Frisbees were flying as students and faculty celebrated this year’s Academy Life Day. Started in 1995 as part of a wider initiative to improve residential life at Exeter, the day set aside for dormwide activities has become a beloved fall-term tradition.
Smiles abound on Academy Life Day as students and faculty enjoy the campus quads or visit local apple orchards, trails and beaches.
Exeter students, administrators, faculty and Trustees gathered in Love Gym to celebrate the longtime educator and activist James R. W. “Wick” Sloane ’71; P’03, this year’s recipient of the John and Elizabeth Phillips Award. One of the Academy’s highest alumni honors, the Phillips Award is given annually to an Exonian who has contributed significantly to the welfare of community, country or humanity.
“Through your writing and your grassroots activism, you have helped address the challenges facing millions of veterans and low-income college students across the nation,” Sam Brown ’92, trustee and president of the Exeter Alumni Association, read from the award citation.
After a diverse career that included reporting gigs for newspapers and more than a decade of executive roles in the insurance industry, Sloane began working at Bunker Hill Community College in 2006. He started with a nighttime shift in the school’s tutoring center, and later became an adjunct faculty member, teaching late-night classes in the college’s nationally recognized Midnight Classes program. Eventually, Sloane worked as senior special programs coordinator in charge of helping students transfer to four-year colleges.
In all these roles, Sloane went out of his way to support his students, many of whom were juggling school with jobs, family responsibilities and other challenges. “When you discovered that a student hadn’t eaten that day, you bought bread and peanut butter and made them a sandwich,” Brown read from the award citation. “You expanded on those efforts by soliciting donations from local businesses and helping to open a mobile food market on campus.”
Sloane also became a regular contributor to the publication Inside Higher Ed, and wrote extensively about issues facing low-income students like the ones at Bunker Hill, including hunger and homelessness. In 2013, his open letter to then-President Barack Obama asked why the same students eligible for federal free and reduced lunch through high school lost those benefits once they began attending college. Sloane’s work spurred lawmakers to persuade the U.S. Government Accountability Office to conduct the first-ever study of food insecurity at U.S. colleges and universities in 2019, and led to new or proposed legislation addressing the issue at the local, state and federal levels.
Sloane began his remarks by referencing the words of W. Ernest Gillespie, who served as the Academy’s interim principal from 1963–64: “Return often, and show us your trophies and your scars.”
“Those words are my Exeter as much as non sibi,” Sloane continued. “[They] create for each of us the 50/50 expectation that all of us will return here with as many scars as trophies, and scars are often where the trophies come from.”
He shared the story of one of his most prominent “scars” — learning he had been “fired on false charges” from his position as chief financial officer at the University of Hawaii in 2003. By that time, Sloane had already developed a love and respect for community colleges and their students, having interacted with them through the University of Hawaii system. “These are thousands of men and women, not that different from any of us, except they never had a break,” Sloane said. “They never had a break equal even to one day at Exeter.”
At a hearing on higher education in Boston, Sloane met the president of Bunker Hill Community College, one of the largest and most diverse community colleges in Massachusetts. At his persistent urging, she agreed to give him a night shift in the college’s tutoring center.
“I kept showing up, until the chairman of the English department found me and offered me a section of College Writing 1 in D118, a windowless basement classroom at 8:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays,” Sloane recalled. “That first class changed me.”
Sloane spoke about his students, many of whom faced challenges far beyond those of a typical undergraduate. He and his colleague, Kathleen O’Neill, were managing the school’s emergency assistance fund when they learned many students were going hungry most days, as they couldn’t afford food.
“We weren’t trained as social workers, but that’s what we became because students were hungry,” he said. “We started with peanut butter, jelly, and bread from the supermarket across the street, three blocks from where Paul Revere landed to begin his midnight ride.”
Thanks to donations from local businesses and the Greater Boston Food Bank, Sloane and O’Neill began distributing food on campus, to the tune of more than 700,000 pounds of food since 2012, Sloane said. When they failed to get attention from the state government, they went to federal legislators like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, leading to nationwide program and legislative changes aimed at combating food insecurity.
