2023 Graduation Remarks

Members of the Class of 2023: I am pleased to deliver this farewell address.

Soon you will be graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy. With diplomas in hand, you will be fellow Exeter alumni. In that sense, we will be peers, members of the same extended Exeter community that spans generations.

I hope you will leave Exeter as I did many years ago – with a deep sense of gratitude for your time here, and a strong sense of belonging.

Our mission as a school, as you know so well, is to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

Your mission as students has been to learn and grow, make lifelong friends, pursue your passions, and prepare yourselves to lead purposeful lives.

You have done all that. You have been challenged during your time here, and you have succeeded. In all your endeavors – academic, artistic, athletic, and more – you have worked hard, aspired to excellence, and achieved excellence. Whether you have been here one year or four, or in between, you have grown in ways that you likely could not have imagined when you first arrived.

I have said many times that Exeter has never stayed strong by staying the same. Even in the last four years, like you, our school has grown and changed in important ways. We have become stronger in how we celebrate the rich diversity of our school community, and how we strive to create a strong sense of belonging for all members of our community. You have played important roles, often leadership roles, in this critically important work, and I thank you.

When I think back on my days as a student, my strongest memories are not about individual or group accomplishments. Of course, I do remember a few triumphs pretty vividly, and I remember a few disappointments. Yet, the sense of what it meant to be part of this community, with its long history and high ideals, and the lifelong friendships that came along with it, are what have had the greatest meaning and most enduring impact for me over the years. And it was my experience that my teachers really cared about me, expected a lot of me, and were uncompromising in their expectations, that gave me self-confidence and propelled me forward. I hope the same has been true for all of you, is true for you today, and will be what you hold most dear in the years ahead.

We must remember and recognize that your time here has not been easy. The pandemic posed significant challenges for our school and for all of you, from spring of Prep year right through last year. But nothing can prepare a school for the tragic loss that we experienced as a community in January.

You have faced adversity and loss with compassion, empathy and grace, determined to find a way forward together. Always together as a community. Drawing strength from one another. Caring for each other.

Throughout your time here, but especially this year, I have admired how you have supported each other, cared for each other, and shown up for one another. I have seen this every day, in every corner of the campus, and in every facet of Academy life, and I have found it inspiring.

I think that is why I believe I will always remember the class of 2023 not only for your accomplishments, which are considerable and many, but more importantly, for your indomitable spirit, your resilience, for how you have celebrated each other, and for the joy that you have brought to our school and all that you have done here.

Exeter is a collection of stories – stories which together comprise the rich history of our school. You now have your own stories – stories that are as much a part of the Academy’s history as the stories of any other class. It has been a great pleasure for me, for your teachers, and for all the adults on campus, to witness your stories unfolding, individually and as a class, and to observe firsthand your growth and your many contributions to the life and spirit of the school.

There is a country music song which some of you might know called Don’t Get Above Your Raising. The song is about not forgetting where you came from. Don’t forget your roots. Don’t forget those who brought you into this world and have supported you all along.

I trace my roots to a small mill town in Rhode Island where hockey was king and going to college not expected. My father was one of the rare exceptions; his athletic skills, particularly in hockey, combined with good grades, earned him an opportunity to attend Brown University, thirty minutes from the small mill town of Harrisville, Rhode Island, where he grew up. Years later, when I was a student here, Phillips Exeter Academy might have seemed worlds apart from my relatives who still lived in Harrisville, but in my mind, they stood for the same things: integrity, hard work and respect.

My grandmother Eva Augusta Rawson, who went back to work in the mill when her husband died at a relatively young age, expected the same of me as my instructors did here. It was during my visits to Harrisville with my grandmother and my aunts and uncles, none of whom went to college, that my values were shaped. That is where I learned to respect the dignity of all work and the equal worth of every human life – values that were reinforced here at Exeter.

Phillips Exeter Academy is not above wherever you came from. Yet, an Exeter education is an extraordinary gift, and being here a great privilege. With that privilege comes great opportunity, and with opportunity comes responsibility.

Our core value of non sibi expresses our belief that wisdom gained here should be used for the good of others as well as for oneself. We boldly proclaim, “Exeter seeks to graduate young people whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.” And we state further that “Exonians are motivated by this philosophy to face the challenges of their day.”

The challenges of your day – whether viewed locally, regionally or globally — are many and formidable, and you do not need me to list them for you.

Imbued with knowledge and goodness, you are ready to take your place in the world and confront our greatest challenges head on. With the abilities you brought with you and the skills you have developed here, and with all that you have learned here, you are ready for your next steps.

Through Harkness, you have had the opportunity to learn with others whose experiences, backgrounds and perspectives differ from your own. You have grown in confidence as you have come to realize your capacity to learn and grow. And you have come to appreciate that human connection is at the foundation of all that we do and all that we can hope to accomplish in this world. You take these Harkness skills and experiences with you as you go forward in life, and are uniquely prepared to join and lead teams that will help develop solutions to our most intractable problems.

You have attended many assemblies in which Exeter alumni have shared their stories about how they have taken what they learned here and have gone on to improve lives and change the world in some meaningful way. It is your turn now. You now will become the change makers. You are ready to follow the examples of Exonians who have come before, and write your own non sibi stories. You are ready, and you have what it takes. It will be exciting to see what paths you choose, and how you will lead your own purposeful lives.

I would like to close with a few more words about gratitude and belonging.

First, I would like to express my own gratitude for your time here, for all that you have contributed to the life of our school, and for the combination of purpose and joy that you have brought to our school and all you that have done here. I will miss you. I will miss this class.

Second, regarding your own gratitude, in addition to being grateful to your families, teachers and all other adults who have supported you during your time here, I hope you also feel gratitude to prior generations of Exonians who have helped make Exeter what it is today, and who have thereby helped make your Exeter experiences possible. We should be grateful to those who came before, and accept our place and responsibility as part of the history of this great school.

And lastly, with respect to belonging, please understand that your belonging at Exeter does not end today. You will always belong here. Your teachers, coaches and other mentors will continue to care for you, and will look forward to your return visits. In the years ahead, it will be deeply meaningful to them to see the impact they have had on your lives, and through your lives, on the world. After all, this is how they have chosen to be change makers.

At the height of the pandemic, I told you, “Exeter lives within us and forms around us, no matter the distance between us.” Wherever your lives may take you, you will always be Exonians, and you will always belong to each other.

Class of 2023: I wish you success and fulfillment in the years ahead. Please come back often to share your stories.

Congratulations!

Principal Rawson’s 2022 Opening Assembly Address

Good morning, Exeter.

I welcome you again to this Opening Assembly, which marks the beginning of the 242nd year in the history of our school.

It is indeed wonderful to see everyone gathered together, and to feel the energy and excitement in the room. For some, this represents a return to the school you already know well and love, and to friendships that already have been formed and mean the world to you. For others, it represents a new beginning. I am happy and excited to see all of you here this morning.

I would like to thank Dean Page for welcoming and introducing our new faculty to our school community. We are so excited that our new faculty are here and are now a part of the Exeter community.

Thank you, Dean Weatherspoon, for welcoming and recognizing our emeriti faculty. We are deeply grateful for our emeriti faculty’s presence this morning and for their enduring commitment to our school.

I would like to extend a special, warm welcome to all our new students. You are 341 in number, and come from 34 states and 20 countries. You bring a wonderful diversity of backgrounds, experiences, talents and interests. Every one of you was admitted without regard to your family’s ability to pay tuition or other costs of attending Exeter.

