The Exeter Bulletin, fall 2016

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Currents of Thought How ideas spread and amplify goodness and knowledge

Fifteen years ago, Phelps Science Center opened, creating a seamless space for lab work and Harkness discussion. Five years later, Phelps Academy Center (formerly the Thompson Science Building) came along.

That facility, mirrored here in the science center’s windows, has become an epicenter for the Academy community. Both buildings are reflective of alumni generosity and the opportunities such selflessness creates for each and every Exonian. —Photo by Christian Harrison

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The Exeter Bulletin

Principal Instructor Lisa MacFarlane ’66 (Hon.); P’09, P’13 Editor Karen Ingraham Associate Editor Genny Beckman Moriarty Class Notes Editor Janice M. Reiter Contributing Editor Karen Stewart Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 Trustees President Eunice Johnson Panetta ’84 Vice President Marc C. de La Bruyère ’77 Wole C. Coaxum ’88, Walter C. Donovan ’81, John A. Downer ’75, Mark A. Edwards ’78, David E. Goel ’89, Jacqueline J. Hayes, Esq. ’85, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, Eiichiro Kuwana ’82, Lisa MacFarlane, Sally J. Michaels ’82, Deidre O’Byrne ’84, Kerry Landreth Reed ’91, Dr. Nina D. Russell ’82, Peter M. Scocimara ’82, Serena Wille Sides ’89, J. Douglas Smith ’83, Morgan C. Sze ’83, Remy White Trafelet ’88, and Nancy H. Wilder ’75 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring and summer,

by Phillips Exeter Academy 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460 Telephone 603-772-4311 Periodicals postage paid at Exeter, NH, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA by Cummings Printing.

The Exeter Bulletin is printed on recycled paper and sent free of charge to alumni, parents, grandparents, friends, and educational institutions by Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH. Communications may be addressed to the editor; email bulletin@exeter.edu.

Copyright 2016 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.

ISSN-0195-0207

CHERYL SENTER

Postmasters: Send address changes to: Phillips Exeter Academy Records Office 20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460

“SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IS, AT ITS HEART, COLLABORATION WITH OTHER SCIENTISTS ... THAT WAS ALIVE AND PRESENT IN THIS COURSE.” —page 30

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IN THIS ISSUE

Volume CXXII, Issue no. 1

Features

30 The Stan-Ex Connection

Exonians’ partnership with Stanford’s Seung Kim ’81 is having an impact.

By Daneet Steffens ’82

36 Against the Odds

With the help of classmates, Anthony Weller ’75 keeps the creativity flowing

By Karen Stewart

40 Harkness in the Community

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Exeter teams up with local schools to create new opportunities for students.

By Debbie Kane

Departments 6

Around the Table: Non Sibi, Meet an Exonian, Advice on Dorm Life, Exeter Deconstructed and more

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Table Talk with David Finkelhor ’64

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Inside the Writing Life: A Conversation with Joan Wickersham ’74

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Sports: Achieving Goals by Providing Assists

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Connections: News and Notes from the Alumni Community

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Profiles: Jack Gilpin ’69, Scott McVay ’51 and Krissy Truesdale ’15

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Finis Origine Pendet: Maybe This Time, in This Place, by Ariel Kim ’16 —Cover illustration by James Steinberg

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AROUND THE TABLE

What’s new and notable at the Academy

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By Lisa MacFarlane ‘66 (Hon.); P’09, P’13

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uch of what unites Exonians on campus and beyond is a shared desire to imagine new possibilities, why-nots, and what-ifs. From that impulse, they create original works of art and scholarship; they imagine new possibilities for putting ideals into action; and they rekindle friendships through the spark of non sibi. As in any good Harkness process, when an individual’s idea meets the ingenuity of the group, the results are wondrous and far-reaching.

Our ongoing work with Dr. Seung Kim ’81 and his lab at Stanford University is a wonderful example of the research itch (page 30). An initial conversation between Seung and Anika Ayyar ’14 led to student internship opportunities at Seung’s lab and a new biology course at Exeter. That course now serves as a model for other schools and is having an impact on scientific inquiry around the globe with a recently published paper co-authored by Seung, two of his Stanford colleagues, and 24 Exonians.

In Raymond, a rural community just west of Exeter, John McDaniels wanted to help more public school graduates matriculate into competitive colleges (page 40). He began talking with Exeter faculty on how to achieve this. Seven years, several collaborations, and two donated Harkness tables later, his Reach High Scholars Program serves as a bridge between the Raymond school system and Exeter, offering support and training for teachers interested in the Harkness method and scholarship opportunities for students who wish to attend Exeter Summer.

Sometimes, all it takes is a simple letter: a plea by one classmate to come to the aid of another.

This is so often where Exonians truly shine, in their grace and selflessness. I am incredibly moved by alumnus Anthony Weller’s story (page 36). He is battling a life-threatening form of multiple sclerosis and his daily challenges are significant, and yet he is unflagging in his commitment to his art. His is a beautiful story of spirit, non sibi, and the timeless bonds created at this school.

I am inspired by these stories, and by dozens of others. They demonstrate for me what is special about our school, and they reaffirm the surest foundation upon which we build the Exeter of tomorrow. We look forward to sharing with you many more stories like this, and to continue working with all Exonians to nurture and support creativity and the remarkable things that spring from it. E

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efore Hillary Aristotle ’17 journeyed from her home in Jakarta for her first year at Exeter, she forged a relationship with a group of children who have had a profound impact on her: She volunteered at Lentera Anak Pelangi (LAP), a nonprofit organization that aids children and pre-teens with HIV — many of whom are orphaned and living with aging caregivers who lack the resources and education to provide for their unique needs.

Invited to shadow LAP’s caseworkers, Aristotle was moved by the children she met during their home visits, but what she remembers the most was their spirit. Despite the fact that many were living in poverty and with the stigma of HIV, which is still quite strong in Indonesia, “They didn’t seem so deprived,” Aristotle says. “Most can’t tell they have HIV. They’re lively, they chatter, they’re just kids.”

During the school year, Aristotle found herself thinking of those kids.

Three years later, she is still involved with LAP and has developed friendships with several HIV-positive children during her summers at home.

Those relationships fostered a deeper understanding of the complex social issues that affect young people living with HIV — and a strong conviction that any effective treatment model must also ensure emotional and psychological support. “There is a disconnect between what the policies try to achieve and what we need,” she says.

Disease management has come a long way in the past 30 years. Faithful adherence to a treatment plan with antiretroviral medication can make the virus virtually undetectable in many cases. But while doing research with UNAIDS this past summer, Aristotle bumped up against a startling fact: “Even when antiretroviral treatment is provided free of charge [as it is in Jakarta], the kids don’t always take it.” That fact troubled her. Missed doses can lead to immunosuppression and resistance to the first- and second-line medications. “Those third-line medications are more expensive and harder to come by,” she says. “The results of not taking them can be tragic.”

Aristotle wanted to know more about what motivates teens and tweens living with HIV to make healthy or unhealthy decisions. She suspected poor decisions were sometimes caused by helplessness — “They’re living in poverty and many are orphans whose parents have died of AIDS. It might be hard to imagine a future” — or, by youthful hubris: “ ‘The virus is in me, but I feel fine. Why interrupt my day to take handfuls of chunky pills when I’d rather be out playing?’ ” Haunted by a question that “had no right or wrong answer,” she began conducting interviews with HIV-positive children to find out what their experiences were like in the hopes that she might be able to help. This past summer, she filmed a documentary with the support of a local production company in Jakarta. Released in September on YouTube, Pills Aren’t Enough is her effort to combat the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS and to raise awareness among the rest of the population.

At a special assembly last spring, Aristotle shared what she’d learned thus far about HIV and AIDS with her fellow Exonians. Urging her peers not to “immerse themselves in the Exeter bubble,” she exhorted them to go out in the world. The young humanitarian, who will graduate from Exeter in June, plans to take her own advice. While she isn’t sure where the future will take her, she feels certain it will involve helping other people: “It’s something I can see myself doing for a lifetime.” E

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Welcome New Trustees These four alumni began their tenure as Academy trustees on July 1, 2016. We welcome and thank them for their willingness to serve the Academy in these leadership positions.

Nancy H. Wilder ’75 of Chicago, a senior consultant on

Sexual Misconduct Consulting and Investigations Division at T&M Protection Resources, is a first-generation private school and college student. She attended Exeter in the earliest days of coeducation under Principal Stephen Kurtz. After earning an A.B. from Dartmouth in 1979, she returned to Exeter as an instructor, dormitory parent and coach, while also serving in the Admissions and Development offices. Wilder later attended law school at the University of Notre Dame, completing her J.D. in 1987.

Upon finishing a clerkship with the Maine Supreme Court, she relocated from New England to Chicago, practicing first in civil litigation and later prosecuting violent crimes against women as a Cook County state’s attorney.

An ardent supporter of the Academy and its mission, Wilder has held many and varied volunteer roles since her graduation. From 1987-89 she was a class agent, and she has served as an Admissions representative since 1988.

Leading up to her 20th Exeter reunion in 1995, Wilder served as Program Committee chair, and was a Reunion Committee member for her subsequent 25th and 30th reunions. From 1990-94 she was a regional association officer for Chicago, and since 2010 she has served as her class president. Of the Academy, Wilder says, “Exeter’s greatest gift to me was an absolute confidence that, with hard work, nothing was beyond my grasp.”

Jacqueline Jourdain Hayes ’85 is senior vice president and deputy general counsel in legal and business affairs at Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc. Hayes resides in Los Angeles. The daughter of a single mother, Hayes attended Exeter on scholarship and, in 1989, earned her B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe. She went on to obtain a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1992.

Since 1996, Hayes has served Exeter as an admissions representative in Los Angeles. She likewise served as the class of 1985’s 10th Reunion Attendance Committee chair and as Reunion General Gift chair for her 15th reunion. Committed to sharing “the gift of non sibi,” Hayes has served as a literacy volunteer, a mentor to inner-city youth, pro bono counsel to unaccompanied minor immigrants from Latin America, and a volunteer for various political campaigns

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and voter registration initiatives. She credits Exeter with giving her the tools “to lead a happy and meaningful life.”

Since July 2012, both Wilder and Hayes have served as elected directors of the General Alumni Association.

Serena Wille Sides ’89 of Washington, D.C., first joined the

Academy community in the fall of 1986, when she matriculated as a new lower from Connecticut. She would go on to captain the girls ice hockey team, to serve as a head guide for the Admissions Office, and to receive, in her senior year, the Ruth and Paul Sadler ’23 Cup. After graduating from Exeter, Sides enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1993. She later graduated from Harvard Law School, earning her J.D. in 1997. She spent six years in New York City as a corporate associate before moving to Washington, D.C., to work with the National Commission on Terror Attacks upon the United States (known as the 9/11 Commission) and, briefly, with the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst.

She returned to practicing law in D.C. as a senior counsel to financial institutions from 2006-13.

Since graduating from the Academy, Sides has served in various volunteer roles on behalf of her class, most recently as class president. In 2014, she began studying for her master’s in divinity at the Virginia Theological Seminary. She will be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in June 2017 and hopes to serve in an Episcopal parish in the D.C. area.

Peter M. “Scotch” Scocimara ’82; P’16, P’18, a resident of Menlo Park, California, is senior director of global support for Google. After graduating from Exeter, he attended Brown University, earning his B.A. in 1987. He completed his MBA at Harvard University in 1993.

The father of two Exonian daughters, Scocimara has been a regular volunteer at Exeter for more than two decades, serving as a member of the 10th Reunion Major Gift Committee, and as chair of the Major Gift Committee for his 20th reunion and of the Program Committee for his 25th reunion. For nine years, from 2002-11, he chaired the Planned Giving Committee for his class, and he was a class agent from 2007-11. A strong believer in the power of Harkness learning and collaboration, Scocimara seeks through his service to his alma mater to “secure the future of Exeter and amplify Exeter’s impact on the world beyond.” E

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SEEN ON SOCIAL Here’s a look at the best pictures and posts from the start of the school year.

Follow @phillipsexeter on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to fill your news feed daily with more scenes ACADEMY LIFE DAY Each year, early in the fall, Exeter cancels classes for a day to give dorms and advisee groups a chance to bond.

and stories like these.

INSTAGRAM TAKEOVERS Exonians have been taking over our Instagram account, each for a day, to show what their lives are like at Exeter.

Follow along with seniors Abby Africa (pictured here), Kelvin Green, Joanna Papadakis, and more to come.

PROCTOR WORDS OF WISDOM Senior dorm leaders shared advice for incoming students on move-in day.

Watch the video at http://bit.ly/ProctorWisdom16

H4 CELEBRATES “CHARACTER DAY” H4, Exeter’s club focused on developing healthy habits, joined in a global initiative to recognize and build on people’s character strengths.

ESSO CLUB NIGHT Students signed up for extracurricular pursuits at ESSO’s Club Night and the Student Activities Interest Night.

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consciousness-raising around rape and sexual assault.”

At this same time, a significant shift was happening in the world of journalism. “Prior to the 1970s,” he explains, “sexual abuse was considered, among other sexual matters, too sensitive and explosive a topic for the press.

But then women like Paula Hawkins, a senator from Florida who had been sexually abused by a neighbor, started coming forward to share their stories. This resulted in a greater willingness among journalists to cover such issues.”

Finally, childhood development specialists began to view child sexual abuse as an area that merited professional specialization.

Such was the landscape when Finkelhor arrived in 1976 at the University of New Hampshire to complete his Ph.D. (started earlier at Harvard) under Murray Straus, a renowned expert in family violence.

From Straus, Finkelhor learned newly developed victim interview techniques that would prove invaluable to his dissertation research: “As a grad student, I realized that there was this burgeoning interest in child sexual abuse, but very little information about it beyond the anecdotal and police blotter sort. There was really no scientific information about how often it was happening in the general population, the dynamics involved, or its effects.”

That realization launched Finkelhor on a mission to “develop a model of causes and consequences” that has helped professionals and the general population alike to better understand how and why childhood sexual abuse happens and what can be done to prevent it.