“[Hunger] has been the injustice I’ve sought to solve,” Sloane told the current Exeter students seated in the gymnasium. “You’ll find your own. You will come across an issue that you simply can’t turn away from — so don’t. Instead, get to work.”
Sloane and Brown were joined onstage by Principal Bill Rawson ’71; ’65, ’70 (Hon.); P’08, a classmate of Sloane’s at Exeter. In addition to speaking in assembly, Sloane joined students in class discussions, visiting a session of the integrated studies course Social Innovation and the religion, ethics and philosophy course Ethics of the Marketplace. He also attended a luncheon with students held at the Class of 1945 Library.
Over nearly 40 years, Russell Weatherspoon ’01, ’03, ’08, ’11 (Hon.); P’92, P’95, P’97, P’01 and Jackie Weatherspoon P’92, P’95, P’97, P’01 left an enduring mark on Exeter’s campus and community. In honor of their lifetime of service to the Academy, Sam Brown ’92, president of the General Alumni Association, presented the Weatherspoons with the 2025 Founders’ Day Award in an Assembly Hall packed beyond capacity with excited students, faculty, alumni and Trustees.
“In the classroom, in the dorm, in the dining halls or along the paths, your warmth, wisdom and generosity have earned you the enduring respect and affection of your colleagues and the devotion and gratitude of generations of students,” Brown said while reading from the award citation for the Weatherspoons.
Established by the Trustees in 1976, the Founders’ Day Award is given annually in recognition of longtime service to the Academy. It was renamed in 2019 to honor Elizabeth Phillips’ role in forming the Academy alongside her husband, John Phillips. Several past winners of the award sat on the stage with Brown, Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 and Exeter’s current Trustees during the award presentation, including:
Russell and Jackie Weatherspoon arrived at Exeter in 1987 with their young children, all future Exonians: Ben ’92, Rachel ’95, Clarke ’97 and Rebekah ’01. In addition to teaching religion, English and drama, Russell Weatherspoon took on many important administrative roles during his time at the Academy, including dean of residential life, dean of multicultural affairs, director of Exeter Summer and — from 2020 to his retirement in 2024 — dean of students.
“With your fair-minded, steady presence — and a seeming ability to be everywhere on campus at once — you assured students that wherever they were, and whatever was going on in their lives, someone was looking out for them,” Brown said.
Jackie Weatherspoon expanded greatly on the role of faculty spouse and dorm parent for more than a decade in Cilley Hall. “From ensuring that Black hair care products were stocked at local drugstores to helping students shop for dresses and style their hair for prom, you were a source of steadfast advocacy and support for Black girls and women on campus,” Brown said.
She later took on official roles at the Academy, serving as associate dean of Exeter Summer and holding positions in Admissions, the Lamont Gallery, the Class of 1945 Library, among others. Off campus, she built an impressive career in public service and human rights advocacy that took her from the New Hampshire House of Representatives to the U.S. State Department and beyond. Jackie brought that experience to her role as longtime adviser to students in the Democratic “Dem” Club, encouraging them to engage in political life at the campus, local, state and national levels.
“This is a magical place,” Jackie Weatherspoon said while accepting the Founders’ Day Award. Arriving at the school as the mother of young children, she said she felt welcomed into the community (and honing her cooking skills) thanks to the other faculty wives who had come before her.
Being dorm parents in Cilley Hall “was a commitment that we had made not only to the school, but how we saw life,” Jackie Weatherspoon said. “We felt life was if you were a teenager, you needed adults to be with you.” Speaking of her career in public service and advocacy, she spoke of working “to make Exeter a better place, the town a better place, our state, and our world.” Many students have walked with her on that journey over the years, she said, including at least two “who someday will be president of the United States.”
“I want to thank you so very much for allowing two teenagers from Brooklyn who wanted to serve people to be a part of your journey,” she said.