Watch the Opening Assembly remarks

Last November we announced a “need-blind” admissions policy, meaning that Exeter’s admissions decisions are made without regard to any family’s ability to pay, and the Academy is committed to meeting the full demonstrated financial need of every student. The generosity of alumni, parents and friends of the Academy, recently and over many generations, has made these commitments possible, and we are indeed very grateful.

In addition to welcoming our new students, I would like to assure you that I have every confidence in your success at Exeter. I say that from the perspective of having once occupied your seat, as a new Lower, many years ago. I came from a modest background and was a financial aid recipient. When I attended opening assembly for the first time, I certainly was happy to be here, and of course I felt the excitement of the day, but I also was a little nervous, and perhaps even a bit overwhelmed or intimidated by everything and everyone around me. That was many years ago. With our robust orientation programs today, hopefully you have already left those uncertain feelings behind, but just in case, let me tell you what I tell all our new students every year.

You can do the work.

You will make lifelong friends.

Absolutely, you belong here.

It has been my custom during my tenure as principal to unveil at Opening Assembly each year a new school T-shirt, and I will do that now. This is an additional way to welcome our new students, and to reinforce for all students, new and returning, a sense of pride and belonging. You are all Exonians. You will be able to collect your T-shirts outside as you leave the gym, and keep an eye out for Exeter bars outside McConnnell Hall as you head to class.

Seniors, members of the Class of 2023, I want to add that it is wonderful to see you in the front section! This will be an important and memorable year for you. We have 31 new seniors this year. Whether this is your fourth year at Exeter or first, or in between, your leadership across all aspects of school life will be important to the success of our school this year.

Uppers, members of the Class of 2024, you have passed the halfway point. It will be exciting to see you continue to learn and grow this year, and to watch as you emerge into leadership positions in your own right. Please welcome 25 new students to your class.

Lowers, Class of 2025, we have 62 new Lowers this year. This is a year for you to explore new passions and develop new strengths, perhaps strengths that prior to coming to Exeter you never imagined you could have.

And finally, preps, Class of 2026, 222 strong and all new to Exeter. It might be hard for you to imagine, but in time you will be seniors, and a new class of preps will be looking up to you. For now, I encourage you to reach out to older students for advice; they can tell you what they wish they had known when they arrived as new students.

It also is our custom at Exeter for the principal at Opening Assembly to talk about the Academy’s Deed of Gift and reflect on the mission of our school. The Deed of Gift was signed by co-founders John and Elizabeth Phillips in 1781, five years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and seven years before the State of New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratifify the U.S. Constitution. Our Deed of Gift is a remarkable document.

It states that Exeter “shall ever be equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter.”

And it states, “Above all, it is expected that the attention of instructors to the disposition of the minds and morals of the youth under their charge will exceed every other care; well considering that though goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous, and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to humankind.”

From these passages, we derive our school mission. Our mission is to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

To unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

We proudly proclaim “academic excellence” as a core value and signature strength of our school. Indeed, that is one of the reasons you are here — to excel academically. Our core value states, “In every discipline, and at every level within our curriculum, we seek to inspire students to develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths. Intellectual exploration through rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse at the Harkness table nurtures inquisitiveness, creativity, insight, empathy, independent thought and mastery in our students.”

We aim high at Exeter. We will help you excel in your academic pursuits, and in all your other endeavors. Our objective is to teach you how to think, not what to think, and the focus, inside and outside the classroom, will always be on knowledge and goodness.

As The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. said, while an undergraduate at Morehouse College, “We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”

At Exeter, we are committed to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive community, where all members of the community have a strong sense of belonging and equal opportunity to thrive. In this regard, our commitment to youth from every quarter is integral to how we teach and learn, and inseparable from our mission to unite goodness and knowledge and prepare our students – all of you – to lead purposeful lives.

The Academy’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Vision Statement explicitly states:

“Our Harkness pedagogy is grounded in the belief that we are all better equipped to learn and to lead when our thoughts are tested by others, particularly by those whose thoughts or identities are different from our own. Only when we skillfully engage our differences … will we find a path to that greater understanding of the world and how we can be of service to it.”

As an educational institution, we value free expression. We recognize that free expression is essential to robust and free intellectual inquiry. We understand that the promise of a diverse community is not realized without such free expression, just as the benefit of free expression is not fully realized without a commitment to diversity.

In our national discourse today, too often we see division, rancor and meanness, a predisposition to attack opponents personally, and a strategy to prevail through some combination of sound bites, half-truths, untruths, and deceptions, or sidestepping the issues entirely.

At Exeter, the goal is not to win but to learn, and the strategy for learning must be precisely as stated in our DEI Vision Statement:

“We must harness perspectives from every quarter to encourage adults and students to think critically, realize and challenge their assumptions, and collaborate to forge a greater understanding of the world. This means developing an inclination toward, and facility with, diversity of thought, perspective and experience. This also means cultivating the empathy, understanding, and respect necessary to open one’s mind to those thoughts, perspectives and experiences that differ from one’s own.”

Experienced Harkness students know that listening with empathy – really being curious about why another person might feel or think differently than you do — is a critical skill, upon which your learning and personal growth will greatly depend.

Learning in this way from each other is exciting, but we recognize that at times it also can be uncomfortable. It can be uncomfortable to have your ideas and assumptions challenged by others. We must be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and we must understand that in a thriving educational community we should expect a diversity of viewpoints on almost every subject worth exploring.

We also want you to find the work challenging and at times even difficult, so you will come to understand your own capacity to meet the challenges that we offer. It is through meeting the challenges that you face that you will come to realize your own possibilities to learn and grow.

This is how we aspire to teach, and how you will learn. In particular, this is how you will learn from one another. It is how together we can seek complex truths. It is the essence of a Harkness education. It is how you prepare yourselves to be the kinds of leaders and citizens that our world needs today.

I would like to draw your attention to a third passage in the Deed of Gift. In the very first paragraph, our Founders wrote, “the time of youth is the important period, on the improvement or neglect of which depend the most weighty consequences, to individuals themselves and the community.” In essence, our Founders were saying that your time here matters. It matters not only to your own development as human beings, but also to those with whom you will engage throughout the course of your lives. Our founders were expressing a belief that imbued with knowledge and goodness, each and every one of you will have the capacity to make a positive difference in the world and in the communities in which you will live.

We give expression to this idea on our school seal, with the words “non sibi,” which in Latin means not for oneself. Non sibi also is a core value of our school, and signifies our belief that wisdom gained here should be used for others as well as for oneself. We state plainly that we “seek to graduate students who are motivated to face the challenges of their day, and whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.” Non sibi is the very spirit and ethos of our school.

One aspect of our commitment to non sibi is our long history at Exeter of environmental stewardship. Gifford Pinchot, Exeter Class of 1885 and generally regarded as the founder of the conservation movement in the United States, championed conservation of our natural resources when he returned to the Academy to speak in assembly in 1919. The first outing club was formed not long thereafter. Our first ecology club was formed, and the first ecology course taught, more than 50 years ago.

In April 1970, quite a number of students boarded buses and went to Washington, D.C., to attend the first Earth Day. Student engagement on environmental issues has been strong ever since, and is strong now, and with good reason, as we hear and read about the existential threat of climate change on a daily basis.

The Academy is committed to doing its part. In recent years, we have reduced scope 1 and scope 2 carbon emissions by more than 60 percent. We have achieved our emissions reductions through a variety of means, including introducing geothermal heating and cooling in several buildings (including the new dorm), and the installation of solar panels on the roof of the field house. We also have steadily grown our curricular offerings in the areas of sustainability and climate science. We will continue to build on these accomplishments this year and in the years to come, and student engagement will be important, as we continue to explore ways to incorporate sustainability into all aspects of our programs, operations and daily lives at the Academy.

