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M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
120 t h Anniversary
Gabriel Hammond ’97 About Gabriel Hammond Graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in international relations and with honors in economics Immediately out of college, joined Goldman, Sachs & Co. in its equity research division, where he covered energy Master Limited Partnerships (MLPS) in the Energy & Power group Founder and CEO of SteelPath Fund Advisors, which he sold to Oppenheimer Funds, where he is now a senior vice president and portfolio manager; founder of Alerian, a financial indexing company with $15 billion of publicly traded assets tracking its indices In 2008, made a $1 million gift to Mercersburg (the largest by a graduate under 30 years of age) to establish the Arce Scholars Program, which provides full tuition to an incoming boarding student with exceptional academic promise and total financial need; the program is named in memory of his mother, Dr. Elda Y. Arce J o i n e d M e rc e r s b u rg ’s Board of Regents in 2010; is the youngest person to be inducted into the school’s McDowell Society (which recognizes donors who have given at least $1 million to Mercersburg)
My first experience at Mercersburg was the swim camp I attended there for a couple of summers before I became a student. I was a competitive swimmer on a year-round club team, and I got to experience the campus and the environment and stay in the dorms. Then I decided to enroll at Mercersburg before my 11th-grade year of high school. My parents had always been committed to education and ensuring that my brother and I had the best opportunities available to us. Between Mercersburg’s swimming and its academics, it was really a great choice. At the time, I was a little reluctant to leave behind my friends and teammates at home in Potomac, Maryland. But I had a wonderful experience at Mercersburg and am very grateful to my parents for supporting me through that. I had a pretty simple transition to Mercersburg; even though I wasn’t very far from home, I was too busy with swimming and with new friends to think about even going home before Thanksgiving. You don’t really have a perspective on it when you’re a student, because you’re so immersed in your activities and your friends, but when you’re there you’re part of all these different spheres of life and different groups of people that interact in different ways. So there are several communities that you belong to when you’re there, as well as the overall community of Mercersburg. Along with swimming, the other sport that I had played all my life was soccer. When I got to Mercersburg, because of the strength of the swimming program, it made sense to go full tilt into swimming as soon as I got there. I had a wonderful experience swimming for Pete Williams and I ended up swimming in college at Johns Hopkins, but I wish I would have played soccer at Mercersburg as well. I really enjoyed taking AP physics with David Holzwarth ’78, who’s still there on the faculty today and was my favorite teacher. There was a tremendous amount of practical application in his class, and he was so enthusiastic about the subject matter and teaching it to us. I was lucky to have two great roommates, Kurt Muhler ’96 and Kamul Masud ’97, in my two years at Mercersburg. Kurt was a 19-year-old postgraduate student, and I was a 16-year-old 11th grader. It was such a terrific experience to have someone to look up to; he was someone who was quite different than I was in many ways. Kamul is a great example of that, too; I’ve never met anyone else quite like him in terms of his openness to meeting and interacting with different types of people. Kamul swam in the Olympics for Pakistan and Kurt became an officer in the Navy and the captain of a Navy SEAL team. The Arce Scholars Program is, without question, the most incredible thing that I’ve ever had the good fortune to be part of in my life. It’s been the most