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rofessor of Sociology David Finkelhor ’64 conducts social science research in an area that makes most people shudder — child sexual abuse and exploitation. This, of course, makes his work as director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center all the more critical. Founded in 1998 with the help of another Exeter alumnus, U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg ’65, the center’s mission is to “combat crimes against children by providing high quality research and statistics to the public, policy makers, law enforcement personnel, and other child welfare practitioners.” To accomplish this, Finkelhor and his team conduct regional and national surveys, and then synthesize findings and implications for professionals who work with victims and perpetrators in prevention and treatment programs.

While it seems unfathomable in the age of “helicopter parenting,” the notion of childhood suffering as a societal ill worthy of research is, according to Finkelhor, relatively modern. “Sustained policy interest in child maltreatment started only in the 1960s, beginning with the pediatric medical community,” he explains. “In those early days, the focus was on battered children and diagnosis through X-rays.” In the 1970s, however, the confluence of three major cultural changes served to broaden the definition of child abuse to include its sexual component.

“First,” Finkelhor says, “the women’s movement had taken root, and thanks to books like Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), there was much

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Depending upon the information one is seeking, Finkelhor and his team’s findings can seem startling and scary on the one hand, or heartening on the other. Some highlights: • After peaking in the 1980s, the rate of childhood

sexual abuse has declined by two-thirds since the 1990s, thanks to greater awareness of such abuse as criminal and harmful.

• According to Finkelhor, there is “an enormous diver-

sity of offenders; there is no simple profile.”

• One-third of childhood sexual abuse crimes that are

disclosed are actually committed by other youth.

• Ninety percent of childhood sexual abuse offenses

are perpetrated by someone with no prior record of offense.

• One-half of offenders have themselves been

victims of childhood sexual abuse.

• Ninety-five percent of offenders are male.

• The current re-offense rate among perpetrators

is 20 percent, lower than that for other violent crimes.

• Youths are more likely to be sexually assaulted

by someone they know in their family, neighborhood, school or social network.

• Children have overall rates of crime victimization

(including rape, robbery and aggravated assault) that are two to three times higher than adults. The Crimes Against Children Research Center was founded with this insight in mind.

Researching one area for so many decades has made Finkelhor a skilled predictor of trends, and he happily reports a decline in what he calls the “pass the trash” mentality that previously plagued institutions such as the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, and schools. The term refers to the practice of reassigning offenders within an organization to another branch of the same organization or a similar organization, without addressing the root cause of the abuse. “There is evidence that this is changing,” he explains, “including at private schools, where, in the past, leaders have been reluctant to fully investigate and report cases that were occurring because of the sense that it would do great damage to the institution. Most now see how destructive it is to students and to the wider school community when such covert management occurs.”

So, does that mean children who attend independent schools are more likely to suffer sexual, physical, and/ or emotional abuse? “I don’t think so,” says Finkelhor.

“Schools in general, and private schools in particular, are

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not particularly high-risk environments. In fact, the home poses a greater risk to the safety of children.”

As with all societal blights, there is much more data to be mined and understood about childhood sexual abuse, and Finkelhor and his team are leading the charge. At the macro level, Finkelhor would like to see a reform of the criminal justice system with children as victims, versus offenders, in mind. “Ironically,” he says, “we have in this country statutory prohibitions on revealing the names of juvenile offenders, but those statutes do not apply to juvenile victims of crimes. In order to make disclosure and prosecution easier, we need more supports within the justice system for our children.”

Broadening awareness through the dissemination of factual information is another area of focus. “There are still myths and misunderstandings when it comes

“...WE NEED MORE SUPPORTS WITHIN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM FOR OUR CHILDREN.” to childhood sexual abuse,” explains Finkelhor, “and that has created difficulty in terms of making policies in a rational way.” As an example, Finkelhor cites sex offender registries. “People are very hung up on these, but most new offenses occur at the hands of people with no prior record, so prevention efforts have to be a lot more general.” One way to achieve this would be for schools to provide information about sexuality that empowers students by helping them to understand what healthy romantic relationships look like. As a complement to more honest sexuality education programs, Finkelhor notes that the time has also come for “a systematic evaluation of existing prevention and information programs to determine which really work.”

One more recent program that is working, and bringing hope, is “bystander mobilization,” which means encouraging other youth or adults to intervene or report when they see something worrisome — like a friend engaging in online communications with someone much older, or a staff member spending an inordinate amount of time alone with one particular student. It is a way of intervening that is helping kids, teachers and staff to act on inappropriate things they may be seeing,” Finkelhor says. “It is also a good example of how we are using the tools of social science to help people understand and deal with social problems.” E

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CAMPUS LIFE AT A GLANCE

SKATEBOARD Avery Clowes ’20 rolls to class on a warm day in September.

LIFE ON THE QUAD Exonians take advantage of a sunny afternoon to spend time with friends.

FALL FUN “Croftettes” Sophie Windisch ’18, Cady Crowley ’17 and Zoe Marshall ’17 pick out pumpkins on Academy Life Day.

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DANCE Students practice their moves during a West African dance and dumming workshop.

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JOANNE LEMBO

JOANNE LEMBO

CHARACTER DAY Wynter Tracey ’19 holds up a card with a word that describes ones of her strengths, as part of an event sponsored by H4, Exeter’s health and wellness club.

JOANNE LEMBO

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL With 115 international students from 35 countries, Exonians took a day to celebrate the many cultures on campus.

MUSIC, MINGLING AND FOOD Tables in Elm Street Dining Hall became cultural centers during the festival.

JOANNE LEMBO

PASSPORT TO ITALY Students collected stamps in their “passports” at each table they visited during the festival.

AN APPRECIATION OF OTHERS From origami to sweet treats, cultural education was a creative and fun affair at the festival.

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Introducing a few of our talented, curious, hardworking, compassionate preps. As part of a new “Then/Now” series, we’ll check in with them again in the springtime to see what they’ve learned and how they’ve changed, and what their goals might be for next year. Until then, we wish them and every prep a successful first year at Exeter!

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHERYL SENTER

MEET OUR NEWEST EXONIANS

An Irvine, California native, Thomas recently moved to Hingham, Massachusetts Webster Hall “I’ve played flute for 5 1/2 years.”

Thomas is involved in Symphonia Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra, Latin Club, Pen Pals Club and prep soccer.

“I miss the food and my younger brothers (my older brother George is an upper at Exeter). I miss the mobility and the beach, too, but the past few weeks have been filled with so many great moments.”

“I want to develop relationships with my fellow students and the faculty and get the most out of being a boarding student.”

Pepper Pieroni

Leah Delacruz

Dallas, Texas Hoyt Hall

Lawrence, Massachusetts Hoyt Hall

“I want to squeeze every ounce of creativity and creation out of Exeter.” Pepper plays 11 instruments and has had two albums and two singles published.

Favorite place on campus: “The steps next to Agora. When the weather’s nice on the weekends, I can sit and play the guitar and the ukulele.”

“My dad was raised on a farm and was the first person in his family to go to college, so boarding school was definitely not on our meal plan. But I found [Exeter] and I fell in love.”

“I really like to do math, because I’m a geek and I like to solve problems.”

Significant object: “That would have to be a photo of my mom and my brother.

They’re the two people I trust the most, and I love them.”

A favorite person at Exeter: “My friend Cristal.

We’ve spent a lot of time together and we’ve definitely gotten closer with inside jokes. Now, when I mention something, we both crack up.”

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Leah Cohen

Caroline Fleming

Allentown, Pennsylvania Amen Hall

Palo Alto, California Bancroft Hall

“I’ve been playing field hockey for five years. I play all year round.” Leah also loves reading and spending time with friends and family.

Significant object: “Probably a necklace that my uncle gave me for my bat mitzvah. I’m wearing it now.”

“I like to hang out with all the girls in [Amen]. We tried to bake, but that didn’t go so well; we burned the chocolate, which apparently is hard to do! We’re going to try again, and we’ll see how that goes.”

“I love to play soccer. I also play basketball and run track, [and] I love to listen to music and watch Netflix; I’m a big believer in Netflix!”

“I was kind of expecting to be confused and alone for the first few weeks [but] especially in my dorm, everyone has been really nice.”

“I love my roommate.

We watch ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ together all the time, and we have the same taste in candy — which is very important.”

Billy Menken

Jack Liu

Woodbury, Minnesota Abbot Hall

Columbus, Ohio Webster Hall

Describing his interests: “Can I say learning? I love to learn.” Billy enjoys math, science, music (piano and voice) and foreign languages, and he plays varsity soccer.

“My favorite class right now is German. I’m just in love with the teacher. He’s a great guy. He’s comedic, and he sometimes sings for us in class.”

“As a person, I’ve always valued kindness and respect, so I try to say good morning to people on the paths, and I always try to help people out with different things.”

“I play multiple instruments — piano, flute, saxophone, so I really like music. Sports [are also] important to me. I try to stay fit.”

“I took a lot of the music I play back home and filed it in a binder. When I feel like going out to play, I just grab it [off my desk] and walk over to the music building. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of that!”

“I do prefer Harkness. I think it’s a different way to approach problems and the work is more fulfilling to me.”

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Advice on Dorm Life I S A D O R A K R O N ’ 1 9 A N D TA R A W E I L ’ 1 9

By Leah Williams

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rganization, or the lack of it, was an early sign that Bancroft Hall roommates Isadora Kron ’19 and Tara Weil ’19 would get along. Both are messy, Tara says, “but it works. The biggest problem is when other people come in.”

The two arrived with different perspectives and backgrounds: Isadora from Miami, Tara from Chicago. Tara, familiar with boarding school life, was eager to live in such an “atmosphere of trust.” Isadora feared leaving her family, describing her Exeter decision as “a leap of faith.”

But when the two chat about their experiences of dorm life, they laugh, adopt similar gestures, even finish each other’s sentences. In animated voices, they share discoveries and advice about communal living at Exeter: You’ll have awkward moments.

Friends and roommates Isadora Kron and Tara Weil

“I love hugging people,” says Isadora.

“I guess Tara’s not [into it]. I didn’t know that.” Tara walked into the room after volleyball preseason practice when they were first living together. “I was hot and sweaty,” she says.

“I go in for the hug,” says Isadora. “It was very awkward, but I’m never going to forget it.”

“I’ve gotten better at hugging people,” laughs Tara.

You’ll realize you haven’t thought everything through, including decorating.

Early in her prep year, Isadora came back from the Democratic Club, her arms full of Bernie Sanders posters. As she neared their room, she suddenly panicked: she hadn’t discussed politics with Tara.

Luckily, she didn’t have to worry. Tara likes the posters as much as she does.

You can sniff out group bonding.

Where the food is, the roommates explain, you’ll find dorm peers to befriend.

Someone, they agree, will always want a snack break the same time you do.

Food is the center of dorm gatherings, when peers watch movies together, go to the beach, make each other mugs or plan a party, like Tara’s for Principal’s Day, which involved toasting the year with sparkling apple juice, pizza, and chips on this surprise day off in spring.

The roommates admit that such easy bonding wasn’t immediate: Those used to being at the top of their classes in previous schools initially tried to impress, but that

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changed as all the dorm mates got to know each other.

“Close proximity was really the defining experience of my year,” says Isadora. “You can’t help but get close to each other.”

Tara agrees, “You can strike up a conversation with everyone.” And, of course, grab a snack.

You’ll share much with your roommate, including differences.

The two describe favorite moments with each other — late nights when they were just laughing. “We can always talk about everything,” says Tara. Both are athletes and lovers of “Sherlock.” Isadora, co-head of the school’s student-run Culinary Association, can discuss the best follow-up to a meal with Tara, a member of the Baking Club. They love English and history classes and adore books.

But they’re not as in sync in habits as they are in hobbies or conversation. “We have different enough nighttime cycles,” says Isadora. “I get up a lot earlier.”

“I feel like waking her up some nights,” Tara confesses.

“CLOSE PROXIMITY WAS REALLY THE DEFINING EXPERIENCE OF MY YEAR,” SAYS ISADORA. “YOU CAN’T HELP BUT GET CLOSE TO EACH OTHER.”

Dorm life can relieve your stress.

The two gush about the dorm faculty who support them, especially English Instructor and Director of Studies Brooks Moriarty. “He goes with the flow,” explains Isadora, who praises his skill in calming student worries.

Faculty advisers also check Tara’s eagerness, which can lead her to overcommit herself: She has to mentally go through each day of the week to remember all of her activities.

Isadora helps Tara too. Roommates hold you accountable for not going to extremes, Tara explains. Isadora remembers times when she was stressed, and Tara walked her through each day, how to break down the tasks. Before long, she returned the favor for Tara.

You’ll miss the dorm when you’re home.

Tara and Isadora are living together again during their lower year and are already planning beach and bowling trips. The two girls miss each other and their dorm friends during trips home. “Sleeping is not a problem,” says Tara. “It’s when you’re awake.”

“Not being able to walk two steps down the hall and say, ‘Let’s go to Stillwells [for ice cream],’ ” adds Isadora. “Not being a quarter-mile from all of your friends.” That easy access to such a close-knit group of peers is difficult to replicate off campus, and why the girls look forward to another year of dorm bonding. E

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Making Community from Food M E L I N DA L EO N A R D A N D H E I D I B RO USS E AU

By Abigail Perham

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“

ABIGAIL PERHAM

wear this necklace every day as a reminder to be conscious and to lead by example,” says Heidi Brousseau as she holds out a smooth, round pendant with these words etched into it: “Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” As the dining services manager at Wetherell, one of Exeter’s two dining halls, Brousseau’s actions have a direct impact on what Exonians eat and how they view the world of food. Melinda Leonard, associate director of dining services, brings a similar inspiration to her work, one that dates back to her childhood in the ’70s, “when everything was about being green.”

For more than 20 years, Brousseau and Leonard have used their experience and their focus on initiating a healthier and more sustainable dining environment to reinvent the way Exonians view breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“When you have that true passion for food, it pushes you to learn everything you can,” says Brousseau. The pair have participated in Menus of Change, a collaboration of researchers, chefs and policy makers working to direct the mainstream food industry toward healthier and more sustainable choices, since its inception four years ago. Inspired by a variety of Menus of Change goals, Brousseau and Leonard now serve less red meat, prepare more plant-based dishes, collaborate with local farmers and have added whole grains to the menu.

