Alum Now Leads Tetris Video Game Company

Maya Rogers ’96 has the quintessential Cushing Academy turnaround story.

The product of a multicultural, multilingual family (her mother is Japanese, her father is DutchIndonesian), Rogers was raised in Japan by entrepreneurs who knew they wanted Rogers and her siblings to speak English, so they emigrated to Hawai‘i, where her parents met. The family moved back to Japan, and after struggling through two years at an international high school, Rogers had an epiphany: she needed to turn her life around. “I honestly wasn’t doing so well in school,” she says.

She learned that some kids in Japan’s international community attended East Coast boarding schools. With just a month before school began, she and her father took a whirlwind trip to visit schools. When she saw Cushing, something clicked. “I had such a welcoming experience,” she says. And just like that Rogers picked Cushing and was dropped off just as the volleyball preseason was about to begin. She felt liberated because she knew this was going to make a difference in her life.

Cushing transformed a reluctant student into a capable one, cementing Rogers’ independent spirit and buoying her nascent confidence. Less than two decades after graduation, she leveraged those gifts into a position as president and CEO of Tetris, a post she has held since 2014. She will share her story in the spring as Cushing’s 2023 Commencement speaker.

What made Cushing work for Rogers were several things. First, there was the emphasis on boarding. “Everybody’s going through it together,” she says. The structured study halls prompted her to study for the first time. She knew she had succeeded when, in Mr. Hancock’s tough U.S. history class, the future valedictorian asked her for help when he missed a class. “I was like, ‘Wow. I made it. I went from a terrible student to now the valedictorian is asking me for my notes,” she says.

She also had early exposure to technology. A computer programming course was being offered and Rogers’ father, a tech entrepreneur and programmer, suggested she enroll. “I may have been the first