Possibly the best decision I have ever made, in my long affiliation with Exeter, was when I volunteered, during my 30th reunion, to become a class correspondent. That is, to gather the news and notes from my fellow 1973 classmates quarterly and write a column for The Exeter Bulletin. I had attended every one of my reunions since graduation, and I had always had an immensely good time, visiting with old friends, making new ones and spending time on the campus of the school I love dearly. So the opportunity to communicate with classmates more often seemed like a great idea. And I have never regretted it.

My co-correspondent in those early years was Sally Spoerl, who has been one of my best friends since seventh grade, and more recently I have shared the duties with Robert Barnett, another close friend who was a fellow Abbot Hall hooligan.

Gathering news from classmates is not without its challenges. In my first few years as a correspondent, a number of classmates didn’t have email. Instead, the Academy provided stamped postcards to send to them. Somewhat tenuously attached to each postcard was a blank card, also stamped and affixed with my address label. Rather frequently the two cards became separated in the mail and the postal service would dutifully send the blank card back to me. When I received the first of these blank cards, I thought a classmate was sending it back anonymously, silently telling me, “This is what I think of your request for news.”

But I always hear back from a few classmates, sometimes quite a few, and receiving those messages is always a bit of a dopamine hit. Nowadays all the correspondence is through email, and the Alumni Office makes it easy by sending a blast email to the class, containing whatever begging, cajoling or threatening message we wish to use in order to solicit contributions from our friends.

The most common reason that classmates give me for not sending in news is the feeling that they have not done anything worth speaking about, compared with what others have done. One time I sent out my request for news, saying that they need not have won an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize for their lives to be newsworthy. Then one of our classmates, Paul Romer, won a Nobel Prize. Now I have to say that Paul never wrote to tell me about the award, but I felt it was newsworthy enough to be included in the class notes. And I am sure that some classmates felt even more intimidated and became even less likely to send in their family news. But I am equally certain that Paul wanted to hear about his friends’ grandchildren and vacations just as much as they wanted to read about his Nobel Prize.

As we get older, I receive lots of news about children, grandchildren and travels. Hearing about these moments of pride and excitement provides me with a feeling of intimacy with classmates that I could not otherwise experience. Sometimes classmates reminisce about their time at Exeter, and those memories will take me back as well. Suddenly I’m that awkward teenager again, worrying about, in increasing order of importance, that English paper I still haven’t written, or the upcoming track meet, or why that one girl doesn’t like me back. (After all, I stood there, leaning against the wall of the Davis Student Center all evening, staring at her, so what more could she want from me?)

Only once did I find my work being censored. My classmate Susan had written about her sporty new car, which was faster than every other car around. Anticipating further midlife needs for excitement and inspired by a popular television show called “Pimp My Ride,” I speculated that soon she would be driving a “pimped-up truck,” before ending up riding a Harley as she approached old age. The Academy couldn’t abide such a suggestive term, and “pimped-up truck” became simply “pickup truck,” and the message I was trying to convey became somewhat deflated.

Exonians don’t just have amazing careers and wonderful families and do things that fascinate us. Sometimes they die. I wasn’t quite prepared for the emotional strain of reporting on a classmate’s death the first time. I was glad that I was not a class correspondent when my best friend died at a far-too-young age in the late 1980s. That was devastating, and I don’t know how I could have written about it.

But I have learned that death, however sad, is also an opportunity to celebrate life. Honoring people with little stories about their lives, from my memories or those of classmates who were closer to them, or from things I learned online, allows me to get past the sadness of their passing and appreciate all that they did, and all the lives that they touched, while they were still with us.

An unexpected benefit of being a class correspondent is being invited to the annual Alumni Council Weekend, which is now known as Exeter Leadership Weekend. Every fall, representatives of all the classes gather at Exeter for meetings, lectures and school activities, with the goals of updating us on new developments at the school and gleaning ideas for further improvements.

Among the initiatives we have learned about over the years are improvements in diversity at Exeter, the concept of non sibi, increased importance of the arts at the school (so now the focus is on three A’s: academics, athletics and arts), and need-blind admissions (so financial concerns are never an obstacle to attending the Academy).

For me the highlight of the weekend is the Friday evening dinner with the senior class. These students are really what Exeter is all about, and they never fail to impress me with their enthusiasm for and love of the school. They always seem to be far more intelligent, mature and well-rounded than we ever were as students, and we alumni always come away from that dinner thinking that we would never be able to get into Exeter today. The students always want to know about our days at Exeter, and especially about the early days of coeducation.

