the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A year after that, Kraning was named lead data scientist for DARPA in Afghanistan. Perhaps as remarkable, the young Turks (as Kraning calls them) impressed each other. “We got the sense of ‘Hmmm, when I disagree with you I realize I might be wrong, and that doesn’t happen very often,’” Kraning remembers. “We said, ‘We should talk more and maybe be friends.’” So before they’d completed their military stint, four of the six of them began filling out the necessary paperwork to become defense contractors together. When they returned home, they began to write proposals, landing more than $10 million in awards in the first round, even
TECH WORLD while bidding against such established defense contractors as Boeing and Lockheed. Eventually one project in particular piqued their interest: they developed a “core internet sensing platform” that revealed a common thread among companies of vulnerabilities to Internet threats. Based on their data, Kraning and his partners began to develop a solution. In 2016, they shut down all other projects to focus exclusively on that solution as a product. “Our data gave us a unique perspective, where we saw an emperorhas-no-clothes scenario,” Kraning says of the cybersecurity approach. “It wasn’t easy, but we solved a number of problems that nobody else in the world seemed to have any idea how to solve, and all of the largest companies in the world had those problems.” From their first interaction with a client, the business model was promising. “We sold a PDF report for the cost of a high-end sports car, so that’s pretty nice,” Kraning remembers. The partners realized they were on to something when they saw that they could sell that report multiple times. Knowing how valuable their product was, Kraning says he and his partners resolved not to use their insights into companies’ vulnerabilities as a way to get their foot in the door. For instance, with the client whose control system for its global headquarters building was online and vulnerable to a serious attack with just a few keystrokes, “we didn’t say, ‘pay us first, then we’ll tell you where the problem is.’ Instead it was: ‘You have an extremely serious problem, here’s all the information.’” They told the company that they hoped to work with them on other issues later, but the first step was “to fix the things where people can actually be hurt.” For that more altruistic approach—doing well by doing good— Kraning gives credit, in part, to Commonwealth’s “very good ethical grounding.” The resonance of his Commonwealth experience doesn’t surprise Kraning. As the number of alumni/ae in Silicon Valley has increased, Kraning says he continues to be impressed by the little high school he went to in two brownstones 3,000 miles away. “The values that they instilled are still extraordinarily relevant for me,” he says.
“IT WASN’T EASY, BUT WE SOLVED A NUMBER OF PROBLEMS THAT NOBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD SEEMED TO HAVE ANY IDEA HOW TO SOLVE, AND ALL OF THE LARGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD HAD THOSE PROBLEMS.” CM Fall 2017 15
PROFILE:
Mike Jacobson ’71 Former general counsel, eBay
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ike Jacobson ’71, likes challenging work, and when he decided to take a job as the first general counsel and the 96th employee at a fledgling Internet company in the late 1990’s he got what he bargained for. “It was a dream job,” says Jacobson, of what became his 17-year tenure at eBay. “I’m one of those people who likes to tackle hard problems and get good results, and I had a conveyor belt of them.” When he first heard about the job, however, he was skeptical. After graduating from Commonwealth, then Harvard and Stanford Law School, Jacobson joined a prominent Bay Area law firm, becoming an expert in the legal ramifications of raising money for biotech companies and then later a mergers and acquisitions lawyer. Eventually, though, he began to have a hankering for more direct involvement in business. In 1997, a client with whom Jacobson had become friendly began regaling him with tales of a tiny startup he’d just joined as CFO. “He’d clearly drunk the Kool Aid,” Jacobson remembers. “I had to endure six months of ever more ecstatic commentary about this company I’d never heard of whose basic business proposition would be dubious to any lawyer: ‘Total
“THERE WAS ALMOST NO SETTLED LAW FOR ONLINE MARKETPLACES WHEN I JOINED IN 1998. WE HAD TO PUT IT IN PLACE, BRICK BY BRICK.” strangers are going to send money to each other and expect something back?’” But when the client reported that eBay was getting ready to go public and needed to hire a general counsel, Jacobson was interested. The reason? eBay, it turned out, was even better than his friend’s pitch had made it sound. “I wanted three things,” Jacobson says, “a company that had a business model that actually seemed to work and a 16 CM Fall 2017
TECH WORLD management team that both knew what it was doing and had integrity.” Jacobson found all of this at eBay, where, he says, Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, had decided early on to professionalize the company by filling it with 45-year-olds who had 20 years of general management experience instead of with the typical Silicon Valley 25-year-olds. Still, the move required an imaginative leap of faith and he had to work to persuade his family that it was a good idea to take a job that entailed an 80 percent decrease in cash compensation. An ability to imagine the possibilities would continue to play an important role. “It took a solid five years for it to be clear that the business model would, in fact, pass legal muster,” Jacobson says. “There was almost no settled law for online marketplaces when I joined in 1998. We had to put it in place, brick by brick, around the world over the next ten years.” Three of the cases the company was involved in during Jacobson’s tenure helped to create that framework. In one, the jeweler, Tiffany and Co., sued eBay in 2004, claiming the company was directly profiting from trademark infringement when users sold fake Tiffany items. In 2008, the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled in eBay’s favor. As the New York Times wrote, “The verdict reaffirms that Internet companies do not have to actively filter their sites for trademarked material.” A second important case involved a company called MercExchange, which claimed that the technology behind various aspects of the way eBay operated its site had infringed on its patents, Jacobson says. In a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, eBay persuaded the Court to change the standard for injunctions in patent cases to one that looks less favorably on injunctions filed by companies not actively using the technology for which they have patents. In Jacobson’s view, the new perspective more accurately reflects the reality of the way products are made today: “The last estimate I saw for a top-ofthe-line smartphone is that they probably incorporate 200,000 pieces of technology. If each and every holder of a patent says you’re infringing and can’t make any more smartphones, well… you understand the problem.” Jacobson has grown less sanguine about the third case he mentions, in which eBay sued a company called Bidder’s Edge to stop it from including eBay’s listings in a wider database of auction sites without its consent. Jacobson says the Bidder’s Edge case, which eBay won, “made it clear that companies could bar third parties from taking data displayed on their websites and using it for their own purposes.” But in retrospect, Jacobson says, this might not have been so harmful, adding that the decision “has essentially created an additional way of protecting your own intellectual property. At the same time,” he says, “in the sharing economy you actually do want to share on many occasions.” His final act as an eBay executive, in concert with other executives and colleagues, reflected years of acquired expertise in the field: “We ended up, I think for valid business reasons, deciding to split the company into eBay and PayPal,” which eBay had acquired in 2002. “It wasn’t going to be as much fun working for a company that was half the size and nowhere near as complicated as the one I had been working for. We decided that, rather than splitting up and going to one half or the other, we would all leave and thus be able to negotiate an agreement that was maximally favorable to the shareholders, as opposed to whichever company negotiated the best.” It was the right decision, Jacobson says, but it meant that after 17 years he had lawyered himself out of a job. He’s now of counsel at his former law firm and waiting to see what happens next. “I would call what I’m doing right now puttering,” he says. “I do a bit of legal work, I do some investing and I’m on some boards. I’m not young enough to say for sure that there will be a third act, and I’m not quite old enough to say I’m done. If the right thing comes along, then maybe. Or maybe not. That’s kind of fun.”