“It’s all about adding choices. Adding new, healthy ingredients students might never have heard of,” Leonard says.

“Like quinoa, or kelp!” Brousseau adds.

Under the pair’s guidance, Exeter has spearheaded the use of LeanPath, an innovative program focused on minimizing food waste, and was one of the first schools to purchase from Red’s Best, a Boston-based seafood company that distributes locally caught, under-fished species.

“We have our finger on the pulse of staying aware and conscious of what’s happening in our world,” says Leonard. “We’re always thinking of the future ­­— trying to find new ways to engage

Heidi Brousseau and Melinda Leonard make it easy and fun to eat healthfully.

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“WHEN YOU HAVE THAT TRUE PASSION FOR FOOD, IT PUSHES YOU TO LEARN EVERYTHING YOU CAN.”

CHRISTIAN HARRISON

with our students, to educate, to make every level of dining better.”

This focus on a healthy food future has long roots for both women. “My great-great-grandparents were farmers, and I think that does ingrain in you, maybe somewhere in your DNA,” says Brousseau, who spends her days doing everything from troubleshooting inventory issues to training staff on a new recipe.

“My fondest memories are going to camp and being surrounded by farm-fresh produce. There’s nothing like a beefsteak tomato right out of the garden, or corn on the cob slathered in butter. It’s about the source. Good, clean food is just so [satisfying],” she adds.

“My family and I were foodies before the term existed,” explains Leonard, who supports every aspect of dining at Exeter — from planning events to managing finances. “Food was the centerpiece of our communication.”

The two women use an open-door policy to stay engaged with students. “We really want to bring students into the bakery and the kitchen, and let them see what we do and voice any questions or concerns,” says Leonard.

“We had a student who had a lot of allergies. I remember his mother was worried that he wouldn’t ask any questions, because he was shy and very polite,” Brousseau explains. The pair introduced him to the cooks and provided a tour of the kitchen.

Eventually he developed a friendly relationship with the entire dining staff. “He’ll come up to ask questions all the time, or just to say hello,” Brousseau says with a smile.

The pair meets with student council members once a month to discuss new plans and ideas. You’ll find them at the forefront of Exeter’s annual Climate Action Day, or collaborating with students on how to reduce food waste — known as the Zero Waste Initiative — or working with the Animal Rights Club.

They’ve both made an array of student-driven ideas In October, Dining Services invited the Exeter possible, ranging from sourcing and providing organic community to attend a vendor showcase. Students, bananas to developing a review-based mobile app for staff and faculty were treated to a delicious array dining services. of locally-sourced foods and global flavors that “You get really passionate students, and it works highlighted the department’s commitment to seamlessly with creating that balance between fun healthy, sustainable cooking. and food education,” says Brousseau.

“This is the home of over 1,000 students. This is Above, Environmental Health and Safety Specialist their kitchen table. Food is a common language with Tyler Griswold with some greens ready for sampling. all of us,” says Leonard. E

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Music and Politics in Harmony HOJOON KIM ’17

By Leah Williams

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o senior Hojoon Kim, getting to know new people is like trying to relate to a piece of music he didn’t write. In music competitions, “You’re required to understand it to win.

“Once you understand it,” he explains, “it’s part of you.”

Kim, who performed with the Boston Pops under Keith Lockhart last spring thanks to his win at the Boston Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition, often reflects on the connections between music and his life at Exeter. He sees empathy as “part of the curriculum,” and he describes moving into Browning House, a dorm that included other preps like him, and sharing a common nervousness with his peers that helped them relate to one another and adjust to life at Exeter.

Getting to know others isn’t easy, he admits.

But neither is learning a piece of music.

Describing his experience with Totentanz (“Dance of the Dead”) by Franz Liszt, the song he played at Symphony Hall, he explains, “Linking your soul to music is hard. It’s really dense. It takes time.” Visualizing the scene the song inspired helped: images of skeletons dancing, having fun.

After he practiced on his own and then with the accompanist before the competition, he began to connect with the song’s meaning: “That’s when I really understood the higher perfection, the inner concordance,” he says. “Life is long and hard. At the end of the day we’re all humans.

We end in the same place.”

His difficulty with the song reminded him of his attitude toward performance: “If I’m struggling with a piece, I just put it out there,” he says. Kim applies the same philosophy to public speaking, another passion.

He began to love it and the confidence it has given him while at Exeter. He was not a member of Student Council during his prep year, but he now holds the position of vice president. “Experience is not the first thing the school values,” he adds.

Kim is active in the Phillips Exeter Academy Model UN team and spent last summer working for the Korean National Assembly. Born in Seoul, he remembers watching his uncle, a politician, on television. While he speaks

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Korean fluently, Kim labors with writing in it, making his reports on the unification of West and East Germany as part of the preparations for the National Audit of the Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee a struggle.

But after his time at the Harkness table, he wasn’t afraid to ask questions, and was less worried about making mistakes. “Everyone is there to help you,” he says.

Kim is often struck by parallels between the political studies he wants to pursue in college and his music. When playing a piece, Kim explains, “You’re out of your body.

You’re not sitting on a chair playing piano. You’re into it.

You’re listening.” This summer, he immersed himself in interning in Washington, D.C. for Rep. Charles Rangel, who represents the 13th Congressional District of New York. A 2015 Department of State Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellow, he’s particularly interested in diplomacy, which will require empathizing with the needs of those around him, just as music does.

“In the beginning,” he says, thinking of his work in politics and music, “those two passions stemmed separately.” But now, “everything is coming together.” E

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DAVE JAMROG

NEW PERFORMANCE SPACE OPENS The Class of 1959 Music Center Addition is complete! Exonians have been taking advantage of its many offerings, including a musicianship studio and “The Bowld” — a magnificent 4,000-square-foot auditorium with seating for 250. Practices and performances will reach new heights in these spaces, and the entire Exeter community will enjoy the many concerts that will now have a home here.

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EXETER DECONSTRUCTED T H E S C H O O L W E L O V E I N D E TA I L

BANCROFT HALL The completion of BANCROFT HALL in September 1935 marked the final stage of construction under the Harkness Plan, launched five years earlier — and saw the end of nearly a decade of building on campus. The addition of seven new dormitories from 1925-35 allowed the Academy to provide space for 300 additional students. For the first time, all boarding students could be housed on campus.

The Exonian reported on March 27, 1935, that “the newest and last dormitory provided by the Harkness gift” would be named Bancroft Hall, after GEORGE BANCROFT, class of 1813.

George Bancroft was 11 YEARS OLD when he arrived at Exeter in 1811, and he graduated two years later at the tender age of 13. He pursued his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, where he also completed a one-year course in divinity, and went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy and theology at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

ANATOLI LVOV/CREATIVE COMMONS

At Bancroft’s request, PRESIDENT LINCOLN wrote out what became known as the “Bancroft Copy” — one of only five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address.

(To learn more, visit: http:// www.gettysburgfoundation. org/41).

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A statesman, historian and Unitarian minister, Bancroft served as secretary of the U.S. Navy under President Polk, helping to establish the United States Naval Academy during his 18-month tenure. He was later appointed minister to Great Britain.

THE BANCROFT TOWER (left) was erected in Worcester, Massachusetts, in his honor.

Dining hall meals were formal affairs in the 1930s.

Students wore coats and ties at mealtime and sat in assigned seats, a fact that rankled at least one op-ed writer, who argued in the October 24, 1934, edition of The Exonian: “Surely a little FREEDOM AT MEALTIME would hurt no one. Even a horse sometimes gets tired of the neigh of his stablemates.”

Bancroft Hall’s gracious common room began its life as a DINING HALL. First opening its doors in January 1935 (nine months before the rest of the building was completed), it was served for many years by an underground kitchen, which was also used to prepare food for the Webster and Dunbar dining rooms.

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The Organizing Principle A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H J O A N W I C K E R S H A M ’ 74

By David Weber

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meritus English Instructor David Weber

interviewed author Joan Wickersham ’74 about the creative process and her writing career, which spans nearly three decades and includes her memoir and 2008 National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index; a book of short fiction, The News from Spain; and The Paper Anniversary, a novel.

Wickersham’s writing has appeared in leading literary journals and in The Best American Short Stories. She has read her work on National Public Radio’s “On Point” and “Morning Edition” and writes a regular op-ed column for The Boston Globe.

Weber ’71, ’74, ’83 (Hon.); P ’92, who joined the Academy’s English Department in 1970, has published five essays about teaching English in Independent School magazine and co-edited three books for the PEA Press. He also compiled and edited Civil Disobedience in America: A Documentary History for the Cornell University Press.

Q: Most of your published work has been literary.

Do you see your monthly op-eds in The Boston Globe as an entirely separate undertaking?

Wickersham: The process of writing the Globe pieces is such a nice change of pace for me. I’m generally a slow, private, doubt-filled writer, and the column comes with some firm, and welcome, constraints: a deadline and a word count. I like to experiment with all the different forms an op-ed column can take: personal essay, deadpan rendering of the rhetoric in gun magazines, analysis of one-star Amazon reviews of Goodnight Moon as an analogy for press coverage of the Tea Party.

The author of three books, Joan Wickersham ’74 finds writing away from home to be most successful.

Q: Are you able to sustain your work without the curse and boon of a daily writing practice?

Wickersham: I work in spurts. And I like to go away. My first residency at the MacDowell Colony, in 2004, was a revelation: being alone in the woods in a cabin with nothing to do but write. When I go away the writing starts to talk to me in a different way — it’s like the radio can suddenly get a station that is not available at home. Since then I’ve done many residencies, and I also find other ways to go away. A writer friend has a house on Cape Cod, and she and I will go there for a few days and not speak to each other until 4 every afternoon. Other friends have

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loaned me houses. I’ve just discovered Airbnb. And when I can’t get away, I work in coffee shops.

“I THREW OUT A 400-PAGE MANUSCRIPT AND STARTED OVER — BUT GETTING STUCK IS AN IMPORTANT INVESTMENT IN FINDING THE RIGHT WAY TO TELL A STORY.”

Q: Your friends know you as a curious, thoughtful and committed reader. Does your reading inform your thinking about your own work or is it just part of your life as a whole?

Wickersham: I’m always reading for pleasure, but also for permission — to be reminded that there’s an infinite variety among writers’ voices, and that the job of any piece of writing is to be fully itself. I love Dickens for the rhythm and extravagance of his sentences; George Eliot for her insight into how we disappoint other people and ourselves; Isak Dinesen for her non sequiturs and her ferocious belief in a strong narrative stance; William Maxwell for his austerity and modesty; James Baldwin for emotional precision; Tim O’Brien for allowing wrestling with the story to be the story.

Q: Does a fully realized piece require its own new form, not just descriptive skill and the authority of honesty?

Wickersham: A lot of what I’m doing when I write is trying to figure out the inherent rules of a particular piece — the form or structure that will be most true to the story. My husband, Jay [Wickersham ’73], is trained as an architect. A long time ago, when I was struggling to write about my father’s suicide, he told me that students at the École des Beaux-Arts begin each design with a parti — an organizing principle. The parti of the Exeter library, for instance, is a sphere within a cube. I found this idea of the parti exciting and liberating. I’d been wrestling for years with how to organize the messy and painful story of my father’s death, and part of the problem was that the story defied any attempt at a conventional linear narrative. When I stumbled on the parti of organizing the book as an index, suddenly I had this cool, numb structure that simultaneously imposed order and ridiculed the idea of imposing order on an inherently chaotic experience.

A parti for a piece of writing can be a generative tool that disappears by the time you get to the final version, or it can stick, and remain discernible. Sometimes, as in The Suicide Index, it emerges from the material.

And sometimes it can be the opposite. The News from Spain started with a parti: I gave myself the assignment to write a group of stories, each with the same title. The title would mean something different in each story, but in each case it had to feel essential and not shoehorned in. It wasn’t until I’d written a few of them that I realized I was writing a book with a common theme — each story was a kind of unconventional, asymmetrical love story.

Q: You’ve sustained your output over many years. Does the problem of writer’s block seem remote to you, or have you struggled at times to give your work the priority it required?

Wickersham: There’s a very funny little moment in a movie I once saw, where a bored, impatient woman is trying to figure out where a piece fits into a jigsaw puzzle and she finally just puts it somewhere and smacks it in with her fist. Writer’s block is a sign that what I’m doing isn’t working, and I can’t fix it by trying to ram something into a place where it doesn’t belong. It can take months to figure out that what I thought was a piece of the sky is actually a piece of the ocean, or that it’s part of a different

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puzzle altogether. I hate writer’s block, but am always grateful to it in hindsight. It usually means that what I’ve been writing is somehow false, which is just as bad in fiction as in nonfiction.

Writer’s block slows me down and makes me throw out pages and drafts — after I’d been working on the book about my father’s suicide for nine years I threw out a 400-page manuscript and started over — but getting stuck can be an important investment in finding the right way to tell a story.

Q: You once gave an assembly about

the two classic writing rules that were insisted on here: ‘show, don’t tell’ and ‘write what you know,’ and said that writers ought to respect them without being in thrall to them. … Have you found other rules that work for you, or have you accumulated enough experience to be able to set rules aside?

Wickersham: “Write what you know” doesn’t mean you need to write autobiographically; it means, write what you know, not what you think you’re supposed to know. Don’t try to sound like anyone else. Go deeper into the particular weirdness of whatever it is you’re writing about. And “show, don’t tell” means you need to think carefully about which details to zoom in on and when to avert your eyes. Look at E. B. White’s description of Charlotte’s death. He shows in great detail how the performers at the country fair break down the rides and drive away in their trailers, and he shows the trash and empty bottles lying on the grass — and then he tells you the big thing, in the simplest, quietest language imaginable: “No one was with her when she died.”

