Commencement

VOLUME CXLV COMMENCEMENT EDITION

FRIDAY, M AY 20, 2016

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

COMMENCEMENT CXCV

Photo by Shirley Duquene ’17

THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

Schedule Events of

FRIDAY, MAY 20 - SUNDAY, MAY 22

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

1 p.m.-9 p.m.

Check-In Alumni House

8:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m.

Check-In Alumni House

5 p.m.

Commencement Rehearsal Main Quadrangle (Johnson Chapel in case of rain)

9 a.m.

Phi Beta Kappa Meeting Stirn Auditorium

1 p.m.

Sigma Xi Meeting Lewis-Sebring Dining Commons 2 p.m.-3 p.m.

Conversations with Honored Guests See College Website

10 a.m.

Baccalaureate Service Johnson Chapel

3:15 p.m.-4:15 p.m.

Conversations with Honored Guests See College Website

11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Conversations with Honored Guests See College Website

4:30 p.m.-6:00 p.m.

President’s Reception Garden of the President’s House

12:30 p.m.-2 p.m.

Luncheon Valentine Quadrangle

9:15 p.m.

Choral Society Concert Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Center

SUNDAY 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

Reception Center Open Alumni House 10 a.m.

The 195th Commencement Main Quadrangle (LeFrak Gym in case of rain) Post-Commencement Luncheon Valentine Quadrangle

STAFF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Elaine Jeon, Lauren Tuiskula HEAD PUBLISHERS Emily Ratte, Tia Robinson EDITORS Gabby Bishop, Megan Do, Paola Garcia-Prieto, Kiana Herold, Drew Kiley, Adele Loomis, Sophie Murgia, Monica Nimmagadda, Julia Turner, Yrenly Yuan, JinJin Xu CONTRIBUTORS Jason Darell, Gabby Edzie, Diane Lee, Alida Mitau, Julia Pretsfelder, Sarah Whelan PHOTOGRAPHER Shirley Duquene

2 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

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Table of Contents SENIOR PROFILES

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Michael Harmon A Jazz Musician Singing Amherst’s Praises Amira Lundy-Harris Feminist Paves the Way for Trans Community John He Exploring New Spaces, But Staying Grounded Mercedes MacAlpine Campus Activist Inspires Through Enthusiasm Ben Walker Climate Advocate Ready to Walk the World Juan Gabriel Delgado Montes Navigating Uncertainty with Serenity and Poise Khalil Flemming A Comedian Connecting to Every Audience Rachael Abernethy A Caring Listener Finds Joy in Connections Tomi Williams AAS President Leaves Long-Lasting Legacy Becky Danning A Math Whiz Studying Human Connection Annika Nygren Mentor Fosters Community Across Boundaries Chris Gow Leading in Faith, On and Off the Football Field Raizel DeWitt Devoted Volunteer Shapes Her Own Narrative Miu Suzuki Dancer Discovers Passion for Diversity and Policy Nico Pascual-Leone A Soccer Standout Turns to His Next Goal

OTHER CONTENT PAGE

PAGE

PAGE

8

28

The Year in News

Fellowships and Scholarships

Honorary Degrees

The Year in Sports

4

6

PAGE

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 3

The Year in News AUGUST David Little replaced Elizabeth Barker as director of the Mead Art Museum on Aug. 31. Little, an expert in contemporary art, previously held jobs at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Center for Humanistic Inquiry opened on the second floor of Frost Library. The 5,000-square-foot center includes a seminar room and research space for faculty and fellows. Professor Martha Umphrey, the center’s director, said the center was intended to be a space for humanistic thinking “in any discipline, including the social sciences and sciences.”

←

2016 marked the last year of the social dormitories, which will be demolished May 23.

Photo courtesy of Kyra Gardner ’18

←

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor visited Amherst on Sept.

8, sharing advice with students based on her own personal and professional challenges.

SEPTEMBER Johnson Chapel was filled to the brim on Sept. 8 when Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor visited campus, speaking to a crowd of enthusiastic students. Although the justice could not answer questions about specific cases facing the court, she did give advice to students on navigating personal and professional challenges.

Keefe Health Center underwent a rocky transition as it went through building renovations and hired an almost entirely new staff. Although the change eventually resulted in more staff and increased operating hours, a report by The Student found that some patients experienced lapses in service during the transition.

OCTOBER Amherst was one of about 80 colleges that announced plans to use an alternative college application program, the Coalition Application. The Coalition Application is designed to make the process easier for admissions officers and for applicants, particularly applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Amherst will begin using the application in July 2016.

Mariana Cruz abruptly resigned from her position as interim chief diversity officer and director of the Multicultural Resource Center. Cruz did not respond to requests for comment on her resignation, but President Biddy Martin said that Cruz left the college for “personal reasons.” Adrianna Turner ’14 became the center’s interim director.

NOVEMBER The college finalized design plans for its new science center, which is set to open in fall 2018. Construction on the science center will begin after commencement.

Hundreds of students gathered in Frost Library for a four-day sit-in to protest racial discrimination. Student organizers had advertised the event as an hour-long sit-in on Nov. 12 to

Photo courtesy of Amherst Olivia Tarantino College‘15

demonstrate solidarity with protesters at Yale, the University of Missouri and other institutions. But instead, the event lasted many hours as students spontaneously began to speak to the crowd about their experiences with racism and other forms of discrimination. On Thursday evening, a group of students named the protest “Amherst Uprising” and presented President Biddy Martin with a list of demands. The protest attracted significant media attention, and some of the demands prompted a fierce debate among alumni on social media.

The demands later underwent significant revision as students from Amherst Uprising split into working groups to discuss their long-term goals.

DECEMBER Amherst received a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to help faculty more effectively teach a variety of students from diverse backgrounds and differing levels of college preparation. The money will be used to provide workshops for faculty on teaching methods, develop new ways of teaching in introductory courses and provide skill development for students in public speaking, debate and design thinking.

JANUARY The board of trustees voted to remove Lord Jeffery Amherst as Amherst College’s unofficial mascot. Lord Jeffery Amherst, who led British forces in North America during the French and Indian War, was controversial as a mascot because he advocated distributing smallpox-infected blankets to kill Native Americans.

The trustees’ vote followed votes by both students and faculty in favor of removing the mascot. A newly formed mascot committee hopes to have a replacement mascot by homecoming 2017.

FEBRUARY College archivist Mariah Leavitt discovered the only known recording of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “The Summer of Discontent.” The speech was given at the New School in New York City on Feb. 6, 1964.

Leavitt found the recording in a box of materials donated by the college’s WAMH radio station.

Five social organizations called “Branches” began a semester-long trial period. Branches are large clubs that hold weekly meetings and put on social events both for their members and for the entire campus.

The idea was conceived by the Social Project Work Group as a response to reports of loneliness on campus and dissatisfaction with Amherst’s social life. Students who wanted to participate in Branches ranked their top choices and then were sorted into Branches by an algorithm.

CONGRATULATIONS INDUCTEES

ΦΒΚ

The following students of the class of 2016 have been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa for their show of academic excellence, based on their cumulative grade point average. Asterisks indicate nomination at the end of junior year.

Johnathan Appel Tess Banta Lindsey Bechen Matthew Bonomo Michael Borkowski * Shiyan Chen Daria Chernysheva Jiwoon Choi Robert Croll Jovan Damjanovic Rebecca Danning * Russell Einbinder

4 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Asa Goodwillie * Michael Harmon Cole Hawkins John He Edward Kleiner Avery Klemmer Rebecca Konijnenberg Wonjae Lee Noah Lerner Judd Liebman James Liu Gabrielle Mayer

Alexandra Mazzotta Meghan McDonough David Nam Robert Neel Omar Pineda Jr. Jason Premo Cheyenne Pritchard Christine Rehr Conner Reilly Samuel Rosenblum Julia Rothacker Steven Ryu

Demetrius Shahmehri Thomas Sommers Jason Stein Olivia Truax Alexander Vega * Benjamin Walker Ningyue Wang Tiffany Wong Xiao Xiao Jenny Xu

→

Hundreds of students packed Frost Library during Amherst Uprising, a protest cumulating in students’ creation of subcommittees to tackle discrimination on campus and improve Amherst’s support for its entire diverse student body.

←

After Amherst Uprising, students at college sporting events demonstrated for the removal of Lord Jeffery Amherst as mascot.

Photo courtesy of Kaelan McCone’19

The Presidential Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion held its first meeting on Feb. 5. President Biddy Martin created the task force, which is comprised of professors, students and staff members. The group will work on diversity initiatives that emerged from the strategic plan and student protests in the fall.

MARCH Jesse Beal became the new director of the Women’s and Gender Center. Beal previously worked as the director for the office of diversity services at Suffolk University.

Amherst hosted its first annual LitFest, a series of events celebrating the college’s rich literary history and partnerships with a variety of literary organizations. Among those who spoke at the festival were writers Michael Chabon, Lauren Groff ’00 and Angela

Flournoy, as well as New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

The Office of Communications unveiled a redesigned version of Amherst’s website on March 16. The website features a simplified user interface as was designed by the website design and development firm Fastspot.

APRIL The Office of Admission accepted 13.7 percent of applicants to the class of 2020. The college received 8,397 applications this year, making for a slightly smaller pool than last year’s record-breaking 8,566.

The Curriculum Committee presented its preliminary recommendations for updating the college’s curriculum.

The recommendations included adding more courses for non-majors in quantitative fields, strengthening advising, changing the requirements for Latin honors and creating minors.

Photo courtesy of Sophia Salazar ‘18

The committee plans to finish a report on its proposals by the end of 2016.

Karen Blake ’17 was elected Association of Amherst Students president on April 7. Blake, who served as a senator for nearly three years, campaigned on a platform to build a more proactive senate and help build community on campus. Chico Kosber ’17 was elected vice president.

