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5 questions for Lamont Poet A.E. Stallings

Award-winning poet and translator A.E. Stallings visited Exeter’s campus last week as the latest in a long line of distinguished poets to visit Exeter through the Lamont Poetry Program.

Known for her skilled use of rhyme, meter and traditional verse forms, Stallings employs frequent allusions to Greek and Roman mythology in her depictions of modern-day life.  She has published four poetry collections, including Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and verse translations of works by the Roman poet Lucretius and Greek poet Hesiod, among others. The recipient of a 2011 MacArthur “genius grant,” Stallings has also held fellowships from United States Artists and the Guggenheim Foundation. A Georgia native, Stallings has lived in Athens, Greece since 1999.

In addition to a reading in Assembly Hall, Stallings worked with students and faculty in the Classics Departments during her visit. She made time to be interviewed by Kaylee Chen, a senior working toward a Classical Diploma and a fellow poet.

Could you talk a little bit about where your inspiration for writing and classics came from and what drew you to those?

I entered college knowing that I wanted to be a writer, and I was originally an English and a music major. I had not taken Latin in high school, but…I just felt like I should take Latin 101 and learn a little bit about things. I had this amazing teacher, Dr. Harris, who was very eccentric and very fun. I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll take another course, then I’ll take another course.’ Finally, I was taking a lot of Latin courses and the head of the classics department said, ‘Why are you majoring in English? You’re taking all these courses, come to the dark side.’ So I ended up switching my major and did not regret it, because I felt like I was getting a lot of the things that I wanted. In the literature class, we would analyze how sounds contributed to meaning and things like that. I felt it was actually very good training for being a working poet.

How does translation impact your writing process, and vice versa?

For as long as I’ve been writing poems, I’ve been doing translation…. I think you learn more about a poem from translating it than almost any other way of reading, because you can’t fudge things. If something is ambiguous, you’re going to have to come down on one side or the other, unless you can pull over that exact ambiguity into English. You have to think about what the cultural references are…. You think about vocabulary, you think about diction, you think about register and you think about syntax. It’s a way to keep those muscles in good working order. It’s [also] a way to try on different identities, learn different things, and write about things that you wouldn’t write about yourself. That can open the door to possibilities. You suddenly realize, ‘Oh, maybe I could write this different kind of poem.’

You mentioned before that meter and structure are a big part of your poems. Recent creative writing movements have gravitated towards a more structureless kind of form, in which people take a lot more liberties with capitalization or punctuation or rhyme or those kinds of things. Do you have any thoughts on what kind of direction poetry in general is taking in this regard?

I think free verse will always be with us, and I think formal choices will always be with us. I think poets will kind of flow back and forth over that. The struggle is always to sound modern and contemporary…. I think it’s more to do with subject matter and diction, syntax. You can write a very modern-sounding sonnet and you could write very fusty, antiquated-sounding free verse. The struggle is always to sound fresh, and that’s everybody’s struggle, from Keats to Shakespeare. If you’re lucky, you write something that continues to sound fresh 2,000 years after you’ve written it. That’s seen in very few cases; Catullus is one of them.

There’s been a question recently as to whether classics should be studied in higher education. Because of the nature of the field, some argue that it’s inherently exclusionary — race-wise, gender-wise and class-wise. Do you have any thoughts on [this]?

I think it’s kind of nonsense. I’m not saying that classics hasn’t been used for classist and gatekeeping purposes. Yes, it has. That’s one of the reasons you have so many fantastic 19th-century women novelists, because the novel did not have the prestige of poetry. To be a poet, you had to know Greek. Keats is criticized because he doesn’t really have a gentleman’s classical education. Women who were not given the classical education…channeled this talent into a less prestigious genre, which they then raised to a more prestigious genre.

But what I love about classics is that wherever you study it, it’s the same. I find it very democratic and anti-elitist in a sense. If I study Latin at a public high school in Georgia and I am reading Cicero, I am reading Cicero as someone at Eton is reading Cicero…. Obviously if your school does not offer Latin and so forth, then that becomes a barrier, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the nature of classics in and of itself. There certainly is quite a lot of racism and classism and sexism in classics, but I think it’s also open to people to grapple with that.

You said one thing you like about Catullus is that he’s able to appear modern even though, clearly, he’s long gone. With your own work, is that the feeling that you wish to impart to your readers?

You hope that you are speaking to someone directly, that you are speaking to your ideal reader, someone who would totally get you and get your work. But that person might be dead, or might be not yet born. The cool thing about literature is that you’re having this conversation with all of the most interesting like-minded friends that you could ever have, but it’s not restricted in time or space. I feel like you’re speaking backwards and you’re speaking forward. You hope, but again, it’s out of your hands.

Big Red rolls over rivals in E/A

Championship hardware and the color red swarming Andover; that is how the most anticipated sports weekend on the fall calendar unfolded Saturday.

Exeter cross country continued its run of dominance at the New England Interscholastic Championships, while another chapter in the historic rivalry between Exeter and Andover concluded with a trio of victories for Big Red.

The Exeter boys varsity cross country teams continued its unprecedented run by capturing a third consecutive Division I title — and sixth in the last 10 years — at Interschols at St. Paul’s. Exeter had the first four runners cross the line in a dominating performance. Byron Grevious ‘24 led the way with his second straight individual title with a course-record time of 15 minutes, 35 seconds. Max Lacombe ‘24 (16:30), Oliver Brandes ‘23 (16:33), and Mateo Bango ‘23 (16:36) followed for Big Red.