I will close this morning by saying that I am excited about this new academic year. It has been a great pleasure to walk about the campus these past few days and feel the excitement, energy and joy that all of you bring to a new school year. When I was a student, I spent my summers waiting to come back. I sense a similar feeling among all of you.

It will be exciting this year to watch you excel across all academic disciplines and thrive in the arts — visual, music, drama and dance. You will compete at a high level in athletics, perhaps win a championship or two, and forge lifelong bonds with your teammates. You will carry on a tradition of numerous strong student publications, excel in other clubs and activities, and provide leadership for affinity groups. You will perform in assembly, give meditations, and be leaders of student religious groups. In all these and many other ways, you will have fun, learn and grow, and, importantly, support each other.

It was very moving at graduation three months ago to hear our graduating seniors express their deep gratitude for their time at Exeter. We all should start this new academic year with similar feelings of deep appreciation and gratitude for the opportunities and privileges that we all enjoy by being a part of the Exeter community.

I will be excited to see what special things you will accomplish this year, how you will contribute to the life of the school, and how you will lay the surest foundation for your own purposeful lives.

And now, for the benefit of the new students, by tradition, we end an assembly by saying “senior class” and give the seniors an opportunity to leave first. Senior class.

2024 Graduation Remarks

Members of the Class of 2024: By tradition, it is now my privilege and honor, as principal, to deliver a farewell address.

I would like to begin where commencement addresses often end, by saying congratulations.

You came to Exeter to learn and grow, have fun, make lifelong friends, pursue your passions, and lay the surest foundation for the rest of your lives — the surest foundation for leading purposeful lives.

You have done all that, and you have done it well. In all your endeavors – academic, artistic, athletic, and more – you have worked hard, aspired to excellence, and achieved excellence.

Your success here is not measured by championships, prizes or awards, but you have indeed won many championships and prestigious competitions, demonstrating that the teaching and learning that occurs here, across all disciplines, is at the highest levels.

You have found joy in your activities and accomplishments and grown in ways that you likely could not have imagined when you ﬁrst arrived. That is true whether you have been here one year or four, or in between. However long you have been here, you have made the most of the opportunities presented to you and you have succeeded.

Along the way, you have formed deep friendships that will last your lifetimes. I am conﬁdent that the friendships that you have formed here will mean as much to you over time as any individual or group accomplishments.

I am proud of all that you have accomplished, but even more proud of how you have contributed to the life of the school, and how you have supported each other. I don’t quite know how you came to be seniors so quickly, but here you are, ready to graduate, and more than ready for the next phase of your education and the challenges that lie ahead.

Your time here has not always been easy. Many of you arrived in September 2020 amidst a global pandemic. Participating in Harkness classes remotely from your dormitory rooms, library carrels or from home was diﬃcult. Building community while coping with COVID restrictions was hard.

We experienced a terrible loss when Matthew Clemson died last year. You responded with compassion, empathy and grace, supporting each other and caring for one another. You honored Matthew’s life and supported his family.

Notwithstanding the cliché, we do not live in an Exeter bubble. We follow the news, hear from loved ones near and far, and care about events in the United States and around the world. This year the events in the Middle East, Sudan, Ukraine and other areas have weighed heavily on many in our community as we are confronted daily by news of war, violence, disease, hunger, poverty, and injustice. We care about the future of our planet and want to know what we can do to make the world a safer, healthier and better place for all.

You have to decide how you want to respond to these and other challenges that you see in the world every day.

You have to decide how you want to make the world, the communities in which you live, and the places where you work, better than you found them — not just for some, but for all.

Our core value of non sibi expresses our belief that wisdom gained here should be used for the good of others as well as for oneself. We seek to graduate young people “whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.” We boldly proclaim, “Exonians are motivated by this philosophy to face the challenges of their day.”

You have attended many assemblies in which alumni have shared their stories about how they have confronted the challenges of their day. It is your turn now to begin writing your own non sibi stories.

It is not the goal or responsibility of your generation to develop ﬁnal answers to the challenges that you see around you. Your goal is to develop the best answers that you can for your generation, with the hope and understanding that future generations will build upon and improve those answers.

Author and journalist Monica Guzman told you in assembly in September that “everyone in this room is wrong about something, you just don’t know what it is.”

Similarly, American historian and philosopher Will Durant once said, “Education is a progressive discovery of [one’s] own ignorance.”

With those thoughts in mind, I urge you to be respectful of strongly-held values and skeptical of strongly-held opinions. Are they grounded in truth? Do they respect the dignity and equal worth of every human life? Are they grounded in an understanding of our common humanity, and do they account for all lives equally?

At Exeter, we seek to inspire students to pursue complex truths. We do this through cultivation of critical thinking, rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse. We don’t seek simple narratives when complex truths are required to understand the world and how we can be of service to it. Let your thirst for knowledge and goodness and your pursuit of complex truths be what drives your education not just in college, but throughout your lives.

Toward that end, as you go forward in life, continue to seek opportunities, as you have had here, to learn with and from others whose ideas, experiences and perspectives diﬀer from your own. At Exeter, we understand that “we are all better equipped to learn and to lead when our thoughts are tested by others, particularly by those whose ideas, perspectives, experiences or identities diﬀer from our own.” This requires cultivating the empathy, understanding, and respect necessary to truly open our minds to thoughts, perspective and experiences that diﬀer from our own.

It is all too easy in this world, and it may be all too easy in college, to surround yourself with persons who think just like you. That might be a good way to ﬁnd agreement, but it is not a good way to learn, and in fact can be quite limiting to your education, and undermine the education process.

By contrast, learning with and from others whose ideas and perspectives diﬀer from your own might seem hard at times, but it is the most interesting way to learn, the most fun way to learn, and the most eﬀective and rewarding way to learn. In short, it is the best way to learn, and likely the only way to solve some of our world’s most intractable problems.

Remember, wherever you ﬁnd yourselves next year, people will expect you to be intelligent and capable; they will also be watching to see if you are kind and have humility.

Class of 2024, I am coming to the end of my remarks. Soon, with diplomas in hand, you will be fellow Exeter alumni. In that sense, you and I will be peers, members of the same extended Exeter community that spans generations.

I hope you will leave Exeter as I did many years ago – with joy and satisfaction in your accomplishments, a deep sense of gratitude for your time here, and, importantly, with a strong sense of belonging.

I am sure you have strong feelings of gratitude for your families, teachers and all the other adults who have supported you during your time here. I hope you also feel gratitude to prior generations of Exonians who have helped make your Exeter experiences possible. We should be grateful to those who came before us and accept our place and responsibility as part of the history of this great school.

During your prep year, when you went home for Thanksgiving and did not return until mid-February, I told you, “Exeter lives within us and forms around us, no matter the distance between us.” That remains true today. You will always be Exonians and you will always belong here.

I certainly am going to miss the Class of 2024. I will always remember the joy that you brought to our school and all your activities. I will eagerly wait to see what lies ahead for you. I have every conﬁdence in your abilities and inclination to make a positive diﬀerence in the world. In the years to come, I hope you will come back often to tell your stories.

Members of the Class of 2024, I wish you success and fulﬁllment in all your endeavors.

I will close where I started, by saying again, congratulations! Thank you.

To all who are assembled here today, and to all who are watching from afar, with excitement, admiration and joy, I present to you our newest alumni, the Class of 2024!