He is utterly subverting the conventional “show, don’t tell” wisdom, which would insist on the details of the spider’s death — and it’s exactly that, his subversion of our expectations, that gives the passage its power. There’s no way you can teach someone how to do that — it comes after years of struggling with those same damned rules we all learned in an Exeter English class. E

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Alumni are encouraged to advise the Bulletin editor (bulletin@ exeter.edu) of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of classmates, for inclusion in future Exonians in Review columns. Please send a copy of your published work to the editor to be considered for an extended profile in future issues. Works can be sent to: Bulletin Editor, Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833-2460.

ALUMNI 1962—J. Philip Jones.

Damaged Lives.

(CreateSpace, 2016) 1965—Charlie Smith. Ginny Gall. (HarperCollins, 2016) 1967—Vincent “Skip” Vaccarello. Finding God in Silicon Valley: Spiritual Journeys in a High-Tech World. (Creative Team Publishing, 2015)

FAC U LT Y/ F O R M E R FAC U LT Y Matt W. Miller. “Paint” [poem]. IN 32 Poems. (Issue 14.1, spring/summer 2016) —“Mulch” [poem]. IN Salamander. (Issue 42, summer 2016) —“And This Story” [poem]. IN The Florida Review. (v. 40, no.

1, spring 2016)

1968—Tony Seton. The Francie LeVillard Mysteries, Volume Nine. (CreateSpace, 2016) 1990—Eileen Kane.

Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. (Cornell University Press, 2015) 1993—Nick Psaris. Q Tips: Fast, Scalable and Maintainable Kdb+. (Vector Sigma, 2015)

Thomas W. Simpson. American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 18671940. (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) —“Recovery’s Rhythm and Blues – Thomas Simpson with Goran Simić in Bosnia” [nonfiction essay]. IN Numéro Cinq. (v. VII, no. 4, April 2016)

1998—Intisar Khanani. Memories of Ash (Book Two of the Sunbolt Chronicles). (Purple Monkey Press, 2016) 2001—Michael Salvatoriello.

Beyond You and I, the Remixes [CD]. (Land of ADM, 2016)

Ralph G. Sneeden. “Meditation” [poem]. IN Southwest Review. (v. 101, no. 3, fall 2015) — “Sheep May Safely Graze” [poem]. IN Ecotone. (no. 20, fall 2015) — “Contrapunctus (#2)” [poem]. IN The Southeast Review. (v. 34, no. 1, fall 2015)

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Achieving Goals by Providing Assists J I M M Y YO U N G ’ 1 6 P U T S H I S T E A M F I R S T

By Lynn Horowitch ’81; P’19

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o understand fully what makes Jimmy Young a special lacrosse player, it is helpful to

understand his formidable achievements. He is Exeter’s only three-time All- American in lacrosse, earning that honor for the first time in his lower year, his first at the Academy.

Young is also one of Exeter’s top scorers of all time, and he served as a co-captain during his senior year. Recruited by several Division I programs, he instead chose Division III Bowdoin College, because it felt like a “big Exeter.”

While these honors and successes are instructive, they don’t capture all of what makes Young an extraordinary player and teammate. It is necessary to know his preferred position and role on the field. As an attackman, he frequently was positioned at the X during his Exeter career, the one offensive player behind the opposing team’s goal. From that vantage point, Young could see

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PHOTO COURTESY OF JIMMY YOUNG

“YOUNG IS VERY QUICK, CAN SCORE GOALS, BUT HIS GREATEST ASSET IS AS A PLAYMAKER. JIMMY LOVES TO PASS THE BALL TO HIS TEAMMATES.” major in college. He particularly enjoyed the whole field and help set up the offensive Varsity lacrosse attack. “You’re kind of the quarterback,” seniors Ben Ferrucci, his Ecology class with Science Instructor Chris Matlack, whom Young calls “a really Young explains. The appeal? “From behind Andrew Bowman, great guy.” Other favorites included Human the net, you can feed the ball to your teamAdam MacKay Populations and Resource Consumption, and mates,” he says. “I could get my friends (manager), Jimmy Ornithology with his adviser and mentor, involved in the game, and I’d rather have an Young and Kevin Science Instructor Rich Aaronian. At the assist than a goal.”

Gilbert.

Honors Assembly held last spring, Young This selflessness did not go unnoticed was awarded the Frank Pinchot Prize in Environmental by his coaches. Head boys varsity lacrosse coach Bill Science.

Glennon observes, “Young is very quick, can score goals, Away from the field and the classroom, Young volunbut his greatest asset is as a playmaker. Jimmy loves to teers at various youth lacrosse camps. He says, “It’s cool pass the ball to his teammates.” to be on the other side, switching to coaching players.”

Quick to share the credit, Young points to his former And he worked for two summers at a vegetable farm in coach for providing great leadership and “know[ing] how Stratham, picking vegetables, weeding, washing the crops to get the most out of every single player.”

— “dirty, hard work” — but with a schedule that allowed Young first began playing lacrosse in elemenhim to work out in the weight room during afternoons. tary school. A native of Exeter — his mother is PEA “I don’t like sitting down, so I like to get outdoors,” he Admissions Officer Lee Young ’82; P’16 — he remembers being the ball boy at age 7 at Academy lacrosse games. He says. “I’m a nature guy.” Birding is also one of his favorite pastimes, inspired by Aaronian. “I’ve seen bald eagles was initially a three-sport athlete, competing in football, down by the river!” he says. basketball and lacrosse at Exeter High School, which With many athletic and academic accomplishments to he attended for two years before enrolling at PEA. His mother, a three-sport athlete at both Exeter and Hamilton his name, Young treasures one moment above all others.

At Exeter, he was part of the squad that “lost big” on the College, was his lacrosse coach into his early high school lacrosse field at Andover in his lower year. The next year, years, when he began to focus exclusively on that sport. playing at home, the team lost a heartbreaker in overtime His father, Jim Young, has been a stalwart on the sideto its archrival. In his senior year, once again at Andover, lines, too. the Big Red prevailed in a 7-6 nail-biter. “We held them Beyond the athletic fields, Young’s interest was in off,” Young says. “It was great!” E biology, with a focus on environmental science, his likely

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NET RESULT Located behind the baseball field, the new Tennis Center features 14 courts. When completed, it will include an elevated viewing plaza and built-in seating areas.

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(Above) Dr. Seung Kim ’81.

(Opposite page) Microscopic image of a fruit fly on G3 journal cover; also below and on following pages.

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n August, G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics, a journal of the Genetics Society of America, published

a peer-reviewed research paper titled “A Drosophila LexA Enhancer-Trap Resource for Developmental Biology and Neuroendocrine Research.” This paper was notable for two reasons: Science-wise, it reveals that the authors’ work and research have created a collection of new fruit fly lines that can be used flexibly by other science investigators. Perhaps more unusually, its authors include 24 Exeter graduates whose research findings, through an innovative lab and classroom collaboration between the Academy and Stanford University, are the centerpiece of this paper.

Since 2013, this “StanEx” program has introduced Exeter students to hands-on, open-ended biomedical research with which they have been creating and characterizing new strains of fruit flies. This research has taken place partly in the Stanford lab of Dr. Seung Kim ’81 during summer internships, and partly in Exeter’s classrooms during an 11-week course in which students’ work ties directly into Kim’s research to identify ways of potentially curing pancreatic cancer and diabetes. The Exeter-student-created strains are now in a public repository in Bloomington, Indiana, accessible to scientists across the globe, and interest in the paper has already generated requests for specific fruit fly lines from the collection from scientists in the U.S., England and Spain.

And it all started with a seminal meeting of like minds between an Exeter student and an Academy alum.

In the summer of 2011, between her prep and lower years at Exeter, Anika Ayyar ’14 was participating in Stanford Explore, a lecture series for high schoolers interested in medicine and biomedical research. When she expressed the idea of exploring a research-focused collaboration between Exeter and Stanford to the series director, he introduced her to Kim, a professor of developmental biology at Stanford whose lab works with — among other models — Drosophila, aka fruit flies. “I have been

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SYNERGY & SCIENCE HOW AN ONGOING COLLABORATION BETWEEN EXETER BIOLOGY CLASSES AND STANFORD RESEARCHERS IS IMPACTING THE WORLD OF SCIENCE

BY DANEET STEFFENS ’82

deeply interested in Biology since elementary school,” Ayyar says. “I was intrigued by the work in Dr. Kim’s lab at Stanford and found his passion for medicine and research extremely inspiring. I knew that my peers at Exeter would be similarly inspired to hear about his work, and so I requested for him to be invited to talk at an assembly during my sophomore year.”

Ayyar’s initiative, Kim’s subsequent visit as an assembly speaker in February 2012 — Ayyar introduced him — and Kim’s informal meeting with Exeter’s Biology Club the next day have generated exciting and far-reaching ramifications not just for Exeter students and faculty and Kim’s research lab, but for scientists across the world whose research efforts utilize fruit flies. About 75 percent of the human disease-causing genes are also found in the fruit fly, so manipulating a particular gene in fruit flies and then looking at the effects on those flies can help identify which genes are likely to cause diseases in humans. Compared with other animals, such as mice, fruit flies require less space and time to breed, so testing candidate disease genes over multiple generations in flies is comparatively cheaper and more efficient. The outcome of the Exeter students’ work, Kim notes, “will allow other scientists to manipulate the flies’ genes and cells in a new way that’s still compatible with the older, classic way. It increases enormously the combination of ways to manipulate the genes and cells in scientific investigations.”

Ultimately, StanEx is the kind of story of connection, collaboration, commitment and determination that epitomizes the best of what the Academy and its alumni can offer.

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GIVING AN IDEA LEGS

Anika Ayyar ’14

“That assembly talk was something that I worked on more than just about any other talk that I have ever given,” Kim recalls. “Those assemblies were so formative for me when I was at Exeter, so I really wanted to do a good job. But I thought, ‘How do I say something that will be meaningful and interesting and perhaps even funny?’ ” He hit on the exploits and Stonehenge-related achievements of Exeter Physics Instructor Richard Brinkerhoff to capture the sensation, and the savoring, of “Aha!” moments of discovery. But he also highlighted the persistence, endurance and sheer bloody-mindedness that such moments require: “In order to be a scientist you have to have these positive qualities. In my own development as a scientist, I realized sometime in my 20s that I couldn’t sleep at night because I was thinking about my experiments; I was really engaged by something, really engrossed in it.”

That was part of what Kim wanted to pass on to those future Exeter graduates, “that you’re all in search of that thing that will keep you up at night and make you persistent enough to weather all sorts of failure. Because science is really about — in addition to success — a lot of failure.”

From Brinkerhoff, Kim also learned the importance of writing —“he was an exacting editor,” even as a scientist. But one of the problems with science in high school, Kim notes, “is that you already know the answer: You’re doing an experiment, but it’s a perfunctory exercise where you already know the answer. The essence of what’s missing is a sense of wonder and discovery, that moment of realizing that you might be the first person ever to think something or connect something or to know something.”

When he met with the Biology Club in the Phelps Academy Science Center, Kim was assailed by the familiar odor of formaldehyded fetal pigs, “so I knew that, in terms of teaching science, some things hadn’t changed much.” He asked Biology Club faculty advisers and Science Instructors Anne Rankin ’92 and Townley Chisholm what they felt they were preparing students for.

“Townley said, without hesitation, ‘We’re preparing them for large college survey courses,’” Kim says. “So I asked, ‘Well, is that what you would like to be doing?’ and Anne told me that they’d explored possible opportunities to introduce undirected research into their classes, but those efforts hadn’t been successful. So I said, ‘Well, what about working with us?’”

It was a suggestion that proved inspiring to everyone from the Exeter faculty, administration and students to the postdocs in Kim’s lab. So what does achieving such levels of professionalism and industriousness at a relatively young age mean to the student participants? Just ask. “By my senior year at PEA I knew that I was passionate about computer science, math and biology,” says Lutfi Huq ’13, who built the database that makes the strains developed by Exeter students available to scientists and investigators worldwide. “This program was a way to essentially combine all three. The skills I’d learned in my computer science courses at Exeter allowed me to create this database. But that early exposure to real-world science, to research, was very pivotal in determining what I wanted to continue with in my career.”

“BECAUSE SCIENCE IS REALLY ABOUT — IN ADDITION TO SUCCESS — A LOT OF FAILURE.”

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Huq, a senior at Cornell who leveraged his StanEx experience into internships with the Mayo Clinic and the National Institutes of Health, is utilizing computer science and math as tools for his biology research and has a strong interest in microbiology: He plans to mix medicine and research as a physician scientist. “Scientific research is, at its heart, collaboration with other scientists,” he says. “That was alive and present in the course. Just by coming to Exeter, you’re already amidst kids who have very strong work ethics, strong moral and core work values; it was even more so in this context.

“My peers were driven and extremely collaborative. We discussed all the work we were doing with each other, and it imitated the exact sort of environment that you would see if you were doing, for example, a Ph.D. or running a lab. … We had very strong mentorship, but lots of the work was also conducted independently. Having that amount of trust and that opportunity to conduct basic science research with the availability of good mentorship, that’s what makes the program so wonderful.”

LEARNING THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR

“I don’t think I ever expected to have published a paper at 19,” says Madeline Logan ’15, now a premed sophomore at Yale majoring in biology and English. “It’s really, really cool.” The opportunity to work in Kim’s lab over a summer, she says, was eye-opening in unexpected ways. Logan discovered that real-life work, such as dissecting fruit fly larvae — “which is really hard because they are so small. You have to dissect them under a microscope with very thin devices” — isn’t just about the successes, but about the failures and how you use those failures to advance.

“Specifically in the scientific process, but also in general, you can have a tough time of it,” she says. “I messed up a bunch of my initial dissections; there were some bumps along the way.

But I learned from the scientists who mentored us that that’s OK, that that’s part of the process.

It’s normal. Learning that you can mess up like that and that it will ultimately end up being OK, that failure is something you can work through — that was important for me to learn.”