The boys JV cross country team extended its own dominant streak and captured its seventh straight JV championship. Owen Dudley ’23 (17:55) and Michael Zhu ’24 (17:50) placed second and third, respectively, while Big Red had six others finish inside the top 10.

The girls varsity cross country team also enjoyed a great day of success and placed second overall. Tenley Nelson ’24 claimed third place overall with a time of 19:36. Daria Ivanova ‘24 (20:02) placed sixth, while Annika Finelli ’24 (21:21) also earned All-New England status with a 16th place finish.

The girls JV program put together a top performance and earned its second straight JV championship. Hawley Dick ‘25 earned individual champion honors with a time of 22:14 while Emerson Seymour ‘26 (22:25), Tiffany Sun ’26 (22:28) and Leta Griffith ’24 (22:31) joined her in the top five.

In other Interschol action, boys varsity water polo earned a 14-11 victory over Williston in the opening round before falling to Greenwich Country Day, 13-9. Exeter will compete in the third-place match on Sunday morning.

Back in Andover, Big Red girls volleyball capped a perfect 14-0 regular season with a 3-1 (25-9, 25-14, 23-25, 25-22) victory over the Blue. Exeter jumped out to a quick 2-0 match lead before Andover earned a hard-fought third set. Exeter staved off a late Andover push in the fourth to cap the win with a 25-22 fourth-set victory. Sofia Morais ’23 and Coco Barton ’23 were solid for Big Red, who will await their postseason opponent for a Wednesday matchup.

On the pitch, it was the Blue who capitalized on their scoring chances by potting one in the first half and three in the second to take a 4-0 girls varsity soccer win. Bridgette Martin ’23 made several saves in goal for Big Red; Esme Shields ’24 was strong in the middle of the field.

Andover struck first in field hockey with a goal in the opening five minutes. Exeter would even the score at 1-1 when Eloise Goedkoop ’23 found the back of the net. Andover would take a 2-1 edge into halftime after capitalizing on a corner before adding a pair in the second half to earn a 4-1 win.

Big Red boys soccer scored the lone goal of the game in the first half when Thaniel Illuzzi ’23 headed in a beautiful cross from Jaylen Bennett ’25 to earn a 1-0 victory. Trevor Piltch ’23 was outstanding in goal, making several key stops including a diving stop with just three minutes to play.

Football capped E/A weekend in emphatic fashion, earning its second straight victory over the Blue by a score of 42-7 in the 138th meeting between the foes.

Andover held a 7-6 lead and was driving in the final minute of the first half before Tommy Dunn ’23 picked off a pass and ran it back to the 20 yard line. Big Red would take advantage of the field position and reclaim a lead they would never give back when Tristan Aboud ’23 scored on a quarterback keeper to give Exeter a 14-6 lead at the break.

The second half was all Exeter, as it scored 28 unanswered points. Running back Xaviah Bascon ’23 scored four touchdowns for Big Red, while Aboud ran for one and threw another to Dylan Almeyda ’23.

The victory capped a 7-1 season for Big Red, who closed the deficit in the all-time series against Andover to 55-73-10.

Artists share joy for discovery

Exeter artists and modern language learners alike were the beneficiaries of artists in residences in October when Japanese artists Takuya and Minami Yoshida visited campus.

The duo spent time with art students in visits to painting, drawing and ceramics classes as well as students studying Japanese language and culture.

Their appearance was sponsored by the Michael Clark Rockefeller Class of 1956 Visiting Artist Fund. The fund provides opportunities for Exeter art students to interact with significant, contemporary artists and create unique works of art in a master-class environment.

Takuya Yoshida, is a painter who uses expressionistic qualities and bright, inventive colors that are derived from the raw beauty of the natural world. He started studying art in New Hampshire at Plymouth State University and received a bachelor’s in fine arts, and then went on to graduate school at New York Studio School and received a master’s in painting.

Minami Yoshida is a sculptor. Her works celebrate the essence of models whom she knows and sculpts. Her figurative forms are abstracted by simplifying the details and textures. These abstractions tend to exude more humanistic and emotional qualities. She is heavily influenced by the Superflat Art Movement and artists such as Yoshimoto Nara and the ancient ceramics has been showing her artwork all around Japan since then. She received her undergraduate degree at Tokyo Zokei University in 2016.

Neuroscientist addresses assembly

Any process of transformation — from social change movements to new approaches in medicine — begins with agitation, neuroscience researcher Khalid Shah told students in the Assembly Hall on Friday. “If you want to bring a change, you need to be agitated in your mind, which will lead to the innovation,” Shah said. “That innovation will ultimately be the change.”

As the vice chair of research for the department of neurosurgery and director of The Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Shah leads a team that is pioneering targeted, cell-based therapies for brain cancers. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Townley Chisholm, instructor in the Science Department, introduced Shah in assembly and welcomed him for a visit to his BIO510: Advanced Biology class earlier on Friday morning. “For over 10 years, [Dr. Shah] has invited groups of students from PEA to visit his lab in Boston and to talk with his researchers…who come from all over the world for the chance to work in his lab on paradigm-shifting ways to use the newest technologies to cure otherwise untreatable cancer.”