HOW TO STORM SILICON VALLEY
D
espite recent headlines about the difficulties for women in Silicon Valley, all four of the alumni/ae we spoke to said they encouraged young people, very much including young women, not to give up on the tech world as a place to find a fulfilling career. But they urge all comers to keep their eyes open. Matt Kraning suggests that recent graduates have oneon-one conversations with former and current employees, and that they find those contacts through their own networks. “If you look on Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll have multiple one- or two-hop connections to people at most tech companies,” Kraning says. “If you reach out with a nicely-worded email and ask to meet for coffee to discuss their work experience at the company, people will often agree.” Mike Jacobson agrees that “culture matters. There are plenty of start-up companies that come out of the millennial ‘bro culture,’ but plenty of others are great. It’s very dependent on the nature and background of the founders, and on whether there is, for lack of a better phrase, adult supervision to steer away from some of the rocks that Uber and others have crashed into.” Lorsch also said that the behavior at the top of a company is an important indicator: “I think there are many companies that work hard to increase diversity and opportunities for those who have been underrepresented. You can generally identify those companies by looking at their employee base today, talking to current and former employees, and probing their culture. And without a doubt, look to the top of any company and see how those in management carry themselves. A poor culture usually starts there.” Both Jacobson and Lorsch stressed that it’s not just techies who make it in Silicon Valley. “There are many other destinations in product development, design, marketing, business development, and legal,” Lorsch says. He adds that the best way to get started in Silicon Valley is to be there. “Finish college and move here,” he says. “There’s no substitute for getting in the door at a company with good people you can learn from.” Johanna Wright, too, urges young people to give tech a chance, especially women. And once you’ve risen in the ranks, be sure to foster the culture for new graduates and young employees. “Think about the people who don’t look like you and advocate for them,” she says. “This will help women and underrepresented minorities, who are often not in positions of power but are doing great work.” And don’t give up on tech. “For younger women starting out, I suggest simply sticking with it,” Wright says. “Tech can be an awesome profession with lots of opportunities for creativity and for building things that other people use. Sometimes you can be unhappy with a specific job or team or role, so change that up, but stick with tech!”
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IN TUNE
THROUGH THE DECADES AMY MERRILL ’64 AND ELLEN ELIAS-BURSA´C ’70 by Mara Dale
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my Merrill ’64 and Ellen Elias-Bursa´c ’70 arrive for an afternoon interview at my home within minutes of each other. Both wear pink shirts. Planned? No, but it’s the first of many coincidences that will come to light over the next hour and a half of conversation and banter. I’ve invited them to my home so that we can chat quietly, without interruption. As luck would have it, plumbers working later than expected generate a frightful racket with a Sawzall® in the kitchen, one room away. Amy and Ellen, gracious and unflappable, listen closely to each other, chiming in with complementary anecdotes and commentary. The give and take is congenial, relaxed. They occasionally finish each other’s sentences.
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History of a Friendship
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Although they did not overlap at Commonwealth, their friendship is of long standing. They met while Ellen’s daughter Sara, ’95 was a student at Commonwealth. “It was the fall of ’92,” recalls Amy, “and we were in room 1A for a fundraising event.” They quickly discovered that they are neighbors in Cambridge, with adjoining gardens. A shared love of the writing of Laurie Colwin soon had them passing books back and forth. Other mutual interests surfaced, leading to ongoing plans and outings. They smilingly recall “a big Stephen Sondheim period,” during which they indulged in many of his musicals—“Passion… Pacific Overtures… A Little Night Music…” Both have strong family connections to the school. First and foremost, Amy is Commonwealth founder Charles Merrill’s daughter. Her brothers Bruce ’66 and Paul ’72 attended the school (as did sister Catherine, “for about ten minutes”). Even more of Ellen’s family attended: her brother Dan Elias was at the school for a few years, and, in addition to her daughter Sara, cousins Henry ’72 and Amy Gordon ’69, and niece and nephew Sophie ’10 and Alexander Elias ’11 graduated from Commonwealth. Ellen and Amy acknowledge that they are not BFFs, exactly— Amy is quick to point out that her oldest and dearest Commonwealth friend is Barbara Goldman ’64 (she also remains close to Ron Carver ’64 and Meg Kistin ’64); Ellen has her own list of enduring Commonwealth friends from the Class of 1970, among them Mark Zelermeyer, Tana Pesso, Pam Judson, Judy Sanford (now Sanford Harris), and Rob Chalfen. But Amy and Ellen remain connected through common interests and parallel life experiences. Listening to them narrate and reflect on their lives is to enjoy a condensed history of what it has meant to be a woman in a particular period in the US—they have made and remade themselves over the years. For both, Commonwealth proved formative. Amy was conscious of her father’s “long shadow” at Commonwealth, but the school “never felt too confined.” Commonwealth in the ’60s hummed with intellectual energy, and social justice occupied students’ minds. Amy embarked on a lifetime of political activism: “I feel grateful that I grew up when I did and was able to evolve politically. So many people, a little younger, went from being militant activists to venture capitalists. That was never for me.” Ellen found her time at Commonwealth, several years
“T
later, similarly “exciting. The anti-war movement was very much a part of our lives. We were a big class, and students came from different backgrounds, reflecting Charles Merrill’s work to make the school more diverse. It made for a rich experience, learning from one another.” Amy studied multiple languages (French, German, Russian), read Shakespeare with John Hughes, and acted “a lot.” Ellen loved the courses she took with Polly and Charlie Chatfield, among others; singing in the chorus and studying French and Russian sparked her lifelong interest in music and languages, most especially Russian: “I was a kid during the Cold War, so Russian had enormous appeal. My dad, an MIT professor, used to bring Russian engineers over for dinner at our house when I was in elementary school. It all seemed so infinitely more interesting than Spanish and French to my teenage mind. And I was also a typical high-school devotee of Russian literature, so that was another piece.” Commonwealth “encouraged independent work, initiative,” says Ellen. “Its emphasis on writing, close reading, and rigor stuck with me.” Both women experienced bumpy transitions to college: they encountered sexism, rigidity, and, in Amy’s words, “old fogeys.” She had headed to Pembroke College, sister college to Brown University, which her mother attended before her. There, she bridled at the male-centric culture—“It felt anti-female!” Amy threw her energies into starting a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (“I got into trouble with the peace person at Brown”) and spent much of her time “communicating with other colleges in Rhode Island, protesting the Vietnam War.” After two frustrating years at Pembroke, she transferred to Brandeis University, which she found “more politically simpatico,” and fell in with people she characterizes with a chuckle as “somewhat lunatic fringe”—people who were married, commuted to school, and in other ways deviated from the norm of college life. She earned her BA in Sociology in 1969. After taking a free 14-month course offered by the City of Boston, she became a licensed practical nurse and went on to work at several area hospitals and clinics. Following some “time out to have kids,” Amy rediscovered her love for the theater and writing and pursued “credentials”—an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, followed by a few years as an English instructor in Brandeis’s Myra Kraft Transitional Year Program and at the Urban College of Boston and Middle Tennessee State University. She served as an associate professor in
he transitions are always happening,” says Amy. “In a sense, they are what keep us together.” “We support each other,” says Ellen. “We get together to strategize, use each other as sounding boards.