After his wife received a standing ovation from the crowd — one of several during the assembly — Russell Weatherspoon took to the podium. “One of the great blessings of having been asked to have a variety of roles is that it multiplied for me over the years my understanding, appreciation and gratitude for that wide range of people who are doing so much, so much of the time, so much of it unseen,” he said.
Of two all-important decisions in life — work and marriage — he said he had been lucky in both. “You will spend most of your life in the work of love and with the hope that you’ll love the work that you do,” he advised the audience. “So you want to choose as carefully as you can. We are grateful because we got the chance to do a work life with you.”
Near the end of his remarks, Russell Weatherspoon recalled a moment last spring, not long before he retired after 37 years of service to the Academy. “I woke up to the fact that this is where we had spent the majority of our adult lives, and that we had spent them among people who had the capacity to make us better people,” he said. “Other people shape you. We are grateful for the opportunity to be shaped by this place and, specifically, by you.”
Walking into the Office of Multicultural Affairs on the ground floor of Jeremiah Smith Hall, my senses were immediately delighted by the smell of sweetgrass and delicious Three Sisters Soup and cornbread provided by the dining hall. Images of Maciah Stasis tattooing a woman’s face and of gorgeous works of white and purple quahog shell jewelry were projected on a TV screen.
The Indigenous Reconciliation Club (IRC) and OMA had invited Stasis, a Herring Pond Wampanoag wampum worker, tattooist, regalia maker, story-teller and singer-dancer to campus to give two workshops and celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day. She was seated at the head of the Harkness table and engaged in deep discussion. As co-head of the IRC, it filled me with joy to see faculty and students packed around the table to learn from Stasis.
She began by telling us a bit about herself. We learned that she is a citizen of the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe, and was born in the land of her ancestors, Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she graduated from Plymouth North High School. Since the age of 15, she has been educating others about her people, delivering keynote addresses at a number of museums and other Indigenous events throughout the U.S. and Canada. Interestingly, she had just returned from a traditional tattooing conference in Canada, where she learned from Inuit tattooists, whose tattooing customs have remained more intact than those of Northeastern Indigenous nations in the U.S.
She shared many details about her work as a wampum jeweler. The quahog clam used to make wampum is endemic to the waters around the Wamapanoag’s land and is believed to be a gift to the Wampanoag as it existed nowhere else. Wampum was greatly valued by Northeastern tribes, and the Wampanoag traded it with surrounding tribes such as the Haudenosaunee, who used it to create treaty belts, among other items. In addition to a form of currency, wampum was and is made into jewelry. Stasis said the work is laborious but worth it. Her pieces include rings, necklaces, bracelets and carvings of wildlife. But, she warned, the dust shed by quahog shells is toxic and has been known to kill ill-prepared artisans.
Stasis then spoke on quillwork, a rare and complicated form of art that uses the quills of porcupines. Quillwork predates beadwork and is used to ornament regalia in much the same way. It is painstaking: Make one mistake and you have to start over, even after multiple hours, or days, of work.
Last, she spoke about her story and process as an Indigenous poke tattooist. She said that tattooing is practiced around the world, and the most common and ancient form is stick-and-poke. This refers to using a sharp needle, or thorn, to insert pigment such as soot into the skin. The method was used across the continent, including in the Wampanoag Nation. Although the custom varied from nation to nation, tattoos generally marked events like childbirth, ages, deaths and accomplishments. But this practice has been suppressed and vilified throughout the history of our country; as a result, few Indigenous cultures continue to practice traditional tattooing.
I learned that Stasis, who has tattooed herself and others for a variety of reasons, is truly a trailblazer in revitalizing this important cultural custom. She says the process is extremely intimate and exhausting, and emphasizes the importance of the environment, the energy and the tattooist during the procedure.
By the end, all of us around the table were brimming with questions, which Stasis answered. She gave each of the attendees a small satchel that contained part of a quahog shell, cedar, deer sinew and sweetgrass, each of which provides protections and properties, she said. I left with a wealth of knowledge and a deep sense of gratitude. This was a truly transformative and mind-expanding event unlike any other I’ve attended in my time at Exeter, and I am extremely grateful for the knowledge Stasis shared, and the space she created in OMA that day.