About seven or eight years ago, Shah explained in his assembly talk, he and his team began questioning the way doctors were treating glioblastoma, a lethal form of brain cancer. For the past 20 years, the treatment options have remained the same: Patients get surgery to remove the tumor, followed by chemotherapy, radiation or both.

“Although we’ve had a number of clinical trials with different drugs…nothing really has changed,” Shah said. He added that the blood-brain barrier, an additional layer of protective coating on the blood vessels in the brain, also make it more difficult for drugs used to treat cancer to get inside the brain to work effectively.

To challenge the status quo, Shah and his team looked to medical innovations from the past, notably the insights that led to the first safe vaccines to treat previously deadly diseases like smallpox in the 18th century. “It started with something really basic: that we use disease to kill disease,” Shah said.

By design, cancer cells leave the original tumor en masse and metastasize to other parts of the body. But they also tend to migrate back to the original tumor — a feature that is key to Shah’s team’s experimental therapy. Using the powerful gene-editing technology known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), they engineered repurposed cancer cells that seek out and attack cells in the original tumor.

“You make them therapy resistant and then you actually also put a kill switch in it, and it kills the original cell,” Shah said. He used images of vivid red and green cells resembling abstract paintings to illustrate the process on the Assembly Hall stage.

The treatment, known as therapeutic tumor cells (ThTCs) has so far been tested on mice, with positive results. “We see a huge survival benefit in animals, and hopefully in humans in coming years,” Shah said. He and his team have more recently been working on engineering the tumor cells to also include cells that spur an immune response, increasing their disease-fighting potential.  

“Once the tumor is gone, you’re vaccinated from further tumors to come — that’s the big picture,” Shah said near the end of his talk, adding that the gut microbiome also plays an important role in the effectiveness of immunotherapy in cancer treatment.

In addition to sharing the thought processes behind his pathbreaking work, Shah offered words of advice — and encouragement — to future scientists in the Assembly Hall audience. He emphasized the value of collaboration, both inside the lab and with scientists of different disciplines: “You need one or two good innovative ideas to make the difference, but…if you don’t have a structure, anything you bring in that is unique [is] not going to go that far.”

“In all of us, there is an innovator lying somewhere,” Shah concluded. “You just have to figure out which domain excites you the most.” 

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Feeling at home

I remember well the day I moved into Dunbar Hall as a new lower in 1968, with not much more than a single duffel bag and a lacrosse stick in my hands. I had never lived away from home, so naturally I found myself wondering what the other students would be like and how I would fit in. My room was sparsely furnished, and my few possessions did not do much to fill it up, nor take long to unpack. Then I was on my own.

I could not have been happier. I was at Exeter. Friendships quickly formed, and with the support of the proctors and faculty who lived there, Dunbar soon became my home away from home. Sure, the seniors looked impossibly old to me, and I wasn’t ready to join the fierce four square battles that played out in front of the dorm each evening, but I found my friends among the other new lowers, and felt that I could not have been assigned to a better dorm. In fact, like most students, I was certain I was in the best dorm on campus.

Fast-forward 50-plus years, and I now have the privilege of doing dorm duty in Wentworth Hall, and the pleasure of seeing firsthand how the important work of faculty, proctors and student listeners continues to foster community today. The day student affiliate program extends this sense of dorm pride and belonging to non-boarders, integrating them into the school more completely, including as proctors in our dorms.

At Exeter, all four classes live together, and most students remain in the same dorm for their entire time at the Academy. Proctors and student listeners return to campus early each fall to be trained for their responsibilities, and the mentoring that occurs between older and younger students is important to the personal development of both. A strong sense of belonging for every student in the dorm is central to creating a strong sense of belonging to the school as a whole, and it is not surprising that our alumni typically identify first with their class year, and second with their dorm.

This fall, we celebrate the opening of the first new dorm on campus since 1969. It’s a multipurpose building that houses 60 students and five resident faculty, as well as an academic space with four Harkness classrooms and a department meeting room for our Health and Human Development Department. The building also frames a spacious lawn with two other dorms, creating an exciting new community space on campus.

To ensure the best possible residential experience for our students, and to attract and retain the finest faculty, it is essential that we continually renovate our dorms in line with the latest principles of accessibility and sustainable construction. Outfitted with geothermal heating and cooling, the new dorm is a testament to that commitment. It will be used to house students from Merrill and Langdell Halls as we embark on the renewal of those historic dorms and the construction of an expansive new dining complex on the site of Wetherell Dining Hall.

In the opening paragraph of our Deed of Gift, John and Elizabeth Phillips expressed their belief that “the time of youth is the important period.” Indeed, it is a time to learn about one’s self and develop a sense of purpose and identity, and to consider one’s place in the larger whole. Our residential programs are an essential component of this process at Exeter, and they are critical to our mission to unite goodness and knowledge and inspire youth from every quarter to lead purposeful lives.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the fall 2022 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Abbot Hall

For nearly 75 years, the Academy operated without dormitories. Instead, “the boys boarded about town,” as one Exeter historian writes. But as enrollment grew, along with the cost of living, the Trustees recognized the need to offer on-campus housing to help ensure equal opportunity for all students. Charles H. Bell explains this thinking in his 1883 book Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire: A Historical Sketch, writing that the Trustees “determined to establish at the charge of the Academy, a dormitory and commons hall for the members of the school of limited means, by which the expense of living should be reduced to the minimum.”