R&B singer Kehlani and rock band X Ambassadors played at spring concert on April 22. X Ambassadors are known for the popular song “Renegades,” which peaked at No. 17 on the Billboard Top 100. Kehlani’s mixtape “You Should Be Here” debuted at No. 5 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums list.

The faculty approved a 13-week calendar for the spring 2017 semester, shortening the spring semester from its current 14-week schedule. The new calendar

will replace a week of classes with a weeklong “reading and reflection period.” The change will not affect the scheduling of next year’s commencement.

MAY The faculty voted on May 3 to approve the Statement on Academic and Expressive Freedom, which clarifies Amherst’s position on freedom of expression. Some students, including the AAS president and vice president, raised concerns about vagueness in the language of the statement and complained that students were not given time to provide adequate input.

— Sophie Murgula ’17 Dan Ahn ’17, Ryan Cenek ’18, Kiana Herold ’17, Diane Lee ’19, Eli Mansbach ’18, Phillip Yan ’18 and Jingwen Zhang ’18 contributed reporting.

Crimes (and Criminals) of the Year Sept. 28, 2015 1:13 p.m., Marsh House Officers responded to a report of someone writing graffiti on the west side of the building. The person was identified as a student who was using chalk. The matter was referred to Student Affairs.

Oct. 25, 2015 2:02 a.m., Pond Dormitory An officer passing through the basement of Pond found two people in a dark common room. After speaking with each of them, they were sent on their way.

Oct. 7, 2015 1:30 p.m., Keefe Campus Center A student reported the theft of a Leatherman Multi-Tool.

Oct. 26, 2015 1:04 p.m., South Pleasant St. A South Pleasant St. resident reported the theft of a Halloween decoration valued at $10.

Oct. 17, 2015 9:16 a.m., Hitchcock House An officer investigated the theft of goods from a vending machine.

Oct. 18, 2015 12:28 a.m., Social Quad A resident reported that a number of handles in the second-floor men’s bathroom were covered with Vaseline. Facilities was notified.

Oct. 18, 2015 3:45 p.m., Marsh House An officer responded to a report from a concerned caller about a knife stuck into a table in the first-floor common room. It was removed.

Oct. 22, 2015 12:41 p.m., Pond Dormitory An officer and fire department responded to an alarm and found it was activated by use of a fog machine. The fog machine was confiscated.

Nov. 6, 2015 11:07 a.m., Boltwood Avenue Officers and the town police responded to a report of a man passed out on a bus at the bus stop. The man was evaluated and did not require medical care. He was removed from the bus and subsequently arrested on a warrant.

Nov. 10, 2015 3:42 p.m., Alumni Gym A student reported the theft of a Raymond Weil gold watch and a silver David Yuman bracelet from an unattended a bag at the Fitness Center. The value of the items is $4,000.

Nov. 14, 2015 5:44 p.m., Off-Campus Locations A student reported a “road rage” incident off campus. An officer followed up on her report.

Nov. 16, 2015

1:21 p.m., Barrett Hill Drive An officer encountered a student with a toy handgun. It was confiscated.

Nov. 29, 2015 10:30 a.m., Campus Grounds An employee reported the theft of a black metal silhouette stature of Robert Frost stolen from the Evergreens property.

Dec. 5, 2015 1:03 a.m., Seelye Parking Lot An officer discovered a vehicle wrapped in plastic wrap. The owner was notified.

Dec. 6, 2014 10:23 a.m., Hitchcock Dormitory An officer passing though Hitchcock noticed a large hole in the wall on the first floor. A shattered glass beer bottle was inside the wall.

Dec. 18, 2015 11:25 a.m., Alumni Gym A student reported the theft of a pair of pants, which contained a set of keys, from the men’s locker room.

Dec. 23, 2015 8:23 p.m., Hitchcock Parking Lot An officer responded to a report of a live rabbit found inside a duffel bag in a dumpster. A home was found for the rabbit.

Jan. 9, 2016 10:01 p.m., Social Quad Officers responded to a report of two naked males running around the social

dorm quad. They were gone when officers arrived.

Feb. 12, 2016 11:35 p.m., Appleton Dormitory While at a room in Appleton, an officer confiscated a beer funnel.

Feb. 20, 2016 9:25 p.m., Service Building Lots An officer observed two women smash a glass bottle outside the Powerhouse where an event was in progress. They were identified as five-college students and were directed to clean up the glass, which they did.

Feb. 24. 2016 10:55 p.m., Orr Rink An officer investigated damage to a gate near Orr Rink. The responsible person was identified on video. Restitution will be pursued.

Feb. 27. 2016 7:51 a.m., Valentine Dining Hall An officer investigated the theft of a newspaper rack valued at $800. As a result of the investigation, a student was identified as being responsible. The matter was referred to Student Affairs.

Feb. 29, 2016 4:24 p.m., Field House An employee reported the theft of Lacrosse equipment valued at $3,000. As a result of an investigation, a 15-yearold youth from Hadley will be sum-

moned to court.

March 30, 2016 10:28 a.m., Keefe Campus Center An officer investigated a report of a possible counterfeit bill being passed.

It was determined the bill was authentic.

April 2, 2016 1:33 a.m., Stearns Dormitory A caller reported three males entered the building with a stop sign and left it on the first floor. It was recovered.

April 3, 2016 3:20 a.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory An officer investigated an incident where a burned shirt was found in a toilet in the second-floor restroom.

April 16, 2016 2:11 a.m., Plimpton House Officers and the fire department responded to an alarm and found it was activated by steam from a shower.

April 24, 2016 3:56 a.m., Charles Pratt Dormitory A caller reported that someone pulled posters and name tags off most room doors on the second floor.

May 1, 2016 1:55 p.m., Charles Pratt Dormitory An officer investigated a case where a substance was smeared over the walls in the basement.

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 5

Fulbright, Watson & Schwarzman Scholars Schwarzman SERVET BAYIMLI A law, jurisprudence and social thought major, Servet Bayimli intends to devote his career to strengthening child welfare practices around the world.

As a Schwarzman Scholar, Bayimli hopes to further his work on child welfare by gaining a greater understanding of the practices of child welfare, juvenile justice and children in foster care in China.

“The United States has consistently finalized more adoptions with China than with other foreign countries,” Bayimli said in an interview, “So any aspiring child advocate must build a strong understanding of the social and cultural values that underlie familial structures in that society.”

Last year, Bayimli addressed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in Leiden, the Netherlands. He was invited to speak along with an attorney he worked with at the Children’s Law Center in New York.

“We particularly talked about the multidisciplinary nature of child advocacy,” he said, “When you’re an attorney for a child, you also have to be that child’s psychologist, you have to be their doctor, you have to assess different kinds of abuse.”

In the future, Bayimli plans to pursue degrees in public policy and law, and later to work at Children’s Rights Inc., an organization that defends children in foster care or who have been victims of abuse or neglect in the United States. In the long term, he hopes to serve on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Watsons ALEKSANDRA (SASHA) BURSHTEYN Sasha Burshteyn described herself in her application as “a child of New York ambition and Soviet sensibility … raised on family myth and the immigrant desire to create.” Born in St. Petersburg and moving with her mother to New York at the age of five, Burshteyn was torn between the stories she heard during her summers spent with her maternal family in Ukraine and the historical narrative of the fall of USSR she was taught at school.

Her Watson project, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: Living Memories and Present Experiences of States in Transition,” will take her to the Czech Republic to learn about its transition from ‘Czechoslovakia’ and commu-

BENJAMIN WALKER A leader of the fossil fuel divestment campaign on campus, Philadelphia native Benjamin Walker received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for his project “No Place Like Home: Stories of Climate Migration.”

Walker plans to travel to Kiribati, Fiji, India, South Africa and Bolivia to immerse himself in local communities displaced by the effects of climate change. Walker wrote in his application that he hopes to learn about the “lived reality of climate change with those who know it intimately.” “[I realized] climate change wasn’t just an ‘environmental problem,’ Walker wrote of Hurricane Sandy’s effect on Long Island, “in devastating

nism, to South Africa as it abolished apartheid, to North Ireland as it grapples with compromise and reconstruction and Mongolia as it moves towards an urbanization at odds with its nomadic way of life. Intrigued by the power of human stories to bring together moments of historic rupture, Burshteyn wrote that she hopes to learn about “the memories and experiences of people who lived, or are living through fracture and restructurings of their nations and realities.”

To Burshteyn, the path she plans to take in the future “is as of yet unclear.” She aims to return from her Watson year with a more profound understanding of her potential pursuits in journalism, fiction, or poetry writing, or academia — or, in her words, “like Anne Carson or Margaret Atwood, an uncompromising mixture of the above.”

and insidious ways, it transformed the lives of families, workers and grandfathers — my neighbours, who shared environmentalism’s care for “home.”

By forming meaningful relationships with families, farmers, activists and slum-dwellers, he seeks to expand and assess what the term “climate migration” means today.

During the year, Walker also aims to produce a podcast exploring how climate migrants envision and understand the idea of “home.” In the future, Walker wants to “play a part in ensuring protections for those most affected by climate change.” By marrying his academic interest in political theory and immigration with his personal investment in climate change, Walker wants to follow his calling in “ensuring that all people have a right to home.”

Fulbrights JOHNATHAN APPEL Political science major Johnathan Appel will be continuing his five years of teaching experience this 2016-2017 academic year through the English Teaching Assistantship in Taiwan.

Appel’s teaching experience began in the summer of 2011 when he worked as a summer math and English teacher at the East Harlem School in his home of New York City.

From there, Appel went on to pursue teaching domestically and overseas, working everywhere from his home state of New York to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

6 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

“Education is the great equalizer by allowing students, no matter what their background, to be educated enough to become a part of the change happening around us,” Appel wrote in his application.

He is passionate about teaching students the culture and rich history of their own home or of other countries around the world. More than simply teaching his students, he hopes to gain knowledge and insight on culture as well as local and global events from his students, peers and colleagues.

Beyond his time in Taiwan, Appel is interested in pursuing a degree in eiher theater or public policy.