— Daniel Connelly ’25 is a proctor in the Office of Multicultural Affairs and co-head of the Academy’s Indigenous Reconciliation Club.
This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
Thomas Ehrlich ’52 has served in the administrations of six U.S. presidents — including as the first president of the Legal Services Corporation and the first director of the International Development Cooperation Agency, reporting directly to President Jimmy Carter. He was also dean of Stanford Law School, provost of the University of Pennsylvania and president of Indiana University.
He has authored, co-authored or edited 15 non- fiction books, written two novels and is finishing a third, Jewels.
We spoke with Ehrlich, 91, about his memoir, Learn, Lead, Serve: A Civic Life, released in December.
You talk about mentorship throughout the book. Is there one mentor who had the largest impact on you?
My father. We were as close as father and son could be — we skied together, played together, read novels together. I can still remember reading The Once and Future King with him. He was always there, always supporting me and a model of what a father, a husband and a caring civic person should be. Other mentors have had a shaping influence on my life including Judge Learned Hand, for whom I was a law clerk, and Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, for whom I was a special assistant during the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
You tell a story about your grandmother giving you a biography of Louis Brandeis, an attorney and associate justice of the Supreme Court. Did that shape your decision to use your abilities for the public good?
Yes, I still have that blue-bound copy of that biography. Brandeis was a great public servant in the best sense. And service was an important part of Exeter for me as well. In my memoir, I call Exeter my ‘best education’, and that’s not hyperbole. Harvard and Harvard Law School were wonderful, but Exeter and the dedication of the teachers 24/7 to their students, of whom I was privileged to be one, was just amazing and transformative for me. Non sibi was at the core, and that really shaped me — it shaped my sense of who I am, how I want to relate to the world around me. I think of the times when I have had the good fortune to be involved in public service, and I really owe much of that to Exeter. This is what Exeter expected of us as students — to think not just about ourselves, alone — and that’s just the way you behaved. When you learn that and behave that way, or try to at least, as an adolescent, it’s built into your character as you grow up and grow older.
It seems like Exeter shaped you emotionally, as well as intellectually.
It did very much, yes. Intellectually, it certainly did in history and in English. We wrote a lot and I’m still writing now. I’m 91 years old, and here I am, writing away, working on my third novel. Exeter is where I learned to read and write, to write and enjoy.
For your Harvard thesis, you researched a survey of family farmers that was done by the Department of Agriculture. You say it was an early awakening for you to the importance of public policy shaped by public opinion. How does it frame the way you look at what’s happening in our country today?
I’m deeply disturbed by what’s happening now. The Trump administration’s assault on our democracy is terrifying. I taught for many years a course called “Democracy in Crisis” at Stanford, so I’m familiar with past crises. And of course, we did have a civil war. This is not a civil war, but I am devastated by seeing what’s happening in terms of an elected president seeking to destroy much of the social fabric of our country, as well as its leadership in the world. Since I oversaw the Agency for International Development, its destruction is a particular blow to me. Millions of people are dying because of that action.
Do you see a future way of managing our way out of this?
I have hope. I quote one of my professors, Sam Huntington at Harvard, who wrote a terrific book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. He ends by saying,“Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideal. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I have hope. I believe we will have a pendulum that swings back toward the middle, that those in Congress will say, “We’ve got to stand up and stop what’s happening.” But the carnage that’s happening
— America’s place in the world will never be the same.
In your many roles in six administrations, was there one in particular that has stayed with you?
Well, they all stay with me. But the one that shaped me most was the Legal Services Corporation, because when I became dean at Stanford Law School, I had no real idea that 40-plus million poor people had no access to justice. It concerned me, which is why I thought, “If I can have a chance to do something about that, I want to do it.” I spent three-plus years listening to poor people all over the country, hearing their stories of how a crisis would happen if they didn’t get a Social Security check or got evicted, and how important it was to have a lawyer, and what a difference that person could make by listening and devoting their lives to helping poor people. That also shaped my approach to others less fortunate and my character.”
