Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy

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Alumni Mentors share their workplace and knowledge with rising seniors.

Anne Rankin ’92, the current Bates-Russell Distinguished Faculty Professor and an instructor in science, embraces her role as a change agent at Exeter. Inspired by conversations with current and former students over her nearly 25 years with the Academy, Rankin spent months brainstorming ways to build meaningful connections between the groups. “Students often talk about how valuable it is to have perspective from someone working in a career they’re interested in,” she says.

To provide those opportunities, Rankin coordinated nine new summer internships that pair students with alumni mentors in the workplace. Open by application to rising seniors, the internships placed students in diverse professional settings, including assisting with eye exams at a retinal clinic, helping a sustainable clothing brand prepare its 2024 collection, and collaborating virtually to develop an artificial intelligence module for older adults.

Rankin’s initiative complements the Academy’s robust summer internship program, which includes an 11-year partnership with Dr. Seung Kim ’81, director of the Stanford Diabetes Research Center. Students work alongside Kim in his lab, conducting hands-on biomedical research, creating and characterizing new strains of fruit flies.

Rankin stresses that the internships are more than ways for students to work in interesting settings for a month or so. “It’s also an opportunity to learn from someone other than teachers,” Rankin says. “It’s about human relationships and learning how to be mentored. Putting the students in touch with a caring adult and having them talk to you about your next steps. That’s important.”

The alumni benefit as well. Mentoring students who share their Exeter experience is an opportunity to share real-world experiences as well as insight into their business or area of expertise. “We don’t coddle anyone,” says mentor Dennis Whittle ’79, co-founder of consulting firm Normal>Next. “They’re doing real work with real leaders in real time.”

Ultimately, for Whittle and other alumni, the mentorship opportunity was as rewarding for them as for the students. “It’s a chance to learn how to be mentors,” Rankin says, “and give back to Exeter in a meaningful way beyond financial contributions.”

A look at a few of the new internships
Follow me: Exploring clinical medicine
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Alumni mentors share their workplace and knowledge with rising seniors

image for Follow me: Exploring clinical medicine
Follow me: Exploring synthetic chemistry
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Alumni mentors share their workplace and knowledge with rising seniors

image for Follow me: Exploring synthetic chemistry
Follow me: Exploring sustainable fashion
image for Follow me: Exploring sustainable fashion

Alumni mentors share their workplace and knowledge with rising seniors

image for Follow me: Exploring sustainable fashion

The power of discovery

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is home to the world’s largest particle accelerator and only antimatter factory, and, for two weeks in September, eight extremely excited Exonians.

In the final months of 2022, our Myriad Magnets team — Daniel Jeon ’23, William Lu ’24, Peter Morand ’25, Achyuta Rajaram ’24, William Soh ’24, Isabella Vesely ’23, Ishaan Vohra ’24 (our team lead) and Aubrey Zhang ’23 — met regularly to develop a research proposal for CERN’s Beamline for Schools competition. Our 14-page submission presented a design for an original and modular mechanical setup to replace the high-energy-consuming electromagnets used in all accelerators.

CERN is a major consumer of electricity. A massive portion of this consumption comes from powering all the electromagnets, which bend and focus the particle beams, needed to run the massive accelerator complex.

Our proposal sought to instead use permanent magnets in special geometric formations — no electricity needed.

In July, our plan was one of three winning entries chosen from hundreds of submissions from student groups in over 60 countries. We were invited to test our proposal at the global epicenter of physics among some of the best scientists in the world.

Three-quarters of the way through our stay in Switzerland, our team trickled into our morning meeting room. Some arrived after team breakfast, others after waking up from eventful late nights of work. We started our day together in hybrid fashion with our support scientists and the other two winning teams, Pakistan’s Particular Perspective at CERN, and the Netherlands’ Wire Wizards working at DESY, Germany’s largest accelerator center. After checking in with everyone, we dived in: How is our physics going? What’s going well? What setbacks is everyone facing? Not a single day had passed without an answer to this final question. We discussed and brainstormed as one big team before setting plans for the day. With only three more days of access to the beam, we had zero time to waste.

A short time later we settled into our shifts across the CERN campus. For the rest of the day, subteams rotated to allow each team member to fully explore all parts of the experiment.