Sometimes you really connect with a student. One year I was walking to the dinner in the gymnasium with two classmates, Sally and Kris. Walking toward us was a student with a big smile. We decided we wanted to sit with this happy young woman. She told us how much she loved Exeter and couldn’t imagine what it would be like to no longer be a student there.

I shared the story of my last few hours as a student. Graduation was over and my family had to leave right away. I stayed behind to say goodbye to friends. One by one they drove off with their parents, and after a few hours everyone was gone. The campus was eerily deserted. I took my stuff out of my room and piled it in front of Abbot Hall. And then it hit me. My time as an Exeter student was really over, and a wave of sadness, the profundity of which shocked me, overcame me. “Oh my,” the student said, “that’s exactly how I’m going to feel. I don’t know how I’m going to bear it!”

Being a class representative helps you to bear it. Hearing from classmates is sort of like being back at school with them. And rewriting their stories for the Class Notes enables me to appreciate their adventures. Visiting campus, I feel like a student again, but without the stress of exams or papers or broken hearts. Just the joy of seeing old friends, making new ones, visiting with students or attending an athletic event or a dance recital is a reminder of what an unbelievably special place Phillips Exeter Academy really is.

Robert Lutes ’73 has been a class correspondent since 2003. He holds a degree in art history from McGill, a master’s degree in public health from Harvard and a medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina. He has worked in emergency medicine for the past 34 years.

Interested in becoming a class correspondent? Contact Cathy Webber at cmwebber@exeter.edu

This article was first published in the spring 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.

As stage manager at the Academy’s Fisher Theater, Laura Callanan ’83 ran productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Night School using many of the same organizational skills that she later parlayed into key positions with the National Endowment for the Arts, McKinsey & Company and the United Nations. As chief of staff for the U.N. Development Programme’s Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery, she collaborated with colleagues from around the world.

“We realized that every one of us had been a stage manager,” Callanan says of one U.N.D.P. working group. “There’s no better way to learn about deadlines and details than making sure the light goes on at the right time and in the right place.”

Today, Callanan, a Barnard College theater major who went on to earn a Master of Public Administration in public finance, has blended her many experiences into Upstart Co-Lab, of which she is founding partner. Upstart serves as a bridge between creatives who are entrepreneurs and impact investors who seek to achieve a social or environmental benefit alongside a financial return.

The idea for Upstart arose during Callanan’s time at the NEA, when she observed creatives were not just working alone in a studio or starting nonprofit organizations, but were increasingly launching for-profit social purpose businesses. She set out to connect these creative entrepreneurs to the trillions of dollars of impact capital in the U.S.

“A lot of transformation for the whole economy can begin in the creative industries,” Callanan says. “At Upstart, we’re not focused on funding ‘the arts.’ We’re focused on financing businesses in creative industries that provide products, services and platforms to customers. Businesses that hire people, that pay taxes — and that need investors to grow.”

Callanan finds creative entrepreneurs work in some 145 industries that span fashion, food, film, TV, video games and more. One such business is Making Space, whose founder, a 20-something serial entrepreneur who is living with a disability herself, connects media and entertainment companies looking for staff with qualified, skilled disabled talent. In just under a decade, Upstart has mobilized some $45 million and is recognized as the leader in the field of impact investing for the U.S. creative economy.

She is careful to point out that impact investing can play a role in anyone’s financial plan. And the creative economy, valued at more than $1.2 trillion in the United States, can be part of any impact investor’s portfolio. According to the U.N., the creative industries are expected to make up 10 percent of the global economy over the next decade. Countries around the world that have long relied on extractive industries and agriculture have grasped that it may just prove to be the golden egg for sustainable development and economic growth.

“Places like Indonesia with a very young population are intentionally leaning into the creative economy. They’re balancing tradition and innovation,” Callanan says. Given that, she and her team are routinely fielding inbound queries from community, state and international arts councils, and foundations exploring ways to invest in their local creative economies.

“That’s really exciting for us, because part of our work as a nonprofit is sharing what we’re learning to motivate and support other people who want to do this themselves,” she says of the process, now formalized as Upstart Consults.

Reflecting on her time at Fisher Theater, Callanan, who walked the boards in productions of Rashomon, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Equus, says acting, too, was pivotal to her career.

“I have no fear of public speaking. And I can translate between the creative people who are entrepreneurs and the investors,” she says, “and help people see where they’re talking about the same thing, just using different language. I would not have my deep appreciation of creativity and creative people without my experience in theater at Exeter.”