CLAIRE CASTELLANO Biology major and Queens, New York native Claire Castellano will pursue her interest and passion for public health and education by way of an English Teaching Assistantship in Malaysia for the 2016-2017 school year.

“Teaching both allows and embodies a unique mutual exchange,” Castellano wrote in her application. Her extensive experience both in mentorship and research capacities give her the tools to make an impact in Malaysia. “Growing up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Queens” has shown Castellano the positive impact of education and teachers that truly care about their students.

She plans to combine her love of education and public health by volun-

teering at afterschool programs and health clinics in order to engage with the Malaysian community.

Focusing on the “international, bound-less quality” of language in her application, Castellano wrote, “I hope to use the collective quality of one language to understand others’ cultures and ways of living and, in exchange, to share my own values and lifestyle.”

“Though English may be the common language to connect us, it will act as the means to express ourselves: to convey ideas, emotions and ultimately, to better voice our differences.”

Looking past her time abroad, Castellano plans to use the cultural competency skills she develops in Malaysia to help her understand what type of teaching or work with public health she wants to continue.

JENNIFER CULLEN Mathematics and German double major Jennifer Cullen has been awarded an English Teaching Assistantship to use both of her majors teaching youth in Germany.

Jennifer will return to Germany after studying abroad there the spring semester of her junior year. In her application, Cullen describes her time abroad fondly, her anticipation to return palpable.

Her various leadership positions — including mentorship positions with Reader to Reader, the Amherst German department and her directing of the a capella group DQ — inspired her to take on

EUGENE LEE English major and Pasadena, California native Eugene Lee has been offered an English Teaching Assistantship in South Korea.

Coming from a Korean background and speaking, what he describes as “half Korean, half English” at home with his family, Lee is intrigued by the idiosyncrasies of both languages and the separation in cultures that come along with them.

A first generation US citizen, Lee describes in his application as being “thrust in the position of a sort of ‘cultural ambassador.’” Lee hopes to teach his Korean family about American culture, and to open

the eyes of his friends and classmates to his Korean heritage.

Intending to learn more about Korean poetry and drama during his time in South Korea, Lee hopes to become involved in school theater productions and poetry clubs.

Beyond his passion for language, Lee speaks excitedly about bringing his photography and musical skills overseas, as well as his “love of Shakespeare.” He plans to start a photography project while abroad that features local stories.

After his Fulbright year, Lee plans to continue improving his language skills before pursuing a decorate in English literature with a focus on medieval and Renaissance Studies. His ultimate goal is to teach at the college level.

CAROLINE ROSE Black studies and classics major Caroline Rose has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Indonesia for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Rose’s passion for education, especially for creating opportunities for marginalized students began in the course Race and Education at Amherst in the spring of her sophomore year. “This class opened my eyes to many different issues and topics within the U.S. education system, especially the lack of quality teachers and educators in poor and urban communities,” Rose wrote in her application.

THOMAS SOMMERS Tom Sommers plans to use his Fulbright research grant to work in a neuroscience laboratory in Trondheim, Norway.

His project, “Using Digital Holography and Electrophysiology to Study Functional Connectivity of the Habenula,” aims to use digital holography to stimulate various zebrafish brain areas and simultaneously record the electrical activity from a not-well-studied part of the brain — the habenula.

“Little is currently known about the habenula’s function and role in human neural processing, despite being implicated … in various disorders in

the teaching position, a prospect she had never considered until her time abroad. Cullen describes meeting new people overseas and her German professors and peers assuming that her majors would lead her straight to a teaching position, an idea she had never considered but came to embrace.

“I am excited about the prospect of being able to continue my relationship with the language and culture firsthand as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Germany,” Cullen wrote, “while also attempting to infect others with the same puzzle-loving relationship to English grammar that I have with German.”

After completing her Fulbright, Cullen plans to pursue a master’s degree in either mathematics, German, education or business.

Her compassion and care shine through in her writing, as she speaks fondly about her work at Passages Adventure Camp where she worked with youth of all ages and served as a teaching fellow at Breakthrough Collaborative this past summer. The cross country captain intends to use her love of athletics to get involved in sports clubs, teams, or after-school athletics programs as well as “[exploring] religious customs by attending events when possible.”

Upon her return Rose will attend graduate school, where she plans to become certified to teach in public schools. She is predominantly interested in finding a program that prepares teachers to work with students from low-income, urban backgrounds. Beyond teaching, she hopes to “later possibly become and administrator for programs in urban schools.”

humans, including depression, sleep disorders, psychosis and addiction,” Sommers wrote in his application, “Because it is evolutionarily conserved across species, understanding the habenula’s function in zebrafish has implications in understanding how the habenula functions in humans.”

Falling in love with neuroscience after taking “Behavioral Neuroscience” as a first year, Sommers found his niche at Amherst as a neuroscience science and premedical student at Amherst, while volunteering as a big brother in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and singing in the Route 9 A Cappella Group.

Sommers plans to enroll in medical school within the next two years, and envisions himself as a practicing physician while continuing his research in neuroscience.

OLIVIA TRUAX A double major in geology and law, jurisprudence and social thought, Olivia Truax hopes to further her scientific and political interests on her Fulbright research grant to New Zealand in geology.

Drawn to New Zealand ever since she studied abroad there her junior year, Truax wrote in her application that she is “fascinated by the connections many New Zealanders have with the sublime and ungovernable geology of their home.”

Truax discovered her path after taking a course on paleoclimatology. “In the reconstruction of past climates, I found a discipline that combines my interest

in the earth’s history with my deeply felt commitment to sustainability and environmental conservation,” she wrote.

She plans to work with researchers at the University of Otago in reconstructing how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet has responded to warming over the last 11,000 years. By analyzing sediment core from the Ross Sea, researchers hope to get important information for predicting the impact of climate change in the coming decades. Truax also hopes to become involved with the Maori Students’ Association to explore the concept of “kaitiakitanga” — a Maori concept of the guardianship and conservation of the natural world.

Following her fellowship, she plans to pursue a doctorate in paleoclimatology. As a geoscientist, Truax hopes to collaborate with policymakers on climate initiatives.

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 7

Honorary Degrees Inger Damon ’84 Infectious Disesase Expert Inger Damon ’84 is director of the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology at the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. In July 2014, she was chosen to lead the CDC’s response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, managing the largest international emergency operation in CDC history. Damon is also one of the world’s leading experts in orthopoxviruses such as smallpox. She directs a research program conducted in high-containment labs to study the variola virus, in order to develop new smallpox vaccines, create better tests to diagnose smallpox, and produce better drugs for treatment.

Damon graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and earned her master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Connecticut. She completed a clinical fellowship in infectious diseases and a post-doctoral fellowship in molecular virology at the National Institutes of Health. A Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, she has authored or co-authored many book chapters and over 160 peer-reviewed publications.

Damon is also director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Smallpox and Other Poxvirus Infections and serves as a clinical assistant professor at Emory University.

William Burns Ambassador William Burns is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global network for policy research. Burns graduated from La Salle University, majoring in history, and later earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees in international relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. After retiring in 2014, Burns is only the second serving career diplomat to become deputy secretary of state. In over three decades of serving, Burns was the undersecretary of state for political affairs, ambassador to Russia, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and ambassador to Jordan. He is also author of Economic Aid and American Policy Toward Egypt, 1955-1981. Adding to his accomplishments are three Presidential Distinguished Service Awards and a number of Department of State awards, including three Secretary’s Distinguished Service Awards, the Secretary’s Career Achievement Award, the 2006 Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Ambassadorial Award for Initiative and Success in Trade Development, the 2005 Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award and the James Clement Dunn Award.

Chris Bohjalian ’82 Novelist Chris Bohjalian ’82 is an award-winning novelist whose books address issues such as human trafficking, environmentalism, homelessness, and animal rights. Of his 18 books, most have appeared on the New York Times bestsellers’ list; three have become movies. His work has been translated into over 30 languages. A Vermont native, many of his books are set in fictional Vermont towns. His novel “Midwives”, about a Vermont midwife who faces legal trouble after her patient dies, became a number one New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Bohjalian has received the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide; Russia’s Soglasie (Concord) Award for “The Sandcastle Girls”; and the New England Society Book Award for “The Night Strangers”, among other awards. He has written for publications such as the Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, and Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Bohjalian graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Amherst College. He lives in Lincoln, Vermont, with his wife, Victoria Blewer.

Kirk Johnson Paleontologist Kirk Johnson ’82 currently serves as Director of Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, overseeing the largest natural history collection in the world at over 128 million objects. Last year, the Museum’s scientists published over 730 scientific research papers and described 517 new species, while hosting over 7 million visitors. Johnson has also led paleontology expeditions in 11 countries and 9 states, discovering more than 1,400 fossil sites. In 2010-11, he directed the Snowmastodon Project, a dig near Snowmass Village, Colorado that unearthed more than 5,400 bones of mammoths, mastodons and other ice age animals. Johnson’s findings were featured in the NOVA documentary Ice Age Death Trap.

Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Johnson worked as vice president and chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. In 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy appointed Johnson to the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee. He is a member of National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration and an elected Fellow of the Paleontological Society. He also hosted the three-part NOVA series Making North America, which aired on PBS networks in November 2015.

Johnson graduated from Amherst with degrees in geology and fine art, received his master’s degrees in geology and paleobotany from the University of Pennsylvania, and earned doctorates in geology and paleobotany at Yale University.