New lessons weren’t relegated just to students, however. Chisholm and Rankin, for their revised classroom roles, literally, and gamely, went back to grad school. “I did my master’s in ’88,” Chisholm says, “measuring neural output, the responses of orbitofrontal neurons to different olfactory, gustatory and sound stimuli, from the brain in an alert macaque monkey. This work with Seung and the students, though … I’ve never done genetics work like this, and the chance to get to do it and to go to Stanford for weeklong stints to be Ethan Gould ’16, Dr. Lutz Kockel and Rex Tercek ’16 at an trained by the postdocs … in terms of profesend-of-summer celebration. sional development, it’s like, well, my year of graduate school was like letting a kid loose in a candy store. This has been a return to the candy store. It’s just been so much fun.”

The program, he says, has an enormously positive impact on the students, as well as on the ways in which he and Rankin work together: “The other dimension of doing this course with a team teacher whom I’ve grown to know and admire even more than I did before is just wonderful, and, with two classes of six students each, you really get to know these students as individuals.

You’re engaged in a discovery process that is about discovery for the students but also discovery

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for the teachers. This is just one small area of genetics research that we cover,” he adds, “but it’s directly pertinent to human medical research, and hosting this joint enterprise, in our little lab here at Exeter, is fantastic.”

Chisholm has also noticed that program participation gives his students newfound confidence; it’s a real pleasure, he says, to watch that develop. “Students get to experience firsthand the power of modern genetics, they get to work with the latest techniques and tools, they get to ponder openended questions — it’s just great. They spend a good seven weeks not only developing these molecular biology techniques, they become very proficient in them and they are also thinking hard about what their data mean and how this fits into the rest of what Dr. Kim’s lab is doing. It’s incredibly exciting for the students to see what can be done.”

ENGAGING IN MEANINGFUL RESEARCH

Ayyar’s experience with the program affirms Chisholm’s words. Her participation sparked something in her, instilling a desire to be part of medicine and biology, she says, “because when you’re working on a problem related to diabetes or cancer, diseases that are very real and impact so many people globally, to think that you could contribute even in a small way to move that research forward in finding solutions and cures for those diseases, is highly motivating for a young high school student. That possibility alone is enough to make you passionate about working in this field for a long time.” Ayyar, a junior at Duke, completed an engineering internship with Google this summer and is studying biomedical engineering and computer science. “I’m interested in the intersection of technology and biology,” she says. “I want to learn more about how to make an impact in medicine through combining those two fields.”

From the start, Ayyar spent extra time in Kim’s lab helping to lay the groundwork for the program. “Over spring break, right after Dr. Kim came to Exeter for his talk, I was invited to join Mr. Chisholm and Ms. Rankin at Dr. Kim’s lab in Stanford, and listened as Dr. Kim and his team brainstormed what aspects of his research could be brought to Exeter,” she says. “At that point, I remember feeling like this was all kind of over my head: How were we, high school students, going to grasp and conduct sophisticated, real-world research? The genetics and scientific concepts involved in the course were very advanced — you wouldn’t go into that much depth even in an AP biology class. So it was a little daunting at first, but the novelty and challenge was also incredibly exciting: Fly stocks are going to be shipped from Stanford to Exeter and students were going to be working on a real Gathering of Bio470 interns with their Stanford mentors at project with wide-reaching implications! The fact that the Kims’ home in 2015: Dr. Ronald W. Alfa, Kathleen Rose they trusted us with that kind of responsibility was mind Skelly, Emma Herold ’13, Rex Tercek ’16, Elle MacAlpine ’14 boggling but really cool.” and Dr. Sangbin Park.

As part of the initial 12-strong cohort, Ayyar also enjoyed new leadership responsibility during the program’s second year, sharing the knowledge she’d absorbed: “My senior year, there was a new batch of 12 students taking the class, and that was when I helped teach, and shared my experience with fly dissections and other lab work.

Guiding my peers to discovering exciting aspects of research and learning will always rank as one of my most rewarding experiences, and I learned so much through the process myself.”

She’s happy, too, that both initial cohorts of students were able to produce something so tangible — a published paper in a scientific journal as well as the newly accessible fruit fly strains — out of their work: “We were just really fortunate that our work resulted in a publication, that too in a

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prestigious, professional journal. That just reinforces how impactful the work is.” But, like Logan, she also appreciates some of the more surprising lessons she gained through the program. “A continuously influential concept for me is the realization that things don’t work a lot of the time and that research requires a lot of perseverance,” she says. “You’re not going to start work on a research problem and then get the results you expect and be done — that’s not how any scientist has ever achieved anything. Success in science requires determination and is the culmination of a whole cascade of failures and learning from them each time; it’s about making your failures useful, adapting to what you learn when things don’t work, and continuing to move forward. Because eventually you do reach a point of exciting discovery and success in your research, but it might just be very different from your initial assumptions!

“When I went back to the lab the second time, there Myles Hagney ’17 and Arjun Rajan ’17 at the fly station in were points where it seemed like we were doing the Kim’s Stanford lab during the 2016 internship program. same process over and over again, like every day, for five days straight, and we were making the same mistakes. And it was at that point where I realized how useless it is to keep trying and hoping for a different result every time instead of analyzing the failures and the process and moving forward constructively from that.”

Ayyar says it was “incredibly empowering” to have a group of professionals place such faith in her and her fellow students in terms of their capability and potential — like Huq and Logan, Ayyar is palpably appreciative of the generous mentoring they received while at Kim’s lab and from Chisholm and Rankin. And she is delighted that the students’ work has produced results that can be shared with others in the field: They’ve made a meaningful, professional contribution to science. “You can see, in the paper, the fly lines that produced relevant results that are actually useful to the scientific community,” she exclaims. “We named our lines with our initials, all of us students, when we created them, so these lines that are going out into professional fly repositories in the biological community have high school students’ names as their markers! Out there! In the world!”

For Kim, giving students that revelatory experience is what this program has always been about, and he’s already pursuing expansions, scaling up with a collaboration between his lab and Commack High School on Long Island. Chisholm and Rankin shared their experience and offered encouragement to teachers there, and Kim shared an early draft of the now-published paper to show the practical impact that was possible. With the input of Exeter leadership, Kim is also investigating the possibilities of implementing a similar program in a high-needs school.

“My hope is that there is a reservoir of students who are not exposed to the most interesting, engaging aspects of STEM [science, technology, engineering, math], and that we will unleash that latent population to find those compelling aspects at an earlier stage and then ideally become addicted to it,” Kim says. “I don’t want to force anything on them, it’s just a new way of engaging people: People are exposed very early on to poetry, music, drama, writing, reading well-written things; I don’t think that they’re exposed soon enough or in an authentic enough way to science.

Math is an exception perhaps. I think things are slowly changing, but I think that the most direct way to teach science or other fields is to give people the opportunity to engage without any distance between the material and their interests. That, in the end, is what we’re trying to do.” E

“STUDENTS GET TO EXPERIENCE FIRSTHAND THE POWER OF MODERN GENETICS ... .”

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MACDUFF EVERTON

Against the

Anthony Weller ’75 keeps the creativity flowing —

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with a little help from his friends.

By Karen Stewart

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W

riting a novel is not for the fainthearted. It takes discipline, patience,

creativity and uncompromising focus. Anthony Weller ’75 has published seven books. That number is more impressive given that two of them — plus another in the works — have followed his 2006 diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS).

Since 2010 Weller has been paralyzed from the neck down. A vicious neurologic disease, PPMS affects some 15 percent of those with multiple sclerosis; it carries life-threatening complications such as difficulty swallowing and a susceptibility to lung and upper respiratory infections. The incurable disease took Weller’s career as a jazz and classical guitarist, to say nothing of his mobility. It marched over his independence, claiming his ability to dress himself or turn the pages of a book. Through it all, Weller has written. He has been a poet, a journalist, an editor and a novelist. The spontaneous intervention of friends — most of them Exonians — has had a profound effect on extending his life as a writer.

Weller’s story is a testament to the bonds forged at Exeter. He was a four-year boarding student from Macon, Georgia, who met the 1970s challenges of stern teachers and a demanding workload by rising early to three alarm clocks and developing a work ethic that defines him 40 years later. “It’s as if we were part of some experiment to see how much torment gifted teenagers might survive,” he wryly recounts.

“I’ve spent a lot of time overseas among the Brits on my mother’s side of the family.

Many of my relatives looked on the Blitz [during WWII] very fondly. Imagine: They were doing without ... they were under threat constantly. But those bonds of mutual dependence and sympathy were unfortunately missing from their later lives. I’ve often felt the same was true of my Exeter friendships. Something happens there ... and we were all in it together.”

At Yale, Weller pursued his study of music and became a jazz and classical guitarist, eventually recording 15 albums. To supplement his income, he taught music and became a travel writer for dozens of magazines from National Geographic Traveler and Esquire to The New York Times Magazine, Architectural Digest and The Paris Review. His extensive globetrotting influenced his music and his writing. A travel memoir, Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road, traces his adventures in, and vivid observations of, India and Pakistan. The cottage he shares with his wife, Kylée Smith, is decorated with artwork from around the world.

Weller had an up-close example of travel writing in his father, the novelist- turnedWorld War II correspondent George Weller. The senior Weller earned a Pulitzer Prize while reporting on the war from five continents between 1941 and 1945; several years after his death, his only son compiled his wartime dispatches into the books Weller’s War and First into Nagasaki.

Weller lost his ability to walk six years ago and is today mostly confined to his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Visitors leave their shoes at the door, and if any of his caregivers fall ill, they don’t report to work. In those instances Smith alone fulfills her husband’s strict personal-care routine, including meal prep and feeding, bathing, and a two-hour exercise regimen to stretch and tone his atrophied muscles.

This is, more or less, how they were functioning when Evelyn Blewer ’75 came for a visit in 2014. Blewer remained friendly with Weller in the years after high school and Yale, where they both attended college. She was back in New England from her home in France and arranged to visit. Though they had stayed in touch, it was the first Evelyn learned of her friend’s complete paralysis. Recalls Smith, “We were in denial and on the brink of broke. We were at our wit’s end. Evi was so inquisitive. She kept asking me questions.”

What Blewer learned was that Weller’s full-time care was consuming. State assistance covered only 10 hours of in-home health care each week, but Weller needed constant support. Smith had given up her work as a yoga therapist to be at home; she turned her professional expertise toward developing a therapeutic protocol to combat the

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“The only reason Anthony is alive and living done by his friends. They built a community

CAPE ANNE BEACON

spasticity and muscle contraction associated with PPMS. With so many other priorities, the couple didn’t spend much time focusing on financial matters. Shortly after her visit, Blewer penned a letter to her Exeter classmates, informing them of Weller’s tenuous physical condition and the couple’s dire financial straits.

“It all started with Evelyn,” says John Weston ’75. Weston remembered Blewer from French class, and he received her news about the Wellers with interest. “I’m at a point in my life when I am looking to give back,” he says.

His former track teammate Sam Winebaum ’75 of Rye, New Hampshire, felt the same. Winebaum received Blewer’s letter in September 2014 as he was on his way to campus for Exeter Leadership Weekend to attend planning meetings for reunion.

He brought the letter and shared it. “I didn’t know Anthony very well in high school,” Winebaum says. “But when I got that note from Evi and I was back at Exeter, I felt compelled, like, ‘I’ve got to do something for a classmate.’”

Soon there were group video conference calls and the emergence of a plan to help the couple. Blewer, Weston and Winebaum are still part of the core team. John Shek ’75 from Florida, Charles Pitts ’75 in Vancouver and Weller’s Yale classmate Bill Brady rounded out the group. Says Winebaum, “We are all very different people. Those differences combined in a perfect and organic way, with … each [of us] taking on roles that suited our strengths.”

Blewer provided leadership, while Winebaum’s affinity for technology saw him researching adaptive communication tools and crowdfunding websites (the team chose YouCaring.com). Pitts, a writer and film producer, collaborated with Blewer on the YouCaring text and a name for the effort: Linking Hands for Anthony. Weston and Shek navigated the legal and technical hurdles related to establishing a formal trust to receive funds. Weston also traveled to Gloucester from his home in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to review the couple’s expenses and help them build a monthly budget. Blewer’s early outreach to classmates yielded enough money to keep the Wellers in their home; by December they had raised more than $100,000. “It sounds like a lot of money,” Weston says, “until you realize that their run rate is more than $11,000 a month.”

As the 1975 classmates crafted appeals and marketed their website, donations started flowing. Support came in from the couple’s literary, community and musical friends as well, with several artists (including painter Charlie Hunter ’76) donating work to the cause. Simultaneously, the class was planning their 40th Exeter reunion. Says Weston, “It has been so many years since high school. Helping Anthony has been a nice rallying point for people and has served to bring some solidarity back to our class. When Anthony came to reunion, it was incredibly emotional for many of us.”

Contributing to the emotion was a speech Weller wrote for the occasion, and that Weston read on account of Weller’s compromised vocal cords. Weller expressed gratitude for the gifts of financial support and correspondence from his classmates, writing, “I wish I could speak to you in as clear and strong a voice as you have spoken to me over the past eight months.” His speech continued, “One of the few advantages of being paralyzed is that you do tend to reflect about the past. I realize now, as I hadn’t before, that the colossal fortune of my life, along with my marriage and the genetic and personal

Anthony Weller and his wife, Kylée Smith, at their home in Gloucester, MA.

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with dignity is because of the fundraising around us. It came out of forged bonds.” gifts of my mother and father was, in fact, my four years at Exeter.”

As distance from the reunion grows, Weston wonders if their best efforts will be enough. He likens the team’s work to riding a roller coaster: rewarding and fraught.

“Because of the funding our community has provided there is no doubt that Anthony’s life has improved,” he says. “But campaign mode is hard to sustain.” He says the team has begun thinking creatively about how to further generate the income needed to sustain their friend.

A small portion of the couple’s income is generated by sales of Weller’s books and albums. He weaves his life story into much of his work, perhaps no more so than in his last book, The Land of Later On. The novel follows a jazz pianist suddenly liberated from a crippling neurological disease as he searches the afterlife for his yoga-instructor lover. He is currently at work on a fictional memoir in the voice of real-life Mozart collaborator and poet/librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Weller is also pondering a book on writing.