You’ve become particularly focused on instilling young people with awareness around community service, public service and civic learning. Do you think that that’s our most hopeful way forward?
I do. I think it’s essential. That has been my passion since the mid-’80s when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, but it’s certainly increased in that the only significant organizations outside of the universities that I’ve helped to run are ones dedicated to preparing college students to be actively, responsibly engaged in public policy and politics. If we don’t do a better job of that, we’re going to suffer more. It’s important not just to serve in a community kitchen, but to ask: “What public policy changes are needed so that community kitchens are no longer necessary?”
— Daneet Steffens ’82 is a books-focused journalist. She has contributed to the Bulletin since 2013.
This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
If we could peek inside someone’s mind, what would we see? Jeffrey Augustine Songco gives us a glimpse. His immersive work Society of 23’s Conservatory, which recently concluded a two-month run at Lamont Gallery, offers a tangible stream of consciousness for visitors to ponder. It is a conservatory in the greenhouse sense, replete with living foliage, but the plants are only one element of a multisensory installment that explores Songco’s complicated relationship between his identity as an American of Filipino ethnicity and U.S. colonization of the Philippines for a half-century.
The Society of 23 comprises a fictional brotherhood of 23 mysterious gentlemen, all portrayed by the artist — a play on Songco’s days in a fraternity as an under-graduate at Carnegie Mellon University.
The installment was host to several PEA visiting classes and served as one of the workshops in the Academy’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming.
Songco says: “My artwork is a celebration of life. I work with a variety of media including large-scale installation, self-portrait photography, sculpture and video. My practice is rooted in a considered set of conceptual parameters that guide my thought and labor towards the final outcome of my autobiographical artwork. I share my reflections on how my mind and body are shaped by the identities and realities I have inherited and constructed myself. This dense layering of things reveals the forest of ideas I navigate and the conflicts I continue to resolve. Each of my artworks relate to one another in particular ways and evolve in their meaning as I continue to create the grand nonlinear narrative of my life.”
This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
For parents of children with autism, hope is everything, but it can be tough to come by. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has remained a chronic ailment since its conceptualization in the early 20th century. A definitive cause is still unknown, and few options exist to treat the one in every 36 children in the U.S. living with autism. The diagnosis can be heartbreaking.
But Dr. James Adams ’80 is working hard to give the autism community a reason for hope. As director of the Autism/Asperger’s Research Program at Arizona State University, Adams has spent the last 25 years pioneering research with a focus on the disorder’s biological causes and treatments. His determination was born of his own despair after his oldest daughter’s autism diagnosis in 1994.
“It was just devastating,” Adams says. “To be told that she had a lifelong, incurable condition. At age 2½, she had an IQ of 32. She had no spoken language and did not respond to her name. We were told that it was just a matter of time until we would have to place her in an institution. They knew nothing.” Adams, an accomplished materials engineer, had spent his career solving environmental problems: designing solar cells and fuel-efficient car engines. “Nothing you can do” was not good enough for him. He believed there must be a way to improve his daughter’s life.
Around 2000, Adams’ wife attended conferences that explored what were, at the time, more radical ideas like nutritional therapy for managing ASD symptoms, which include health, social and behavioral challenges, as well as significant gastrointestinal problems.
“I thought, we’ve known about vitamins for 50 years,” Adams says. “How could it be possible that kids with autism could be deficient in vitamins?” But once he read the research, he understood the potential. This became the framework for his first study, designed to gauge vitamin deficiencies in children with autism.
Five more studies followed, with great success. Adams then used the results to formulate a comprehensive multivi-tamin and mineral supplement that would improve the nutritional status of autistic children. In 2015, he founded the Autism Nutrition Research Center, a non-profit dedicated to pioneering research in dietary and nutritional support for ASD. The organization now distributes his supplement, called ANRC Essentials, around the world.
“It is not a cure,” Adams says. “But it helps about three-quarters of them in many ways, including improved language, cognition and social interaction.”