The school experimented first with housing students in an Academy-owned building on Spring Street, which had been the J. & B. Williams printing shop. The arrangement worked so well that in September 1852 the Trustees voted “to erect a more suitable and capacious building for the same purpose, in the Academy grounds,” Bell writes. “It opened for use in 1855. It was constructed of brick, and contained rooms for fifty young men, with a dining hall and other needful accommodations; and cost about twenty thousand dollars.”

Abbot Hall, room 13, circa 1879

As Frank H. Cunningham details in his book Familiar Sketches of The Phillips Exeter Academy and Surroundings, the rooms were “furnished at a nominal rent, so that fifty boys are thus supported at about one half the cost of living at the ordinary boarding houses.” Residents paid $1 a year for a room. “The Trustees believe that no other institution of the kind in the country has approached this Academy in giving substantial aid to young men of poverty and merit,” Cunningham writes.

The building was named Abbot Hall, in honor of Benjamin Abbot, the Academy’s second principal, who served from 1788 to 1838. Abbot was a respected and beloved instructor, teaching such subjects as Latin and Greek for 44 years and counting among his pupils statesman Daniel Webster.

Ever considerate of the Academy’s mission to educate students in goodness and knowledge, the Trustees voted to post, inside each student’s Abbot Hall door, a set of eight rules, including: “There shall not be in or about the building, during study hours, any singing or playing of musical instruments, or any other noise inconsistent with the quiet study; and good order shall be preserved at all times.”

Abbot Hall remained the only on-campus dormitory until Soule Hall was built in 1893.

 

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the fall 2022 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

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The joys of persistent curiosity

For many Exonians, the summer months offer that rare opportunity to follow their passions unhampered by school-year schedules and commitments. We caught up with four seniors as they settled on campus this fall and asked the time-honored question: How did you spend your summer?

 

James Clavel ’23

Baseball Statistician

Big Red ace James Clavel ’23 first played baseball in Japan, where he lived from age 8 to 12, so it was fitting that he returned there this summer as an intern with a professional team. Thanks to his Japanese maternal grandmother and family trips to Japan every summer until COVID hit, Clavel has stayed fluent in the language and interested in the culture. Through some local contacts, he secured an internship with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, a member of Nippon Professional Baseball.

Clavel spent three weeks conducting statistical analyses for the team, which has won 11 championships. “They liked me because I understood both U.S. and Japanese baseball,” Clavel says.

His primary focus was on trends among American batters in Japan, analyzing what made some more success-ful there. He looked at walk rates and noted that the higher the rate, the more successful the Americans were in Japan. Interestingly, he also determined that players who tend to strike out in American baseball, where success is measured in home runs, did well in Japanese baseball, where the game is less focused on power.

The internship reinforced Clavel’s plans to make a career of scouting or other off-the-field work in baseball.

And though he would have welcomed the opportunity to throw a few pitches, Clavel was happy to spend time focusing on a sport he loves in a country that means so much to him.

“I was really interested in working with a baseball team; I would’ve done anything,” he says, acknowledging that he did some homework on stats and Excel spread-sheets before heading to Japan. “Once I got there, they showed me a lot of it’s just using your eyes and looking for trends.” He also used his eyes and his expertise to scout high school and industrial league tournaments in Osaka, tracking pitchers with video and a radar gun. At least two of those pitchers are likely to be drafted this winter.

With a population of 1.5 million, Fukuoka, in southern Japan, is not a small city, but Clavel, who lived there on his own, was noticed enough to be interviewed on national television.

“I guess it was a bit of a novelty to have an American person there,” he says. “My boss told me they thought it was really interesting that there was a foreigner who was working in baseball.”

 

Minseo Kim ’23

Non Sibi DreamCatcher

Insomnia keeps Minseo Kim ’23 up at night, but she is sleeping fine. “I would start in the afternoon and just keep coding and fixing bugs,” she says. “Night would pass by and before I knew it, my mom would knock on the door and bring me green tea.” That coding was integral to DreamCatcher, a product Kim is co-developing that uses photoplethysmogram (PPG) data to track sleep.

Early in the pandemic, while attending classes from her home in Seongnam, South Korea, Kim became aware that her fellow Exonians and millions globally were struggling to get a good night’s sleep. With tech and design thinking in her blood — she has lived in tech hubs Silicon Valley and Seattle — Kim and a teammate began exploring a new way for people and their doctors to track sleep data as part of the POSCO ICT AI Youth Challenge.

Sleep is routinely monitored with an electrocardiogram (ECG), which tracks heart rate, heart rate variability and other health data. But it requires the user to wear multiple sensors that can make it difficult to sleep. A PPG, however, requires only a single sensor — think Apple watches and oximeters — though the data it provides aren’t as detailed. Using artificial intelligence, Kim and her teammate were able to “train the model” to estimate an ECG wave accurately from a PPG wave and provide detailed data on how well and how long the user slept.

They encapsulated the circuitry in a forehead sensor Kim designed using Blender, a computer-aided design program, and produced with a 3D printer. Through Bluetooth and an Android app the teammates developed, the sensor could submit data to the user’s phone. The app also could provide pink noise, a blend of sounds that have been proved to aid with sleep. Research shows that back-ground sounds can be disruptive during deep sleep, so the sensor could deliver a signal to the app to turn off the sounds when the user enters rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the deepest stage.