Congratulations!

Need-blind admissions

Dear Exeter community,

We are excited to share the news that from this day forward all admissions decisions at Exeter will be made without regard for any family’s ability to pay tuition or other associated costs of attending the Academy. Beginning with students who will enter the Academy in the coming academic year, our admissions process will be “need-blind.” Cost will no longer be a barrier to any qualified students who dream of attending Phillips Exeter Academy.

When Exeter was founded 240 years ago, John and Elizabeth Phillips made a commitment that continues to serve as one of our core values:

And it [the Academy] shall ever be equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter.

Expanding access to an Exeter education is central to our mission. The commitment expressed in our Deed of Gift ensures that all our students, regardless of economic circumstances, are not only able to attend but also know they belong at Exeter. Financial aid makes it possible for students from “every quarter” to join the Academy community and learn, lead and thrive here.

Today, we renew our commitment to youth from every quarter. Over the last two years, alumni, parents and friends have committed over $90 million in new endowment for financial aid. With this new support, building on support for financial aid provided over many generations, the Academy Trustees have voted unanimously to make this commitment to “need-blind” admissions.

The Trustees have made this commitment with the understanding that additional support will be needed to sustain our commitment into the future. Fundraising for financial aid will continue to be an important priority for our school, and will remain so always. Today almost half our students receive financial aid yet we must expand our reach if we are to ensure that economic circumstances will not be a barrier to any deserving students who wish to receive an Exeter education.

As we approach the 250^th anniversary of the founding of our school, we take inspiration from the ambition of our founders. It is humbling to consider the generations of Exonians who have come forward over the years to support the school, often inspired by the gratitude they felt for the assistance they received themselves. It is equally humbling to contemplate the generosity that will support our school and our commitment to youth from every quarter in years to come.

We are deeply grateful for the many ways alumni, parents and friends support our school. Whether it is through your philanthropy, your volunteer service, or both, we thank you for your generosity, and for your goodness.

Best regards,

William K. Rawson ’71, Principal

Morgan C. W. Sze ’83, President of the Trustees

Opening Assembly 2023

Good morning, Exeter.

When preparing for today, my thoughts naturally drifted back in time to the Opening Assembly that I attended as a new Lower many years ago. This room was very different then. The stage was smaller, and there was no balcony. We also had 200 fewer students. We sat in wooden pews and were assigned to our seats alphabetically, with Seniors up front, then Uppers, then Lowers, and Preps in the back. With a last name beginning with R, I was pretty far back. I admit to feeling a little nervous that day, but I also was excited. There was no doubt in my mind that Exeter was where I wanted to be.

Of much greater significance than the physical changes to this room over the years are the changes in the composition of our school. Since the decision to become a coeducational school in the fall of 1970, my senior year, Exeter has been a leader among secondary schools in steadily becoming a more diverse and inclusive community. We seek students of promising academic ability and strong character from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and identities – socioeconomic, ethnic, religious, racial, gender, geographical and cultural – and we admit students without regard to their family’s ability to pay tuition. I have described the rich diversity of students that results as one of the defining strengths of our school.

You represent that rich diversity at Exeter today. Wherever you have come from, and whatever your prior experiences might have been, you have demonstrated abilities and qualities that will enable you to contribute and thrive here. You have earned your places at Phillips Exeter Academy.
New students, I will tell you now what I tell new students at Opening Assembly every year: rest assured, you can do the work; you will make lifelong friends; and, most importantly, absolutely, you belong here. We welcome you. We are delighted that you are here.
Our Deed of Gift, signed by John and Elizabeth Phillips in 1781, states that Exeter “shall ever be equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter.”

The Deed of Gift states further:

“[A]bove all, it is expected that the attention of instructors to the disposition of the minds and morals of the youth under their charge will exceed every other care, well considering that though goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous, and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”

From this powerful language, we derive our mission statement: unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

Our school seal, adopted in 1784, contains the Latin words non sibi, meaning “not for oneself.” Depicted in a rising sun over a sea of knowledge, these words express our conviction that wisdom gained here should be used for the good of others as well as for oneself. We boldly proclaim that we “seek to graduate young people whose ambitions and actions are inspired by their interest in others and the world around them.”

We return to these foundational statements each year at Opening Assembly because they explain why Exeter exists, and why we are all here today.

Phillips Exeter exists not to confer extraordinary privilege on a chosen few, but to lay the surest foundation for your purposeful lives. The Deed of Gift is a statement of belief – specifically a belief in all of you – that endowed with knowledge and goodness, each and every one of you will be empowered to make a positive difference in the world in whatever ways you might choose.

You will find at Exeter an extraordinary range of opportunities to develop intellectually, artistically, and athletically. You will be able to choose among a wide range of courses, and even design some of your own courses of study. You also will have opportunities to pursue your passions through a wide variety of co-curricular programs and test yourselves in competitions against other schools. You will have to make some choices – you can’t do it all, and adequate sleep is very important to your health and success. But in addition to building on strengths and interests that you have brought with you, I hope you will explore new interests and perhaps build new strengths, and maybe surprise yourself along the way.

You also will find a wide range of opportunities to contribute to the life of the school, help us build a strong sense of community, support your fellow students, and engage in community service in the surrounding Town of Exeter. Again, you will have to make choices, but the opportunities are there for you, and your engagement will be an important part of your life at Exeter. This is non sibi in action at Exeter.

Some returning students know that I enjoy watching English Premier League Soccer. When one team is gaining momentum and pressing the attack, the British commentators often will say the team on offense is “starting to ask questions” of the other team. In a sense, we will be asking questions of you during your time here. What do you want to study? How do you want to contribute to the life of our school? What kind of presence do you want to have in your dorms, classrooms, teams, clubs, and other student activities? What kind of student leaders do you want to be? What kind of person do you want to be? These are questions that in fact you will ask yourselves each year. Your answers will shape your learning and growth and determine the impact that you will have on our school during your time here.

The world is asking questions of us all as well. Even as our society has become more open and inclusive than it was when I was a student, and even as advances in technology have led to improvements in most aspects of our lives, we are confronted with disturbing headlines every day reflecting immense challenges here in the United States and around the world. How will you respond? One thing is clear: we will need the best minds across all disciplines to confront the challenges that we face and make the most of the opportunities before us. We will need artists as well as scientists, poets as well as mathematicians, ethicists as well as economists. Most importantly, across all disciplines and all walks of life, we will need citizens and leaders who are motivated by the spirit of non sibi, and who are committed to teaching and living the principles of a just and sustainable society – environmentally, economically, and socially.

Toward that end, through Harkness and our rigorous academic programs, we will help you develop tools to better understand the world around you. We will help you develop critical thinking skills and seek complex truths. Our goal is to teach you how to analyze and think, not what to think. You will master material in individual subjects at high levels, and in the process develop the skills of a lifelong learner.

I hope you will find your academic work exciting, and also at times difficult – after all, you have come here to be challenged. In meeting the challenges that you will face, you will begin to understand more fully your capacity to learn and grow.

Much of the joy and excitement that you will experience at Exeter, inside and outside the classroom, will come from learning with and alongside your fellow classmates.

To realize fully the opportunities through Harkness to learn with and from each other, we must commit fully to diversity of thought and free expression. Robust debate and free intellectual inquiry are fundamental to our educational method and mission, just as freedom of expression is a pillar of a healthy democracy.