Sandra Faber Astrophysicist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University, where she has been on faculty since 1974. Lawrence-Ligtfoot is a MacArthur prize winning sociologist who examines the relationship the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, and socialization within families and communities. She is the author of 10 widely known books, including “I’ve Known Rivers,” “The Art and Science of Portraiture,” and “The Third Chapeter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50.” In addition to the MacArthur prize, Lawrence-Lightfoor is the recipient of Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize. In 1993, Swarthmore, her alma matter, established the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair, and upon retirement, Harvard will rename the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair to the Sara Larence-Lightfoot chair, making her the first African American woman in the university’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

8 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Sandra Faber is a University professor of astronomy and astrophysics for over 40 years at the University of Santa Cruz, California and is also the first female member of the Lick Observatories. Faber graduated from Swarthmore College, majoring in physics and minoring in mathematics and astronomy, and holds a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University. Faber has made many contributions to the field of astronomy including the Faber-Jackson relation, the first known structural scaling law for galaxies, and the “cold dark matter” theory that has become the standard paradigm for galaxy and cluster formation in our universe. Faber is als known for her construction of the Keck Telescope and building the first wide-field planetary camera for the Hubble Space Telescope. Currently, Faber leads a project aimed at discovering how galaxies and evolved. In addition to her scientific achievements, Faber is also a member of U.S National Academy of Sciences and is the 2013 recipient of the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama.

Images courtesy of Amherst College

Senior Profile | Michael Harmon

A Jazz Musician Singing Amherst’s Praises It’s safe to say that few people love Amherst as much as Michael Harmon. The musician, RC and Hillel leader brings his boundless enthusiasm to everything he does.

—Paola Garcia-Prieto ’18 First-years, sophomores and juniors who attended the resident counselor show during orientation week will remember hearing the talented Michael Harmon singing a heartfelt ballad called “Most Beautiful Girl on the Quad.” The song, an Amherst-themed version of the Flight of the Conchords song “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room,” was my first impression of the charismatic Resident Counselor. There’s probably no better person to welcome new students to Amherst. A natural performer, Harmon is beloved on campus for his charm and infectious energy.

Falling in Love with Amherst Harmon’s musical talents aren’t confined to the RC show. He plays in two jazz bands and a pop-cover band with his brother Josh Harmon ’18, whom he describes as “the best drummer I know.”

He has been honing these talents for a long time: His first memories at Amherst include jamming out in the basement of Stearns with his ninth-grade camp-mates. Harmon participated in a pre-college camp the summer after his first year of high school. Although Harmon claims he wasn’t thinking about his college plans at the time, he said, “It planted the seed in the back of my mind that Amherst was a special place.”

Before being officially accepted to Amherst, Harmon was a high-achieving student from New Jersey who had been waitlisted by his top three schools. His counselor told him not to expect to be taken off any of those waitlists. But before he resigned himself to being a Georgetown Hoya, Harmon and his parents took a road trip to Amherst.

“I slept in the back seat,” Harmon said. “They woke me up when we got to the admissions office, I unwrinkled my shirt and asked for an interview with a dean. I met with

Dean Hawkins and told him that Amherst was still my top choice, handed him my résumé and I told him I hoped he’d consider me for Amherst because I would really love to come here. And that was just about it.”

Harmon ended up being taken off all the waitlist at all three of his top choices: Amherst, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. However, Harmon ultimately followed his gut feeling that Amherst was the right choice for him.

“When I tell people on tours ‘Come to Amherst’ I really mean it — I don’t just say that because it’s my job to,” Harmon said. “I am very lucky and grateful for the experience I’ve had here.”

His love for the college is undeniable; Harmon has been a tour guide all four years and has consistently given a tour every Friday at noon. He talked about how every day he left his tour in a better mood than before.

“Talking about how great this place really reminds you of how great this place is,” Harmon told me. “I can’t believe my last tour is in two weeks. Two weeks ago I gave a tour and said, ‘You know in a month is my last one of these and I’m probably going to burst into tears when I say why Amherst. And sure enough, I got a little bit choked up.”

He went on to recount how great it feels at the end of the tour to answer the question that every visitor has for him as they walk down Memorial Hill back towards the admissions office.

Harmon is genuine with his answer: “I always say you only have four years to live as an undergraduate surrounded by undergraduates in a bucolic setting like this,” he said.” And to just drink in the liberal arts experience and broaden your academic horizons. I can’t think of any better place to spend these four years — it’ll be hard to leave.”

History and Hillel Harmon has done more than grace the campus with his musical talents. He also played a key part in re-energizing Jewish life on campus, remarking how happy he was to see the amount of students in the Hillel club now compared to his first year at Amherst.

This year he also started a series of discussions in which faculty share their knowledge about the history of the college. Harmon said he always wondered about the history that was surrounding him as he walked around campus, and after Amherst Uprising last fall he felt it was important to show the community how activism has always been a part of Amherst culture. He spearheaded this initiative with the history department and found that many people were eager to learn more about their college’s history.

Since last fall he’s served on a committee devoted to revitalizing senior week. The lack of activities for seniors remaining on campus during the week before commencement bothered Harmon and his friends, so they collaborated with Student Affairs to create a four-day series of activities, including a trivia night with Book & Plow farmer Pete McLean and movie night on Tuttle Hill. He and his friends wanted everyone to have a chance to be together as a class one last time before reunion. “Why not enjoy the time now at this beautiful place that we’ve called home?” Harmon asked.

From Camp Counselor to Resident Counselor As if all of his extracurricular activities weren’t enough, Harmon was also an RC in Stearns for two years before spending his final year in Wieland. He credits his childhood camp for teaching him the skills he’s used with his residents over the last three years. “The two places that have changed me the most as a per-

Harmon “can’t think of any better place to spend these four years” than at Amherst. His love of the college led him to create a series of faculty talks focused on the history of Amherst College.

Photos courtesy of Michael Harmon ’16

Harmon’s thesis for his interdisciplinary major, colonial and post-colonial studies, is based on his experiences in South Africa. son have been Camp Emerson and Amherst, probably in that order.”

Harmon spent a total of eight summers at this camp in the Berkshires, both as a camper and a counselor. “Being a camp counselor is the best job in the world — it’s something I might come back to later,” Harmon said. “It’s just too much fun. It’s a special dynamic of being an authority figure and knowledgeable upperclassmen or adult [that’s a], like, cool, fun, still-a-kid goofball. And I try to bring that dynamic to everything I do.”

Harmon said it was those years he spent at the Berkshires that inspired him to become an RC at Amherst. “Once I realized the position existed and I saw at the RC show that you could be goofy and play music to make people feel better and just be silly and fun and guide your peers, I thought, ‘I have to do this,’” Harmon said. “And I’m so glad I did. I mean the RC family is just the best fraternity Amherst College has ever had. Sorry, DKE.”

Crafting a New Major Harmon’s thesis adviser and mentor, Ronald Rosbottom, summarized Harmon’s academic career: “Michael never needed an adviser.

He had it all figured out as soon as he arrived on campus. He advised me!”

Harmon branched out of the typical selection of majors offered at the college by creating his own interdisciplinary major: colonial and post-colonial studies. The subject combines all his interests: history, political science, anthropology, environmental studies and creative writing. Although this sounds like a major that should already exist, the pre-med student claims he created it in order to write an interdisciplinary thesis based on his trip to South Africa.

Harmon wrote a variation on a travel log for his thesis, detailing the historical and political issues in the area relating to the things he saw and the people he met. “It’s all through the lens of the stories of my travel, seen through the eyes of a tourist,” Harmon said. The way he described his trip filled me with wan-

derlust. But the trip almost didn’t happen due to Harmon facing the MCAT, surgery and mononucleosis all at the beginning of that summer.

Luckily his health recovered in time for his travels, and he came back to Amherst with an interesting answer to the question, “What did you do this summer?”

Harmon will spend next year at the University of Cambridge, completing a one-year master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine.

“I took a history course my junior spring with Professor Servos called Science and Society in Modern America and it was one of the best courses I’ve ever taken here,” Harmon said. “And it sparked my interest in this subject that I hadn’t really thought about, even though it fell right in between my two interests: humanities and the sciences, particularly history.” The class prompted him to apply for the program, in which Harmon hopes to pursue his intellectual interests while figuring out if he wants to go to med school.

He said it’s important to have this time to explore before he finds himself “facing the inevitable.”

It’s unlikely that Harmon will forget his roots in the humanities while studying medicine. His plan is to study neurology and to explore what it means to be conscious. He also wants to study how the brain reacts to music and affects our emotions.

No matter how many prestigious prizes he will eventually win, to me and to many others, he will always be the funny goofball we call RC Michael. He will be greatly missed by many people on campus and has one of those contagious smiles that inexplicably fills you with joy.

An anecdote from his friend Shelton Cochran ’16 perfectly sums up Harmon’s overflowing enthusiasm.

“One time Michael was talking about how much he loves cricket and how cool the cricket team on campus is, and so I asked him how many games or practices he had gone to,” Cochran said. “He said, ‘None, but I have an Amherst cricket hat!’”

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 9

Senior Profile | Amira Lundy-Harris

Feminist Paves the Way for Trans Community Through their thesis project, campus activism and commitment Amira Lundy-Harris has redefined identity at Amherst and given voices to those who are often not heard.

—Diane Lee ’19 I had never met Amira Lundy-Harris before, but upon walking into our meeting at Frost Café I immediately recognized why they were selected for a profile. Their dominating air of confidence, paired with an effortless demeanor, brought my eyes to focus on Lundy-Harris, despite the buzzing afternoon noises of the cafe.

Through their leadership in the Black Students Union and Pride Alliance and their commitment to queer and black studies, Lundy-Harris has dedicated a fruitful college career to a thorough understanding of intersectionality.

Growing Up in Oakland Lundy-Harris was born and raised in Oakland, California. Growing up in Oakland and having parents “with a feminist and Afro-centric mindset and set of values” made issues of diversity and identity a source of interest for Lundy-Harris.

With an older brother in Amherst’s class of 2009, who had received generous financial aid from the college, Lundy-Harris found Amherst to be a logical next step after their life in California.

“While Amherst is statistically a diverse place, a lot of diversity is new to the college,” Lundy-Harris said. “I feel like the administration is still trying to figure out how to do more than just include different groups of people on the college campus and to actually create a space where all sorts of people thrive, which is more of a difficult task.”

Lundy-Harris struggled with finding their place at Amherst. “I remember being really lonely and feeling like I didn’t fit in at all,” they said.