The resulting paper received a Samsung Humantech Paper Award competition bronze medal in February 2022. Kim and her collaborator have a patent pending on the hybrid AI architecture they developed, a generative adversarial network and a convolutional neural network.

DreamCatcher isn’t Kim’s first use of AI and technology to respond to a health concern. In middle school, alarmed by the increase in suicide rates among her peers due to overwhelming academic stress, she developed a “mind lightening pen.” A combination of programming and heartbeat sensors that responds to an increase in stress level, the pen buzzes to remind the user to take a break from studying.

This summer, in addition to refining the DreamCatcher, Kim volunteered as chief technology officer for the South Korean branch of United Nations Volunteers and was an intern at the Way Maker School in Seongnam, helping to build a computer science curriculum that includes AI, emotion classification and empathy. “That got me thinking a lot about what it really means to care for someone else,” she says. “What does it mean to be non sibi? And what does it mean to incorporate that into technology? It’s about fully understanding the person and the problem, and finding the solution together.” 

 

Isabella Vesely ’23

Galactic Imagineer

By fourth grade, Isabella Vesely ’23 was focused on science. The Wisconsinite started robotics teams and later “stumbled upon” weekly lectures at the local university’s planetarium, where she took notes eagerly, surrounded by college students. By the end of middle school, she was two years ahead of her class in math, and a teacher recommended that she apply to Exeter.

Delighted as a prep to be able to choose classes in any branch of science, Vesely quickly realized her favorite was physics, for its expansive focus on everything, including particles and galaxy clusters. She barreled through Exeter’s entire physics curriculum. “Physics really helped me have this analytical mind, always questioning.”

This summer, Vesely participated in the QuarkNet Summer Research Program, a paid virtual opportunity for high school students. It is supported by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and is home to the world’s second-largest particle accelerator.

Vesely and a partner were assigned to imaging galaxy clusters across millimeter, optical and X-ray wavelength bands. Those were combined with the rest of their research group’s findings to create hyperfast, analytic model-based simulations of galaxy clusters to deter-mine their mass through an artificial intelligence neural network. That kind of information, Vesely says, along with research in dark matter and dark energy, will some-day play a role in developing as-yet-unrealized uses here on Earth.

“The base of physics is really just asking questions about what’s going on around us,” she says. “Once you find a discovery and know more about the world, you can have meaningful applications. The first step is experimenting and observing, using our eyes or, now in modern physics, computers, simulations, neural networks and AI.”

This fall, while continuing research for Fermilab, Vesely will tackle special types of problems in quantum mechanics and apply so-called deep neural networks and physics-informed neural networks as part of her senior project. She’ll review existing research to re-create results and hopes to help make the process more efficient.

Next spring, though, she’ll be a congressional intern. “We need better public policy that’s actually based on things that are pertinent in modern science,” Vesely says of her somewhat incongruent interests. “A lot of new public policy — in technology and energy, especially — has ties to physics and computer science. In the future, I hope to use what I explore in physics and engineering and computer science to make sure we have a very ethical way of living that’s more efficient.”

 

David Kim ’23

Budding Diplomat

Iran might not be at the top of everyone’s travel bucket list, but for David Kim’23 it is. So, two years ago, limited by quarantine and other restrictions at home in Hong Kong during the pandemic, Kim did the next best thing to traveling: He visited the local consulate — considered “foreign soil”— with a friend. The Iranian consulate general enthusiastically welcomed his two unexpected visitors.

“That was great luck on our end in terms of meeting him first,” Kim says. “That gave us confidence going forward.” It also inspired the two to make a formal plan to visit as many of Hong Kong’s 64 consulates general and 56 honorary consulates as they could, then share information and highlights from the ensuing discussions with their peers. The result: Consulate Review, a global organization whose mission “to bridge current and aspiring world leaders through open, meaningful conversations” is carried out today through chapters run by students in San Francisco; Cairo; Bogotá, Colombia; and Dubai, among other cities.

Together with Exeter friends Drew Smith ’23 and Jayson Tung ’23, Kim brought the project to New York and the United Nations last fall. They have met with ambassadors from every continent except Antarctica, asking challenging questions about education, gender equity, human rights, economics and climate change. They then share information with interested students through their website and Instagram feed. Kim says some conversations have been particularly notable, such as one with a member of the Israeli delegation and another with the Russian ambassador shortly before the war in Ukraine. This summer, Kim juggled a social media internship at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of The Gambia to the United Nations with his consulate visits before returning to Hong Kong to work on rebranding Consulate Review. That meant designing a new logo and articulating objectives, but also broadening the organization’s social impact.

To that end, Consulate Review is assisting the Iranian consulate with an event introducing Hong Kong residents to Iranian culture and geography, volunteering at the Panamanian consulate’s booth at the Belt and Road Summit, and initiating a pilot program to bring diplomats to schools in New York City’s five boroughs that might not otherwise have the means to do so. The team also hopes to begin filming informative documentaries.

“In so many different ways, this project entered my life and helped improve it,” Kim says, noting that the other country he would most like to visit is North Korea.