Members from the Exeter and Pakistani teams rushed to the test beam control room to check the overnight data and prepare the day’s experiments. We were lucky: Particles came through as expected, and our complex setup with numerous particle physics-specific detectors suffered from no major errors (a true rarity). The calmer aura of this morning was mildly misleading — it was a major development from the beam shifts of the days prior. Since our first day, those assigned to beam shift could expect two hours of intense problem-solving led by our support scientists. From fixing data collection and software concerns to examining mechanical components and detectors that randomly stopped working, each shift was a unique experience at the center of computer, electrical and mechanical engineering in physics.

A few buildings over, a group of students headed to a data analysis session. There we learned the ins and outs of CERN’s data analysis library, called ROOT, from CERN scientists and engineers. Some of our mentor scientists prepared physics and data analysis-specific programming exercises, often using real data from older runs, while other mentors stayed throughout the day to help debug, answer our many questions and offer new ideas to ponder. Ready to start putting our new techniques to the test, we began analyzing our own data. All of our team’s analysis sessions that day consisted of translating numbers into useful methods of understanding our magnet arrays’ effectiveness.

At Exeter, our physics club often looks to show how physics is fun in unconventional ways. CERN’s Markus Joos, our program’s technical coordinator, has perfected a similar pedagogy. In “playground” sessions, he shared his decades of experience working on some of CERN’s largest experiments. Amid CERN stories and general experiment questions and answers, we explored the inner workings of the detectors and computer systems that underlie our own and CERN’s most elaborate experiments. We worked as a team to create a cosmic muon detector, using scintillator detectors to expose the fundamental subatomic particles raining down on us from cosmic radiation.

Our time in the playground enhanced our understanding of the inner mechanisms of our experiment and even inspired new ideas — including a new magnetic mangle design and the possibility of a detector to measure the random positively charged beta particle emission of bananas (a project shaping up to become a senior project for Achyuta Rajaram and William Lu)!

Throughout the week, we attended special lectures from CERN experts. We even had the chance to meet Bathsheba Nell Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations office in Geneva, and give her a personal tour of our experiment! Taking full advantage of our location, we also toured CERN’s historic first particle accelerator from 1957 (where we realized we had studied its exact physics principles in Exeter’s advanced physics sequence!), the antimatter factory, and the extensive engineering facilities. To cap off a fully immersive experience, we explored the historic and cultural aspects of Geneva, making sure to practice our French even when trying Swiss chocolates.

As the trip ended, we wrapped up our data collection and presented our conclusions to the CERN and DESY labs. Our initial results, using our magnetic mangle in a dipole configuration, showed that a radially and rotationally adjustable magnetic mangle is indeed possible for meaningful particle deflection. In other words: Our design worked! We also confirmed that stationary arrays of magnets in the dipole Halbach configuration can deflect the beam. But after boarding the plane home, our particle physics adventure had only just begun to accelerate. From across the Atlantic, we will stay in contact with CERN, completing our data analysis and exploring the impacts our results may unlock.

This article first appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Finis Origine Pendet: Insulting the Prince

In the world of transistors, silicon, steel, resides a set of 0s and 1s named the Prince.

Jailed by Supercell, to dash, lance, and exclaim “Ha Ha,” for millions of cursing prepubescent children, who have not yet finished their homework. It takes 14 of their worthless seconds to generate a prince.

With a clanging of steel, and a foolish overconfidence, he lands on his horse, only to be chipped away by skeletons, defenseless against minions, or kited by a skillfully placed ice golem.

His health bar drained to zero, the prince disappears in a puff of pink smoke. Doomed to reappear, and vanish, many more times until the player finally decides: the Prince is not worth 14 seconds of their time.

Such is the daily routine of the Prince.

Jailed, as we are.

Hopeful, as we are.

Gone, as we will be.

(Inspired by “Insulting the Prince,” by Martin Espada)

Tanay Nandan ’25 was awarded a 2023 Lamont Younger Poet Prize. The prize honors poems of exceptional promise written by preps and lowers at Phillips Exeter Academy as well as achievement in the early years of a student’s developing craft. 

This poem first appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Exeter crew medals at historic Head of the Charles

Exeter crew conquered the famed Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston over the weekend, sending three Big Red boats through the twists and turns of the Charles River. A three-day event, the Head of the Charles is the largest regatta in the world, attracting more than 11,000 athletes and thousands of spectators who line the banks with energy and fervor.