Our school Vision Statement for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion speaks to this point in compelling fashion. It says:

“We must harness perspectives from every quarter to encourage adults and students to think critically, realize and challenge their assumptions, and collaborate to forge a greater understanding of the world. This means developing an inclination toward, and facility with, diversity of thought, perspective and experience. This also means cultivating the empathy, understanding and respect necessary to open one’s mind to those thoughts, perspectives and experiences that differ from one’s own.”

Learning this way together is exciting, interesting, and fun. Through the collision of ideas and perspectives, reflecting differences in backgrounds and experiences, we learn to probe issues more critically, and come to understand our own ideas and perspectives more deeply. Empathy is critical and not to be taken for granted – we must work at it. And as I have said in prior Assemblies, we must learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable, and must understandthat we should expect a diversity of viewpoints on almost every subject worth exploring. Our willingness to learn in this way, and engage across differences, will propel our growth as individuals and as a community.

I am very excited about the year ahead. I can’t wait to see all that you will do and accomplish. I can’t wait to see your plays and performances, see you compete hard on E/A weekends, witness your accomplishments in various academic endeavors and competitions, and see you contribute to the life of the school in so many other ways. I will be there along the way, with your teachers, advisors, and other mentors, applauding from the audience, cheering from the sidelines, and supporting you in other ways as best I can.

In turn, I hope you will never lose sight of how fortunate we all are to be a part of this very special school community. I hope you will always be grateful to your teachers and all the adults here and at home who support you during your time at Exeter. I also hope you will feel gratitude to prior generations of Exonians who have helped make your Exeter experiences possible. One way we demonstrate our gratitude is by treating those around us, students and adults alike, with humility, kindness and respect as we go about our daily responsibilities. How we say hello on the paths, and how we say thank you when going through the line in the dining hall, matters – to ourselves and everyone around us.

It has been my custom during my tenure as principal to unveil at Opening Assembly a new school t-shirt for the year. We do this as a fun additional way to welcome our new students, but also to emphasize to all our students, new and returning, that you are all Exonians, and you all belong here. Immediately following this assembly, please collect your shirt in the Academic Quad. Please take a shirt with your class year on the front. You will see that the shaded part on the back in fact is small type displaying the very words that I have been talking about this morning: non sibi, knowledge and goodness, youth from every quarter, and purposeful lives.

And now, by tradition, we end this assembly by dismissing the Seniors first.

Senior class.

The power of ‘youth from every quarter’

Our Deed of Gift, signed by John and Elizabeth Phillips in 1781, states that Exeter “shall ever be equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter.”

Since the decision to become a coeducational school in the fall of 1970, my senior year, Exeter has been a leader among secondary schools in building a more diverse and inclusive community. We seek students of promising academic ability and strong character from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences and identities, and we admit students without regard to their family’s ability to pay tuition. The rich diversity of students that results creates a powerful learning environment and is one of the defining strengths of our school.

This year we have 1,078 students from 39 countries and 45 states and territories. Almost half are recipients of financial aid. They bring an impressive diversity of talents and interests. Students drive their learning at Exeter, inside and outside the classroom, and we look forward to seeing all that they will accomplish this year in academics, the arts, athletics, extracurricular activities, student leadership roles, community service, and in so many other ways. It will be exciting to see them grow in ways they never could have imagined before coming here. It has been nothing short of wonderful the first few days of the fall term to see how excited all our students, new and returning alike, are to be here, and how quickly new friendships form at the beginning of each year.

At Opening Assembly, I reminded our students that to realize fully the promise of our diverse community of learners, and to make the most of the opportunities through Harkness to learn with and from each other, we must be fully committed to diversity of thought and free expression. Robust debate and free intellectual inquiry are fundamental to our educational method and mission, just as freedom of expression is a pillar of a healthy democracy. I told our students we must learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable, and understand that we should expect a diversity of viewpoints on almost every subject worth exploring. Learning in this way propels our growth as individuals and as a community. It is how we prepare our students to be the citizens and leaders that our world needs.

I also spoke to our students about the gratitude we all should feel for the privileges we enjoy as members of this very special school community. Our gratitude extends to prior generations of Exonians who have helped make Exeter what it is today, and to all adults here and at home who will support our students and our school this year. We show our gratitude by how we make the most of the opportunities that are given to us, by how we strive for excellence in all that we do, and by how we incorporate the spirit of non sibi in our daily lives.

So, as we begin the 243rd year in the history of our school, I express gratitude to all alumni, families and friends of the Academy for your belief in the mission of our school and for your steadfast support.

This story was originally published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Changing while staying the same

I have said many times that Exeter has never stayed strong by staying the same.

Last month I attended a student panel at Experience Exeter, our revisit program for newly accepted students, and was struck by how much actually does stay the same. As I listened to current students describe their Exeter experiences, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to my own. They expressed it differently — I’m certain I never praised my faculty adviser as being “super chill” — but the students today value the same things many of us valued most during our time here. Close friendships. A strong feeling of belonging and community. A sense of purpose and meaning in contributing to the life of the school. A strong belief in the benefit of learning with and from diverse peers through Harkness. And certainly, joy and satisfaction in aiming high in academics, athletics, the arts, cocurricular programs, community service and everything else that our students do.

Our mission as a school has never changed — we seek to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives. Each phrase can be traced to our Deed of Gift, written in 1781. We are steadfast in our belief that knowledge and goodness together lay the surest foundation for usefulness to humankind. We are unwavering in our commitment to academic excellence, and to rigorous inquiry and thoughtful discourse in pursuit of complex truths. That commitment remains core to our identity as a school and central to our Harkness pedagogy. It informs how our students learn and grow outside as well as inside the classroom.

Our commitment to youth from every quarter is now more fully realized by the adoption of our need-blind admissions policy. Our commitment to socioeconomic diversity has always been a defining strength of our school; the diversity of backgrounds, identities, talents and experiences that results shapes the student experience across all fields of endeavor and is inseparable from our vision for what it means to be an excellent school.

The Latin phrase non sibi, inscribed on our school seal in 1784, reflects the conviction of our Founders, to which we hold true today, that an Exeter education should be used for the benefit of others as well as for oneself. We continue to believe that “youth is the important period” to instill in our students the values and personal qualities that will propel their learning and growth and provide the foundation for their service to the greater good.

In the pages that follow, you will find ample evidence of our enduring mission and values in the joy our students have in their learning and growth and in the many examples of how our alumni are leading purposeful lives.

Yes, Exeter constantly changes. We are a stronger school because of our evolving academic and cocurricular programs, our extraordinarily talented students and our deeply committed teachers. Yet, at its core, Exeter is built on the mission and values that have guided us for 243 years. I hope you take pride, as I do, in the many ways that the our school continues to change and grow — and remains the same.

Editor’s note: This column first appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Exploring how goodness fits into the future

Have you ever stopped to consider the ethical implication of clicking “like” on an Instagram post? Or whether digital assistants like Alexa and Siri have First Amendment rights to free speech? What about corporate social responsibility? Is that a thing? These are some of the salient questions bubbling up in the world today that, more often than not, go left unexplored — especially by many adolescents.

Religion Department Instructor Peter Vorkink P’95 is working to change all that and help keep Exeter’s curriculum in step with the times. Last winter term, the department offered Religion 597: Silicon Valley Ethics: Case Studies in the World of High Tech, an experimental new course Vorkink designed that required students to think deeply about the complex ways in which technology has altered not only how they live their daily lives, but also their values.