“Obviously, we’re ‘on different sides,’” Kim, a native of South Korea, says of his meeting with the North Korean consulate general. “But once you speak with someone, if you’re kind and respectful, they usually reciprocate. That has helped me tremendously — not just in that regard, but also at school, communicating with different people. You should be open to conversation, open to learning somebody else’s opinion, and willing to adjust if you learn something that’s different from what you think but aligns with the general moral truth.”   

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

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Welcome to New Hall

Move-in day falls on a sunny Wednesday in early September. All over campus, welcome signs decorate open dormitory doors and chalk-drawn arrows point the way inside. Students lug crates and drag suitcases along the pathways, taking frequent breaks to hug friends and compare summers.

A bit of extra excitement fills the air, along with the smell of fresh paint, as students and their families make their way down Front Street and enter the newly constructed 42,000-square-foot dormitory, currently known as New Hall. Resident faculty members perched on red Adirondack chairs greet new arrivals as they pass through the window-lined entrance and step tentatively into the dorm’s light-filled common room, where proctors have gathered to answer any questions.

In a third-floor room, Kendra Wang ’25 unpacks while her roommate, Jackie Addo ’25, has most of her belongings neatly arranged on her side of the room. The cozy double is made roomier by built-in wooden desks and shelves set against the window and dressers tucked underneath raised beds. Tackboard covers the wall above each bed, awaiting each student’s personalized array of fairy lights, posters, photographs and other decorations.

New Hall is the first dormitory to be built on Exeter’s campus in more than 50 years. If that isn’t significant enough, the sustainably constructed building also houses an academic space with four Harkness classrooms, bringing living and learning at Exeter together under one roof for the first time. With its opening this fall, New Hall has created a vibrant community hub on the western edge of campus, furthering the school’s vision of residential life as an essential part of the Exeter experience.

Priya Nwakanma ’23

“There’s something really unique that boarding schools can offer to both day and boarding students,” says Carol Cahalane, the Academy’s dean of residential life since 2018. “It’s the opportunity to have many places and ways to gather with peers who are equally interested in connecting and learning about each other and the world together.”

Cahalane is far from the first school leader to place residential life among the most valuable aspects of an Exeter education. The process of converting the Academy to a residential school goes back to the construction of the first permanent dormitory on campus, Abbot Hall, in 1855 (see sidebar, “Abbot Hall”). In the early 1930s, Edward Harkness’ revolutionary gift funded the addition of Bancroft, Langdell, Merrill and Wheelwright Halls. This brought the school’s total to 13 large dormitories, each housing 35 to 70 students, in addition to eight smaller house dorms, and provided accommodations for instructors with families for the first time.

“The residential element is at the heart of the education we provide,” Principal Richard W. Day reported to the Trustees in 1971, two years after the last two large residence halls to be built, Main Street Dormitory and Ewald Dormitory, opened on the northern edge of campus. “Dormitory life is not separate from but an extension of what takes place in the classroom. The value of each experience is dependent upon the quality of both.”

This symbiotic relationship was on everyone’s mind in 2019-20, when more than 700 community members weighed in on a vision for Exeter’s future and composed a Campus Master Plan. Based on the result of a student housing study, the plan included the renovation of six existing dorms over the next decade, as well as the construction of a new residence hall to house 60 students. This new hall would allow for renovation of existing dorms without either executing that renovation completely in the summers or displacing students during the school year.

“The new dormitory is not about an expansion of student enrollment,” says Heather Taylor, campus planner and architect. “It’s about a long-term strategy to improve student life and housing options on campus.”

Following Wentworth’s renewal, Langdell and Merrill Halls are the next dorms scheduled for renovation, and students from both will be living together in New Hall for the next two years. Langdell and Merrill are expected to reopen in the 2024-25 school year along with an expansive new Wetherell Dining Complex. “We’re very fortunate in that all of these are good buildings with good bones that we will be able to renovate them for the next 100 years,”

Taylor says. “My hope is that the same is true for the new dorm. You want to design a building that is timeless and functions for generations of our students.”

Historic Dow Barn houses two of New Hall’s five faculty apartments.

In accordance with the principle of environmental stewardship, a key aspect of the Campus Master Plan, the primary structure of New Hall is wood frame rather than steel, which minimizes its carbon footprint. Inside, the building maximizes natural light in both the residential and academic spaces, and geothermal heating and cooling systems provide dehumidification to the student rooms and air conditioning and heating to the faculty apartments and academic spaces. Faculty apartments on each level include separate studies opening directly to student hallways, ensuring a strong faculty-student connection as well as privacy for instructors and their families.

The building also incorporates the historic Dow Barn, which dates to the mid-19th century. Previously used only for storage, the barn was adjacent to neighboring Dow House, a former clinic that the Academy purchased in 1967 to adapt into a student and faculty residence. Dow Barn’s original exposed wood beams now adorn the cathedral ceiling in a second-floor faculty apartment. The façade on the barn end of New Hall incorporates the double doors and diamond-shaped windows of the original barn, as well as the vented cupola and weather vane. The same angular windows, repeated along the rest of the building, echo the barn’s classic look and feel, creating a seamless blend of historic and modern.