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AMY MERRILL ’64 AND ELLEN ELIAS-BURSA´C ’70 the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music from 2001 until 2015, when she retired to pursue playwriting and producing full-time. Ellen attended Macalester College, drawn by its strong music and Russian programs. Unfortunately, that meant wrangling with an inflexible, all-male Russian department of “Russian men in their seventies who remembered the Revolution. They were interesting characters, but so doctrinaire, with set ideas about what we could and should read.” Feeling claustrophobic, Ellen spent her junior year in what was then Yugoslavia. “Finally, all the way over in Zagreb, I could take the Soviet literature classes I’d been craving!” She settled into a rich period of learning more languages: “The languages of the ex-Yugoslavia share quite a bit of grammatical structure with Russian, so I was already able to understand quite a lot even before I’d begun the study of Croatian, and that was gratifying.” She graduated from Macalester with a BA in Russian literature and language and worked as a freelance translator before studying toward a master’s degree at the University of Zagreb with a specialty in South Slavic literature. In 1999, Ellen received a PhD from the University in philology. She then worked as a language preceptor in the Slavic department of Harvard University for ten years. In 2005, she joined the English translation unit of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She translated for the War Crimes Tribunal for five years—an intense experience that she spoke about a few years ago at a Commonwealth assembly. Although Ellen says that she “was never the activist Amy has been,” during and after the ex-Yugoslav wars she “felt committed to using my skills as a translator to support the writers whose writing and politics I admired, and to support the investigations of the War Crimes Tribunal.” Both Amy and Ellen married young (and are now single). At 19, Amy married Michael Ansara ’64, “my high school sweetheart.” (She would later marry “my second Commonwealth husband,” Robert C. Johnson ’67.) Ellen married Mico Bursa´c, whom she met while singing in a chorus in Zagreb, at age 21. “Both Amy and I,” says Ellen, “were quite young when we had our children. At the time, when I was 25 (when my older daughter was born) I didn’t think of myself as particularly strong or independent. Maybe having kids that young allowed me to develop into that later.” Indeed, the years after having children brought changes for both women. Each found herself, in the ’90s, “transitioning,” says Amy. “I thought that maybe I would be a novelist, but eventually made my way back to writing plays.” Ellen worked at Commonwealth for a couple of years as part of the school’s first fundraising team. During that time, she founded the parents’ association, which is still going strong.
Amy describes the trajectory of her life as “20/20/20— twenty years working in hospitals, twenty years teaching writing, and the twenty I’m involved in now.” She loves “living the life of the footloose, freelance person.” Whereas “sometimes people at my age retreat” and become less
active, slowing down has not occurred to her; she aims “to write a bunch of plays and promote them” and “to get involved in irresistible projects.” The word “project” figures in much of Amy’s work. Both playwright and organizer, she has written many plays that reflect her commitment to race and class and women’s experience. She has researched and written about war and the effects of war
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up the etymology of words just because (look up: mawkish, tawdry, gossamer), the sentence-by-sentence inch through a text, the act of letting someone’s voice speak through me and with me, the juggle of how far to go in explaining culturally specific references, and the reminder not to condescend to my readers by spelling things out or simplifying them too much. And the remarkable collegiality that reigns among literary translators.” Accomplished, independent women both, Amy and Ellen have marched not lockstep, but often in parallel. Reflecting on the arcs of their lives, Amy says, “There were definitely times when we found ourselves doing things that weren’t, maybe, our life’s work.” But exigencies dictated some choices, and now both women can embrace the fluid life of freelancing— which allows for other pleasures, such as enjoying grandchildren. “The transitions are always happening,” says Amy. “In a sense, they are what keep us together.” “We support each other,” says Ellen. “We get together to strategize, use each other as sounding boards. Because we travel quite a lot, there are periods when we hardly see each other. But as we’re neighbors, we often find a way to slip a coffee
on family and community. Currently, Amy is involved in the Basra-Boston Project, a collaborative venture that seeks, as stated on its website, “to promote dialogue between individuals in countries separated by geography and war, by sharing research and creative ideas. Through exhibitions, presentations, and performance, the project brings the results of this exchange to wider audiences.” “The latest scheme,” says Amy, “is to put together a women’s workshop in Dubai.” “Amy loves fomenting discussion,” says Ellen. “Yes, it’s one of my strengths,” Amy shoots back. Ellen, too, has moved into full-time freelancing, juggling various roles: freelance translator (of mostly literary texts in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian); independent scholar; language teacher (“I got my high standards as a teacher from Commonwealth”); and contributing editor to the online journal Asymptote. She is also vice president of the American Literary Translators Association. In the fall she will return to Zagreb University on a Fulbright Scholarship to teach translation studies to master’s students who will go on to work as translators in the European Union. Immersed in doing what she loves, she waxes eloquent about the pleasures of translation: “Every aspect is thrilling—the reading through before I start, as I begin to think about how I’ll rise to the various challenges, the fun of looking
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“A
... s. we’re neighbors, we often find a way to slip a coffee or glass of wine into our otherwise complicated schedules.” “And,” says Amy, “We go to cool stuff together—events, plays.” “Especially Amy’s plays,” says Ellen. “I go to as many as possible. It’s become a hobby, seeing Amy Merrill’s stuff!” or glass of wine into our otherwise complicated schedules.” “And,” says Amy, “We go to cool stuff together— events, plays.” “Especially Amy’s plays,” says Ellen. “I go to as many as possible. It’s become a hobby, seeing Amy Merrill’s stuff!”
REMEMBERING
REBECCA FOLKMAN
A Commonwealth teacher—with love and an edge— from 1982 to 2012
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The magazine you hold in your hands owes much to Rebecca Folkman. She worked tirelessly, for decades, to create a school magazine that included student work, faculty voices, and, always, crisp, lively, accurate prose. Her legacy as editor lies in the details. Read on for words from students and colleagues (and see, also, more at our website: www.commschool.org/rememberingrebecca).