Luckily, Lundy-Harris eventually found people they connected with in feminist spaces on campus. One of their greatest role models at Amherst has been Dana Bolger ’14E, a campus activist and co-founder of Know Your IX, an organization that campaigns against sexual violence.

“By sheer luck, I met her through one of my classes freshman year. She was the first person out there organizing a dialogue on what needs to change here,” Lundy-Harris said. “It’s

definitely inspired me to think and talk about these issues at length.”

Lundy-Harris began seeking out the resources and the community they needed. “It was an integral part of me becoming a black studies and SWAGS major and choosing to live in Drew House,” Lundy-Harris said. “It’s been difficult, but also ultimately positive.”

Getting into Black Studies and SWAGS At Amherst Lundy-Harris explored their passion for black feminist theory. This interest sparked in Black Sexualities, a course they took during the spring of their first year at Amherst.

“It was an awesome course for me to take as a freshman because it mixed all sorts of media to study the material,” Lundy-Harris said. “We looked at things like R. Kelly’s ‘Trapped in the Closet’ music video and then the next day, would read some queer people of color critique. A lot of different sources coming together and in conversation is pretty amazing.”

Lundy-Harris said their continued interest in black feminist theory flourished under the guidance of Professor Aneeka Henderson, who focuses on the intersections of blackness and womanhood in the sexuality, women’s and gender studies department.

“I think I’ve taken all of her classes!” Lundy-Harris said with a smile.

“She’s my adviser and my thesis adviser. She and Professor Polk have constantly looked at intersections of gender and race, so their classes have been important in my time as a scholar and individual. I’ve really developed a black feminist lens and intersectional approach to feminism.”

Lundy-Harris’s intellectual pursuits have gone hand-in-hand with their extracurricular activities. They have co-chaired Black Students Union for two years and have led the Women of Amherst group on campus, co-directing the Women of Amherst performance this year. They have also been a leader in Pride Alliance.

“These groups have been some of the most important spaces in my four years here,” Lundy-Harris said.

Lundy-Harris has also been a staff

member of the Queer Resource Center for the past three years.

“I was definitely drawn to that community my freshman year, but my sophomore year was when the QRC had enough funding for student employees,” Lundy-Harris said. “I think that’s when I solidified my community there. That’s been a very big part of my time at Amherst. My co-workers are some of my closest friends here on campus.”

Transitioning and Feminist Spaces These student groups became even more essential to Lundy-Harris when they came out as transgender their junior year at Amherst. Lundy-Harris identifies as gender queer non-binary and transmasculine.

“It involved coming out to everyone and changing pronouns and reintroducing myself the way I wanted people to address me,” Lundy-Harris explained. “Amherst has a long way to go with issues like this, but I think for the most part, it is a pretty good place to be trans.”

Lundy-Harris prefers “they, them, their” pronouns, though they are also comfortable with “he, him, his” pronouns. “Sometimes, it’s about compromising — I realize that not everybody will understand the fluidity of gender and respect that,” Lundy-Harris said. “It’s definitely better than being misgendered as a ‘she.’”

Members of QRC, like director Angie Tissi-Gassoway, have been crucial in arranging large aspects of transitioning like hormones and surgery.

“She’s been instrumental in talking to health services to make sure these things are covered by the school, as well as overseeing gender neutral bathrooms, gender neutral housing and even having names that people want on their ID cards,” Lundy-Harris said. “The transitioning hasn’t been easy, but it’s been much easier because I’ve had allies like Angie really fighting for me. I’m glad I started to transition at Amherst.”

The transitioning process, when Lundy-Harris officially started taking testosterone, has been a huge piece of “me coming into myself and growing

Photos courtesy of Amira Lundy-Harris ’16

A black studies and SWAGS major, Lundy-Harris wrote a thesis on queer communities of color in New York. into myself in the past four years,” they said.

Lundy-Harris’ orientation as a gender queer non-binary and transmasculine individual has complicated some of the work that they have done at Amherst. For example, transitioning gives Lundy-Harris increasing male privilege. “My commitment to feminism will never waver, but I do need to negotiate how I interact with feminist spaces and recognize my masculine privilege,” they said.

Domestic Study During their junior year, Lundy-Harris did a domestic study at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C. “It was a time in my career at Amherst where I was feeling just a lot of anger and frustration about race in America and on this campus,” Lundy-Harris said. “It was in the midst of Black Lives Matter beginning and lots of killings of black people nationally. I felt a lot of apathy here.”

Going to Washington, D.C. in the spring was a “much needed break,” Lundy-Harris said. D.C. also has a vibrant black queer community, and Lundy-Harris found a supportive environment there.

“D.C., being a major city with a majority black population, gave me so much to do,” Lundy-Harris said.

“There’s a lot of feminist work going on. There’s a lot of Black Lives Matter-related things happening. It was a place that was unapologetically black and that was really important to me.

It definitely made it possible for me to come back to Amherst and enjoy the rest of my time.”

Finding a Thesis

“I hope that I will have had conversations that sort of change people’s thoughts about gender and that that stays with them,” Lundy-Harris said.

10 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Back at Amherst, Lundy-Harris decided to write a thesis for the SWAGS department. The thesis focused on effective kinships that trans and queer individuals find in reaction to the rejection they face from their biological families. Lundy-Harris focused on two trans liberation movements: STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and Bash Back!.

Lundy-Harris looked at the way both groups of queer and trans people established family formations.

Lundy-Harris examined how

non-biological family structures functioned and what was possible in those spaces. These social structures contributed to political action and advancing trans rights, they said.

The idea for their thesis originated from an assignment Lundy-Harris completed in their Black Studies 300 research course during their sophomore year. The assignment asked students to imagine a significant research project and how to make it happen.

“I focused on queer communities of color in New York,” Lundy-Harris said. “Particularly, the drag scene in New York after watching ‘Paris is Burning’ was really interesting to me.

What I found fascinating was that trans people who live together in houses actually form a family — there’s a mother, there are children and etc.”

Lundy-Harris thought about this even after the class was over and used it as a starting point for their thesis.

They also found inspiration while doing undergraduate research at University of California, Berkeley the summer after their junior year.

“I was doing research on the same topic of kinships and that was like the second stepping stone to getting to my thesis,” they said. “The summer helped me narrow my focus on gay men and trans women.”

Next Few Years Lundy-Harris plans to continue their interests in queer and black studies in the next few years at the University of Maryland, College Park, where they will be pursue a doctorate in women’s studies. Their positive experiences during domestic study in the D.C. area motivated Lundy-Harris to choose the University of Maryland as their next place of intellectual pursuits.

“I think that’s going to end up hopefully leading to my work in academia,” Lundy-Harris said. “I want to continue working on and thinking about trans studies within feminist spaces. My hope is that I, in some way, have made it a bit easier for trans students to navigate being here. I hope that I will have had conversations that sort of change people’s thoughts about gender and that that stays with them. I hope that I’ve made some spaces inclusive.”

Senior Profile | John He

Exploring New Spaces, But Staying Grounded Discovering a love of nature upon arriving from Shanghai, John He decided to take a chance by combining his passion for geology with his interest in legal theory.

—JinJin Xu ’17 In the middle of our conversation, John He apologized for his hesitant answers. “I feel lost,” he admitted. “That may be my most central theme here.”

I was taken aback, because He has many reasons to feel confident about his achievements — editor-in-chief of The Indicator, leader of the FOOT orientation program, founder of spring break trips to Zion National Park, among others.

Yet here he was, shifting in his seat, genuinely unable to talk about his accomplishments.

Instead, he talked about his experience of writing an English paper on “Moby Dick.” “I explore as I write,” he said. “I enjoy wandering.”

A lover of the outdoors — which he discovered upon arriving here from Shanghai — He brings a sense of exploration to his studies, too. “I see myself as a stable-ish person, so I’ve always looked for things that would upset that stability,” He said, on his movement between law, jurisprudence and social thought, studio art, geology and German classes.

He paused and joked, “Can you describe me as very avant-garde?”

Getting Lost After participating in the FOOT orientation camping trip as a first-

year student, He fell in love with the outdoors.

Although he had no outdoors experience in Shanghai, he had always been drawn to nature. He immediately joined the Outing Club, took up rock climbing and canoeing and became a leader of the FOOT program. His love for the outdoors cumulated in brainstorming a spring break camping trip to the Zion National Park with a few friends. The trip ended up taking two years to organize.

They first sent a proposal to President Biddy Martin, which was rejected. But He persisted. The next year, he wrote a new proposal and succeeded, procuring $10,000 to fly a group of students to Utah.

“It was a logistical nightmare,” He admitted.

At Zion, they hiked a backcountry trail for a week. Many of the students did not have any prior outdoors experience.

“To realize the land we walk on every day has a rich history that we know very little about, that a single rock can contain so many stories,” He said. “That changes the way I see the world.”

He’s affinity for the outdoors attracted him to geology in his sophomore year. He credits Amherst’s

open curriculum for giving him the autonomy to explore. Having taken many law, jurisprudence and social thought and German classes, it was a drastic turn for He, with no math or science background, to declare geology as his second major in addition to LJST. “Geology is a science, while LJST is the most humanity of humanities, as far apart as two majors can be,” He said. “Geology is not just a different mode of thinking, on a different time scale and magnitude, but you have to position yourself in a different point of view. Think 4.6 billion years ago.”

Yet he is attracted to both subjects because of their interdisciplinary openness to many perspectives and techniques.

He remembers his junior year summer as his definitive Amherst experience. For the first part, he stayed on campus and researched suicide protest with Professor Andrew Poe. Then, he went to Montana and attended a geology field camp. Afterwards, he stayed in Montana to conduct geological research with Professor Tekla Harms.

“Everything was leading up to me going to graduate school in the humanities,” He said. “Geology changed my trajectory.”

Drawing Rocks

An avid member of Outing Club, He learned to rock climb while at Amherst and led the Outing Club’s spring break hiking trip in Zion National Park.