Through those early studies, Adams zeroed in on the gut microbiome-brain connection. “We’ve discovered now that more than 80 percent of kids with autism have serious bacterial and/or yeast infections in their gut that could last for years, even decades,” Adams says. “These infections produce toxins — such as paracresol, a bacterially derived metabolite — that affect not just gut symptoms but brain and body function by poisoning the key neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, involved in mood, learning and memory. It has been truly revolutionary. I won’t say it’s the cause of autism, but I will say it is a major contributing factor.”
What Dr. Adams cannot say just yet, but what the autism community is eager to find out: Could these bad gut bacteria, somehow introduced to a baby’s microbiome during birth, be one reason autism develops in a segment of the population? And could these toxins also be contributing factors for other ailments that develop later in life like Parkinson’s disease, or mood disorders like anxiety and depression?
“We know that when you administer these toxic metabolites to mice, it causes autistic symptoms,” Adams says. “But when you treat the mice with microbiotic transplants from a healthy mouse, it cures them.”
His team has been doing human trials of Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT). As of March, four clinical trials had been run, with the fifth and sixth under way.
MTT involves taking gut bacteria from super-healthy donors, purifying it, and giving it to children with autism in either pill or capsule form. Adams describes it as akin to taking a probiotic, except a probiotic typically has only a few species of gut bacteria; MTT provides more than 400 — all the species that would be present in a healthy gut, Adams says.
“We’ve seen 80 percent reductions in gastrointestinal problems — diarrhea, constipation, pain, reflux,” Adams says, “and major improvements in core autism symptoms such as language, social interactions and behavior.”
Parents report that their children are happier, with a reduction in the anxiety, irritability and depression that often come with autism. A federal grant allowed Adams to repeat the study with adults who have had gastrointestinal and autism symptoms for 20, 30, 40 years. Their improvements were similar, Adams says.
In 2023, Adams co-founded Gut-Brain Axis Therapeutics Inc. to achieve Federal Drug Administration approval of MTT. The company is funded by more than 80 families — parents and grandparents of autistic children and adults who believe progress is possible. They need to raise $20 million for one final study.
In January, Adams’ gut-toxin research led to the release of a urine test for diagnosing autism, produced by Autism Diagnostics LLC, a commercial company he founded. Viable for children as young as 2, it measures the amount of toxic metabolites present in a sample. The test is awaiting F.D.A. approval in the U.S. but is available through a firm based in the U.K.
Adams is still pushing for progress, but he has found peace at home with his wife and three children.
“What matters really for people is not how successful we are financially or intellectually,” he says. “But are you happy with your life? Do you enjoy the work you do? My daughter is able to do meaningful work. She is a very loving person. What matters most to me is her health and happiness.”
This article was originally published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
What started as “betcha can’t” on a team bus trip to a squash match turned into a yearlong passion project for Byran Huang ’25. After accepting a teammate’s challenge to build a computer from scratch, he says he spent “a couple thousand” hours meticulously planning, building and testing nearly every element of his custom open-source laptop. Huang calls it anyon_e.
“I thought about all the projects I’d done in the past — building circuit boards, power systems and data systems,” he says. “This felt like a capstone to all that, a magnum opus.”
Huang parlayed his pursuit into a sanctioned senior project, receiving support from the Academy. He worked extensively in the Design Lab in the Phelps Science Center and spread his materials in the back of Steyer Distinguished Professor Brad Robinson’s physics classroom. “I received amazing funding,” Huang adds. “I blew my budget two and a half times over and nobody batted an eye. The school was constantly there to support me.”
It was important to Huang not only that his laptop be fully functional, but also that his process was easy for others to replicate. “This is a time when technology is innovating so fast, but people don’t get access to how to create things openly,” he says. “I wanted to go on this journey to publish everything I had made for the world to share.”
Huang produced a YouTube video, “How I Made a Laptop From Scratch – anyon_e,” detailing every step of his building process. Among the more than 1 million views was a Neuralink engineering lead who recruited Huang to intern with the Robot Surgery Electrical Engineering team this summer.