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French, film, and fiction writing were at the heart of Rebecca’s work at Commonwealth. Together she and Bob (and, more recently, Frédérique) kept up a vital and vigorous French program, while her elective in film analysis gave her room to share her love for film noir, Hitchcock, and other classics; to teach students to read closely in another medium; and to give them the privilege of having her correct and edit their writing. When she taught fiction writing they also learned to read and edit each other. And the results, shared at each year’s fiction assembly, were often breathtaking…though they sometimes pushed the envelope. Rebecca always took on her duties with gusto. If you emailed her an article to be edited, whether in Cambridge, New York, or Paris, Rebecca worked her magic and had it back promptly, much improved. If she disagreed with you, she still worked with you. You could learn a great deal about loyalty from Rebecca. She cared about her students, advisees, colleagues, and the School like no one else. —Bill Wharton
! Rebecca: irreverent, never irrelevant; strong-minded but so soft-hearted; salty of tongue but sugar-sweet on behalf of those in need of championing and protection (small children, advisees, and, most especially, dogs and the English language). Rebecca listened acutely and sympathetically and critically, all at once, to whatever one said; held strong opinions; and never hesitated to speak her mind. Her advice ranged from sound to outrageous; her loyalty and generosity knew no bounds. She gave unstintingly to students, friends, and the School, and Commonwealth, and I, and all of us, remain indelibly the better for it. Thank you for everything, Rebecca. —Mara Dale
“You could learn a great deal about loyalty from Rebecca. She cared about her students, advisees, colleagues, and the school like no one else.”
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! Ms. Folkman introduced me to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, convinced that the kid who turned the margins of his homework into landscapes populated with miniscule figures would get the Netherlandish painter. I remember once, when recommending a cartoonist for me to look at, she told me, “He’s a cynic, like you.” She didn’t say, “Like us,” but I felt it was implied. Here was one of my people. —Andrew Kensett (formerly Andrew Arnold) ’09
! My dearest memories with Rebecca are from the times we saw each other long after I graduated from Commonwealth, where she was my French teacher and advisor. We went to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. We went to art galleries in Paris. We walked through Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. We had tea in her house on the couch. I was always in awe of her unwavering curiosity and enthusiasm; she was one of the most truly stylish women I’ve ever met; she could make me laugh at my own self-seriousness; she demonstrated a genuine care and affection for me as a human being. I am honored to have had a friendship with Rebecca. I love her and will miss her very much. —Ottessa Moshfegh ’98
! Rebecca was passionate about having as much student art work as possible placed in all of Commonwealth’s publications. Every spring, as soon as the student art show was up, Rebecca began to inspect and select the work. She had an uncanny eye for work that would shine in publications, and she was constantly looking for ways to promote the excellent art students produced. Rebecca started the tradition of a school calendar, with each month represented by a student painting, drawing, photograph, pot, or art book, and she also began publishing an annual series of color postcards of student work. Even after she retired, she continued to edit the school publications, always ensuring that quality student work was just as important as articles and writing. —Rusty Crump
“I think Rebecca’s message to the kids ... was that art and pleasure are always worth the journey.” Friday afternoons, troop up to the top floor, close the curtains, and lose myself in classics of French cinema. A Bout de Souffle. La Femme De. La Jetée. I knew about close reading from Mr. Davis and Molly, but Ms. Folkman taught me to read visually, to parse the use of light and dark and space and breath just as I learned to dissect sentence structure and the nuances of word choice. I work in radio now, and every day I draw on the careful attention and intention I learned on those far-off Fridays. —Kat Aaron ’95
! Rebecca took pleasure in not mincing words. All sorts of things struck her as rather amazing, and she let you know about the latest without, it seems, a moment’s delay. Watching her find words for it right there on the spot could be daunting if she was on the attack, but what you mostly got was some wonderfully egregious absurdity laid out like a wind-up toy. Her face lit up, and she invited you to light up too. This way of hers was something I loved, and will never forget. —Eric Davis
To me she’d always been Rebecca, but once tenth grade started, I discovered Madame Folkman. I was not used to seeing her in those long, flowing Issey Miyake numbers. I knew her from summers in Paris, where she had a different uniform: Levi’s, a loose shirt tucked in, and Birkenstocks. Her hair was always a little wild and her sunglasses big and dark, and, to a very young French girl, she was totally fascinating. She encouraged curiosity and fearlessness in me like no other. —Jeanne Koenig ’93
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Rebecca remains one of the most important teachers I’ve had in life, not only because she taught me how to speak French and look at a film (essential skills in both of our books), but because she conveyed to me—with her enthusiasm, her rigor, her interest—that the world of art and culture was mine as much as it was anyone else’s. I’ve thanked her for that ever since. —Sasha Watson ’92
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I will never forget Ms. Folkman, who was a teacher of sharp wit, intense rigor, and devilish humor. I now realize that she was daring her students not just to rise to her rigorous challenges, but to take as much delight in thought and argument and analysis as she did.
Rebecca Folkman encouraged me to go to Commonwealth, and after I graduated she again encouraged me to spend a year living in Paris. She was the kind of person who would meet a statement about what I was doing with, “Okay, why?” This was intimidating and provocative and also somehow maternal. I wish I had answered that question more often.
—Sam Davis ’08
—Amiel Bize ’98
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“Rebecca had an enormous heart for anyone or any creature around her she perceived as vulnerable, frightened, or disadvantaged.” CM Fall 2017 25
! Rebecca had a deep commitment to the French program, of course, and as the two halves of the French department for most of those years, we relied on each other heavily. Because we frequently took the same Cambridge bus, then the Red Line train, we often walked together down Charles Street, through the Public Garden, and along the Commonwealth Avenue mall to school. Once, we spotted a frantic ferret, rushing up one tree, then another, in a panic. Rebecca realized it had gotten away from its owner, and she pleaded with me (this was before she had a cell phone) to dial her husband Jonathan so he could alert the Animal Rescue League. Rebecca had an enormous heart for anyone or any creature around her she perceived as vulnerable, frightened, or disadvantaged. Rebecca was sharp, edgy, cultured, but this last bit, I think, is why she mattered so much to so many of us. —Bob Vollrath
! Once, in a French class of four or five students, Mme. Folkman brought in a stack of beautiful little photography books and asked each of us to choose one, study it, and lead a class on it. I still have the book of Robert Doisneau photos that I chose, and I remember eagerly taking notes on the photos before the class. Getting to share in her delight over a book, a scene in a movie, the dirty jokes she always made sure we didn’t miss, are some of my favorite high school memories. —Siobhan Watson ’99
! My dearest memories of Rebecca are of our trips to New York City on Museum Day. We would load up a bus with students early in the morning and travel to Manhattan, where Rebecca, through her many contacts with curators, would have arranged visits to two museums—usually the Met and another such as the Guggenheim or the Modern—with a side-trip to Central Park in between. We would return late in the day, always with a stop in New Haven at Clark’s Dairy for homemade ice cream. I think Rebecca’s message to the kids, in offering this trip, was that art and pleasure are always worth the journey. —Barb Grant
! I took film the first time Madame Folkman taught it, and it was perhaps the best course I have taken in my life. She didn’t just want us to work hard, but to have fun. She made popcorn. —Helen Kafatou Moschapidakis ’87
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“...she was one of the most truly stylish women I’ve ever met...” ARTWORK BY JEAN SEGALOFF
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I greatly admired the way Rebecca channeled her intense energy into the things she believed in and loved. Whatever she embarked upon tended to become a sort of mission. She had enormous passion and stamina for looking at art (high art, but also popular forms like Westerns or ephemera, such as decorative vintage labels from fruit and vegetable boxes which she voraciously collected). At every break from school she would take off as soon as possible for New York or Paris to see as many great films and art exhibitions as she could pack into every day. From time to time she would come into my office to peruse my Art History library and always her verdict was, “you need more.” She made herself my agent, wherever she was, shipping to me great books she found at bargain prices or catalogues from landmark exhibitions at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Met, which proved to be invaluable to me for years in teaching my course. —Judith Siporin
Carrie Healy
PROFILE
Building the Commonwealth Community, One Student at a Time BY SASHA WATSON ’92
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or teachers and students alike, the school year can feel like a marathon: exhausting, the end forever out of sight, and—finally— deeply gratifying. In the meantime, those buffeted by deadlines and crises might find Carrie Healy to be the most reassuring person in the room. When she reports on admissions at a faculty meeting, introduces a speaker at an open house, or relays admissions assignments to teachers, her steady demeanor, clear directives, and crisp professionalism soothe the soul. Add the warmth with which she welcomes new students at the beginning of the year, thanks current students at recess for their help with admissions events, or speaks enthusiastically with a family at an open house, and you have Carrie, the director of admissions and financial aid and a force of stability in the sometimes-frantic world of Commonwealth.