“It was terrific to see Exeter field three crews in this huge and popular event, attended by top athletes from the U.S. and abroad,” said coach Greg Spanier. “Our athletes, with a wide range of histories, rowing-wise, trained hard and showed a strong desire to improve their skills and fitness every day.”

The women’s youth 4+ boat of Jane Park ’24, Eden Fisher ’24, Athena Sperantsas ’24, Ava Cathey ’25 and Sophie Turner ’25 delivered a terrific performance, earning a medal with a third-place overall finish in a time of 19:31.934 among a field of 90 boats.

The women’s youth 8+ boat of Victoria Mabardy ’25, Evie Gaylord ’25, Sophia Slosek ’25, Nora Unger ’26, Amelia Post ’26, Chloe Bosma ’26, Bea Prairie ’25, Melissa Yuan ’24 and Kaitlyn Farkas ’26 paced the course in 19:43.965 to finish 56th overall. The men’s youth 4+ of Arian Khichadia ’25, Rohan Radhakeesoon ’24, Mason Cotter ’25, Michael Goodall ’24 and Rohit Kantamneni ’25 made it through the curvy course with a time of 18:24.442 to claim 50th place overall. 

The women’s youth 4+ boat held the lead for more than half the race and were impeded while on the water, forcing them to stop and get separated by the passing boat. The aggressive, meandering course often causes close quarters on the water, and crews who do no yield when being passed are penalized, thus forcing the Big Red boat to pause. An otherwise outstanding performance placed them on the podium. This is the third straight year an Exeter girls 4+ boat has earned a top-five finish at the Head of the Charles. The crew of Jacqueline Luque ‘22, Fisher, Jamie Reidy ‘24, Matilda Damon ‘23 and Charlotte Pulkkinen ’22 claimed second place in 2021; Gracie Keyt ‘23, Fisher, Sperantsas, Damon, and Reidy teamed up for a fifth-place finish in 2022.

“In addition to the athletes themselves, much credit for the success of our program should go to Coach Morris, Coach Moore and Coach Cathey, who have instilled such magnificent skills, spirit and expertise into this particularly successful and competitive group of five athletes,” Spanier said. “Also acknowledged should be the all other coaches in our program for their work with the supporting all of our teams on the water, whose abilities and team spirit form the foundation of the program. Also, Mr. Burnham, who in his role as Boathouse Manager, maintains our access to top-class equipment and who is always willing to make timely repairs and adjustments, often in difficult circumstances and at very short notice.”

 

Published author a work in progress

Like so many authors, Brendan Shay Basham knows much of the writing process is revision. And, as he told an engaged assembly audience, the road to self-discovery can take a similar path.

“If consciousness is the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, then we have plenty of time for revision — to revise our story, to look at ourselves in new ways, to look at the world in new ways,” he said.

Basham’s debut novel “Swim Home to the Vanished” draws on his real-life experiences as a chef, dealing with the grief that comes with loss and mental health. In his assembly remarks and subsequent lunchtime Q&A, Basham shared the moments of his life that made him pause, reflect and revise his way of thinking.

Born to a white father and a Navajo mother, Basham had always been told the meaning of his Tó Ts’ohnii heritage was “big water.” He said he took that to heart, feeling as though he needed to live near large bodies of water “in order to feel like himself.” It wasn’t until later in life that an aunt explained the English translation of the name had distorted the actual meaning — “expansive water.”

“There’s something about how language and translation and transliteration can throw us off. That kind of definition, being defined by another, being pushed to margins,” he said.

This subtle, but powerful piece of knowledge presented a new way for Basham to reflect on his life — his years behind a cookline, the many places he’d called home and the passing of his brother — revising his personal story while creating art in different forms.

“This is my expansive water. It looks like chaos. But that’s kind of what water is, isn’t it? It’s kind of chaotic and it’s unpredictable,” Basham says of his writing and artistic pursuits.

Basham also spoke on the topic of mental health, sharing that he was recently diagnosed and with bipolar disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. He reflected on his time as a chef, crediting the way his brain works for his success in the kitchen.  

“ADHD is not a disorder, it’s a different way of seeing the world, it’s truly a superpower,” he said. “When I’m a chef, I have six pans on the saute station, I’ve got stuff on the grill, I’ve got stuff in the fryer, something smoking in the oven, something braising in the other oven. I’m screaming at my cooks, dancing with my dishwasher. I’m screaming at the front house staff and my business partner and I can do this all at the same time.”

