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will return home to Durham to begin medical school at Duke in August, before marrying her fiancé, Luke, in October in Atlanta. Jenny’s time at Duke will overlap with Katherine Brazer, who just finished her first year at the Fuqua School of Business. Katherine is spending the first part of her summer traveling in China and Thailand, then will complete an internship in product management and marketing for IBM in RTP. Bethany Walters is finishing her one-year internship at Red Bank Veterinary Hospital in New Jersey. Although she says that it has been a great learning experience, she can’t wait to get back to North Carolina. The jury is still out on what Bethany will be doing next year, but it will definitely involve working with zoo and/or exotic animals in some way. Other classmates have taken time to experience and enjoy the outdoors, whether as a break from work or as a part of the work itself. Whitney Zimmerman recently passed the three-year mark in Munich, Germany, having opted in late 2014 to switch from an expat to a local contract at the BMW Group so he can stay indefinitely. In June he will begin an executive M.B.A. based in London with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He continues to enjoy mountain climbing in the Alps and drinking beer in his lederhosen, though normally not at the same time. Tanyss Knowles has been doing less yodeling than Whitney, but did see her fair share of beautiful mountains this spring. She just moved back to Vancouver after four years living in the Yukon of Canada, and along the way drove the spectacular 2,400 kilometers of wilderness
highway from Whitehorse to the southern coast of British Columbia. Tanyss is transitioning south so that she can begin her master’s of social work at the University of British Columbia in September. Meanwhile, Jeff Speir, another West Coast nature-phile, graduated from Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, in May. He will sit for the Oregon bar exam in July and plans to practice environmental law, focusing on the areas of air pollution and species protection. Rich Preyer has also made a commitment to environmental work (and all the little animals), as he just finished the first year of his master’s program in environmental studies at Antioch University in New Hampshire. This summer, he will be designing environmental education programs for the City of Asheville, where he lived for several years before beginning graduate school. As the degrees, weddings and frequent flyer miles continue to roll in, the Class of 2005 looks forward to catching up in person to share stories both old and new in the fall. The DA family may be spread thin geographically, but there are still plenty of common threads that keep us together as we build some amazing lives around the country and around the world.
2006
Imani Hamilton Imani.hamilton@gmail.com Hello from the Taipei airport! As I write this, I’m on an overnight layover awaiting my flight to Bangkok for a three-month tour of Southeast Asia! After working for four years, I’ve decided it’s time to
switch careers and return to more project-based design work, so I’ve ended my job and I’ll be taking the rare seam between careers to explore and take a real vacation. And I’m excited that I will be joined by LaQuesa Gaillard the last two months! I was lucky enough to see a few friendly DA faces this year — beyond seeing my dear friends Jordan Schiff and Tarun Wadhwa all the time in the Bay Area and many more in North Carolina, I had the pleasure of visiting with Logan Roberts in New Orleans, and Nick Thomas, Nick Gallo and Caroline Stubbs on their visits to San Francisco. Caroline got engaged in Paris last fall to Seth Jones, whom she met in dental school at UNC. The two are getting married in the North Carolina mountains next year. Heather Hoffman is currently living in NYC, finishing her first year of a two-year pediatric dental residency at NYU/Bellevue. She spends most weekends in D.C., visiting her newlywed husband as he works in an oral surgery residency at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Nick Gallo reports that he’s still having fun traveling and working for the Oklahoma City Thunder — and that it’s always great to see DA friends in different cities around the country! Jake Engebretsen is the assistant athletic director at Asheville School in Asheville, North Carolina. Jake just finished his first full year there (after starting in January 2014), and he is also the head varsity boys basketball and varsity girls lacrosse coach. This summer, he’ll run a Nike Basketball Camp at Asheville School. Michael Hutchings is enjoying living and working in New York. Sean
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Taylor finished law school at University of Minnesota this spring, and will be working in Minneapolis. It sounds as though he will also be weaving around Thailand and Vietnam with his girlfriend this summer! Also on the Asian continent, Camilla Kelsoe wrote from the Hubei Province in China, about to start on her dissertation research for the next two months: “I am at the University of Pittsburgh for a Ph.D. in archaeology. Specifically, I’m studying the emergence of social inequalities (ranked social classes) in southern China during the late Neolithic, roughly 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. I’ll be doing my dissertation research in the first half of the summer, then in the second half I’ll be returning to Pittsburgh where I’m getting married!” Meredith Hall writes: “One month ago I married the best guy on the planet, Geoffrey Gummerson, and I am now officially Meredith Hall Gummerson! My sister Rachel ’10 was the maid of honor at our wedding. Our little family of three (with our dog Fletcher) is in the process of buying a house, assuming inspections go as planned, and I have accepted a new position as an ECGC Teacher at Quail Hollow Middle School next year. I am planning to begin my master’s work this summer. Geoffrey and I also completed two more half marathons this year, doing one of them with Rachel. I guess a lot has happened, but it all has fallen into place so well that it seems completely normal.” More wedding bells! Kyle Sloate will graduate from Duke’s Physician’s Assistant Program in August and will marry Rob Kirkland ’07 in October! I’m looking
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