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By the time a new class walks in the front door of 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Carrie has met with each student, knows his or her family, learned, as she says, “what makes them tick,” and can welcome each new face with genuine familiarity. Carrie recalls that she didn’t know what to make of that most Commonwealth of daily rituals, recess, when she first visited the school in the spring of 2013: “I remember being crammed downstairs listening to announcements and just wondering what was this thing, why was it called recess, and did it really happen every day?” Though confused, she climbed the stairs with “a great sense of the natural and friendly community, as well as of the incredible range of interests at the school.” She adds warmly, “Now that I work here, I can say that recess really does perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the School. All you have to do is stand down there for fifteen minutes to get a sense of the place.” It’s this sense of the School’s intellectual rigor, creative energy, and strong community that Carrie now works to convey to prospective students and their families. She goes to schools, makes contact with families, and counsels parents and students as they consider options. She then goes on to interview about 60% of all applicants, review all applications, and conduct admissions meetings in which decisions are made. By the time a new class walks in the front door of 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Carrie has met with each student, 28 CM Fall 2017
knows his or her family, learned, as she says, “what makes them tick,” and can welcome each new face with genuine familiarity. She sets the tone, then, for the experience students will have at Commonwealth, drawing them into and introducing them to the community that will become a part of their lives. For as long as she can remember, Carrie knew that she wanted to work in education, though, early on she assumed it would be as a teacher. She worked at Concord Academy’s summer camp four years in a row as a teenager, becoming head counselor by the age of 18, a role in which she managed a staff of four and ran the program of 18-20 three- and four-year-olds. It was there, though, that Carrie first questioned whether classroom teaching would be her path. “It was exhausting!” she exclaims, laughing. At Brown, where she studied education with an emphasis in history and policy, she got her first taste of a role in admissions, and liked it. As a volunteer with the admissions department at Brown, Carrie gave tours to prospective students, offered information sessions, and helped to run revisit days for admitted students. She recalls this experience with great fondness: “I loved the feeling of standing in front of high school seniors and their parents, speaking about everything I loved about Brown.” It was, she says, the sense of connection that she experienced in this role that she so enjoyed. Carrie herself attended Middlesex School in Concord, and had what she calls “a great independent school experience” there. When she graduated from Brown in 2006, she spent a year working as a case assistant in intellectual property in a law office in Boston, but found the job isolating and lacking in the human connections she’d found so vital at Brown. So she started looking for jobs in schools and, soon enough, had stepped into a maternity leave position in the admissions office at Newton Country Day School. She wound up staying for three years instead of the planned three months, and she also became the sailing coach at the school. Carrie had sailed in college but, even so, sometimes found the experience of being out on the Charles with a group of teenagers “terrifying and exhilarating.” She laughs now that “every day we got off the water, I breathed a sigh of
relief that I hadn’t lost anyone.” It may have been a lot of responsibility for a 24-year-old, but Carrie loved getting to know the students. From Newton Country Day, she went on to Northfield Mount Hermon, where she was enthusiastic about the experience of working at a large boarding school. In her two years at the school, she traveled the country, worked with international admissions, and learned what it meant to be a part of a very large admissions team. After two years, though, Carrie wanted a break from living out of a suitcase, and she also wanted to fine-tune her own career goals. She entered a program in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, a year-long master’s degree that she says solidified her desire to work in independent schools. It was in 2013, right after she finished that program, that Carrie found herself at recess at Commonwealth and, soon after, began her job as director of admissions and financial aid. Stepping into the role, her first mission was, she says, “to prioritize relationships— between teachers and admissions, student ambassadors and admissions, and Commonwealth families and local schools.” She dived into the school, sitting in on classes, attending events at night and on weekends, and getting to know students and faculty by living alongside them. “For me, getting to know the culture of the school was the thing,” she says. It was only once she had this sense of the place and its people, that she would be able “to tell the story of the school and communicate that culture to prospective students and their families.” When she reflects on her role now, Carrie returns to the human connections that have always sustained her. “There’s something so satisfying,” she says, “about picking up the phone and helping a family begin the search for a school. I can draw on all I’ve learned about Boston and its schools, and I can connect them with places that might be great options for their kids. Sometimes I get a sense that Commonwealth might not be the right fit, and then I suggest schools that could be. I see myself as counseling kids and families, and even if I think a student is a strong contender for Commonwealth, I might want them to consider other options so that they’re really sure when they come here that this is the right place for them.” At the seventh and eighth grade school fairs held in the fall, there are three elements of Commonwealth that Carrie relays to students and their parents: the urban setting with all of its resources and
“I know when I’ve hit a chord with kids and their parents,” says Carrie. “Their eyes light up. Then I go on to try to get a sense of the student. I want them to understand that I’m interested in them as people.” opportunities for independence; the small size of the school, perfect for students who want to take an active role in shaping their community; and the academic rigor, inviting to the intellectually curious. “I know when I’ve hit a chord with kids and their parents,” says Carrie. “Their eyes light up. Then I go on to try to get a sense of the student. I want them to understand that I’m interested in them as people.” After the information season, come the applications, and this is where Carrie says working in admissions at Commonwealth is very different from doing the job at another school. Carrie has one full-time admissions team member working with her, Lindsay Ewing, who, she says, “is amazing.” In addition to Ewing, four faculty members—Don Conolly, Rikita Tyson, Rob Sherry, and Melissa Haber— also work in admissions. In February, the admissions committee sits down in a series of meetings and discusses every applicant, coming to a conclusion together about whether the student is a fit for Commonwealth. This is rigorous work, and it’s only once the class for the coming year has been assembled that Carrie breathes a sigh of relief. “And then we do it all again!” she says. It’s an athletic schedule, so it makes sense that Carrie is something of an athlete herself. She began running seriously during her year at Penn, and three and a half years ago, she challenged herself to run ten half marathons in ten states. She’d just finished her ninth in Annapolis, Maryland when she sat down to talk about her work in admissions. “There’s nothing like tying on your shoes and going for a run after a busy day,” says Healy, and she gives the smile that lets you know she can handle just about anything that comes her way. CM Fall 2017 29