“I’m proud of the many sustainable features of the new building,” says Mark Leighton, director of Facilities Management. “Especially the reuse of Dow Barn, enhanced building envelope, geothermal systems, low-maintenance materials, and efficient sizing and layouts of the student and faculty spaces.” In addition to its main residential space — bedrooms for 60 students, five faculty apartments, an airy front common room and ground-floor game room with kitchen and laundry — the building’s academic wing is home to the Health and Human Development Department, with four Harkness classrooms, a department room and a flexible common area.

New Hall was built on the former site of Fisher Theater, which was the hub of the Academy’s performing arts offerings from 1971 until the opening of The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance in 2018. The sloping topography of the building site allows the new dormitory to easily incorporate academic and residential space, while keeping them securely separate.

The academic entrance, on the north side of the building, opens onto a courtyard adjacent to the Forrestal- Bowld Music Center and is a short walk from both the Lamont Health and Wellness Center and the Phelps Science Center. On the Front Street side, a broad campus green in front of the student entrance to New Hall links the building to two smaller dorms, Dow House and Front Street Dormitory. “I love how the topography allows for two distinct entrances, both of which have strong connections to campus,” Leighton says.

While the union of Merrill and Langdell in New Hall was born of necessity, it’s also an unprecedented opportunity. For the first time, former residents of two different dorms, their affiliated day students, and a small group of new students have come together to create a unified dorm

identity and forge the enduring bonds so many Exonians take away from their time on campus. “I do think each dorm has a very unique culture, and I’m fascinated to see how they mix,” says Troy Samuels, the head of New Hall and an instructor in history. “I’m excited to get to play around in terms of building community.”

The main floor conference area.

While Samuels and other dorm faculty members take the lead in this process, they will rely on the support of senior proctors for the vital task of building dorm unity. Other large dorms on campus typically have six to eight student proctors, but New Hall has 10, five from each former dorm. “At the beginning of the year, we’re going to be doing double duty,” says Bronwyn Hall ’23, a senior proctor who spent her first three years at Exeter living in Merrill. “Two people on duty every night, one from each dorm, so that we make sure everyone gets a chance to get to know people that they don’t know, and even the proctors get to know the other dorm’s proctors.”

Hall and her fellow proctors also played a key role in helping their dormmates prepare for the transition during last spring term. Merrill and Langdell residents went through the process of room draw together and also gathered on a few more informal occasions, like toasting s’mores on Wetherell-Ford Quad. “I think they’re going to be a little cautious at first,” Samuels says, adding that the new dorm “has just so many wonderful spaces and wonderful opportunities for them. It’s going to be great.”

Students Jackie Addo ’26 and Kendra Wang ’25 are one of several cross-dorm pairings in New Hall.

After meeting for the first time during an off-campus dinner outing at a local Thai restaurant, Addo and Wang became closer friends when they both ran winter track. As preps, Addo lived in Langdell and Wang lived in Merrill, but they decided in the spring to room together this year, becoming one of several cross-dorm pairings in New Hall.

A week after move-in day, their double looked well lived-in. They have both ordered shelves to attach to their beds for phone chargers and alarm clocks, and tacked up photographs, prints and collages over their beds. A shared built-in desk, which runs the length of the wall beneath the windows, is loaded with textbooks, laptops, Clorox wipes and other dorm room staples.

“I really like the view, especially when I’m studying,” Addo says. “When times get stressful, it’s really nice to look out at the trees.” The desk is so roomy that she has placed a second chair at the end, ideal for study sessions with a friend. Wang, a self-proclaimed “super clothes shopper,” loves the big closets.

Addo and Wang acknowledged having mixed feelings over the summer about the move to New Hall, and they worried about missing the close-knit culture of their former dorms. Now, however, they are optimistic. “There was a lot of emphasis in the first dorm meeting of everyone really trying to make the effort to see us as one big dorm,” Wang says. “I think that’s actually going really well.”

Addo agreed, saying: “There are a lot of people from Merrill that I wanted to talk to — people in leadership roles or people that play on the volleyball team — but never really got to know. I’m still working on that since it’s only been a week. But I feel really close with the Merrill people, and I’m really excited to see what we can do as one dorm.”

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the fall 2022 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

A shared experience

It’s a day before the official start of the school year, but the lively conversation spilling out of room 207 in Phillips Hall might have you believe the term is well underway. Inside, Instructor in English Courtney Marshall looks on as a prompt about pop music, meant to serve as an icebreaker, is bandied about by a group of students whose thaw around the Harkness table and with each other started days ago.

The class is part of a three-day orientation program for minority and LGBTQ+ students and students with high financial need known as Equitable Exeter Experience, or E3. After a three-year hiatus, the program has been revamped and revived by Director of Equity and Inclusion Stephanie Bramlett. “What the E3 program does is help students prepare for a school that may not necessarily be ready for them,” Bramlett says. “For some students, this is the most diverse place they’ve ever been. For other students this is the least diverse place they’ve ever been. So, what does it feel like to sit around the table and have the conversations about identity, which we’re asking them to do all the time, at a school like Exeter?”

After students in Marshall’s class exchange thoughts on singers Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, they dive into a dynamic discussion of the poem “Abandoned Farmhouse” by Ted Kooser. This practice time at the Harkness table is an important way to acclimate new students to what is an often unfamiliar way of learning. 

“One of the big levers that independent schools can pull is making sure that students are feeling like they are stakeholders in the institution before they even start classes."

