TH E WORLD ARE EAGLE HIL L ALUMNI?

Originally from Chappaqua, New York, Fuirst grew up loving animals, being outdoors, and camping with his family. He attended middle school at Eagle Hill.

Reflecting on those years, he said, “Eagle Hill’s curriculum and advising transformed my ability to navigate my emotions and the learning process. I learned to effectively absorb information and be a comfortable and confident student. And if I wasn’t doing well at something, I knew how to seek help and how to troubleshoot. That was really it for me, because by no means were my high school grades phenomenal.”

After high school, motivated by a desire to pursue his love of the outdoors, Fuirst landed at Paul Smith’s College. Its 14,000-acre lakeside campus is tucked into New York’s Adirondack State Park. Fuirst remembers thinking, “This is such a peaceful place to spend four years.” He did — while earning a bachelor’s degree in wildlife sciences.

Fuirst later got his Ph.D. at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, where he now teaches.

Fuirst’s continued research on Canada jays seeks to answer the questions, “Where do animals go? How do those decisions impact their survival?”

The answers will allow us to make more effective conservation decisions. He’s hoping his findings help protect Canada jays and other birds, mammals, and species that rely on the winter climate, too.

Since Henry Zuckerberg graduated from Eagle Hill in 2013, he ignited an enthusiasm for cooking, a love of history, a curiosity for whiskey-making, and a zeal for building affordable homes. And, on his journey, Zuckerberg found a way to “pay it forward.” Here’s what he had to say about life since Eagle Hill.

Q. You’ve kindled a passion for cooking. What sparked that?

A. After Eagle Hill, I went to a Quaker boarding school called Westtown in Pennsylvania. An English teacher at Westtown taught a class called “Food Writing in the New Yorker.” It was great and I wanted to eat better, so I started getting into cooking. I ended up working in kitchens over the summers and as a line cook at a pub in England.

On majoring in history at Hamilton College.

A. I love history. It’s funny but being a history major was extremely reading and writing-intensive, and those are really the core reasons why went to Eagle Hill. It was pretty cool to go ahead and major at a school with subjects that were very rigorous for me. I feel a real sense of accomplishment.

Q. You did an internship in a gorgeous region of England. Tell us about it.

A. I had decided I didn’t want to be a chef because I didn’t like the lifestyle, so I thought maybe I could do something tangential to food. So I did a summer internship at the Cotswolds Distillery in the UK. We made whiskey and gin and some other byproducts. It was the eighth fastest growing private company in the UK at the time.

Q. As a child, you were tutored using the Lindamood-Bell® program, a language processing instruction method. You flipped the script as a college student. Tell us about that.

A. I’m sure some of the kids at Eagle Hill have come across Lindamood-Bell®; it’s an amazing tutoring program. During my senior year in college, I signed up to be a Lindamood-Bell® tutor for kids with special needs. It involved teaching kids how to break down words phonetically, how to break sounds down, all the way through standard reading comprehension.

Basically, it was how to teach a kid to read, which was fun. But it was hard getting an eight-year-old to focus on something that is quite difficult for them. And it was on Zoom, which I wasn’t super experienced with at the time. I did a couple of tutoring sessions a day with different students, following their learning plan. Tutoring was an exciting full circle for me. It felt cool, in a very small way, to be able to sort of pay it forward with my time.

Q. You seem to have found your purpose working in real estate. What do you find meaningful about that work?

A. I now work for a company called the Richman Group, a full-service real estate firm based in Greenwich. There’s a Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) program, which is administered by the federal government and states. It’s used as an incentive to build affordable housing across the country. And that’s the specialty of this company— they focus on that space. I’m on their asset management team and I’m training now on a project in Harlem. We specialize in apartments, particularly low-income housing. It’s really wonderful. We’re helping people build homes and get a house so they can raise a family. That, by itself, is very gratifying and it’s tangible.

Q. How did Eagle Hill prepare you for life?

A. I owe a lot to Eagle Hill in terms of their ability to grow confidence in me as a learner… the teachers took the time to build it. I went from a place where I was doubting myself to a place where I felt like I could do something. A lot of people, whether they are dyslexic or not, they don’t necessarily think they can. And that really made all the difference.