Connecting with Silicon Valley

Vorkink knew he had to connect Exeter with the epicenter of innovation, California’s Silicon Valley, in order to make the class authentic and relevant. But how? The idea he landed on was crowdsourcing — ask Exonians currently working in the technology field to take part in the class as co-designers of its syllabus. Vorkink leveraged his Rolodex — populated during his 47 years of teaching — and enlisted alumni from such high-tech giants as Google, Apple, Oracle, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to collaborate one-on-one with students over the course of the term as mentors and resources in developing case studies. It was a first-of-its-kind experience at the Academy. “I know of no other secondary school offering a course like this, and few colleges, either,” Vorkink says, “and what a wonderful way to connect alums to the life of current students.”

Among the 40 experts Vorkink tapped was Christine Robson Weaver ’99, project lead for Google’s Machine Learning Division. “I’m thrilled that Exeter is diving into such a relevant and timely area of study,” Weaver says. “Right now, in Silicon Valley, and in my role at Google, these issues are top of mind.”

Next-gen problem solvers

Anna Richardson White ’98, brand communications director at Instagram, readily participated as well. “It was an honor to be part of such an important and groundbreaking class,” White says. “I’m pleased that Exeter would create this critical course for the next generation of leaders, creators and problem solvers.”

When Religion 597 hit the Courses of Instruction, Vorkink was overwhelmed with registrants, enough to fill three full sections. Students were attracted to the class’s contemporary practicality and how it could teach them to make a difference. “As a person with a computer science background and interest in entering Silicon Valley,” Pavan Garidipuri ’19 says, “I wanted to explore Silicon Valley’s ethical dilemmas so that, in a non sibi spirit, I’ll know how to create products that will help society, not harm it.”

Parsing the Digital Age

Over 10 weeks, the students parsed some of the serious questions of the Digital Age. They took internet truth quizzes (Can you spot fake news?) and read the technology section of The New York Times, plus articles in Wired and on Slate. They listened to TED Talks and watched documentaries on extremists and conspiracy theorists and prank videos on YouTube. They scrolled through Twitter and Instagram (as well as Finsta, or fake Instagram) accounts. They did all of this with an eye on identifying ethical conundrums, and figuring out how they differed from political, legal, sociological, historical or technological issues.

As questions arose, the alums, via email, Skype and cellphone, stepped up to provide context, to frame the issues as constructively as possible, to offer resources for further inquiry and to be solid sounding boards. “This is the first exercise as an alum where I felt clear and direct attachment to a student,” says Quincy Smith ’97. “My mentee shared accountability, we used teamwork and gang tackling on top of Google docs, Sunday calls and a flurry of text messages. It was like Fortnite.edu.”

The term’s efforts culminated in the production of a student-written case study on a single issue. Students chose from a broad list of nearly 70 topics that Vorkink supplied, including body scanners, the surveillance economy, virtual currencies, the gig economy, public shaming and fake news. “Writing the case study was an eye-opening experience,” says Gordon Chi ’19. “I didn’t realize how complex the ethical considerations for self-driving cars could be. I started to question whether the design rationale of our algorithms should be determined by the government of the country where the product is used, or rather simply the programmers that create the self-driving cars.”

“Know thyself”

On high school campuses where many students may not align with a single religion, broadly scoped classes like Religion 597 offer another avenue for understanding what it means, at the deepest level, to be a person. “When I think about teaching religion to adolescents, I think about ferreting out, identifying, naming, discussing and comparing the personal and practical pieties, the value systems by which our students live, that which they hold most dear in their hearts, what’s really real for them, what really matters, what constitutes the center of meaning for them — all of which is encapsulated for me in the term ‘religion,’” Vorkink says.

An Episcopal priest and ardent world traveler, Vorkink has taught philosophy and religion at the Academy since 1972. He graduated from Yale and earned a divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York. When he was 20, he spent a summer in Florida volunteering for Martin Luther King Jr. “Working closely with King showed me a different side of religion, namely, religion as praxis, or the practice of faith,” he says. He went on to study philosophy and religion at Harvard, leaving the doctoral program ABD (without writing his dissertation) to come to Exeter. Then in 2015, Vorkink wrote his thesis, entitled “Know Thyself: Why and How to Teach Religion and Philosophy to Secondary School Students,” and fulfilled the final requirement for his doctorate.

A key part of Vorkink’s unwritten lesson plan for the Silicon Valley course was to help students figure out how all of their individual choices in this technologically charged world pertain to their philosophical search to “know thyself.” “In a generation where our influences have expanded from our parents to millions of online users around the world, it has become harder for us to determine our own morals and make our own decisions,” Mia Kuromaru ’19 says. “This class helped me realize that every student should understand the importance of their own autonomy.”

Classmate Tina Wang ’19 noticed her habits changing throughout the term. “I’m much more aware of my own technology use now,” she says. “I often find myself pausing to think about the ethical dilemmas behind news stories I see. … This course pushed me, it taught me to question and challenge what we too often blindly accept.”

Vorkink was pleased to hear that what the students were learning in the classroom carried over into their everyday lives: “Probably the most encouraging comment any student made, and I heard it again and again in different contexts during this course was, ‘You know, I never thought about that.’ That was encouraging in terms of why the course was valuable to offer. … It made them think.”

In a final act of reflection inspired by Jill Lepore’s New Yorker article “What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago,” Vorkink asked the students to imagine the technologies of 2069. Some prophesized a data-driven society completely devoid of privacy, while others saw the end of livestock farming in favor of cellular cloning of lab-grown meats. Many noted an increased reliance on robots to perform low-level jobs and the replacement of traditional “screens” with holograms. Each futuristic prediction was placed in the Academy Library vault as a time capsule, waiting to be opened during the classmates’ 50th reunion.

Beyond the table

Exeter students feed their hunger for discovery with passion projects outside the classroom.

Not every inspiration occurs at the table.

Harkness works up an appetite for ideas and possibilities, for figuring out how things work and why things happen. That hunger for understanding continues to grow beyond the classroom door. Like a flame given oxygen, Harkness and its lessons spread.

Whether it’s inventors flocking to Design Lab during open hours or a blossoming poet filling her free blocks with verse, Exeter students are constantly exploring. Many of their biggest discoveries and brightest ideas are of their own making. Our fledgling robotics team tried-and-erred its way straight to the world championships. The collapse of a family beehive inspired a trio of seniors to study causes and seek solutions. Two members of the class of 2019 took advantage of the senior independent study program to pursue their arts in self-designed projects.

They represent a culture of invention and ingenuity at Exeter. Here are their stories.

Rookie robot team has all the right stuff

“They are VERTEX!” shouts the ref in a red Hawaiian shirt as he announces this match of Rover Ruckus, the regional FIRST Tech Challenge event held in February. He points to three Exeter students wearing protective goggles, nervous smiles, and red T-shirts emblazoned with VERTEX and the lion rampant: Vincent Xiao ’22 and Joy Liu ’20 (robot drivers) and Neil Chowdhury ’22 (match coach). Whoops from the crowd of thousands resound through Southern New Hampshire University’s athletic complex as VERTEX’s partner for this match and their two opposing teams are introduced.

As the racing bugle sounds, the teams’ four robots, simulating lunar rovers, drop from their tethered parking spots on the red landing craft to start their three-minute navigation of the pitch. The rovers, with long metal extenders and heavy-duty wheels, are designed to pick up “minerals” (in reality, Wiffle balls and plastic cubes) and deposit them in designated spots. After 30 seconds of entirely autonomous driving, buzzers blare and the driver-led portion of the match begins.