At geology field camp, He walked and studied the Montana earth and learned how to draw maps and cross sections. “It sounds like a 19th-century pioneer activity,” He laughed, pulling out a map to demonstrate, “but geological mapping is very observational while being interpretational.”

The interpretive element made him realize that it is only the surface of the land that he walks and sees.

“You construct a two-dimensional picture of the land from which you visualize and make an interpretation of the three-dimensional picture over time of how the area formed,” Hesaid.

He’s observation and drawing skills were sharpened in his studio art classes here.

Harms noted that He’s artistic abilities set him apart in the field of geology.

“We got word back from the field camp that he drew the best cross sections the faculty had ever seen,” Harms said. “He is meticulous in how he represents things, but he can also think and see in three dimensions. And I think that shows up in his artwork. He has a very deft hand in representing things.”

Harms added that this meticulous yet creative thinking also show up in his research. She talked about He’s special topics with her last fall, in which He patiently measured squash pebbles and carefully explored different ways to analyze them.

Photos courtesy of John He ’16

He’s LJST thesis incorporated his love for geology with his interest in legal theory.

“This is the kind of situation where you could plug and chug and not really think about what the result would actually mean in terms of the real world, but he did some very careful thinking about that and made me think in ways I had not been thinking,” Harms said. “If you are a faculty member who has been teaching as long as I have, when a student can teach you things or makes you think in ways you had not been thinking, that’s just the most fun there is.”

While He enjoys the crossover between art and geology, he is less sure about the connection between geology and his interest in political and legal theory.

“If I were to do things over again it would be to take more art classes,” He said. “The nice thing is that they always take a lot of time out of your schedule.”

This year, He wrote a thesis in the LJST department titled “Space in the Political Thought of Carl Schmitt,” in which he explored the relationship between law and land and the human conception of legal and political contexts as land-based.

“I didn’t know my argument until I wrote my conclusion,” He confessed.

He’s training in geology shone through in his thesis, in which he questioned whether spatial imagination could form a coherent basis for legal thinking. Yet, it is through geology that He discovered the limitations of political theory.

“What I’ve realized is that the field of political theory is limited when it comes to thinking about space, because it can only do so conceptually and abstractly without a good grounding on where we actually live — land,” He said. “Even the solid ground underneath is not solid. It actually deforms like pudding over geologic time. I think geology is better able to capture your imagination with the processes of mountain building and continental collision.”

It was with this understanding that He decided to attend a geology master’s program at the University of Arizona this fall, drawn to the strong tectonics department there. Nevertheless, He is not ready to abandon his interests in political theory and

the humanities. “I can imagine my ideal career as being a combination of LJST and geology, but this does exist,” He said.

Being Grounded Describing their trip to Montana, Harms recalled the ease He displayed when they attended a rodeo on their first night there. “We stayed in a rural Montana town,” Harms said. “I enjoyed seeing the meeting of the cultures. I said to him, ‘I think the people know you don’t belong here.’”

Yet, though Harms said she could physically fit in easier than He in rural Montana, He seemed more effortlessly at ease. “He’s moved between cultures so much that he is innate in what Amherst is always wanting to teach a person, which is to be able to look at your own culture from the outside, to be objective about your own culture, but also to see someone else’s culture,” Harms said. “So he was very adept at that.

He wasn’t at all thrown in Montana, seeing an American culture so different from New England. I think he does it effortlessly.”

He’s willingness to explore and to seek discomfort, allows him to adeptly navigate different social, cultural and academic spaces. Yet, he does so earnestly, away from the public eye.

“For such a highly wildly competent person, John strikes people as a fairly unassuming character, and I think so much of it is just a sort of humbleness,” his friend Tiffany Wong ’16 said. “He doesn’t take himself very seriously, but lets his actions speak. I think you learn the most about John through what he does — he just does many, many amazing things and doesn’t feel the need to share it.”

Wong added that He’s earnestness is most evident in his friendships.

“He’s a dependable person in an understated way, like a there-ness probably, dependable in that if I ever need him he will just be there for me.

I value that a lot,” Wong added.

He’s desire to wander is grounded in his friends. Mark Boyer ’16, He’s suitemate, mused over his presence.

“I think it’s notable how he brings joy to people, particularly by giggling profusely at his own jokes,” Boyer said.

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 11

Senior Profile | Mercedes MacAlpine

Campus Activist Inspires Through Enthusiasm Mercedes MacAlpine’s genuine joy and infectious passion for life allows her to lead confidently while caring for and inspiring those around her.

—Lauren Tuiskula ’17 My first introduction to Mercedes MacAlpine came as my Community Engagement Orientation trip leader during first-year orientation. She was everything I expected an Amherst student to be, and everything I hoped to embody. Within an hour of meeting MacAlpine, her infectious effervescence and leadership had already inspired a group of 30 timid first-years.

Now I’ve had the privilege of knowing her for three years — watching her make everyone nearby laugh during lunch at Val, hearing her brilliant contributions to class discussions and watching people genuinely perk up when she greets them with a smile. I had the chance to sit down with MacAlpine to hear about how she got here, where she’s headed next and how she’s kept herself going.

Early Academic Passions MacAlpine prides herself on hailing from New York, having lived in almost every borough in the city. She attended a small all-girls’ school in the city for thirteen years before attending Amherst.

She knew that the challenges of Amherst were well worth the immersive experience ahead of her.

“In a lot of ways I felt most prepared academically,” she said. “I love

learning and I chose Amherst because of the classes I visited, I was super ready to stop doing that speed through that 15 books in a semester thing, I wanted to get deep into something and be challenged. I was ready to do cool work.”

MacAlpine’s opportunity for independence toward the end of her high school career helped her find her niche, and ultimately a home in the Black Studies department at Amherst. “I realized there were whole parts of my education I hadn’t explored, parts that were directly related to me,” she said.

“I liked the way I felt after I took those classes, it felt more personal.”

After this early exploration, MacAlpine charged forward with similar work at Amherst, taking Black Studies 111 and then pursuing multiple classes within the major each semester. “It kicked my ass, but I loved it,” MacAlpine said of her time spent in the department.

As someone who devoted herself so wholeheartedly to her academics, MacAlpine was sure to acknowledge the many Amherst professors who influenced her. She fondly recalled working with Professor Ilan Stavans, crediting his help in shaping her persona as an activist, improving not only her academic writing but also giving her

By creating and leading Purple Pride, Amherst’s first cheerleading squad, MacAlpine made the most of her infectious energy and ability to inspire others.

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confidence in her writing outside of the classroom.

She also commented on her relationship with her advisor, Professor Rhonda Cobham-Sander. “She’s just amazing,” she said. “She gave me all the straight-forward advice I needed in my life, she’s very real.”

Professor Cobham-Sander noted the “one of a kind” nature of her advisee. “Mercedes dances to music of her own making: Instead of following the predictable route many interdisciplinary majors choose of combining history, literature and the social sciences, she has taken her interest in Black Studies into her experiments with art, fashion and fabric.”

A True (Cheer) Leader When asked about her favorite Amherst memories, MacAlpine responded without hesitation, “men’s soccer winning a national championship, duh.”

She is fiercely passionate about building community and supporting her peers.

That’s why it’s no surprise that perhaps the most notable among her contributions to the college is her creation of “Purple Pride,” the College’s first-ever cheerleading team.

“The whole idea started as a way to get me out of my two-year slump,” MacAlpine said. “My mom told me to find something I was passionate about and do it. It was always on the periphery of my mind, so then I just went for it.”

In true scholarly fashion, MacAlpine carried out thorough research, even checking out books from Frost library to help her learn more about cheering.

She pitched the idea to the athletics department, but met questions about interest and what exactly the group would entail, and was forced to put in more research. After four months spent with the Smith cheerleading team, a period she affectionately refers to as her “cheer internship,” MacAlpine was even more prepared when she returned to the Amherst athletics department, and finally succeeded in founding Purple Pride.

“It was so much work, but it was all worth it,” she said. “I took all of that energy I had spent wallowing in sadness and put it into this thing that I was so passionate about, and suddenly I wasn’t sad anymore.”

MacAlpine acknowledged the help of her friends and their commitment to working with her early on and supporting her passion for cheering. She distinctly remembers the team’s first homecoming game and how surreal the moment felt. “It was freezing, I mean freezing,” she said with a laugh.

“But I didn’t care because it was such an incredible experience and I’m so grateful.”

Much of MacAlpine’s love of cheering relates back to her passion for community and supporting others.

“I love seeing the effect we can have,” she noted. “Being on the sidelines and seeing people out there strug-

Photos courtesy of Mercedes MacAlpine ’16

MacAlpine, a Black Studies major, is well-known on campus for her humor, academic brilliance and passionate activism. gling and just saying ‘let’s go’ and then they push themselves that extra little bit. That’s the most rewarding feeling, and to me that is truly the epitome of community.”

In addition to Purple Pride, MacAlpine also spent all four years as a member of Dancing and Stepping at Amherst College, performing predominantly with the step group. She recalled being overwhelmed by the talent of her peers, and even trying to avoid auditions. However, “joining by accident” proved beneficial, since she spent eight semesters with the group and places her last DASAC show on the list of her favorite Amherst memories. Her friends in the group remain one of the most memorable aspects.

“I just love people so much,” she said. “The fun thing about being a black woman is you get to watch a lot, I like to watch people and see little things and get interested in people. When I see something I want to bring that amazingness out. You can see people doing incredible things whether it be at DASAC or on the court and you want everyone to see them being that great, I think that’s where cheering comes in.

I just love bringing out fantastic things in people.”

Activism at Amherst MacAlpine’s presence is well known around campus, and much of that is a testament to her activism. She’s served on the Diver report committee, Amherst Uprising Oversight Committee, Amherst College Student Athletes of Color Council, Multicultural Resource Center Director search committee and the Student-Athlete Advisory Council.