Another key component of the program is pairing the 48 incoming students with  21 returning student mentors. “We’re trying to create long-standing relationships that hopefully will continue this year so the new students can have someone they can look to even past this program,” says mentor Evan Gonzalez ’22. “I think one of the things we’ve talked about the most are the resources available to new students that they might not find out about until later.”  Bramlett believes it’s crucial for students to have a full understanding of the access they have toresources like the Office of Multicultural Affairs and affinity groups. The more awareness students have of the opportunities around them, she says, the more agency they have to become involved: “One of the big levers that independent schools can pull is making sure that students are feeling like they are stakeholders in the institution before they even start classes.”

Like Gonzalez, mentor Sanisha Mahendra-Rajah ’23 hopes the program will provide students with a peer group as they settle into their new environment. “Having the E3 community as people who understand your background, you have that shared understanding going through Exeter,” she says. “The [new students] get to know the mentors and the faculty, but I think also in meeting each other, they’ve already met so many people with whom they have shared backgrounds and shared experiences.”

“This program is for the mentors as much as it is for the mentees,” Bramlett says. “This is the beauty of Exeter — everything that we do, we are growing together. So as mentors are leading, they are also learning,”

Having participated in the program, prep Layla Whitaker ’25 says she felt ready for the first weeks of classes and used what she learned to make others feel at home. “Because of E3 I was prepared and I knew where the buildings were and I knew people on campus. I was able to help others like new preps, and it always feels nice to know what you’re doing.”

At the program’s closing ceremony, mentors and mentees form a large circle on the lawn in front of Wetherell Dining Hall. The students take turns sharing what they’ve learned over the three days before tossing a ball of yarn to the next speaker. “I learned there are a lot of amazing people and a lot of amazing resources here,” says one student. “I learned so much from our Harkness conversations,” says another.

Before long, a web of colorful string crisscrosses the quad, connecting the group in that moment and beyond.  

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the fall 2021 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

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Leading the library forward

Soon after arriving at Exeter, Laura Wood had a conversation with a former faculty member who expressed concern that students just weren’t using the Class of 1945 Library anymore.

“Then in the next breath, [the person] mentioned, ‘Well, the students are doing their research using databases,’ and then went on from there,” she recalls. “So, I brought the conversation back around to say that if the students are using databases for research, then they are using the Library. That is the Library.”

In our internet-dependent, post-card catalog age, Wood knows and embraces the challenges that come with ensuring that a school library stays relevant to students, teachers and other community members. This summer, she kicked off her tenure as only the fifth Academy Librarian in more than 50 years, having most recently worked as the associate university librarian for research and education at Harvard University.

An avid hiker and snowshoer, Wood lives off campus with her wife and 12-year-old son. As she settled into her new role this summer, we spoke with her about her background and her introduction to Exeter, as well as her strategy for collaborating with other departments and leading the Library into its next phase.

How did you decide to become a librarian?
I thought I wanted to become a professor. I was very interested in the study of religion, and I was pursuing a master’s degree [at Yale Divinity School]. But I came to the very quick realization that I did not want to be a writer, and that if I were to pursue being a professor, writing would be a major component. That got me thinking, what’s closer to what I do love? Finding information, supporting other people’s research, organizing things — the way that libraries do. I went on to get a library science degree, so I could put that into practice and have a practical application of my religion studies.
 
Having worked at the university level up to this point, what made you want to come to a secondary school like Exeter?
Like many people worldwide, I found myself rethinking how I spent my time before the pandemic. It crystallized for me some things that were important that I hadn’t prioritized and weren’t really present in the work that I was doing, like being a member of a community. I loved working in research universities and with librarians, but I didn’t get to work with students, and I didn’t get to participate in the life of the university in any kind of broad way. I’m interested in libraries being a part of the educational process. I think of myself as an educator, and I was looking for an opportunity where I could better identify as a member of a community of educators.
 
What are some of your initial impressions of Exeter and the Academy Library?
I don’t feel like I have the full taste [of the school] yet. Exeter Summer is great to see and to be part of, and it gave me a chance to focus on the staff and the day-to-day workings of the Library without being overwhelmed. The Library staff here have done a great job managing through a big transition; they have been experimenting with new programs and adapting existing work to the new constraints of the pandemic. The demands on them have rapidly changed, including how the building gets used to support PEA needs.
 
What do you think the role of the Academy Library is in life at Exeter?
Throughout my career, because of the rise of digitization, it’s been harder and harder for people to understand what the role of libraries can be. I always think of libraries as three parts. You have a building, a collection and expertise (meaning the people who can help the other stuff make sense). There’s a strong weight [at Exeter] on the Library as a building, but there may be opportunity for a better balance as we think about what libraries can do and what this library already does, much of which is hard to see because it is bits and bytes and digital. It’s a constant learning process for me, of how we can work with technology and with content in digital forms and maximize the library’s ability to help faculty and students as they pursue their intellectual questions and conversations (as well as assignments).
 
Could you share some goals for the school year ahead?
My goal is to be out of the library a lot. I want to understand the athletics program. I want to understand CAPS [Counseling and Psychological Services]. I want to understand the life of the classroom. My goal is to figure out how this library can continue with and increase its ability to partner with the rest of the institution, and to meet needs that maybe people haven’t even recognized yet. Because that’s what libraries do — we can provide things you didn’t know you needed.

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