General Alumni Association President, Trustee and Awards Committee Chair Betsy Fleming ’86 has announced the selection of Richard S. Aaronian ’76, ’78, ’97 (Hon.); P’94, P’97 as this year’s recipient of the Founders’ Day Award.

Conceived by Principal Stephen G. Kurtz and established by the Trustees in 1976, the Founders’ Day Award is given annually by the GAA in recognition of exceptional service to the Academy. The legendary Hammy Bissell ’29 was given the first Founders’ Day Award, and an Academy who’s who has followed.

Aaronian joined the faculty in 1971 as an instructor in science. Named the Harlan Page Amen Professor of Science in 1999, he is credited with introducing ornithology and marine biology into Exeter’s science curriculum, along with a place-based field trip program. He has led educational travel programs for students and alumni in locations as far flung as Costa Rica and Plum Island, Massachusetts.

In addition to serving as dorm head for three dorms — Amen and Bancroft halls and Williams House — Aaronian coached boys JV hockey for 26 years and served as an assistant coach for JV baseball for 17 years. He was a member of numerous major committees and was Chair of the Science Department from 1991 to 1995.

When he retired in 2020, Aaronian was the Exeter faculty’s longest-serving member, having logged 49 years of devoted service. His exceptional teaching has also been recognized with the Rupert Radford Faculty Fellowship Award, the Brown Family Faculty Award and the George S. Heyer Award.

Aaronian will receive the Founders’ Day Award and speak during assembly May 19.

“Today we’re starting to grapple with Rita Dove,” says Duncan Holcomb, instructor in English, on a recent Friday morning in Phillips Hall. Immediately, the chatter around the Harkness table in Holcomb’s English 420 class quiets down, as the students turn to excerpts from the award-winning poet’s latest work, Playlist for the Apocalypse.

On Wednesday, Dove will give a reading in Assembly Hall as part of the Lamont Poetry Series. She is the latest in a long line of distinguished poets invited to Exeter’s campus to give readings and attend English classes thanks to the support of the Lamont Fund, established in 1982 by Corliss Lamont, Class of 1920, and Jacquelyn Thomas, former Academy Librarian.

Even among these distinguished ranks, Dove’s achievements as a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright and educator stand out. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah, she served as U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to 1995. A longtime creative writing professor at the University of Virginia, she is the first poet to receive both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, and more recently won the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, an award for lifetime achievement from the Library of Congress.

Holcomb is one of several English instructors reading Dove’s work with his students in anticipation of her visit. During this particular class meeting, he asks the students to talk amongst themselves about which of the assigned poems they’d most like to discuss. The students’ overlapping voices fill the room again, as they point out favorite passages to each other and ask questions about perspective and theme.

The first poem they choose to discuss, “Woman, Aflame,” is one of a series that Dove originally wrote for A Standing Witness, an operatic song cycle composed by Richard Danielpour that bears witness to the past five decades of U.S. history. Subtitled “Fifth Testimony: Roe v. Wade,” the poem begins:

“She was a mother. She was a girl who dreamed of becoming

a mother someday. She was either a tease or a tramp, a lover

or a wife — still she had to do the counting…”

“I think the line breaks are pretty interesting,” says Michael Goodall ’24. “Like the first line: ‘She was a girl who dreamed of becoming,’ and then the next line skips to ‘a mother someday.’ I feel like this shows the lack of opportunity, and how this optimism is kind of simmered down with other factors.” 

“One thing that stood out to me is at first you would think this is all talking about one woman,” Aliyana Koch-Manzur ’24 responds. “But I think it’s kind of encompassing many women’s experiences… . By using one pronoun to describe all women, it’s saying that this is something all woman could be affected by.”

The next poem, “Declaration of Interdependence,” contains two alternating narrative voices, and Holcomb asks two students to read the poem aloud together. The students quickly identify the two voices — one belonging to a Jewish person, the other to a Black person — and discuss how the poem deals with some of the stereotypes that are often applied to each.

“What is the ‘interdependence’ in the title?” Holcomb asks. “It’s the opposite of independence, right?”

“It’s to show how both these groups have similarities in their mistreatment,” says Nafees Abdullah ’24. “Fight’s not the right word, but it’s the one that comes to mind — why fight over that when you can come together and support each other?”