While her contributions in these roles were invaluable, her ability to both redefine and fully embody activism has had the largest impact on the Amherst community.

“It’s all about forming relationships with people,” she said. “By advocating for myself or by advocating for my clubs, that’s how I made myself known.

I want to be there for people, and put myself out there. I wanted to finish out strong and do as much as I could before I leave.”

MacAlpine reflected specifically on Amherst Uprising, a monumental moment in her Amherst career in which she proved to be instrumental.

“The cool thing about it was that everyone brought something different,” she said.

Prior to Uprising, MacAlpine recalls thinking she would take a step back from her activism, and focus on herself and her job search. “I was just so tired,” she said. However, when the moment presented itself, MacAlpine knew she needed to speak up.

“I was not planning on getting involved…” she said. “But I recognized that this was a moment where we could break the cycle. I was able to tell people how I felt, and that was definitely one of the scariest moments.”

However, MacAlpine’s efforts proved somewhat successful, as she reflected on the changes she’s seen post-Uprising.

“There is a way that we have changed,” she said. “There’s more compassion and more openness that exists now that didn’t before, I have never been more proud of this community … In that moment I stopped questioning whether Amherst was the right place for me, because I knew then that it was.”

Continuing to Grow After graduation MacAlpine will begin an internship with a fashion magazine based in Baltimore, Maryland. After starting a fashion blog in her sophomore year at Amherst, she’ll have the opportunity to do similar work as a style editor intern. She also hopes to pursue her passions for cheerleading and dance, and will continue to train and audition for NBA dance teams.

In the long term, she hopes to make a lasting impact in the ever-formidable real world. “I see myself being able to be as useful as I was here,” she said. “I want it to be an organic way of being involved, though, whatever happens, I want it to come on its own.”

After such a formative experience, MacAlpine reflected on her transformative college career. She recognized the toll Amherst can take, but in true Mercedes fashion, still found the positives despite challenging situations.

“It’s important to talk and connect on a real level,” she said. “Some of the best conversations I’ve had here were when I was upfront and real. We all struggle here, but it’s up to you to make it something beautiful.”

Senior Profile | Ben Walker

Climate Advocate Ready to Walk the World A climate activist, LJST thesis writer and Watson Fellow, Ben’s accomplishments are second to his compassion and dedication to represent the disempowered.

—Kiana Herold ’17 Most students recognize Ben Walker for his campus activism surrounding divestment, or for his many accolades — the most recent being the prestigious Watson Fellowship and his honors law, jurisprudence and social thought thesis. Despite his accomplishments, in person Walker is refreshingly down-to-earth.

Professor Sanborn, who taught Walker in two classes, said he “loved the kind of warm, open, curious presence that [Ben] brings to the room.”

He added: “His seriousness is never far from his playfulness, and he’s just basically a huge pleasure to be around.”

While playful, Walker also has a depth and care about him that his friends value. Walker’s friend Athri Ranganathan ’16 said, “His words and actions are always considered and impactful — Ben doesn’t take false steps. You couldn’t ask more of a writer, thinker, and worker. He leads by example in a way few others do, especially in our college, at our age.”

Another friend of Walker’s, Bryan Doniger ’18, said Walker was a role model for “how to do serious, sustained academic work, for how to navigate through this campus without the benefit of a sports team or otherwise institutionally-sanctioned friend group.”

Whether he’s talking about climate change or communities at Amherst, Walker always returns to the theme of caring. When talking about fighting climate change, he focused on the empathetic act of caring for a common cause and a thoughtful deliberation of choices and their impact on the world itself and the global community.

The Evolution of Home The concept of home is important to Walker and he incorporated this theme into both his thesis and Watson project. His attachment to where he is from shapes the causes he cares about.

Walker hails from Plymouth Meeting, a suburb of Philadelphia that was originally settled by Quakers in the early 18th century. Now, numerous interstate highways intersect at the location. Walker recounted how it used to be all farmland, with old Quaker buildings smack dab in the middle.

Walker was attracted to Amherst because he saw it as an institution going through exciting changes. A friend he respected, an immigrant from Brooklyn, decided to attend Amherst some years before him, so Walker gave the school an especially careful look.

He quickly formed an attachment to the Pioneer Valley, loving the outdoor environment, which he got to know well through his training on the trails for a marathon during his sophomore year. Having volunteered on the farm, his favorite place on campus is the Book & Plow Farm’s greenhouse.

“Cool people, cool tunes, delicious vegetables … what more could you want?” he said.

He acknowledged that the college has its flaws: “It can be overwhelming with its intense academic workload and uncomfortable at times if you are not wealthy and white,” he said. But ultimately he is grateful for his time at Amherst — thankful for the friends he has made here and the people he has surrounded himself with.

When asked what he was most proud of doing at Amherst, he responded, “I am really proud of small

With his Watson Fellowship, Ben will travel to numerous countries and document individual stories of climate migration.

communities you can be a part of that took me in and said I had a chance to shape something, do interesting things.” He talked about the community at Marsh House, where he lived junior year: “They are all so kind. I felt proud to live there.”

This is so representative of Walker’s character; instead of talking about his accomplishments (this interview was all about him, after all) he deflected praise and instead spoke about others. Walker found that the relationships formed in this community make Amherst what it is. Just by sitting down with him for an hour, it’s evident he has a different way of seeing the world than most, and has a mature perspective on what makes life meaningful.

When asked what he would want to change about his time at Amherst, he said he would liked to have placed more trust in himself earlier on.

When you first arrive at Amherst it’s easy to be taken aback by how talented other students are, Walker noted, saying that at times he felt he often had a different way of thinking than many others at the college. Over time, he has come to see that as a strength rather than a weakness.

Advocating for Lacking a Voice

Those

Walker’s focus on the threads that connect people eventually led him to become a leading campus activist on issues related to climate change and divestment from fossil fuels. He worked for two summers in New York, first at the Long Island Civic Engagement Table the summer after his sophomore year and then at Make the Road NY. Both organizations focus on advocating for and improving the lives of working class communities of color.

The first day on the job at the Long Island Civic Engagement Table was transformative, and made Walker start thinking about the way climate change affects disempowered groups.

It was a few years after Hurricane Sandy had hit, which particularly impacted the already under-funded neighborhoods with poor infrastructure. Many Latino and African American communities on Long Island were still recovering. On his first day, he went to a community center that housed a summer camp, community park and pool, in a small town in Long Island. A contractor from a wealthy white neighborhood had dumped infected waste there, making people sick, and those working to clean it up also got sick. Walker described this as a “light bulb moment” when everything came together.

“Climate change isn’t just about polar bears and glaciers; it affects people, often the most disempowered,” Walker said.

At this job he learned a set of skills he could take back to Amherst to use to push the college to divest from fossil

Photos courtesy of Ben Walker ’16

Walker has fought tirelessly for the college’s divestment from fossil fuels as coordinator for the Amherst Divestment Club. fuels. After seeing firsthand the politics of power that underlie climate issues and how they affect real people at an individual and community level, Walker began to fully appreciate the importance of working against climate change from a higher level. “If climate change is about power, then changing our light bulbs is not going to do much,” Walker explained.

This prompted him to get much more involved as a divestment coordinator for the Amherst divestment club during his junior year. Ben described his role as a combination of a cheerleader and horse master — he encouraged everyone to come up with ideas and then corralled forces to get the job done.

He continued to think about climate change his senior year, only through a different outlet. An LJST major who admitted being much more interested in the “ST” than the “LJ,” his goal for his thesis was to find a more nuanced way to think about the future of climate change.

His responses throughout the interview were always thoughtful, yet they vacillated between being extremely well-spoken, to philosophical, to casual and laidback.

“Climate change is this problem of enormous scope and really daunting scale, in the sense that if affects everything,” Walker said. “It exists on scales of time that move past human understanding … which is a pretentious way of saying it’s gonna happen for a really long time.”

His thesis centered on the “criminally understudied” French philosopher Michel Serres’ work on climate change. Serres “models a way of thinking about the problem that is cautious and modest and still caring,” Walker said. “He cares very much about what will happen to people, but he is also hesitant to say with any certainty what will happen. And that way of thinking about a problem so daunting as climate change seems very valuable.”

Walking the World, Leaving Soft Footprints Focusing on the individual-level human aspect of climate change became central to Walker’s plans for the year of his Watson Fellowship. The

Watson Fellowship allows students to travel the world while working on a project of their choosing. Walker’s project will focus on climate displacement, and Walker will make a podcast on the stories of individuals and their changing relation to the concept of home. Walker found that his past experiences working with immigrants in the United States and climate change were very much related.

“There are all these tiny perceptual experiences with climate changes that aren’t captured when it’s reduced to a big-picture problem,” Walker said.

“I’m interested in how people who are forced from their local homes think of themselves as part of a global home, living in this global community.”

He will travel to Kiribati, Fiji, India, South Africa and Bolivia and speak with activists, farmers, policy makers and people living in slums, among others. Walker wants to hear the personal stories behind choices to move and to form an understanding on a local level in personal terms.

“Even if people aren’t scientists they do understand what climate change is — they just don’t understand it in terms of climate change or global warming,” Walker said. “A farmer working his field knows what is happening to it on his own terms and that is just as valuable as the work of a climate scientist I think. Particularly because those views on the issue aren’t represented at all on the internationals stage where those things are being decided.”

Moving Forward When asked about his plans after the Watson, he smiled, shrugged and said, “Who is to say?” This isn’t to say he didn’t have any ideas — he would consider applying to other fellowships, going back home and working with a Quaker volunteer service or working on trails.

“At the end of the day, I’d say that Ben’s a good guy,” Ranganathan said. “A guy who can do solid impersonations of American accents, from Philadelphia street vendors to Southern writers; a guy who’s good at loving (so I am told) and has a strong moral compass and follows it … if you haven’t known him now, you’ll wish you had in a few years.”