Clutching an Xbox controller wired to an Android phone that communicates with a second Android on the rover, Xiao gives robot 15534 a burst of speed. Its intake pulls in two balls, maneuvers one into the robot’s carrying cabin and releases the second back to the “crater.” 15534 swiftly backs up 4 inches, extends a long ladderlike arm above the landing craft and tilts the ball onto the craft’s roof. It bounces off. Again 15534 tries, this time with a cube. It goes in, but to the wrong spot. Two more attempts and success. “Nice job!” intones the ref.

The VERTEX alliance has won the round.

It’s the impact we make on the community. Diversity in STEM was really an issue we wanted to focus on.

Penny Brant

Begun as a PEA club in September 2018, VERTEX walked away from Rover Ruckus with the prestigious Inspire award, given to the team that, in addition to being strong technically and creatively, is an ambassador for FIRST programs, showing graciousness on and off the pitch, and sharing knowledge, excitement and experience with other teams and the community. Judges commended the work on autonomous operation and the engineering notebook, as well as the extensive community outreach programming. VERTEX was also praised for its inclusiveness: members hail from around the world and half identify as female or nonbinary. The Inspire award guaranteed VERTEX a spot at the FIRST World Championship in late April, where 1,400 robot teams from more than 70 countries gathered. (See how the team did at worlds.)

Although they call themselves “rookies” — about half the VERTEX team had no previous robotics experience and seven are new to Exeter — they bring hours of teaching programming and robotics to peers, and hours more in self-taught skills. It clearly shows. The FIRST regional judges singled out the team’s work with open source image recognition software — the robot must be able to “see” where it is going and what to pick up — because the students had mastered the software and identified flaws in the algorithms.

But when you ask the students what really counts, it’s not the technology.

“It’s the impact we make on the community,” says Penny Brant ’20. “Diversity in STEM was really an issue we wanted to focus on.” Through presentations and interactive events, VERTEX showed community groups that robotics is fun and everyone can do it. Brant is most proud of STEM Day, a student-run event in January that gathered more than 100 Exonians and community members for presentations by Harvard and MIT researchers, a tech fair of student projects and participatory challenges.

“STEM Day was a revolution,” adds David Song ’21, the self-taught CAD guru who is widely credited with jump-starting the robotics team. The turnout and excitement, he explains, especially on a Sunday, showed the pent-up demand among students for opportunities to collaborate on STEM projects outside of the classroom.

Kai Lockwood ’21 remembers coming to Exeter as a prep and asking, “Where’s the robotics club?” A year later Lockwood, who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronoun they, joined the fledgling FIRST robotics team as its electrical lead, happy to be working with their hands again, something they craved. Lockwood is fulfilled and inspired by the robotics demonstrations for local organizations including Girls Who Code, the YMCA, FIRST LEGO League, ESSO robotics club and Seacoast Outright, a LGBTQIA+ support group.

On a Wednesday afternoon in late February, a few weeks after the regional win, VERTEX members gather in the busy Design Lab on the third floor of Phelps Science Center.

Xiao, the mechanical captain, stands next to the table where 15534, currently shorn of many components, is undergoing major redesign for worlds. The table is strewn with colorful zip ties, wires, screws, gears, clamps and bands. Xiao works silently, and, as people approach the table, he connects. Two students have recently joined the project, and he talks to them about mechanical priorities. “If you use this, remember that you need to get the screws out of the way — they need to be in really tight,” he explains as he holds a metal fitting in the air.

Liu comes over to the table and picks out a part from the box labeled “Mech Kit.” She wonders aloud if it will adequately maintain rigidity if they use it to fix the intake. “The robot is never done,” Liu frequently points out in conversation. The team’s try/fail/regroup/try approach is in clear evidence today as she and Xiao discuss what has worked, what has not, and paths for moving forward. This openness to challenge and change has successfully survived several serious tests already, including an unexpected software breakdown during Rover Ruckus, and the disruptions to progress that occur every time the team disbands for school breaks.

Lockwood wanders in around 3 o’clock, cheeks still flush from swim practice. They immediately bend down to the table and get busy — hands confident and strong as they pull apart wires, then brace them on the robot with duct tape. Lockwood notices that a new part has arrived. Soon, Lockwood and Nico Gallo, the Design Lab coordinator and VERTEX adviser, are holding ends of the large blue coiled air hose, flexing it and talking about tensile strength and where points of resistance will occur.

Panda Atipunumphai ’20, a CAD specialist, is over by the window working on a project that is a direct offshoot of her robotics work. Although she doesn’t yet know it, in a few days she and her team will receive the Innovation award from LaunchX, an MIT entrepreneurship program, for their plan to reuse single-use plastics as 3D printing filament.

Song, tall and quiet, wanders fluidly from the robotics group to another table where an AI-driven recycling sorter is undergoing a final build for presentation at LaunchX. Recognized for his leadership and dedication at the state championships, Song is waiting to hear if he will make the FIRST Dean’s List at worlds, an honor given to only 10 students.

Liu has left the Design Lab, carrying a part that is not working as predicted. Suddenly, a question comes up and Xiao asks, “Where’s Joy?” There’s a ripple of disruption as team members query each other, across tables busy with activity, to see if anyone knows where she has gone. “There she is!” announces Xiao with relief as Liu returns a few minutes later. VERTEX gets back to preparing for worlds.

Creating buzz in the fight to save bees

It’s a startling statistic: Approximately one in every three mouthfuls of food comes from crops pollinated by bees. But commercial honeybee colonies around the world are failing at an alarming rate, declining by 30 to 40 percent over a seven-year period in the United States alone.

Vinny Kurup ’19 hadn’t heard the buzz around honeybee die-off when he started fall term in Social Innovation, a senior elective. But three months of collaboration, many hours of research, one video and an oral presentation later, he has in-depth knowledge of how this impacts food sources worldwide. In January, Kurup and classmates Jenny Yang ’19 and Cooper Wolff ’19 unveiled their solution, BeeInnovative, at the New Hampshire Social Venture Innovation Challenge (SVIC). The trio captured first place in the competition’s high school track for their proposal to create a mobile application and monitoring device that alerts beekeepers of hive health issues. “I was a little nervous about the competition and didn’t know what to expect,” Wolff says, “but we were really prepared.”

That preparation is thanks, in part, to their teacher, Director of Service Learning Liz Reyes, and the way Social Innovation is structured. The course is designed to get students out of the classroom and into the community. “The students have to study root causes of problems in society, like environmental concerns, health care, refugee rights — issues that negatively impact well-being,” says Reyes. Students are challenged to understand issues by engaging one-on-one with stakeholders. “I ask them to partner with people in the field to develop solutions,” she says. The class breaks into teams during the course to study a specific problem and propose a potential solution. The culmination is the SVIC.

I was excited to see how my research could be applied in the real world.

Jenny Yang

The BeeInnovative team came together around an issue that Yang was already studying: the failure of one of her family’s beehives. Last summer, she programmed a computer to identify hive-health problems by interpreting images collected from other beekeepers and disseminating her findings on social media. But she was eager to dig deeper into the problem. “I was excited to see how my research could be applied in the real world and figure out how this system could really look,” Yang says. “I knew there was still a long way to go.” The project also intrigued her classmates. “We’d heard about Jenny’s work with bees and knew we wanted to expand off her research,” Wolff says.

To get started, Wolff interviewed Exeter staffer Linda Safford P’12, P’14, a local beekeeper who explained the effects of mites on honeybees and how timely monitoring of hives could prevent their failure through early identification of disease. Combining this knowledge and additional research with Yang’s efforts, the students developed an early-warning solution designed to identify disease before it spreads and triggers a hive failure.