Like any good scientist, Huang is taking what he learned from this experience and hoping to refine the process. “I’m really looking forward to building a second version of this laptop that’s affordable,” he says. “Something you can build in your house from scratch.”
Huang is quick to credit the Academy as an inspiration, saying, “Exeter has always been this place that I’ve felt has magical powers to push you to discover more you didn’t know you were capable of doing.”
For the third consecutive year, an Exonian competed on the global debate stage. Andrew Gould ’26 headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in late March for the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championship.
Co-head of the Academy’s Daniel Webster Debate Society, Gould qualified for the international tournament through his stellar performance at various debate events throughout the school year, including a first-place duo team finish alongside Jinmin Lee ’26 at St. Paul’s School, where they debated a resolution stating that the United States should increase its military presence abroad. “We ran a counterplan to throw off our opponents,” Gould says. “As the opposition, we argued that the U.S. should increase its military presence to uphold global prestige, especially in the face of revisionist states like Russia or China. We also argued that if countries currently reliant on U.S. military and nuclear protection were to be abandoned by the U.S., they would develop their own defenses, and even potentially their own nuclear arsenal. Those aren’t necessarily our personal views, but researching and building that counterplan was incredibly eye-opening. It gave me a deeper appreciation for the delicate balancing act that is foreign policy.”
To prepare for world competition, Gould received coaching and encouragement from teammate Emma Sordi ’25, who competed at the event last year and placed second in the impromptu speaking event, as well as former team-mate Colin Jung ’24, who finished fourth in the debate category in 2023. In Kuala Lumpur, Gould reached the finals in three of the four categories in which he competed: parliamentary debate, impromptu speaking, interpretive reading and after-dinner speaking. He finished in sixth place overall among 120 competitors and won further distinction as the first-place male speaker and debater.
On March 2, Sofia Gonzalez-Gulick ’26 joined the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in a performance of Symphony No. 6, a notoriously difficult work by composer Gustav Mahler. As a member of the orchestra’s percussion section, Gonzalez-Gulick played a distinctive part in the symphony, which includes a motif of cow and church bell sounds in the distance. Standing on a Symphony Hall balcony, Gonzalez-Gulick played cowbells and chimes.
“I got to work with a monitor so I could watch” conductor Benjamin Zander, she says. “And I had the conductor’s assistant backstage reading the score and helping me to cut off at the right time. I had never done anything like it before.”
Now in its 12th season, the BPYO is a tuition-free, highly selective orchestra that includes high school and college students ages 12–21. “The goal of the orchestra is ‘shaping future leaders through music,’” Gonzalez-Gulick says. “I feel lucky to be surrounded by students in college who act as mentors and are pursuing what I want to pursue.”
Ethan Ding ’25, Tristan Price ’26 and Martin Yau ’26 are also members of the youth orchestra, which will perform works by Debussy, Walton and Rachmaninoff in another live concert at Symphony Hall in May. In June, the orchestra will tour Mexico, performing in León, Veracruz, Puebla and Mexico City.
Exeter’s Robotics Club’s team VERTEX started strong at the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Tech Challenge New Hampshire Championship. The team posted an undefeated record in the qualification rounds during the February event in Concord. But a loss in the first elimination match put VERTEX under pressure to survive among 28 other teams in contention.
“I could see the looks of stress on their faces,” says VERTEX Outreach team member Jade Yoo ’27. “But they all worked very well under pressure” to fix the robot for the next round of competition.
Thanks to their adjustments — and a skillful alliance with Team Tesseract of Nashua, New Hampshire — VERTEX rebounded. The team won its next three matches and captured victory in the finals as captain of the winning alliance, along with a spot at the 2025 FIRST Championship, considered the world championship, in Houston in April.
Members of the other Exonian teams, EDGE, SURFACE and APEX, cheered on VERTEX at the state event, along with some Robotics Club alumni.
Team VERTEX, Exeter’s top Robotics Club team, placed first in the FIRST Tech Challenge New Hampshire Championship.