As Basham met with several dozen students for a Q&A session one asked, “If life is about revisiting and reshaping your own personal narrative and your life, can stories have a proper conclusion?”

“It’s cyclical,” Basham said. “I don’t think it has to end. I think it depends on your culture, how we are raised and what you believe in. If you think that a story has an end, then you’ve stopped growing.”

 

Mapping the mosquito genome

Malaria killed an estimated 608,000 people worldwide in 2022 and sickened some 249 million more. With globalization and climate change — and the presence of potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes — malaria may even make a comeback in North America, where it was considered eradicated in 1951.

Now Exeter students have joined research efforts aimed at fighting the global spread of malaria, which has no cure. In a new biology course developed by Science Instructors Shimaa Ghazal and Anne Rankin ’92, and taught by Ghazal, students succeeded in mapping a full genome sequence for a strain of the mosquito species Anopheles gambiae, a leading host for the parasite that causes malaria. The results of their efforts were published in GenBank, the National Institutes of Health’s annotated database of publicly available DNA sequences.

To carry out this real-world research, Ghazal, who has a doctorate in microbial genetics, and her students collaborated with laboratories run by Dr. Seung Kim ’81 at Stanford and Dr. Michael Povelones at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Called PEA_Agam_2022 (short for Phillips Exeter Academy, Anopheles gambiae, winter 2022), the newly mapped genome is one of only seven for Anopheles gambiae that are published in GenBank and the first to be published by a high school. By studying the different strains of Anopheles gambiae and pinpointing genetic material that makes the mosquitoes better or worse at carrying the disease, scientists hope to develop more effective insecticides and — one day — breed mosquitoes that are resistant to carrying malaria.

In addition to the complex “wet lab” work involved in preparing the snippets of mosquito DNA for sequencing, students read and discussed journalist Sonia Shah’s book The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years. “We wanted to put the disease into a broader context, and broaden the students’ understanding,” Rankin says. “We sequenced a genome, but we did not just sequence a genome. We learned a lot about the context of malaria in different parts of the world, and the way it has influenced human history.”

The “malaria course,” offered in the winter term 2022, will return this spring as BIO650: Exploring Bioinformatics and Next-Generation Sequencing. Building on the model of Exeter’s popular “fruit fly course,” part of a collaboration with Kim’s lab at Stanford since 2012, BIO650 will also introduce students to the growing interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics, which applies computer technology to understand biological data and information.

All's well as Exeter expands geothermal footprint

Exeter has 86 new additions to its campus infrastructure which won’t be heard nor seen but whose output will be felt for decades to come.

A four-month long project to sink geothermal wells beneath the Academy Building lawn is near completion. Those wells, joining the more than 40 that already were in place, will be used to heat and cool a new dining hall and, eventually, the Academy Building itself.

Geothermal well systems are designed to use the Earth’s relatively constant subsurface temperature along with a heat exchanger to either add to or remove heat from a building. Existing wells on campus regulate temperatures in Phillips Hall, New Hall and the Goel Center, among other places. The well projects are part of Exeter’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plan announced last spring.

The new dining hall and renovated Merrill and Langdell halls are on schedule to open next fall.

 

 

Ardura to take reins of Big Red girls soccer

Diego Ardura will be the head coach of the girls varsity soccer program, effective at the end of the season, the Exeter Athletics Department announced. Ardura, who currently serves as co-head coach of the program alongside Alexa Caldwell, served as an assistant with the program for two years before being named co-head coach and, now, head coach of the program.

“Coach Diego demonstrates a superb ability to connect with, challenge, and educate students,” said Director of Physical Education and Athletics Jason Baseden. “He is passionate, excitable, and incredibly knowledgeable about the sport, he is an impact-maker on our campus, and we’re looking forward to him continuing to work with our students and leaving his mark on the program.”

Ardura arrived on campus in 2019 and serves as an instructor in the Modern Languages Department. Prior to Exeter, Ardura taught and coached soccer at the Hotchkiss School.

“I am both humbled and very excited to be named as head coach of the girls varsity soccer program,” said Ardura. “Being a teacher and coach at Phillips Exeter is a dream come true. I have been very fortunate to work alongside and learn from great coaches like Alexa Caldwell and Kerry McBrearty. I am also thankful to Jason Baseden for his mentorship over the years.”