Weller’s method is striking, especially given that his pre-paralysis style was to complete two first drafts in longhand before typing a third draft into his computer.

Before his voice was compromised, but after he lost authority over his typing, he used dictation software for correspondence, articles and books. These days, a typist comes to his home to record his words. His nights are mostly sleepless, so he uses the time productively: Lying in bed looking at the ceiling, he stitches words into sentences and then into paragraphs. He edits and revises and holds his work in his memory. When the typist arrives at noon they work for two hours, every day but Saturday, Weller reciting the sentences still in his head from the night before. He includes time to compose emails and thank-you notes for the support he receives. “The process isn’t as awkward as it sounds,” he wrote in “Paralyzed from the Neck Down,” a 2015 Wall Street Journal article. “After he was overtaken by blindness, John Milton used dictation. At times, so did Henry James and Mark Twain. I have no excuse for second-rate work.”

Many of his friends, like Sam Winebaum, express awe at Weller’s determination: “Anthony is an incredibly brave person and a true talent. The most vital thing for Anthony is to continue to work. A writer’s got to write.”

That it can happen at all, and that it can happen in their home, Smith says of her husband’s work, is nothing short of a miracle. “You can only offer quality of life if you have quality care. These two years have been a miracle,” she says. “The only reason Anthony is alive and living with dignity is because of the fundraising done by his friends. They built a community around us. It came out of forged bonds. Without it, Anthony would be living in a nursing home.”

“I certainly wouldn’t have written another novel,” Weller interjects. “It seems absurd to be able to do something more or less well and not do it. So I try to create what beauty I can.” E

Classmate John Weston welcoming Weller to the class of 1975 reunion. With Weller are his caregiver, Douglas bBale, and Kylée.

You can hear Weller’s music at www.anthonyweller.com, and read some of his old journalism on his blog at www.writeweller.com.

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HARKNESS IN THE COM A LOCAL TOWN TEAMS UP WITH EXETER TO OFFER STUDENTS AND TEACHERS NEW OPPORTUNITIES

BY DEBBIE KANE

Eighth-grade students in a Raymond Roundtables classroom.

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aymond is a New England town in transition. Only 13 miles west of Exeter, it feels much farther away. Home to 10,000 residents, the community is rural but a commutable distance to larger New Hampshire cities such as Manchester and Portsmouth; the largest local employer is a Wal-Mart distribution center. Residents still greet one another on the town common for Raymond’s annual July Fourth celebration, proud of its small-town character. Despite an influx of new residents in the past decade, the school district has limited resources to spend on academic enrichment.

John McDaniels, a retired investment lawyer and Raymond High School graduate, saw an opportunity to help. He wanted more Raymond students to have the opportunity to set and achieve high educational goals, including matriculating at competitive colleges and universities, like his alma mater, Brown. In 2007, he launched the Reach High Scholars Program, a nonprofit organization that helps provide direction and support to Raymond students, in part through collaboration with Exeter.

A ROAD MAP TO COLLEGE

For seven years, Exeter has worked with Raymond teachers to offer Raymond Roundtables, a summer academic enrichment program for middle school and ninth-grade students in the town’s public schools. Roundtables is a central initiative of the Reach High Scholars Program, which has

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MUNITY CHRISTIAN HARRISON

recently taken over direction of the courses from Exeter.

Raymond High School now sends a greater percentage of graduates to competitive four-year colleges than most New Hampshire public schools. Dozens of Raymond High graduates attend such institutions as Brown, Dartmouth, Holy Cross, Hamilton and Skidmore; two have been named Fulbright scholars; and others are going on to top jobs and graduate programs. Most of them have received financial aid with minimal amounts of debt and need-based grants of up to $62,000 per annum that, over four years, will have a total value of more than $3.5 million.

This year, two former participants, Jon Lemay and Ginny Harmon, also alumni of Exeter’s summer school (now known as Exeter Summer), returned to Exeter to teach in the program.

McDaniels attributes much of the program’s success to the evolving partnership among Reach High, Exeter and the Raymond schools. “Exeter has given us the courage to do great things,” he says. “We’re so fortunate that the school is supportive and we have access to their amazing resources.”

FOUNDATION FOR LEARNING

McDaniels and Ethan Shapiro, then the director of Exeter Summer and now the Academy’s dean of faculty, believed it was important to create a strong educational foundation for Raymond students before they reached high school. In summer 2010, they launched Raymond Roundtables, introducing summer math and English enrichment courses to 21 seventh- and eighth-graders at Iber Holmes Gove Middle School. In 2012, Raymond High ninth-graders were added, and in some years the program has had more than 40 students. Roundtables, featuring the intimate, individualized Harkness method of teaching, was initially taught by Exeter faculty; classes are now taught as well by Raymond teachers, who are trained and mentored by peers at Exeter.

The Raymond teachers attend Harkness teacher-training workshops, meet Exeter instructors and observe Exeter Summer classes on campus. Rebecca Sharrow, a seventh-grade language arts teacher, was one of the first Raymond teachers to participate in the training. “I loved it,” she says.

“It allows students to have their ideas validated by others and builds conversation in a respectful way. It’s definitely motivating and engaging.”

During the summer Roundtables, Sharrow teaches two sessions of language arts to a group of nine to 12 students. Her greatest challenge is building community among the students in a short period of time. Often quiet at first, they quickly become comfortable with the Harkness method of learning and start sharing ideas. “Roundtables is one of the very few opportunities our students have for enrichment,” Sharrow says. “It gives them an opportunity to meet other motivated learners and it’s intellectually fulfilling.” Approximately 200 Raymond students have been through the program to date; about 15 percent have gone on to attend prestigious colleges and universities.

Sharrow now gathers students around her own Harkness table, donated by Exeter in 2012, during the regular school year. Despite the challenge of teaching to a mixed-level class of up to 22 students, she applies the Harkness method daily. “It engages my students and encourages thoughtful conversation,” she says. “Some of my students wouldn’t have a chance of being successful under a more traditional teaching method.”

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SCHOLARS CONNECT DURING EXETER SUMMER

AMURICA.COM

Reach High Scholars builds on the success of Roundtables by engaging Raymond High students in rigorous college preparation. Its Reach High Scholars Club offers like-minded high school students a supportive environment to explore higher-education opportunities. Beginning with freshman year, students take PSAT and SAT prep classes, pursue summer enrichment activities and visit colleges, opportunities not always available at under-resourced New Hampshire schools. All students are encouraged to attend academic programs such as Exeter Summer. “These are all really good, really busy kids,” says Deirdre Doyle, a high school English teacher and the club’s dedicated adviser. She helps students stay focused on college, encouraging them to sign up for college visits organized by Reach High and helping them with the admissions process. “Just taking hard classes and making good grades isn’t enough to get into competitive colleges, not if you’re from a small school in New Hampshire,” she says. “Summer programs like Exeter’s give our students an advantage.”

Since 2008, Reach High Scholars has sent a total of 118 students to summer programs at Exeter, St. Paul’s School, Brown and Dartmouth. Nearly all receive some form of financial aid to attend, making the programs accessible to more Raymond students.

Rising juniors in Reach High Scholars typically attend Exeter Summer, most as boarders. Anywhere between three to seven Raymond students have participated in the program annually since 2009. In addition to learning with like-minded peers, Exeter Summer participants experience living away from home, where they meet kids from around the world. “It really opens their eyes,” says Elena Gosalvez-Blanco, director of Exeter Summer. “They enjoy the diversity. Connecting with students from around the Exeter Summer alum and teacher Jon Lemay. world is very important, especially outside the classroom. One student told me, ‘I feel like I traveled to 60 countries this summer.’ ” This year, seven Raymond High students attended Exeter Summer. Their enthusiasm was evident when they returned to school this fall. McDaniels says that’s typical: “Every year, they come back telling [their] teachers how they should teach. They’re more Harkness than Edward Harkness!”

STUDENT SUCCESS STORIES

The hard work by Raymond students and their mentors is paying off. Jesse Hardman, a 2015 graduate of Skidmore and an Exeter Summer student in 2010, received a Fulbright Scholarship (the first for a Raymond student) to study in Germany. A second Fulbright Scholarship was awarded last year to Charles DeBenedetto, a recent graduate of Hobart and William Smith and 2011 Exeter Summer student. DeBenedetto is currently teaching English in Taiwan. Below, we share stories of three others who are thriving.

JON LEMAY

When Jon Lemay arrived at Raymond High School, he knew he wanted to attend college; he just wasn’t sure how to get there. Home-schooled until eighth grade, he was still adjusting to public school when he learned about Reach High Scholars. “When I heard about opportunities to attend advanced summer programs at St. Paul’s and Exeter, it was something I wanted to do,” he says.

Lemay attended Exeter Summer in 2009, then the Advanced Studies Program at St. Paul’s the next year. “It was an amazing experience,” he says. “I knew I wanted to attend a college that felt like Exeter.” One of three Reach High Scholars to graduate from Skidmore in 2015, with a bachelor’s degree in English, Lemay is now a teacher at Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis, Tennessee. He returned to New Hampshire this summer to teach English in Raymond Roundtables. He also taught detective fiction to rising 8th- and 9th-graders at Exeter Summer.

“I identified with the kids in so many ways,” Lemay says. “These programs can make such a difference in their lives. I told them ... it’s really what you make of it.” Lemay has passed his experience along to family as well: His younger brother, Josiah, a former Roundtables participant, attended Exeter Summer this year.

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GINNY HARMON

Ginny Harmon, who graduated from Raymond High School in 2013, attended Exeter Summer in 2011 as a rising junior, and St. Paul’s the next summer. “My Exeter Summer experience was incredible,” she says. It was her first time meeting students outside of Raymond and experiencing the Harkness method. “I was always the one in school who raised her hand,” she says. “That summer I learned how to listen.”

Harmon, a senior at the University of New Hampshire majoring in international affairs, Spanish and political science, returned to Exeter Summer this year as a teaching intern. She co-taught a world literature class for seventh- and eighth- graders with an Exeter mentor, Greg Rossolimo. Like Lemay, she wasn’t much older than her students (her sister, Anna, an Exeter Summer student this year, introduced her as “Miss Harmon” to friends on campus). Although teaching for the first time was nerve-wracking, it brought Harmon back to her own Exeter experience. “It was so rewarding to see what each student brought from their background,” she says. “There was an innocence that really Exeter Summer intern Ginny Harmon made me want to create a safe place for them to learn together. I didn’t (left) with sister Anna, a 2016 student. want them to worry about being right.”

Harmon is considering teaching after graduation, acknowledging that she wants to pursue a career that challenges her “to think and do good.” Asked if Exeter Summer and Reach High Scholars have shaped who she is today, she answers emphatically, “Yes, in every single way.”

AMI NEEPER

Raymond High graduate Ami Neeper attended Exeter Summer in 2009 and Summer@Brown the following year. A 2015 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, Neeper earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a concentration in pre-health and a minor in visual studio arts. She learned about Reach High Scholars from Deirdre Doyle and other classmates. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after high school, and the program gave her a sense of direction.

Neeper’s classes at Exeter included astronomy and marine biology; her favorite was ceramics. “We used the potter’s wheel every day,” she says. “That was something RHS didn’t have. It was a completely different experience for me.” The course inspired Neeper to continue taking fine arts classes throughout high school and college. She’s now pursuing a doctorate Newlyweds and former RHSP participants in pharmacy in an accelerated program at the Massachusetts College Ami Neeper and Stephen Diamond. of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Manchester, New Hampshire.

She also recently married Stephen Diamond, a fellow Raymond High graduate and Reach High Scholar who’s a software engineer at BAE Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire.

JENNA GALLO PHOTOGRAPHY

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McDaniels, Doyle and the Raymond High students credit the Exeter partnership, through Raymond Roundtables and Exeter Summer, for much of the success of Reach High Scholars.

“I’m so grateful to my teachers and everyone who made this happen and held me accountable,” Lemay says. “What would’ve happened if they hadn’t said ‘Do this, you’d enjoy it’? It really did make a difference in my life.”

McDaniels, who is working to create programs for adult mentorships and stimulating summer jobs within a 35-mile radius of Raymond for students during their college years and after graduation, would love to see RHSP expand beyond Raymond: “Reach High Scholars Program is a model that could be replicated in other communities to address the much-publicized issue of excessive student debt — and to give students who might not otherwise imagine it the encouragement and guidance they need to reach their potential.” E

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“CENTRAL TO OUR STRENGTH IS THE HISTORY AND TRADITION OF PHILANTHROPIC SUPPORT OF EXETER.”

CHERYL SENTER

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CONNECTIONS

News and notes from the alumni community

Sustaining Excellence Morgan Dudley ’77, Director of Institutional Advancement

I

am honored to be at Exeter as we start our 236th year. I have heard from

many alumni and parents about your aspirations that Exeter continue to set the standard for excellence in secondary school education. You challenge Exeter to reach higher, to do better, and to make the most of the opportunity that we have before us to ensure a proud, strong and secure future for our Academy, and for our students.

Central to our strength is the history and tradition of philanthropic support of Exeter. Gifts to The Exeter Fund support a faculty unequalled by any other secondary school and provide scholarships and support for our students with financial need. For generations, The Exeter Fund has given youth from every quarter the opportunity to receive the best secondary school education in the world.

Support from generous alumni and parents also provides the resources Exeter relies upon to maintain and improve our beautiful campus and facilities. Exeter’s reimagined South Campus will expand opportunities for learning and growth in unprecedented ways, providing venues for the performing arts and athletics that reflect our belief in the importance of experiences beyond the classroom.

Non sibi unites us. There is nothing more powerful than the combination of knowledge and goodness. The leaders of the future are here at Exeter eager to learn, and poised to go out and address some of the world’s most serious problems. Your continued support of Exeter builds on the generosity of the generations before us to ensure that these students will change the world for the better.

Thank you for joining us in our support of Exeter and the future of our school and the world. E

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J A C K G I L P I N ’6 9

All the World’s a Stage

By Janet Reynolds

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t first glance, being an Episcopal priest and a

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was my main mentor in theater at Exeter,” Gilpin says.