“How we transfer our knowledge from year to year is central to our success and is a key reason why being on the team is so fulfilling,” Teddy Duncker ’25, captain of VERTEX, told The Exonian. “It always feels like you are learning something from others.”
Beyond the programming, building and deploying of the robot, VERTEX team members like Yoo work to spread awareness of robotics and STEM by building a broad community including middle school students and government officials. At the state competition, the Outreach team took on the additional task of scouting the other teams and choosing an alliance partner — an effort Yoo says paid off big this year.
VERTEX also took home the Inspire Award, the highest team honor given at the event. The award combines robot performance with community service and work to spread awareness, a key part of the mission of the FTC organization.
After a win in New Hampshire, Yoo and her VERTEX teammates are preparing for the next level of competition. “We see what went wrong and change it to make the robot better,” Yoo says. “We can’t afford many mistakes in Worlds.”
Last summer, Davido Zhang ’25 spent six weeks at the Research Science Institute, an intensive program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 100 of the world’s most accomplished high school science, math and engineering students. He began researching optimal transport, the mathematical concept that involves determining how to most efficiently move things from one place to another. As Zhang explains it, his project considered not only the transport of material resources — how companies like Amazon might optimize their shipping routes — but also data, in situations like training artificial intelligence models.
Zhang continued his research during the school year at Exeter, under the direction of his mentor in the MIT program. The resulting project, “Lipschitz Optimal Transport Maps,” earned him a $2,000 prize as one of 300 finalists — out of nearly 2,000 entrants — in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search. Exonians have made impressive showings recently in that prestigious national competition: Achyuta Rajaram ’24 captured the $250,000 first prize last year, and Alan Bu ’24 and Riya Tyagi ’24 made the top 40.
“Perhaps one day in real life you’ll see an algorithm related to this math,” Zhang says of his research into optimal transport. “The idea is that the real solution is really complicated, and you’ve got to spend days with a computer just to find [it]. But there are ways to use significantly less time to find a solution that’s good enough, and that’s what I was working on.”
By the time Oron Wang ’27 showed up to compete for the United States in the 16th Romanian Master of Mathematics, he had been preparing for nearly a year. The lengthy selection process for the global contest began with a series of invitational competitions and continued with the Mathematical Olympiad Program, an intensive summer training camp in Pittsburgh. “The preparation process is kind of constant,” Wang says. “You’re always just slowly improving.”
Finally, Wang and five compatriots headed to Bucharest in February, where they tackled two complex problem sets (six total problems) demonstrating sophisticated mathematical reasoning and proof techniques. After two intense days, the U.S. team captured third place among 16 teams. Wang won a silver medal, earning an individual ranking of 19 out of some 85 competitors
Oron Wang ’27 (far right) and the U.S. team at the 16th Romanian Master of Mathematics event in Bucharest.
He also met students from 19 other countries and spent time with his teammates from across the United States.
“The most fun part was getting to see the city,” Wang says. “We only had about a day of free time. But the six of us walked around Bucharest and found this cool museum, the Museum of Communism, which had all the details about life under communist rule in Romania. We all enjoyed it.”
Following an early interest in child welfare, Amy Lin ’25 began researching the origins of America’s foster care system last year as part of Exeter’s U.S. history course sequence. She focused her “333” — the capstone term paper assigned in the spring term History 430 course — on the orphan train movement, a welfare program that transported children from Eastern cities to rural Midwest foster homes from the mid-19th century through the 1920s.
“I’ve always been interested in things related to children, and in writing and literature, and I carried that into the U.S. history requirement,” Lin says. “I learned a lot about structure, how to write a history paper, as well as how to do research and how to utilize the library.”
Lin worked over the summer and the school year to expand her research into a longer project, mining the wealth of electronic resources available through the Class of 1945 Library. The result was “The Origins of the Foster Care System: The Evolution of the Child Welfare System, 1850–1950,” a work that appears in the spring 2025 issue of The Concord Review, the nation’s leading publication for high school students doing research in history and social sciences.
— Adam Loyd and Sarah Pruitt ’95 are staff writers for The Exeter Bulletin.
This article was originally published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.