“I wonder if, like the Declaration of Independence is a way for America to have freedom from the British, this declaration of interdependence through unity of minority groups is finding freedom from these stereotypes,” says Corinne Wingate ’24. “They’re not seen as having those commonalities, but by asserting how similar they are, it’s like having freedom as a wider group.”

The group concludes by briefly discussing a third poem, “From the Sidelines,” before the class period ends. “We can come back to that,” Holcomb says. “Make sure to schedule your conferences with me by Wednesday — which is when Rita Dove gets here.”

In addition to her reading and book signing at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dove will hold a Q&A in the Assembly Hall the following day

Every Exeter student appreciates how the Harkness approach emphasizes learning through discussion and collaboration. But every once in a while, you just want to go it alone.

Senior projects allow students in their final year of study to explore a topic of their choice, working largely independently with guidance from a faculty-mentor. The program allows Exeter students to study areas of interest that fall outside traditional course descriptions and develop their own curriculum.

This winter, five members of the class of 2023 took advantage of the opportunity to dig into projects in the arts and sciences:

Alysha Lai, “The Plane Play: An Audience Interactive Comedy”

In The Plane Play, written and directed by Alysha, the audience chooses a flight and journey for each performance. The passengers on the flight are a collection of characters: a scared lady, a young couple, a criminal (or two), etc. Every performance is a staged reading and has the potential for a different ending.

Rodrigo Spinola e Castro, “Building a Magnetometer for Space Weather Studies”

In this project, Rodrigo built a magnetometer to measure changes in the local magnetic field caused by solar phenomena.

Eric Zhang, “Exploring the Effectiveness of Basic Genetic Experiments for Learning”
Eric spent the term working to create a 90-minute genetic curriculum where students learned about basic techniques and concepts like DNA extraction and the structure of DNA.

Chloe Becker, “Away”

Chloe’s presentation shares three songs from her album “Away”, which tells the story of an astronaut who crashes into a planet that seems to appear out of nowhere when traveling through space. The full album will be performed live in spring term.

Aisha Janus, “Fragrance: Consumer Preference and Formulation”

Aisha has worked on the analysis of perfume notes and ingredients in order to find those with a correlation to a perfume’s success with American consumers. My project culminates with a formulation of such an optimal perfume.

Exeter swimming delivered quite a performance at the Eastern Interscholastic Swimming & Diving Championships at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, this past weekend. Big Red girls claimed fifth place overall and the boys finished sixth, while Exeter’s combined score of 777 points placed them fourth overall against some of the top competition from around the country.

“Easterns is the premier prep school meet in the country,” said girls head coach Nicole Benson. “This is a great way to kick off our championship season and provide opportunities to our swimmers to compete amongst the best.”

“The energy at Easterns always bring out the best in our swimmers, and the entire experience brings us closer as a team,” continued boys head coach Don Mills. “The meet was full of exceptional swims from all of our athletes.”

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Big Red got to work re-setting the record books immediately on the first day of competition. Mena Boardman ’26, Audrey Zhang ‘24, Brianna Cong ’25 and Sophie Phelps ’25 teamed up to post a school record while earning All-American status in the 200 medley relay with a time of 1:43.66.

Boardman then went on to claim first overall in the 50 freestyle, posting a school record and earning All-American status in the process with a time of 22.94.

Brianna Cong made a splash and finished second overall in the 100 butterfly with a time of 55.02.
On the boys side, Ethan Guo ‘25, Henry Liu ‘23, Lang Gou ‘25 and Rudd Day ‘25 placed fifth in the medley relay with an All-American time of 1:32.62 before Andrew Van De Water ‘23, Zach Quitkin ‘23, Michael Yang ‘24 and Patrick McCann ‘23 took fifth place in the 200 free relay with a time of 1:28.15.

Guo earned a seventh-place finish in the 200 freestyle with a time of 1:42.16, while Day swam to an eighth-place finish in the 50 free with a time of 21.55. Gou wrapped up day one with a seventh-place swim in the 100 butterfly with a time of 50.71.

Day 2 of competition was much of the same as Boardman kicked off the day with a school record swim and third-place finish in the 100 freestyle with a time of 50.42.

Sophie Phelps followed by breaking her own school record in the 500 freestyle when she touched the wall at 4:58.61, claiming fourth place overall. Cong also broke one of her own school records in the 100 backstroke with a time of 55.84, good enough for fifth place.