“We were in what had been the old Episcopal parish hall,” he says of his Exeter theater days. “It was a fairly flexible space, before the new theater was put in. It was a good playground for us to experiment in.”

Gilpin also got a chance to direct while at Exeter, taking on Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. “That gave me a lifelong feel for Pinter as a playwright,” he says.

From Exeter, Gilpin went to Harvard “with a vague intention of going into the law.” He continued to do a lot of theater, though. “My sophomore year, I realized I didn’t want to spend life behind a desk.”

Gilpin continued on to acting school in New York and was soon a regular on stages and, eventually, on TV and in movies.

In between, he married and had three children, one of whom, Betty Gilpin, is an actor as well.

While juggling the needs of ministering to a congregation and an audience might seem far apart, Gilpin believes the two clearly feed and inform each other. “What I like most about acting is the process of exploration, of yourself and of the character, and the sense of risk that you have to have,” he says.

“I love rehearsal for that reason,” he adds. “You’re working with people whose imaginations are alive, who are willing to trust each other, to explore whatever life is going to put in front of them on a given day. It’s a great gift, to be part of that.”

Being a priest is similar, he says. “You’re dealing with people in their highest highs and their lowest lows. You’re walking with them through the deepest and most important dimensions of their lives. That’s the juice. It’s also an infinite gift they give you, to be given their trust, to hold their hand in these times.

“The people in church are like a rehearsal — putting themselves on the line, rejoicing in real achievements, living life fully. I like being around that.” E CAROL KALIFF WITH PERMISSION FROM HEARST CONNECTICUT

well-known stage, television, and film actor may not seem connected. Jack Gilpin ’69 begs to differ.

“In the practice of homiletics, you have to exegete the text, the congregation and yourself. That’s exactly what you do as an actor,” he says on the phone from his Connecticut home. “You draw the truth out of the play, the audience and most of all yourself.

“There’s a performance aspect [to doing the liturgy].

Since I’m the only clergy [at St. John’s Episcopal Church in New Milford], it’s like doing a one-man show every week.

But I’m certainly not the main character.”

Gilpin became a priest in 2012, after slowly migrating back to the faith of his youth.

He attended church sporadically while on the road in regional theater before eventually taking classes at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, while also acting, until he became a priest.

But Gilpin has been an actor ever since he stood on the Exeter stage as Reverend Parris in The Crucible. To date he’s been in about 30 movies, including Funny Farm with Chevy Chase, Something Wild with Melanie Griffith, and Adventureland. He’s also a regular on stages around America and on Broadway, and he has had many TV roles. He was recently seen on the new Showtime series Billions and on CBS’ Madam Secretary. From 1995 to 2001 he had a recurring role on Law and Order.

Gilpin got the acting bug when he was 5 and played the Easter bunny in a church pageant. “I remember at the curtain call munching on a jelly bean and looking at the audience and thinking, ‘This is very cool,’ ” he says.

At Exeter he moved from the bunny to play meatier roles. His portrayal of Reverend Parris (foretelling his next career?) was directed by Rod Marriott and Tom Hinkel. He was in Hamlet, also directed by Marriott. “Rod

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S C O T T M C VAY ’ 5 1

Channeling Ishmael’s Everlasting Itch

By Genny Moriarty

A

SUZETTE J. LUCAS, COURTESY OF COMMUNITY NEWS SERVICE

poet, naturalist and philanthropist, Scott McVay ’51 is inspired first and foremost by his wife, Hella — a German-born mathematician whom he met while assigned to Cold War-era Berlin with the United States counterintelligence corps.

A favorite maxim is, “Without Hella, nothing; with Hella, everything.” Beyond his wife of 58 years, McVay finds inspiration in the wonders of nature. “As you look at the natural world,” he says, “in all its variability, connectedness and diversity, it’s just one miracle after another.”

That ability to see connections and appreciate diversity has been a hallmark of his professional life. With a career as wide-ranging as his interests, McVay has directed or served on the boards of numerous institutions — the Geraldine R. Dodge, W. Alton Jones and Robert Sterling Clark foundations, the World Wildlife Fund, the Chautauqua Institution, the Earth Policy Institute, and Grounds for Sculpture to name just a few — and worked tirelessly to promote the arts, education, women’s issues, environmental stewardship and animal welfare.

While director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, McVay created the biennial Dodge Poetry Festival to “elevate poetry in our culture.” Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, the festival has been instrumental in bringing poetry to New Jersey’s schools, and it inspired journalist Bill Moyers to film three PBS specials, with 21 hours of footage from the festival. In 2010, McVay and his wife established the Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail in Princeton’s Greenway Meadows Park, reflecting their shared belief that poetry and science are closely linked.

“The great poets provide insights that can illuminate and light our way,” McVay says. “Ideally, a scientist thinks like a poet.”

Another notable initiative was McVay’s work on the Dodge Foundation’s Chinese Language Initiative, a decades-long project aimed at introducing Mandarin

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instruction into American high schools. While China was still a “sleeping giant” in 1983, McVay and his peers sensed it would emerge on the international stage. With the help of Princeton University educators and a supportive parent base, the foundation provided funding and guidance to help implement Chinese language programs at the nation’s top schools. “Learning another language helps us see things in a new way,” McVay says.

What sparked his enduring interest in so many fields? “It was Moby-Dick!” As an English major at Princeton, McVay took a course on Melville’s epic and was captivated by the author’s encyclopedic descriptions of whales and the 19th-century whaling world. “I am insatiably curious,” McVay says, before quoting a line from the book that propelled his life: “It’s that ‘everlasting itch for things remote …’ that torments me.”

While he may not have landed on any “barbarous coasts,” his itch has led him and Hella on adventures of both the seafaring and intellectual kind. He has led two Arctic expeditions to study, film and record the elusive bowhead whale’s song and collaborated on a documentary film, In Search of the Bowhead Whale, with the National Film Board of Canada. He has also published dozens of scientific papers, one volume of poetry, Whales Sing and Other Exuberances (2013), and a 590-page memoir, Surprise Encounters With Artists and Scientists, Whales and Other Living Things (2015).

Surprise Encounters puts the focus not on McVay, but on the noteworthy individuals he has had the privilege of knowing. Written as a series of vignettes in which he describes his encounters with such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, Edward Albee, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, E.O. Wilson, Sylvia Earle and Ralph Nader in prose and verse, McVay’s memoir received praise from Kirkus Reviews — but it’s his readers’ delight that makes this Renaissance man’s heart glad. E

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K R I SSY T RU E S DA L E ’1 5

By Lynn Horowitch ’81; P’19

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hat does it take to start a nonprofit as you

transition from high school to college? As Krissy Truesdale ’15 discovered, it takes passion, commitment and energy. And it doesn’t hurt to throw in healthy doses of flexibility, resilience and creativity.

As a day student at Exeter, Truesdale was an active member of the Environmental Action Committee. During one meeting, a student from Arizona, Calais Larson ’13, remarked that her state ought to be doing more to encourage renewable energy. Truesdale agreed, then made an offhand comment about how she wished New England could make use of solar panels. Larson asked “Why doesn’t it?” The meeting attendees drew a blank.

Truesdale and Larson did some research and discovered the potential.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Truesdale is now a sophomore at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in global environmental studies and minoring in innovation and entrepreneurship, management, and East Asian studies. She also runs Solar for Our Superheroes (S4OS), a nonprofit that she incorporated in 2014, during her upper year at Exeter; the organization was given tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) in the fall of 2015.

When Truesdale conceived of Solar for Our Superheroes, she envisioned a two-pronged effort focused on social justice and environmentalism. The organization’s mission was to thank local leaders for their service by providing sustainable energy in the form of solar panels for their homes.

On the S4OS Facebook page, Truesdale writes about the source of her inspiration: her grandfather, who was a firefighter in Peabody, Massachusetts. She recalls how he was a “hero to the many neighbors he went out of his way to serve in his everyday actions, big and small.” In his memory, she became committed to thanking community-nominated heroes. Marrying that interest with her commitment to environmentalism, she developed S4OS. The organization is launching its pilot project to thank a nurse in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Converting a home to solar energy costs tens of

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thousands of dollars. As a busy college student, Truesdale knew she needed help to achieve her mission. She solicited funds through pitch competitions, grants, Indiegogo, corporate donations — wherever she might find sources of funding as committed to renewable energy as she was. She entered a partnership with the Boston Solar Company, which agreed to donate the time and labor for solar panel installation. Solar for Our Superheroes was chosen to participate in StartUp Worcester; the award money led to office space and access to mentors and other entrepreneurs. Truesdale also found a way to engage college peers who shared her passion by setting up internships.

Despite all of these efforts, Truesdale found it difficult to build a replicable model for providing solar panels for free to members of her community by funding each one individually. But she also discovered that the government and other nonprofits offer myriad types of support for those who want to convert to solar. Time for a pivot: She identified federal government loan programs, local rebate programs, and funds earmarked for renewable energy for low-income and middle-class people — many types of incentives, provided by all levels of government, other non-profits, foundations, and by solar power companies.

Truesdale says, “Lots of people don’t know about the programs or they don’t know how to apply — it’s really confusing!” She recognized that Solar for Our Superheroes could have an impact by connecting people with funding and access that was already available.

While the initial model for her business has changed, Truesdale doesn’t regret its evolution. “We want all people, when they think solar, to think of Solar for Our Superheroes,” she says. “It used to be that we looked for veterans, teachers, firefighters — those who served as role models in their community. Now we are there for anyone.” As Truesdale notes, “Renewable energy is a dynamic industry, and you have to stay flexible!” E

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REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION OF WORCESTER SUN

A Flexible Approach to Solar Power

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JOHN KARREL ’71

A Fount of Friendship

By Lori Ferguson

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Perkins. Karrel decided to engage. “It was a great experience,” he says. “I hadn’t known Sam at all when we were Karrel ’71 doesn’t mince words. “I’m an Exeter junkie,” he confesses unabashedly. in school, but we got together all those years later and he became a good friend.”

It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, to hear That’s the wonderful thing about Exeter, Karrel that when then-class president Dan Hunter approached continues. “Even though I graduated years ago, the Karrel at their 40th reunion and asked him to serve as experience just keeps getting class correspondent, he made richer. The ability to create new what he laughingly describes as a friendships as well as continue three-second decision. “I love to old ones is incredible.” A case in talk with people and find out what point: Karrel recently began his they’re doing,” Karrel explains, second term as class correspon“and I’ve always had strong dent, tag-teaming with longfeelings for Exeter and the people time pal Eric Freedman. “Eric in my class, so, on the spur of the was my closest friend when moment, I said yes.”

I was a student at Exeter and For Karrel, the urge to give we’ve stayed in touch over the back is strong. Although his time years, so when Greg Todd, my at Exeter was short — the Redding, first partner as correspondent, Connecticut, native attended the decided to step down, I immediAcademy for his upper and senior ately reached out to Eric. We’ve years — Karrel characterizes it been having a great time sharing as incredibly rewarding: “I did the role. We’re always shooting not come from a family tradition emails back and forth, chatting of attending private schools, but about Exeter and gathering I was looking for a challenge, Karrel (second from right, front row) with ideas for the column.” and my parents and I liked what members of the class of 1971 on the steps of Volunteering involves a Exeter had to offer. I had a great the Academy Building. significant time commitment, two years there.”

Karrel concedes, but for alumni who feel a strong pull From Exeter, Karrel went on to Yale, and later UCLA, toward Exeter, it makes a lot of sense. “I don’t do it just to where he completed his MBA. He has spent his profesgive back, although that’s certainly important — I’m very sional life in the marketing and advertising world, first grateful for my time at Exeter and what it did for me,” with such well-known agencies as Doyle Dane Bernbach he says. “It’s also about cultivating the friendships I’ve and Saatchi & Saatchi, and later as principal of his own made over the years. They keep deepening with active industry search firm, John Karrel & Associates. Today, Karrel happily describes himself as semiretired, with time involvement.”

A student of the Vietnam era, Karrel admits that Exeter for “nonwork work” such as volunteering for Exeter. was not without its periods of unsettledness during his Class correspondent is not, however, Karrel’s first tenure, but he says the bonds of friendship were a constant foray into volunteering for the Academy. He was already at a time of political unrest. With the current difficulties involved with his class before stepping into that role, active on committees for development and reunion atten- facing the Academy, Karrel confesses that relationships are once more being tested. “Recent developments at the dance. He was initially drawn into the volunteer cycle by school have created some very stressful moments among then-class president Bill Rawson, who approached him classmates, and yet friendships keep deepening, becoming at their 20th reunion and asked if he’d work on fundraisricher and more complex. Exeter is an amazing place.” E ing for their 25th reunion with class of ’71 member Sam hen it comes to his alma mater, John

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P H I L A N T H R O P Y

Paying it Forward HOW THE GENEROSITY OF ONE ALUMNUS INSPIRED ANOTHER

By Janet Reynolds

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lumni and parents give to Exeter for a variety of reasons — one-time

Pablo Barrutia ’92 received the President’s Award in September for his service to the Academy.

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capital improvements, special projects or scholarships, to name just a few. The impetus behind such generosity is a universal desire to support and inspire our amazing students and faculty. What these benefactors don’t expect is to discover how their initial gift served as a catalyst for others to give back decades later.

But that is precisely what happened with Pablo Barrutia ’92 and John Hessel ’52. Barrutia was so grateful for receiving the John H. Hessel ’52 and Sidney A. Hessel Scholarship Fund for three of his four years at Exeter that he became a donor himself, establishing the Pablo E. Barrutia and Ben Eugrin Scholarship Fund. Barrutia and Eugrin, also a scholarship student, became friends while at Exeter.

Barrutia has also been a regular volunteer for the Academy, working with middle schools in Milwaukee, where he lives with his wife and three children, to identify and recruit potential Exeter students, particularly those from underrepresented communities.

He annually hosts a recruiting event at his home.