CWSAA
Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association
FROM THE PRESIDENT
I
n August I attended my first staff retreat for work. I felt nervous as I drove down: Was I ready to spend three full days with my colleagues? Then I remembered that this wouldn’t be my first extended trip with peers and supervisors. At Hancock we worked alongside our teachers, cooking breakfast, unloading the buses, and playing soccer. It taught me a lot about being part of a community. After this realization, the impending staff retreat felt much less daunting. I’m sure many of us have been there: while sitting in a meeting or a class, or maybe talking to a customer, something calls you back to English class, the Commonwealth mall, or recess announcements. Maybe this brings a smile or a sigh of relief as you realize you aren’t cramming for an exam. When I joined the Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association (CWSAA) in 2015, I felt like a freshman again as I entered the School. In many ways nothing had changed. I was six months into my first job out of college and I didn’t really know what I was doing. As in Commonwealth’s first year, the work was pass/fail. Yes, there were projects I could have done better with, but like a Commonwealth freshman, I wasn’t judged for small mistakes; I was learning and adapting to a new environment. Being a member of the CWSAA has been truly rewarding. Although the Association is comprised of alumni/ae of varying ages following differing career paths, we share a common experience and offer our own perspectives. I’ve had the joy of watching the School go through important renovations over the past few years, and although the building has changed, the feeling of walking through the
Laura Pedrosa ’10, CWSAA President
Commonwealth and Dartmouth doors hasn’t. If you haven’t seen it yet in person, I encourage you to do so. I would like to congratulate Alisha (Atlas-Corbett) Elliott ’01 on transitioning from CWSAA president to her new role as director of development at Commonwealth. As the new president, I am grateful to be continuing with the Association in a greater capacity, and I hope to meet many more fellow alumni/ae in the near future. If you are interested in joining CWSAA or have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out or to stop me in person at an event. Thank you for this opportunity, and I look forward to the school year!
Connect With Commonwealth! commschoolalums commonwealthschool
30 CM Fall 2017
CLASS NOTES Fall 2017 1963 Peter Barkley: “Life goes reasonably with long walks, coffee, poetry, and returns to Quebec. The big event of this year is finding myself in the process of moving to the countryside after a half century living in Cambridge. I’m calling it a second life as it is something I’ve hoped to undertake for a number of years. Concert life is a rich brew of music—the Odyssey Opera’s Dimitrij by Dvorak, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a number of modern works, and a new version of the Mozart Requiem conducted by the composer/ arranger. This fall and next year look just as rich and varied. I know I will have to hang up my vocal cords at some point, but I hope this
is still a good many years away. I also want to share a memory from Hancock: a bunch of us were making a racket in the house in the late hours, so Mr. Hughes yelled from upstairs to quiet down. We flicked off the lights and, in rushing to our sacks, I went flying with a crash over two chairs. Ah, such memories that come to mind upon a summer’s day.”
1964 David Freidel is a professor of Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently directing long-term research at the royal city of El Peru, ancient Waka’, in Peten, Guatemala.
1966 Roy DeBerry has spent the past two years renovating his great aunt’s 1919 house in Oxford, MS, with his nephew, Keiffer DeBerry. During the restoration, Roy made every effort to maintain the integrity of the home, which has been in his family for five generations. The house will now operate on solar energy in order to be “completely off the grid.”
1967 Lisa Rubinstein: “Our family is doing well. My husband, Joel, retired in January and has been happy and relaxed, so it is wonderful for us. I
2.
1.
1. Roy DeBerry ‘66 renovating his great aunt’s 1919 house. 2. Mixed Media by Deborah Friedman ‘73.
CM Fall 2017 31
2.
1.
1. Arthur Mateos ’15 (left) and Ben Koger ’12 (right). 2. Priscilla Tsai ’04 and husband Jordan Musgraves with their dogs, at their wedding on January 7, 2017. 3. Lisa Rubinstein’s step-daughter, Ann, on her daily commute. 4. Jonatha Brooke ’81 and her husband Patrick Rains in St. Emilion.
3.
am still working full time as a psychiatrist, but not adding new patients, so the numbers are tapering, and I have more free time. I am on the Board of Boston Health Care for the Homeless, an incredible organization staffing 47 different shelters and sites. Jim O’Connell, our founder and president, wrote a terrific book called Stories from the Shadows about his work on the streets. My brother, Michael, is living in the Back Bay and visits us often. My older stepdaughter, Sally, married fellow librarian, Kelly, in April. They now live in Amesbury, MA. Kelly brings a 19-year-old daughter, Rosie, into the family. We’re thrilled with all of it! My younger stepdaughter, Ann, still works in Oakland, CA, as a lawyer helping homeless people get benefits. She commutes on a bike with her dog, Ari, in the backpack (see photo 3.) My stepmother, Colette, still
32 CM Fall 2017
lives in NYC and Sherman, CT, and is writing a memoir. This is certainly a happy time for all of us.”
1968 Leslie Tuttle is learning digital video production at Emerson College. Having been a still photographer for fifty years, she reports: “It’s time to make media that moves—for websites—to support organizations and causes that matter!”
1971 Eric Stange: Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, which Eric directed, was selected for the 2017 Independent Film Festival of Boston.
4.
1973 G.A. Finch sends good news about his children: “My daughter, Marisol, obtained her MBA in May from Washington University in St. Louis and got married in June; my other daughter, Gabriella, received the highest Girl Scout achievement, the Gold Award in May; and my son, Maximelio, earned his Eagle Scout award in June.” Janet Kagan: “After living in Chapel Hill, NC, for almost 20 years, I sold my glass-box mid-century home and moved to a small town one hour east of Raleigh, NC. It is difficult to imagine retirement because I love what I do: aligning artists and designers with communities and projects. Working across America keeps me humble and alert. My
daughter recently became a mother herself, so now I have ascended into unfamiliar territory with a grandson whose blue eyes are a look into infinity. I am frequently in Boston and welcome the opportunity to reconnect with other alums!” Deborah Friedman is living in San Francisco and still working as a veterinary ophthalmologist. She is also doing lots of mixed media artwork, which you can see here: www.deborahbeniofffriedman.com.