This article was first published in the spring 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.

This season Big Red wrestling’s roster featured 10 girls, the most in the history of the program. A traditionally male-dominated sport, wrestling at Exeter is rapidly growing into a competitive arena for female athletes — a trend that’s happening around the country. The National Federation of State High School Associations reports that girls wrestling has experienced significant growth in participation, increasing 102% since 2021.

“There are multiple teams with double-digit numbers of girls on their roster this year,” says head wrestling coach Justin Muchnick. “There are girls divisions at both the league and New England tournaments, as well as several girls-only invitationals throughout the season.”

The rise of girls wrestling can be attributed in part to top-down efforts. The inclusion of women’s wrestling in the Olympics in 2004, the expansion of women’s college programs and the NCAA’s decision to recognize women’s wrestling as an official championship sport in 2025–26 have provided clear pathways for female athletes to compete at higher levels.

“In the world of New England prep schools, a lot of this has been driven from the bottom up, by individual coaches and programs committing to girls wrestling,” Muchnick says. “You have to give a ton of credit to Andover for being the prime mover here: Kassie Bateman and Rich Gorham have spent a decade-plus making this vision a reality. But at this point there are quite a few other programs — Choate, St. Paul’s, Hyde, Northfield Mount Hermon and now us — that have made girls wrestling a priority.”

Exeter ranks in the top third of NEPSAC wrestling programs in terms of girls participation. The focus moving forward is on retention, recruitment and building a team capable of filling all 12 weight classes.

“I really want to use our current momentum to add as many girls as we can to our program!” Muchnick says. “Beyond competition, the growth of girls wrestling is reshaping the culture of the sport itself. The camaraderie among female wrestlers, even between competitors from different schools, is setting a new standard. As girls wrestling continues to flourish, it is clear that the sport is becoming stronger, more inclusive and more dynamic than ever before.

This article was first published in the spring 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.

Just three years out of college, Lauren Arkell ’18 is fulfilling one of her big career goals in aero-space: working on a mission to the moon. As flight controller on the mission operations team at Firefly Aerospace, she is playing a key role in the debut flight of the company’s lunar lander, Blue Ghost, which is scheduled to launch in mid-January.

During the two-month mission, the Firefly team will work around the clock in the console room, with Arkell and two other flight controllers alternating in 12-hour shifts. “I’ll be sending all the commands from the ground to the spacecraft and working hand in hand with the flight director to run through all of our operations procedures,” Arkell says. The procedures “make sure we meet our mission requirements and do all of the payload operations we need to, as well as monitor the health and safety of the vehicle.”

Blue Ghost will spend nearly a month orbiting the Earth and about two weeks in lunar orbit before landing near Mare Crisium, a basin in the far northeast quadrant of the moon’s Earth-facing side, for 14 days of surface operations. Dubbed Ghost Riders in the Sky, the mission will use 10 scientific instruments (or payloads) to collect data as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.

Arkell’s ties to Blue Ghost go back to a summer internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio during college. She worked on a passive coating to mitigate lunar dust, the abrasive fragments from the moon’s surface that can wreck astronauts’ spacesuits and equipment. “That coating is one of the payloads that Blue Ghost will bring to the moon,” Arkell says.

After graduating from Davidson College in 2022, she worked on various projects for a contractor for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland but kept her eye on the lunar dust mitigation project. When a position opened at Firefly, she jumped at the opportunity, moving to Austin, Texas, to fulfill her goal of working on a lunar mission. “Getting that data on lunar dust mitigation can solve the issues we saw during all of the Apollo missions and be super beneficial for NASA’s return to the moon,” Arkell says.

A presentation by Tom Marshburn, a Davidson alumnus and former astronaut who made three flights to the International Space Station, inspired Arkell to enter the aerospace field. At the time, she was majoring in physics and on a pre-med track but was undecided on a career. “I was able to connect with him personally,” she recalls. “He was such a nice guy, so normal and willing to chat, that I saw myself in him and saw the path that he took as an option for the first time.”

But Arkell says she discovered her passion for STEM at Exeter, where she was a three-year senior day student from nearby Brentwood. She loved her chemistry and physics classes, and vividly remembers taking astronomy with Science Instructor John Blackwell, including regular trips to Grainger Observatory. “Mr. Blackwell had a great take on how expansive space is, and how we know so little about it,” Arkell says. A co-captain of the varsity lacrosse and soccer teams at Exeter, Arkell went on to play lacrosse at Davidson. She brings those well-honed teamwork skills to the work she’s doing on the Blue Ghost mission.