“Mr. Hessel’s scholarship fund let me afford Exeter — period,” Barrutia says. “Without his and his wife’s help, Exeter would not have happened. I’ve always been grateful for those who gave me a chance and helped me out.” Barrutia, who works for a large insurance company, received the President’s Award during Exeter Leadership Weekend in September for his tireless efforts on behalf of the school.

Hessel was thrilled to learn how Barrutia has been paying it forward since graduation. “It’s very gratifying,” he says, noting that he and Barrutia have exchanged a couple of emails in recent years. “I know you’re supposed to cast bread upon the waters, but in this case I got back a loaf.”

Hessel attended the Academy because of his father. William Saltonstall ’24, a revered history teacher and principal at Exeter for decades, had been a classmate of Hessel’s father, Sidney, at Harvard. “My father was impressed with [Exeter’s] preparation of the students for college,” he says.

But it was the target shooting that sold young Hessel. “I liked sports, but I was not a good athlete; except one thing I was really good at was target shooting,” he says, noting he was a member of a national summer camp team. He and his family were touring the campus when he heard the familiar ping-ping-ping of a shooting range. “My ears picked up like a hound dog. I said, ‘Do you have a rifle team?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ He took us to the range. That was probably the deal sealer.”

Hessel credits Exeter with giving him the tools to be a successful adult. “It let me grow up. I had responsibility,” he says of his time there.

It was Saltonstall who inspired Hessel, during a daily chapel talk, to give back to the school. “It stuck in my mind,” Hessel concludes. “That’s where the idea came from. I can make a difference at Exeter.”

And Hessel has. While he has donated funds for specific brick-and-mortar projects — the office of the Science Department chair bears his name, for

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instance — it is the funds that help people that he points to with the most pride.

In addition to the original scholarship fund, he and his wife, Aileen, recently established the Aileen and John Hessel Innovation Fund. Its aim, he says, is to support projects, mostly in the sciences, that might otherwise be considered too experimental for funding.

“I should have named it the failure fund,” he says. “I wasn’t looking to establish already slam-dunk successful things, but to allow funding of experimental stuff.”

In some ways this new fund is an extension of the scholarship fund, which has been an investment in unknown people. The John H. Hessel ’52 and Sidney A. Hessel Scholarship Fund is designed to give people an opportunity for an entirely new educational and life experience, and to let them see what they can make of it. “It’s to provide an opportunity for students who otherwise would not be able to go to the Academy to go,” Hessel says. “What I hope is they have successful lives and that they do because they were able to attend the Academy.”

Like Hessel, Barrutia credits his father with getting him to Exeter. Raised in Texas by Peruvian parents, Barrutia says his father moved to the U.S. so his children could receive a better education. He found a book, Preparing for Power, which listed the prep schools most commonly attended by those in leadership and power.

“My father took that book when I was about 10 and started strategizing about trying to get me into some of these boarding schools,” Barrutia says. “Exeter was my top choice.”

But getting in was just the first hurdle. Paying for it was another. “We had certain financial issues, so I needed financial aid for Exeter,” he says. “My first year, work-study was part of that.

Only a couple of my classmates were also [doing] work-study.

That was a very difficult first year for me.”

From his second year on, Barrutia received the Hessel scholarship, which meant no more work-study: “That was a big relief and freed up more time to do the real activities.”

Barrutia credits attending Exeter with helping to make him the man he is today. “I always felt constantly pushed to do my best on every front,” he says. “I learned a lot about myself and the world we live in. I learned hard work pays off.

And I learned that if you do want to learn more about yourself, you have to get out of [your] comfort zone. I was out of my comfort zone from day one.”

But this “tough love,” as he calls it, also had a safety net. “Someone always had my back — teachers, advisers, classmates,” he says. “I always knew I had somebody by my side to pick me up and encourage me. I was grateful for that.”

It is the kind of experience that motivates Barrutia in his work with Exeter today. “I was very grateful for all Exeter has given me,” he says. “When I got financial aid and the scholarship, it put me at par with so many of my classmates.”

Barrutia is pleased to be “giving back ... something that Exeter, through Mr. Hessel’s generosity, has graciously provided to me.” And while he’s delighted with his recent award, he adds, “It never crossed my mind I’d be recognized for my efforts. That’s not the intent.”

Paying it forward to help others — through his scholarship fund and by helping those with talent see beyond their own boundaries to the possibilities that a school like Exeter might afford them — is his way of saying thank you. E

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John Hessel ’52 and his wife, Aileen, are longtime supporters of the Academy.

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FROM EVERY QUARTER E XO N I A N S M A K E C O N N E C T I O N S AT H O M E A N D A R O U N D T H E WO R L D Please note, all photos are identified left to right unless otherwise indicated.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Exonians enjoy reconnecting through numerous activities and events, including large receptions and small socials, sports competitions, cultural and educational opportunities and non sibi projects. You can view and register for events online at www.exonians.exeter.edu, or call the Alumni Relations Office at 603-777-3454.

COAST TO COAST Exonians gathered at entertaining events across the country.

HOBOKEN Exonians from the New York City area gathered in New Jersey for a summer happy hour: Daniel Tumpson ’69, Katherine Powers ’03, Christina Danka ’02, Ciatta Baysah ’97 and Frank Decker ’49.

CALIFORNIA

Exeter-Andover viewing party in Palo Alto Saturday, November 12 Reception in San Francisco Thursday, March 9 Reception in Los Angeles Saturday, March 11

COLORADO

Reception in Denver Monday, November 28

GEORGIA

Reception in Atlanta Thursday, December 8

MASSACHUSETTS Reception in Boston Wednesday, March 29

NEW YORK

Exeter-Andover viewing party in Manhattan Saturday, November 12

TACOMA ART MUSEUM Executive Director of the Tacoma Art Museum Stephanie Stebich ’84 led a personal tour of the Edvard Munch collection for Exonian museumgoers from the Exeter Association of Washington.

Reception in Manhattan Wednesday, January 11

WASHINGTON STATE Reception in Seattle Tuesday, November 29

CLASS of 1944 MINIREUNION The class family gathered in June in Stamford, CT: Jane Hamilton-Merritt; Tisha Potter; Jenks Middleton; Phil Potter; Pete Grady and Mimi; Ken Ford; and Jane Williams.

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EXETER AT THE BALLPARK Baseball games drew Exonians together this summer.

The Exeter Association of Charlotte, NC, hosted a game between the Louisville Bats and the Charlotte Knights on August 10. Among the attendees were Heath Bergman ’03 with his wife, Anne.

Exeter alumni, parents, students and their guests from the Exeter Association of Greater New York watched the Arizona Diamondbacks play the New York Mets at Citi Field on August 10.

Last summer’s trip, Remembering World War I: France and Belgium, was led by Jack Herney, instructor of history, emeritus. Participants pose for a photo at Vimy Ridge.

EXETER EXPEDITIONS

Participants on the London theater tour gathered for their closing dinner. Sarah Ream ’75 (first row, center), instructor in theater and dance, led the group.

Alumni and parents immersed themselves in the London theater scene and WWI history during engaging tours led by Exeter faculty.

INTERNATIONAL A summer gathering took place in Japan on August 6.

The Exeter Association of Tokyo shared an evening with Academy Instructor in Science Michael McLaughlin and Exeter students from the Riken program, John Wang ’17 and Dirk Komarnitsky ’17.

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C O N N ECT I O N S

REUNIONS 2017 Each Exeter class hosts a reunion on campus every five years. These events culminate a year or more of planning by classmates and the Alumni Relations Office and include informal gatherings, family activities, music, meals and plenty of time to reconnect with old friends and discover new ones. If your graduation year ends in a 2 or 7, we look forward to seeing you in May.

May 5-7, 2017 1987 30th Reunion 1992 25th Reunion 1997 20th Reunion 2002 15th Reunion

MASSACHUSETTS hosted by Susan Littlefield and Martin Roper P’19 in Weston on August 7.

SEND-OFF PARTIES New students gathered with tried-and-true Exonians at locations across the globe before heading off to the Academy to begin the 2016–17 academic year.

May 12-14, 2017 1962 55th Reunion 1977 40th Reunion 1982 35th Reunion 2007 10th Reunion May 18-21, 2017 1967 50th Reunion

TEXAS hosted by Sonia and Nathan Price P’17 in Houston on August 30.

May 19-21, 2017 1957 60th Reunion 1972 45th Reunion 2012 5th Reunion May 23-25, 2017 1947 70th Reunion 1952 65th Reunion

NEVADA hosted by Anu and Ram Thummala P’16, P’20 in Las Vegas on August 20.

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Have you seen this?!

On Exeter’s alumni website you can: • Connect with 21,000 other Exonians • Stay in touch with friends and classmates • Register for events in your area It is mobile-friendly and easy to use. Sign up today!

exonians.exeter.edu

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www.facebook.com/phillipsexeter

www.twitter.com/phillipsexeter T H E

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B U L L E T I N • 55

F I N I S

O R I G I N E

P E N D E T

Maybe This Time, In This Place

By Ariel Kim ’16

W

hen I was 5 years old, I hated ballet.

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DAVID NELSON

When I shuffled into my first ballet class, all of the blond-haired, blue-eyed nymphs stared at me like I’d just tumbled out of Snow White’s cottage with the seven dwarves. And, rest assured, I was no Snow White. My chubby cheeks and thick black hair made me nothing like those slender-boned beauties floating through the air as if they were stray feathers from a tutu.

You’re not pretty enough, they said.

You’re not skinny enough, they said.

You’re too short, they said.

I quit ballet for a time to pursue other things. And yet, despite my initial impression — “This is not the world for you” — something else, elusive but urgent all the same, brought me back, years later. Dance will do that, I reckon.

So when I came to Exeter four years ago, I joined the intermediate dance class, albeit with the kind of hesitation that a mouse has when entering a lion’s den.

Because in the pink leotard and tights of a toddler ballet class distantly remembered, a tiny Korean girl still floundered. My hair had only grown wilder with age, and the thick waves didn’t do much to disguise my near-explosive cheekbones. I had no illusions about the fact that I, my body, my skill, did not fit any of the stereotypical, desirable molds for “ballerina” or even “dancer.”

But maybe this time, in this place, it would be different.

And as I stood at the barre for the first time in years, looking at myself in the rollaway mirrors, I thought that maybe, maybe they were wrong.

For the next four years, I danced away every spare hour, soaking in technique and artistry, learning how to speak with my body. I made up for lost time, joining Advanced Dance and the Dance Company, learning new styles and choreography . . . and I even started to dance en pointe, something I never dreamed I’d be able to do. That first day when I stepped onto the marley floor with my feet squeezed in between the leather soles and burlap sides, the wool and gel toe pads cushioning my metatarsals and some tape wrapped about my bony pinky toes, I felt like a newborn duckling, waddling around in feet too big and too strange. But I also knew that I’d waited all of my life for the pressure of papier-mâché around my toes.

I think part of me will always be that squishy duckling. Never perfect. I can always learn a new variation, stretch higher in développé, turn faster from fifth.

But I dance for a different kind of perfection. I dance for the moments when every movement, every breath, falls flawlessly into place. As the music moves through me, I just feel. My body is my instrument, my power of expression.

Mine.

And this incredible gift wouldn’t be mine, I wouldn’t have any of the technique or the artistry or the awareness, without the Theater and Dance Department. Our little studio in Davis is full of memories of laughter and growth and community, experiences that I already found myself desperately missing as my time at Exeter drew to a close and we seniors prepared for our last spring concert. I am honored to have been a part of the groundbreaking for the new Center for Theater and Dance, and I know that students in the years to come will find just as much guidance and support as I did within the studio. Because dance at Exeter offered me a space in which to fall flat on my face after an attempt at a triple pirouette and still get right back up again. A place where I do belong, even with my messily bobby-pinned ballet bun.

Thank you to the dance program for giving me the opportunity to grow as both a dancer and a person in ways that I never would have imagined, especially as a chubby toddler in beginning ballet all those years ago. And thank you for rekindling and fueling my love of dance, a love that I will carry with me even when my knees won’t let me grande plié anymore. E

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LAMONT GALLERY FREDERICK R. MAYER ’45 ART CENTER

2016 & 2017 EXHIBITIONS ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS: 50 YEARS OF EXETER FINE CRAFTS

September 7-October 15, 2016

Featuring the work of over 60 local craftspeople from across New England to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of Exeter Fine Crafts located in downtown Exeter.

(Left) Karen Orsillo, Floral Set, 2013, colored porcelain (Right) William Mitchell, February Morning, Mt. Washington, 2016, serigraph

2016, A STATE OF MIND: BOSTON PRINTMAKERS

November 1-December 10, 2016 Reception: Friday, November 4, 5-7pm Gallery Talk: Saturday, November 5, 10am Over 140 members from the Boston Printmakers, working in a variety of techniques, will tackle some of the challenging sociopolitical issues that are facing us today.

(Left) Susan Jaworski-Stranc, Red Squirrels, Blue Squirrels, reduction linoleum print (Right) Ellen Singer, Migrants, 2016, woodcut

CLEW: A RICH AND REWARDING DISORIENTATION

January 20-April 15, 2017 Reception: Friday, January 20, 5-7pm Gallery Talk: Saturday, January 21, 10am

Using overlays of music, poetry and visual arts, Deborah Barlow, Todd Hearon and Jon Sakata give viewers new ways to see, hear and navigate an intricately layered world.

Deborah Barlow, Uteppe, mixed media

INDY 500 PEA STUDENT ART SHOW

PEA ART DEPARTMENT

May 2017

Advanced art students in the Art 500 course — and their teachers — showcase a body of work centered on an in-depth investigation of a concept or theme. Not to be missed!

LAMONT GALLERY PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY 11 TAN LANE EXETER, NH 03833

603-777-3461 www.exeter.edu/lamontgallery gallery@exeter.edu Gallery Hours (school year): Tuesday-Friday 9-5, Saturday 10-4.

Free and open to the public. Call for accessibility information.

20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460 Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to a son or daughter who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) with his or her new address. Thank you.

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STUDENTS.

Each one worthy of your support.

THE EXETER FUND W W W. E X E T E R . E D U / G I V E