1974 Sage Givens: “After spending the bulk of my career as a venture capitalist investing in startups, I decided to jump the fence and create a company for myself and my friends. Gambol Life is a fun and easy app that facilitates meaningful in-person connections with people who share similar interests, location, and group affiliations (like Commonwealth!). The app will be launched in Washington, DC and NYC this fall. If you are interested to learn more, visit: www.GambolLife.com.”
1975 Jana Schweitzer: “I retired from work in the mental health field this past winter. Since then, I have been catching up on the various passions I didn’t have time for when working full time. We have been spending the summer in Italy, hiking, biking, and exploring in the Dolomites, which has to be one of the most beautiful and diverse areas. I am also sticking my feet back into wildlife conservation. I volunteered in Namibia with an organization that helps injured and orphaned cheetahs and other wildlife, and soon I will be headed to Kyrgyzstan to assist with research on snow leopards. It’s great to finally get back to my roots, as this has been my dream since I was at Commonwealth. Our daughter is in graduate school in Boulder, CO, so we have had some delightful excuses to go there for skiing and hiking as well. All is well in Portland, and we are glad that we live in a simpatico liberal area while our country is going through these hard times.”
1981 Jonatha Brooke: “We are finally through a painful kitchen renovation in our new digs in Minneapolis. (We lived in the house
through the four-month demolition drama: toaster oven, coffee machine, set tub. I don’t recommend it.) But It’s been a beautiful summer, which is helping with the culture shock of the move from New York City. I’m finding my way here, homing in on simpatico musicians, hosting a regular residency at the Dakota Jazz Club, and taking long walks around Lake Harriet. I’ve been touring behind my latest record, Midnight Hallelujah, and I will be performing a three-week run of my one woman show, My Mother Has 4 Noses, at the Jungle Theatre in Minneapolis in February. The best part of the summer was a trip to Paris and St. Émilion for a sort of busman’s holiday. One of my husband’s artists, Cyrille Aimée, was playing both cities, so we got to taste some great food and wine and unplug for a few days—so rare. And it happened to coincide with our 20th anniversary. Pas mal.”
1982 Christopher Atwood, professor of Mongolian and Late Imperial/Early Modern Chinese History at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with UPenn’s Chinese Studies Librarian, Brian Vivier, to grow the school’s Mongolian literature collection from 600 titles to the fourth largest collection in the United States. At the 2016 International Association of Mongolian Studies Conference, Christopher and Brian chose 1,492 books from a local vendor to send back home.
1983 Erik Schwartz made Team USA in archery shooting in the barebow class (no sights or stabilizers). The US team trials were held in southern Illinois in late June. He competed in the World Championships in Robion, France in September 2017.
1990 Deborah Rudnick: “Greetings from endlessly rainy Puget Sound, where we are evolving gills. I am busy running a small non-profit that works on watershed conservation and citizen science and I am the K-5 science coordinator for our local school district. My daughter is 10 going on 16. Keep up the amazing work growing spectacular young people, Commonwealth!”
1999 Jonathan Sheffi writes that there have been “a lot of changes this year: In March, I finished up with my startup, Curoverse, and began a sabbatical: lots of travel to Cape Town, Melbourne, and Berlin, and I’m trying to finish visiting all 50 states. I’ve also been reading a lot, advising other digital health startups, and I completed a Hebrew immersion course over the summer. The acquisition of Curoverse closed in August, which has been a big relief after a lot of work. Special thanks to the Commonwealth alums and students who worked on the company along the way, including Misha Zatsman ’97, Sam Shapiro ’13, Johnny Saldona ’18, and Kevin Fang ’18.” Jonathan is now a product manager at Google.
2004 Priscilla Tsai married Jordan Musgrave on January 7, 2017, in Memphis (see photo 2). Zach Biegun was a guest at the wedding with his husband, Jay. Priscilla and Jordan visited Julia Cavallaro in Boston this past summer. Priscilla writes, “I still live in Memphis, teaching and playing violin with the Symphony. Some highlights from my experiences in Memphis include performances with Midori, Michael Stern, Gil Shahm, Augustin Haedelich, Christoph Koncz, and Johnny Mathis, and a recording session with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.”
2005 Joanna Rifkin defended her PhD dissertation at Duke University on June 2, 2017. Although the defense was a success, she promptly fled the country and arrived in Canada on July 1st, just in time for that country’s sesquicentennial. After the Canada Day festivities, Joanna started working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, where she is now researching the evolution of sex chromosomes in a genus of plants with Stephen Wright and Spencer Barrett. At the beginning of August, she’ll take off again, this time on a research expedition to collect Rumex paucifolius in the environs of Yellowstone National Park with her mother. She aspires to one day relax. Joanna’s husband, Matt Dougherty, defended his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CM Fall 2017 33
in March and moved to Toronto with Joanna, along with their two cats. All four mammals are settling in well. The humans like the museums and restaurants; the cats like the eighth-floor windows and forest of cardboard boxes. Ben Orlin: “After three years in England, I’m moving to Amherst, MA. I’ll be working on two books about math for a general audience, the first of which—Math with Bad Drawings—should be available in Spring 2018.”
Germany. He reports that “Arthur Mateos ’15 spent this summer interning with the department.”
2014 Jay Rauch was named 2017 Presser Scholar to recognize his achievements as a performer, composer, scholar, and conductor, at Boston University’s School of Music.
2006
Former Faculty
Irene Kaplow: “I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Stanford at the end of the summer and started a post-doc in the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon. I would love to meet up with Commonwealth alumni/ae in Pittsburgh.”
Janet McGhee retired from her role as Skidmore College’s choral conductor, where she taught from 2001-2011. She is the founding artistic director of Battenkill Chorale, a 100-voice community choir based in Albany, NY. Janet has two sons, Ring and Max Merrill (grandsons of Charles Merrill).
2009 Symone Williams moved to Ithaca, NY to pursue her MBA at Cornell University. She is thrilled to have been awarded a full scholarship and is enjoying her time on the beautiful campus. Andrew Kensett: “Not long after graduating from Commonwealth, and before beginning my studies at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), I changed my last name from Arnold to Kensett. After graduating from RISD in 2013 with a BFA in Printmaking, I moved to the Sonoran Desert to enjoy its world-class backpacking and pursue a career in museums. I am currently serving as assistant curator at the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography (CCP), working jointly with the Phoenix Art Museum to bring exhibitions from the CCP’s collections to Phoenix audiences. My first exhibition, Longer Ways to Go, featuring the work of Japanese photographer Kōzō Miyoshi, was on view at Phoenix Art Museum through October 15.”