“So much of it is active troubleshooting, working with everyone in  the room,” Arkell says. “You really have to trust yourself, your co-workers and the other people on console that are the specialists, and you’re constantly working through problems. It’s a lot of pressure, but I think it’s very exciting.”

Andy Novick ’01 enjoys all aspects of his work as an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, a psychiatrist and a researcher. But spearheading clinical trials in treating major depressive disorder with psilocybin, a component found in certain species of fungi, is what he finds the most exciting.

“It’s the ability to oversee people getting dosed with this psychedelic compound, making sure it is done safely, and the potential things we can learn from it,” Novick says.

A Drug Enforcement Administration Schedule I license allows Novick to possess and administer the drug for research, and an investigational new drug license from the Food and Drug Administration authorizes him to specifically study psilocybin for major depressive disorder, he says. The FDA “had to green light me and go through my study protocol with a fine-toothed comb.”

Novick’s interest in psychopharmacology began at Exeter, where he felt supported as he explored the topic. Science Instructor Kathleen Curwen, one of his favorite teachers, taught him both chemistry and biochemistry. “It was in her class that I got to write my first psychopharmacology paper,” he says, “critiquing an article on testosterone derivatives and aggressive behavior. When I told her the topic, she didn’t consider it odd. Instead, she let me run with it.”

Novick began doing research in neuroscience at Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in pharmacology. He went on to receive his medical degree and Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of South Dakota. In 2019, he joined the faculty at the University of Colorado.

“It became really obvious around 2021 or so that psychedelics were going to be a part of psychiatry that wasn’t going anywhere,” he says. “Psilocybin was something I wanted to start with given that it had some research suggesting a really high utility in things like major depressive disorder.”

The clinical research Novick is conducting at the university’s Anschutz Medical Campus entails a psilocybin trial in 40 individuals with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. He says, “Subjects are randomized to receive either a therapeutic dose of psilocybin or an inactive microdose of psilocybin that acts as a placebo.”

Results from the eight-week trial have proved auspicious. “What we think psilocybin does is that it creates a window of opportunity in the brain for significant change,” he says. “People with depression are often stuck in a brain state in which they have certain thoughts and feelings, often of a very negative nature, that they can’t get out of. Psilocybin makes the brain more plastic and more open to potential change — to change those patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors.”

Novick tempers his enthusiasm with reality. “Major depressive disorder is a serious and difficult illness,” he says. “I don’t think this is going to be the ultimate fix for the entire population. But I do think it’s going to be a huge improvement from what we have right now.

“This work is very much my life,” Novick continues. “Some call that being a workaholic or not having balance. I prefer to view it as getting to do interesting stuff that I enjoy, every day.”

Just as outdoor temperatures start to dip, a familiar chill begins to emanate from the south end of the George H. Love Gymnasium. For decades, Rinks A and B have been the home to Exeter’s boys and girls hockey teams and the setting for recreational skating for the Academy community. Construction of the first indoor rinks on campus began in the late 1960s as part of the massive “new gymnasium” project which was officially rededicated as Love Gymnasium in 1980. Since then, the rinks have played host to thousands of competitions, dorm night outings and, when not frozen, alumni receptions.

1. FILLING THE RINK It takes tens of thousands of gallons of water at the start of every season to turn the concrete subfloor into a skateable surface.
2. KEEPING IT COOL The rinks’ refrigeration system keeps the ice temperature from 17 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit. The indoor air temperature is set to 55degrees with an ideal humidity level no greater than 50%.
3. SMOOTH SURFACE Zamboni is a brand of ice resurfacing machines made by a California-based company, but it has become the common term for any apparatus that performs this function. They shave a thin layer of ice, wash the remaining ice with hot water (about 140 degrees Fahrenheit), then spread the water to create a smooth surface as it refreezes. Ice resurfacers can weigh more than six tons with a full tank. According to Zamboni.com, the machines’ top speed is 9.7 m.p.h.
4. ICE TIME Academy teams, clubs and physical education classes, as well as local public high school teams keep the facility bustling all winterlong. On average, the rinks are in use 70 hours each week. Five dedicated employees keep them in top condition.
5. WINNING HISTORY The first E/A hockey game took place in 1914. The seeds of what became the first Academy-sponsored hockey team were planted a few years earlier, but we all know that sports don’t get real until Big Red and Big Blue clash. Girls hockey at Exeter began for the 1974-75 season. In 1998-99, the boys team posted a 30-3 record en route to its only New England crown. The next season, the girls team took home their own New England championship.