The girls wrapped up the competition with one more record-breaking performance as Phelps, Cong, Zhang and Boardman teamed up to set a school mark in the 400 freestyle, claiming second place with a time of 3:27.59.

Guo led the efforts on the boys side on Day 2, winning the 100 backstroke with a time of 49.75. Henry Liu added a second-place finish in the 100 breaststroke, coming in at 55.53.

Big Red has two big meets left on their 2022-23 campaign as they will travel to battle Andover on Feb. 22 before competing at the New England Championships on March 4-5.

Hundreds of Exeter parents walked in the shoes of college admissions officers over the weekend to learn about the art and the science of choosing an incoming class.

The mock admissions workshops, in which parents and admissions professionals meet, discuss and ultimately choose from among three imagined candidates, were part of the College Admissions Weekend program. The event, hosted annually by Exeter’s College Counseling Office for parents of 11th-graders, offers a peek behind the curtain at what goes into those decisions and shares critical knowledge to make the admissions process as painless as possible.

A highlight of the weekend was the keynote address by Dr. Anthony Jack, an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has researched how class and culture shape how undergraduates navigate college. Jack’s book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, digs into the stratification of lower-income students: Those he calls the “privileged poor,” who matriculate from boarding and private schools, and the “doubly disadvantaged,” those who arrive at college from local, typically distressed public schools.

Jack notes how elite American universities take pride in enrolling an increasing number of students of color and more students from low-income families, but many among those number are the “privileged poor,” hailing from elite secondary institutions. Those students already are familiar with the culture of private schools and know how to take advantage of the resources and the systems of support available to them. Meanwhile, those who go straight to selective colleges from “forgotten neighborhoods and neglected schools” don’t take advantage of the resources because they have never benefitted from them. That, in turn, puts them at a distinct disadvantage to thrive.

Jack’s research shows that although first generation and lower-income students make up roughly 50% of the students at four-year schools, just 14 percent of undergraduates at the most competitive colleges come from the bottom half of income distribution. Thirty-eight U.S. colleges — those considered among the most selective in the country — have more students in the richest 1 percent of the population than the bottom 60 percent, he notes.

The mock admissions workshops on Saturday morning deployed 11 college admissions officers from schools such as Dartmouth, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon to lead Harkness discussions about potential “candidates.” Each of the three fictional student profiles told a story of an exceptional student with good grades, a variety of extra-curricular interests and strong recommendations from their instructors and advisers.

The parents at each table had to come to a consensus on one student to enroll, one student to put on a waitlist and one student to turn down. Those hard decisions exemplify what college admissions officers face each spring while considering thousands of applicants for placement.

For the second time in four years, the most prestigious indoor track event in the nation featured an Exonian. Byron Grevious ’24 finished in sixth place in the high school boys one mile at the 115^th running of the Millrose Games in New York City last weekend.

Grevious kept pace with a field of the top mile runners from around the country to finish in a time of 4:12.95. Grevious, who has made a substantial mark at the national level through his blazing times in cross country, indoor and outdoor track, follows in the footsteps of Will Coogan ’20. Coogan, currently running at the University of North Carolina, competed in the one mile at Millrose in 2020.

Grevious has earned the distinction of being one of the best high school runners in the country, competing at indoor nationals and outdoor nationals as a 10th grader before reaching new heights this year as an upper. The Southport, Connecticut, native wrapped up a cross country season by finishing second overall at the Nike Northeast Regional before claiming 12^th overall at Nike Cross Country Nationals.

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“My mentality changed sophomore year,” said Grevious, regarding his mindset heading into big races. “Nerves definitely used to be there leading up to the race and at the starting line. Now I get excited to see what I can do. Having the opportunity to run with such high class runners has made me more excited than nervous. I get excited to compete.”

The success he experienced in the fall has carried into winter. In just his second weekend of racing this winter season, Grevious shattered his own school record in the 3,000 meter with a time of 8:15.10 — good enough to be the fastest time by an 11^th grader in the country this season. He also was a part of a school record in the distance medley relay, ran a personal best 4:14.11 one mile, and has qualified for indoor nationals in the one mile, two mile, and 5,000 meters.

“Leading up to races, I’ll sometimes go through my training log,” he said of his preparation tactics. “I tell myself I know what I can run, I’ve done these workouts, I was hitting these reps at this pace and I felt good.”