The BeeInnovative team proposes placing a small camera connected to a Raspberry Pi (a single-board computer) at the entrance of a hive to continuously monitor and record bee activity. The camera sends video footage of bees traveling in and out of the hive in real time to the Raspberry Pi, which uses machine learning technology to inspect the video frames for behavior or appearances that may be indicative of disease. The data is sent to the BeeInnovative mobile app so that beekeepers can monitor their hives’ status. Should an anomaly be detected, the app alerts the beekeeper, displays potential treatment methods and provides a listing of beekeepers within the app’s community.

Yang’s strong STEM background and her knowledge of honeybees, Kurup’s public speaking and coding abilities, and Wolff ’s writing and interviewing experience were complementary skills during their project’s development phase. Yang worked on the project’s written summary; she and Kurup presented a two-minute oral overview to a panel of judges during the competition; and all of them worked on a three-minute video.

Based on positive feedback from the SVIC judges, Kurup, Wolff and Yang are continuing their research and creating a business plan for BeeInnovative. They’ve turned the project into an independent research course for their senior spring term. Using their skills in physics, computer science and electrical engineering, they’ll delve further into the project, building a mobile app as well as a prototype hive monitor. “There are so many variables we don’t know,” Kurup notes. “We have to make sure we’re using the right kind of camera, whether it’s recording the information we want, and if its relaying that information to the app.” They’re excited about the possibilities.

Support from Exeter students and staff has been key. “I didn’t envision the project coming this far when I started it last summer,” Yang admits. “The fact that I’ve been able to continuously work on it at Exeter with the support of the school, Mrs. Reyes, and my friends and teammates is really energizing.”

Kurup agrees. “Exonians are used to being challenged in a narrow sense but we also have the support of the school to take risks in fields we’re passionate about,” he says. “The truth is, I don’t think any of us would’ve been able to do this project outside the environment Exeter provides.”

Harkness for one: seniors hone solo projects

Kate Denny ’19 knots a salmon-pink apron around her waist, grabs a dish cloth and sops up an imaginary spill from an empty diner table. She complains about her manipulative mother, who, it just so happens, she murdered.

Moments later, she beseeches her husband, Agamemnon, to spare their daughter and not sacrifice her to the Greek gods.

In another moment, she sings at Don Quixote in a scolding alto to see her for who she really is, not a lady but a prostitute. “I am not any kind of lady!” she chides.

This shape-shifting performance, carried out on the stage of The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center’s Actors Lab, is Denny’s senior independent study project on full display. For weeks, she worked to memorize six monologues and two songs from disparate sources, all with one commonality: They are the words of strong female characters. The show, presented three days before spring break, is Denny’s de facto final exam.

At an institution where collaboration is canon, the independent study program for seniors remains a popular outlet to go it alone. The goal of the program is to allow Exeter students the opportunity to explore areas of interest that fall outside traditional course descriptions. Seniors, with approval from the faculty, may design individual projects of comparable value and scope to those of an academic course. Each student keeps a faculty adviser updated on their progress but generally works independently throughout the term. The time and resources poured into projects often exceed those dedicated to many senior-level classes.

Recent projects have included writing and producing a bluegrass album, designing and conducting a Harkness class for adults on campus and constructing a 150-squarefoot tiny house on wheels. During winter term, eight students devised independent study projects ranging from Denny’s one-woman spectacular to Yasmina Abukhadra and Tony Ye’s exploration of ways to harness solar energy.

Ultimately the way you decide to create a character for yourself and create a persona is all up to you.

Kate Denny

For Denny, a solo project comes naturally. Theater is a passion she hopes to make a career one day, and she sees the acting process as an independent study each time she tackles a role.

“I love Harkness. I think it works really well in a lot of subjects,” she says. “I love Harkness math. … I love it in history, I love it in English. I think it’s really important to get all of the different perspectives and opinions when talking about a subject.

“But in acting, you kind of have to analyze a piece for yourself. You can’t let other opinions influence what you think about a piece, you can’t let other influences tell you how to play a role. Obviously, a director is there to guide you along the way, but ultimately the way you decide to create a character for yourself and create a persona is all up to you.”

Denny worked with Theater and Dance Department Chair Rob Richards to choose the roles. She wanted variety — different eras, different ages, fictional and actual — as long as the voice was that of an inspirational female character. She called her project “Femme Play-Tale: Exploring Strong Female Leads in the Theater.”

A day student from Exeter, Denny juggled her regular course load, playing the Wicked Witch of the West in the Mainstage production of The Wizard of Oz and singing in Concert Choir, all while trying to organize and memorize the monologues. She then mapped out the order of a show that wound up being 38 minutes long.

Between each act, she gives the small audience a brief description of the character, the challenges the role presented and why she chose it. She closes the performance with a song from the Broadway hit Rent.

“The only thing to do is jump over the mooooon,” she sings.

Natalie Love’s independent study project also revolved around female characters. She chose six young women on campus — friends, dormmates, one of her younger sisters — to serve as the subjects of a series of portraits Love re-created using serigraphy, or silk-screening.

Unlike Denny’s personas, however, Love’s subjects did not have overt statements to make. Her inspiration came from studying essayist Leslie Jamison in a creative nonfiction class during fall term. Jamison, in her introduction to the collection Best American Essays 2017, laments that the only art worth making it seems in this charged era is “political with a capital P” — “a pointed commentary on mass shootings, a vocal critique of our current administration, a harsh op-ed about race relations.”

Love, a senior from Arlington, Virginia, has focused on having “deeper meaning” with her art projects in the past, but this time she wanted to zero in on the individual. “I just wanted to look at people up close, just as people,” she says, “not with any sort of agenda behind it or extra meaning, but that people in themselves, just being people, have meaning.”

Many seniors choose to focus on a calling for their independent study, a project that serves as a precursor to a college concentration. Love chose a hobby. She is an aspiring physicist and mathematician; she’ll study both at Brown. The printmaking project offered her a chance to step outside exploring electricity and magnetic fields in her Advanced Physics class and the geometry of polyhedra in her Math 690 course.

But Love insists her interests in science, math and art all go together.

“I don’t really believe in this whole right brain-left brain thing. Type A, Type B, whatever,” she says. “Because the thing is, there is a science in doing this kind of art.”

She proceeds to explain how forcing ink through the tiny holes of a screen onto a canvas requires a scientific approach — and a weather report. “Like when you do the photo-emulsion, when you coat a screen, how long you let it rest will determine how long you have to cook it for, to harden the emulsion on to the screen. If I coated some screens a week ago, and today I’m going in to shoot the screens, you have to think about, is it a sunny day? Because if it’s sunny, it can change the chemistry of the emulsion.”

And as math and science seep into her art, art informs her science and math.

“For anything, creative thinking, creative problem-solving is really important,” she says. “And I think that doing the arts can help foster that creative-thinking spirit.

Love was drawn to the freedom of essentially being her own teacher — for one class, at least. Art Instructor Mary Claire Nemeth served as her adviser on the project, but as is typical in the independent study format, the oversight was mostly hands-off.

“I wanted that sort of trial and error, figuring it out,” she says. “I wanted to sit there and think, ‘What are the variables here, what can I adjust, and what effect will that have to solve the problems I’m faced with?’

“When you get out into the real world, you really are just accountable to yourself and your deadlines. And I set the deadlines for this project. … It’s nice to have that level of trust with a faculty member, where she’s like ‘You do you.’”

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Emma Ward

2023 Graduation Remarks

Principal Rawson’s 2022 Opening Assembly Address

Watch the Opening Assembly remarks

2024 Graduation Remarks

Need-blind admissions

Opening Assembly 2023

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