2011 Suzanne Freeman joined the faculty at the U.S. Naval War College in February as a Research Associate in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute (RMSI).
2012 Ben Koger is pursuing a PhD with the department of collective behavior at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Konstanz,
34 CM Fall 2017
Bill Mueller is a mathematician and software developer at MathWorks in Natick. He lives in Rockport with his two sons, Eli and Neil. They blast Dead Kennedys as necessary.
In Memoriam We are saddened to report that former Commonwealth history teacher Richard “Dick” Huddleston (faculty 1961-1963) passed away on January 5, 2017 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. After teaching at Commonwealth, Mr. Huddleston was a professor of History at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and acting dean of admissions at New College in Sarasota, FL. He is survived by his wife, Lindsey V. Huddleston; two children, Katherine L. Huddleston-Conforti and Michael A. Huddleston; and four grandchildren. We were also saddened to learn that James S. Ackerman, father of Anne ’66, Tony ’67, and Sarah ’72, died on December 31, 2016. A Renaissance architectural historian, Mr. Ackerman was the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University from 1960 until his retirement in 1990. He published numerous articles and books, many of which are considered classics in the field of Michelangelo and Palladio architecture.
The Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association invites you to our first
Alumni/ae of Color Reunion If you identify as an alum of color, or if you would like to learn more about the School’s diversity initiatives, please join us for hors d’oeuvres, wine, and beer on
Friday, January 5, 2018 6:00 p.m. at the School
A LUM N U S P E R S P ECT I V E
INVESTING TO MAKE AN
IMPACT BY EUGENE FLOOD ‘73
I
spent years in the finance world, first teaching about global financial markets and economic issues, and then directly in the action on Wall Street. During my corporate years, I often found myself focused on issues like driving annual revenue growth, appeasing shareholders and regulators, and dealing with the latest human resource fiasco. It never occurred to me that all this activity shielded me from asking deeper questions, but when I stepped out of the corporate environment at age 57, I found myself spending too much time wandering around our home in Chapel Hill. This daily meandering frustrated me and, it turned out, annoyed family members. One day, my now 32-year-old daughter, who was finishing an MBA at the time, said, “We need to talk,” and I knew it was not going to be good. She went on to say, “Since you stopped working, all you talk about is your accomplishments: the companies you worked for, the universities you worked with. You never talk about you. What do you care about? What are your dreams?” Finally she asked, “What do you want me to say about you to my children?” Though she didn’t have children, I was surprised at how unprepared I was to answer. It was time for me to become a more passionate, thoughtful, and engaged human being with dreams and aspirations, not just another manager with a scorecard. At the time, my daughter and I were at work on a consulting project for a global investment firm that required us to perform a large body of macroeconomic analysis identifying key themes, problems, and opportunities facing the world’s economies. Amazingly, this gave me the platform to explore, with her help, the two hard questions that I had synthesized from her challenge: 1) What are the most critical issues facing the
world? and 2) How have I used the skills, the education, and the experiences I have been blessed with to make an impact? After Commonwealth, I studied economics at Harvard College and then earned a PhD at MIT, where I specialized in international finance. I went on to teach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, MIT, the
CM Fall 2017 35
A LUM N US PE R SPECTIV E
Nomura School of Advanced Management in Tokyo, and at the International Management Institute in Geneva before diving into Wall Street. In both the stock market crash of 1987 and the Great Recession of 2008, I learned a great deal about management and governance of complex organizations dealing in multiple lines of business, countries, regulatory environments, tax jurisdictions, and currencies. When my daughter asked me her questions, and I looked back at how I’d spent my career, I saw that my skill set in managing highly mobile human capital that works on hard—and constantly changing—problems might be useful in addressing some of the big issues facing the world today. To address some of these problems, I’ve taken on several new projects. I’ve recently launched an investment firm, Next Sector Capital, and begun to head its Dubai office. We do what some call “impact investing,” buying companies that work in these critical areas, then working with their management teams to help make them more effective in running their businesses. One example is a company that has built a platform to help the aging US population manage the expensive and fragmented healthcare landscape. The company’s service conveniently ties together primary care providers, hospitals, pharmacies, and all the various critical sectors of an individual’s healthcare network, which reduces costs and increases the speed with which decisions are made. I also sit on the board of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). We make grants to (we think of them as “investments in”) early career scientists who work in chemistry, physics and astronomy. Our foundation is 100 years old, and about forty of the scientists RCSA has chosen to invest in have gone on to win Nobel Prizes. One scientist whose work we recently invested in is Will Dichtel in the Chemistry Department at Cornell University. Will’s work is in the interface of organic chemistry and materials and
has applications in water purification, energy storage, detection of explosives, and the interaction of nanostructured materials with biological systems. Science like this by outstanding, early-career researchers ultimately works its way into society and helps to make lives better. Another group I work with is the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases (IGHID) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I chair the Advisory Board. We work on big health issues facing the world, including HIV, cancer, burns (a huge issue in the developing world), and clean water. My wife and I just returned from a trip to Zambia and Malawi, where we talked with senior doctors, scientists, and public health and education officials about how to eradicate cervical cancer in those countries—a problem that is running rampant in Sub-Saharan Africa—and plans to build a new wing of the main university teaching hospital in Lusaka to focus on women’s and children’s health. Through the IGHID’s work in medical research, the training of health professionals, and running hospitals and clinics in the US, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, we are touching millions of lives. Each of us has a gift, whether it’s writing, teaching, public speaking, or building teams. During my sixty-plus years of life, I’ve learned that my gifts lie in analyzing problems and working with people. I often think back to my daughter’s thoughtful question: What do I want my future grandchildren to hear about how I used these gifts? I hope she will now be able to say that I used my education and experiences to team up with talented and passionate people as I tackled some of the world’s most challenging problems and worked to improve the lives of others. Of course I don’t know how all my diverse efforts will work out, but I can tell you that I am running hard and trying to make this last lap of my race count.
IT WAS TIME FOR
ME TO BECOME A
MORE PASSIONATE, THOUGHTFUL,
AND ENGAGED
HUMAN BEING
WITH DREAMS AND ASPIRATIONS, NOT JUST ANOTHER
MANAGER WITH A SCORECARD.
36 CM Fall 2017
The COMMONWEALTH FUND
“We encourage you—alumni/ae, parents past and present, and friends—to join us in contributing to The Commonwealth Fund. The Fund supports vital aspects of what makes Commonwealth the vibrant community that it is.” Charles Fried , P’79, ’81, GP’19, trustee; Jonah Fried ’19, and Greg Fried ’79
For more information,
To make a gift to The Commonwealth Fund, visit www.commschool.org/makeagift.
contact Carly Reed, Director of Annual Giving and Alumni/ae Relations 617-266-7525 ext. 291 or creed@commschool.org.
COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL 151 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02116 www.commschool.org
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