“Byron embodies a wonderful mix of steadfast focus to detail and dedication to getting the work done over a long period of time,” said head track and field coach Hilary Hall. “This is not a work for a few weeks and then take a break kind of athlete. He knows that it takes consistent, persistent work over months and years to get results and he is willing to put in that effort.”

“Byron is the whole package,” said distance and head boys cross country coach Brandon Newbould. “He is a respectable student-athlete who is well-suited to the academic rigor of the Academy and he enjoys racing and is excited about the opportunity to face America’s best.”  

The Millrose Games annually feature top runners from the around the world, including past, present and future Olympians. The high school mile field included 13 of the top milers from around the nation. Grevious wasone of just two runners from class of 2024 and one of two from the New England region.

With Girls Who Code, Exeter students act on the Academy's goal to unite knowledge and goodness.

Students fill the hallways of the Cooperative Middle School just after 2 p.m. on a recent Wednesday afternoon. As hundreds of sixth, seventh and eighth graders check their lockers and headed for the exits, six members of the Exeter Student Service Organization group Girls Who Code make their way through the noisy crowd to a second-floor classroom. A cohort of middle school girls soon joins them, choosing seats at a large rectangular table in the middle of the room. They flip open their laptops, ready for another course in the basics of the programming language Python.

Like all of the more than 50 student-run clubs under the ESSO umbrella, Girls Who Code is a free service program offered by Exeter students to members of the local community. Since 1967, ESSO has built on the Academy’s founding principle of non sibi, or “not for oneself,” by sending students out into the community to serve as volunteers. “ESSO presents Exonians with an opportunity to get involved in the society in which they live,” a co-director of the organization told The Exonian in 1968.

The Girls Who Code group is affiliated with the international nonprofit of the same name, which aims to help close the longstanding gender gap in programming and other technology fields. After meeting online only during the earlier phase of the pandemic, the group returned to in-person meetings this fall, beginning with smaller gatherings at a local library.

This is only their second meeting at the middle school, located about 10 minutes from Exeter’s campus in the neighboring town of Stratham, and the group is still getting to know each other. They do a round of introductions (name, hometown, favorite ice cream flavor) and a review of what they did last session (making sentences with variables) before club co-head Joey Dong ’23 kicks things off in earnest.

“Could we maybe do a little exercise? Can you guys make a variable that stores how much money you have…and then make a print statement that says ‘I have however many dollars in my bank account’?”

As their students turn to their screens, the Exonians move around the room, offering help. Between exercises, they take turns explaining the concepts behind each one. Dong, who has been involved with Girls Who Code since the summer after her prep year, created the curriculum they’re using for a non-profit she co-founded, The Dream AI, which focuses on teaching machine learning algorithms.

Pranavi Vedula ’25 goes over the three forms of data in Python: strings, numbers and Booleans. “[Boolean] is really just a fancy way of saying true or false,” she explains. “You can set certain conditions to be true or false, then execute your code to happen based on that outcome.”

A day student from Brentwood, New Hampshire, Vedula has now experienced Girls Who Code from both perspectives, having learned from Dong and others when she was a student at the Cooperative Middle School herself. “I tried doing a little bit of coding here and there when I was younger, but it didn’t ever click and I didn’t enjoy it until after Girls Who Code,” she says. “The mentors made me feel seen, and it was the first time I felt seen for who I was. I didn’t feel overpowered, and I didn’t feel stupid.”

Now that she’s a student at the Academy herself, Vedula enjoys paying it forward by teaching coding to younger students. “Being a female in a STEM field is difficult because it’s a very male dominated field,” she says. “Having that space to connect with other female students is really valuable.”

The middle schoolers in the class agree. “[Boys] are chaos,” one sixth grader puts it succinctly. “It’s a lot harder to learn with the noise, the funny jokes, stuff like that,” another adds.

By the time class ends, the students have written code that subtracts money from their bank accounts to “buy” an array of things, from $10 cookies to UFOs for a Martian voyage, and started programming an input function that asked people their favorite ice cream flavor. They’ve also polished off a couple of bags of cookies — with some assistance from their Exonian teachers.

“Technology is such an influential field right now, [and] we can’t just have the people behind technology be male-dominated, because that’s going to be carried through in the products and in technology itself,” Dong says of her dedication to the Girls Who Code mission. “We want technology to be fair to everybody.”