“It is with so much comfort that I leave the program in Diego’s hands,” said Caldwell, who has been at the helm of the program for seven seasons. “The program has such a bright future with his energy, enthusiasm, and knowledge of the game.” 

Coach Ardura was born and raised in Spain, where he grew up playing soccer from a very young age. After a few years in his home club, he was recruited by Real Oviedo FC, a professional football academy in northern Spain. He has taught Spanish and coached varsity soccer for more than 10 years at independent schools.

“Being born and raised in Spain makes me appreciate what a unique opportunity it is to be a student-athlete even more,” Ardura said. “Our girls varsity soccer team wants to be the type of program that has very curious, academically motivated students who love playing soccer and competing. I strongly believe that being a great student makes you a better soccer player, and vice versa.”

In addition to coaching for Big Red, Ardura also coaches at Seacoast United FC and holds a USSF National C Coaching License and an Advanced National Diploma. He lives on campus with his wife, Dr. Joyce, and his three children, Anna Valeria, Sofía and Mateo.

'Curious' conversations will save us, author tells Exeter

Monica Guzman never said the word Harkness during her assembly address last month, nor does she ever mention the term in her acclaimed book “I Never Thought of It That Way,” but her messages in both resound with familiarity for anyone who has ever sat around a table.

“One of the things that’s going to help save our democracy is to get curious about people, with people,” Guzman told her Exeter audience.

A Mexican immigrant and dual U.S./Mexico citizen, Guzman came to the United States when she was 6. She grew up in Dover, New Hampshire, and lives in Seattle with her husband and two children, a proud liberal daughter of conservative parents. That family dynamic is the foundation of her book and the inspiration for its title. “’I never thought of it that way’ is a phrase you say when some insight, from someone else’s perspective, has crossed that chasm between two human beings and maybe landed with you.”

Watch Monica Guzman’s assembly address

Much of Guzman’s messages — listening to understand, not to respond; learning the roots of differing perspectives — parallel the values of Exeter’s Harkness pedagogy. Principal Rawson spoke about those values in the pages of The Exeter Bulletin when he arrived on campus in 2018 and has leaned on them ever since.

“We need less talking at each other, more listening to learn from each other rather than to judge or apply labels, and more effort to reach a common understanding around our problems. Harkness makes room for that. At Exeter, we have the chance to realize that our differences, and different perspectives, can be the very things that make life exciting. Our differences are how we express our common humanity. Understanding that — valuing it — is what I think Harkness drives us toward.”

Guzman told assembly that without connecting with people with differing perspectives, “whoever is under-represented in our life is going to be over-represented in our imagination. And our imaginations are not a great source of truth. They are where anxiety starts to fill in the blanks.

“The solution, as much as one can sum one up, is bridge-building. Looking for moments, having ways, to check your imagination with reality, by traversing what can feel like an impossible gap. This can be really, really hard to do, but the way that you begin to do it is just about yourself, questioning your own assumptions.”

Guzman’s book was the Exeter faculty’s common read over the summer. Her assembly will serve as an inspiration for students’ Core Value Project proposals this fall to encourage curious conversations and perspective sharing.

Guzman described a “vicious cycle” in today’s society “where you judge each other more while you’re engaging each other less. What that means is that the judgments you make rely more and more on the signals you get from media, from those who agree with you and less and less on the actual source: The minds and hearts of people who disagree with you.”

 

What’s an Exeter Bar?

(Hey wait, did Exeter invent the blondie?)

When Exeter bars appear on the menu at either of our dining halls, the bakers typically make 1,200 servings to feed the hungry hordes. Weighing in at more than 140 pounds of batter, that includes about 35 pounds of chocolate chips and nearly 40 pounds of flour. Rarely will a crumb go to waste.

According to Don Doane, who was the dining director in the 1970s, the original recipe was for Congo bars. Members of the catering team made some modifications and later renamed the recipe — thus an everlasting favorite at the dessert station was born.

A family-sized recipe of Exeter bars calls for 22.5 ounces of chocolate chips and makes 48 individual bars, which would cover half of one of the sheet pans used by the dining services bakers. One full sheet of bars contains 11 pounds of batter.

For many years, PEA’s Alumni Relations team has sent an Exeter bar to each member of the previous year’s graduating class — providing a tasty reminder of Exeter while they’re studying in their college dorm rooms.