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 13

Senior Profile | Juan Gabriel Delgado Montes

Navigating Uncertainty with Serenity and Poise An economics and political science double major, Juan Gabriel Delgado Montes looks to put these skills to use in the field of human development.

—Sophie Murguia ’17 Juan Gabriel Delgado Montes and I were sitting side by side on a bench overlooking Memorial Hill, witnessing a too-perfect Amherst College scene. Everywhere around us, members of the class of 2016 were taking advantage of the tentatively sunny weather to have their senior portraits taken, all dressed up and grinning in front of the Holyoke Range. Speakers from the baseball stadium blared loud music in the background. An extremely enthusiastic tour guide led a group of families up the hill, gesturing excitedly toward the statue of Robert Frost on his right: “They say that’s where he sat and did all of his work. I don’t know how true that is, but it would be cool if it were true!”

Beholding all this busyness, Delgado Montes was, as always, serene.

“During the day, when you’re busy with class and work and everything, Memorial Hill is a grounding moment,” he said. “It’s quiet, you feel the wind, you get to see the seasons change.” Like just about every Amherst student, Delgado Montes has a variety of precious memories associated with Memorial Hill, from writing about the place for his American Studies class to coming here to hang out with his longtime girlfriend.

“It’s a romantic spot and I’m often a hopeless romantic,” he said.

I’m used to starting these interviews slowly, beginning with the easy questions and then gradually getting more personal. But the political science and economics major got very reflective very fast, with hardly any prompting from me.

“I’m often a very serious person, but there’s no need to be,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s nice to sit on Memorial Hill and talk to someone and not worry too much about the academics and the stress … My hypothesis is that when we grow up we learn to take things a little less seriously, or to embrace uncertainty, and those things are related.”

Helping People on Their Own Terms Delgado Montes has grown up in a manner quite different from most Amherst students. He was born in La Paz, Bolivia, but his parents’ jobs at charities and NGOs kept the family moving frequently. By the time he arrived at Amherst, he had already lived in Ecuador, Colombia, the U.S., England, Honduras, Peru and the Netherlands.

“We are close,” he said of his parents and older sister. “I think it’s because we’ve had to move so much.

“To be a good leader, for sure, you really need to be able to pull from everyone. It’s not just the loudest voices,” Delgado Montes said.

14 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

It’s always been the four of us, no matter what country we live in, so the only stability has been the four of us.”

Often, Delgado Montes’ parents would take their children to work with them. “It exposed me to a lot of the problems in the world from a very, very early age,” he said. His parents’ organizations worked on issues related to poverty and development, and Delgado Montes realized that he wanted to spend his life working on the same problems. At the same time, his parents helped him to recognize flaws in the field of development.

“It’s very paternalistic,” he said.

“I am interested in working in development and helping people fulfill their potential on their own terms.

But I am not sure exactly how yet.”

Delgado Montes’ mother studied communications and his father is an anthropologist. But Delgado Montes went a slightly more conventional route in studying economics and political science. Like countless other economics majors, he’ll spend the next year working in consulting in Boston, at Deloitte.

“It’s an interesting approach for me,” he admitted, after a slightly self-conscious pause. But he spent his childhood learning about the field of development as it relates to the public sector, and now he wants to learn about the private sector.

“The private sector has the resources, even if it doesn’t have the incentives — it has the resources to put things toward a good social use,” he said.

I asked him if he worried about being seen as a stereotypical Amherst econ major, taking the safe route from Amherst to a cushy consulting job.

“Absolutely,” he said. “That why when I say I’m an economics major, I always say I’m an economics major and I’m interested in human development. I say human development rather than economic development.”

He has clearly thought a lot about this and has an uneasy relationship with the conventional wisdom in his fields of choice. “I’m not just interested in trying to fit into the existing framework,” he said. “I’m trying to understand how the status quo works — how economists think, how politicians really think. What’s the room to pivot the status quo toward something better?”

Delgado Montes has already started working on these problems in his time at Amherst. Last summer, he interned for a startup in Kampala, Uganda, which provided credit scores for people in the informal economy. This would eventually influence the work he did on his political science thesis, which focused on the informal economy in Peru. His thesis looks at the ways in which ed-

Photos courtesy of Juan Gabriel Delgado Montes ’16

Delgado Montes credits his upbringing in numerous countries for his interest in the field of development. ucation affects discriminated minorities’ access to formal employment.

Delgado Montes’ adviser, Professor Javier Corrales, raved about his work, which co-won the prize for best political science thesis.

“His results are path-breaking and generative,” Corrales said.

Thrown into a Storm Delgado Montes is perhaps best known on campus for his time as Association of Amherst Students vice president, which got off to a rocky start. He was elected in spring 2014, at the same time as a nasty, protracted fight over the presidential election. Delgado Montes was tasked with running senate meetings as two campaigns argued over whether one of the candidates had overspent on their election posters.

“That was just a really ugly time,” he said. “That was actually my first senate meeting as vice president.”

I reported on the election controversy for The Student, and during that month I watched Delgado Montes deftly navigate many torturously long senate meetings, managing the discord in a way that was firm yet unfailingly polite. Although only a sophomore at the time, he was clearly the adult in the room.

Because the Judiciary Council voided the presidential election results, Delgado Montes was unexpectedly thrown into the role of interim president for the summer.

Yet although the election drama was “very unpleasant,” it didn’t seem to throw him off his course much. He worked with IT in developing Amherst’s first-ever mobile app, making sure the app would address students needs and that they would actually use it.

He also took on the more difficult task of expanding the AAS’ role to include greater student advocacy.

“For the AAS to be a good institution it need to go beyond funding,” he said. He acknowledged that the AAS is often viewed by students as being purely a funding body, and is unpopular because of it. And during his term as vice president, the AAS did indeed spend more time advocating for students — using his typ-

ically rigorous methods of quantitative analysis, Delgado Montes has crunched the numbers to prove it.

Yet he’s the first one to acknowledge that the AAS still has a long way to go in advocating for students’ needs.

Delgado Montes led the senate at an especially divisive time, he seems to have had unusual success in connecting with students from across campus.

“I don’t think that I have a specific part of campus that I easily identity with,” he said.

I wondered aloud whether this was a necessary quality for being a good leader.

“To be a good leader, for sure, you really need to be able to pull from everyone,” he said. “It’s not just the loudest voices. It’s always easy to listen to the loudest voices, but it’s important to understand that they’re equal to the voices that aren’t as loud.”

Already an Adult I interviewed Delgado Montes the day after senior ball, and he was feeling a little nostalgic. But leaving Amherst, he said, “feels natural.”

A lot of seniors say this, but with Delgado Montes it seems especially true. More than any college student I know, he seems ready for adult life.

He is preternaturally self-possessed, with a clear vision of the kinds of problems he wants to spend his life solving. And far more than most Amherst students, he is used to living independently — he took a gap year in the Netherlands before coming to Amherst and now lives in an off-campus apartment with his friends.

“I think Juan has added a certain grace and poise to our year,” his friend and housemate, Jayson Paul ’16, told me. “He has a certain maturity that people both respect and emulate.”

Perhaps this is why he’s so ready to graduate, despite the fact that Amherst has been a special kind of home for him.

“I’m not worried about the future,” he said. “I’m not too sad yet about what I’m leaving behind. I think I’m at the right point, so I’m actually very fortunate.”

Senior Profile | Khalil Flemming

A Comedian Connecting to Every Audience On stage, on the track, or just in Valentine Dining Hall, Khalil Flemming fosters friendships and community wherever he goes.

—Gabby Edzie ’17 Khalil Flemming’s theater and dance thesis was an original comedy called “Equal Weight.”

The inspiration for the title came from a weekly tradition in Mr. Gad’s House of Improv, in which members tell stories for their week. During one session, Will Savino ’14 noted that when Flemming told stories, he gave “equal weight” to each part.

“I could have a conversation with someone at a bus stop that resonates with me just as much as listening to a speaker at a conference,” Flemming said. “It kind of represents the way I am in life in general. Either just appreciating or acknowledging the wealth of things that are happening to me at a given point.”

From my conversation with Flemming, it’s clear that this is true. He’s the sort of person that pays attention to an interaction that most people would see as being insignificant, which has rendered him a meaningful part of the Amherst community. He’s led an Amherst career of equal weight.

Stealthy Detective Flemming grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, a residential town 30 minutes from Boston. He began acting in school and church at a young age, and impressed audiences encouraged him to pursue more opportunities. And so his father did some research and 9-year-old Flemming transformed into Piglet from “Winnie the Pooh” for his first play at the Boston Children’s theater.

In high school, Flemming continued acting and picked up a few other weights to add to the balance. Outside of the acting he did at school, Flemming acted in various television and film productions. He also had some interesting experiences voice acting for

computer games, including an educational game geared toward improving children’s cognitive skills.

“I was a neighborhood detective kid that would go around and say stuff like ‘there’s a mystery over at the sewer pipe. We have to find out what objects were there so we can blah blah blah.

We have to find the yellow shovel.

Find the yellow shovel. Find the yellow shovel. Find the yellow shovel,” he said.

The stealthy detective was also a member of his high school’s track and field team, and the future Gad’s star turned down a chance to join his school’s improv group so that he could instead accept a spot on the hip-hop dance group.

“I mean yes, I was a dope dancer,” Flemming joked.

Making the Most of Amherst When Flemming arrived at Amherst, he quickly took advantage of what the college has to offer, continuing with acting and track and field, while seeking out new interests.

“I dove way too deep my freshman fall,” he admitted. “Gad’s, first year of track, I acted in a senior’s thesis — every day of the week I had multiple things to do. I’ve sifted through the options and found my way through the years.”

Flemming met people in each corner of the campus as he did this.

“There was a new level of intelligent people here to interact with, so I found myself more challenged by the people than the environment. Things that I thought I was talented or competent in, people showed me there’s a new level of,” he said.

As the years went on, this remained true. Each passing ‘hello’ or

long dinner conversation held weight for Flemming. As I experienced while acting in a play he directed, the value Flemming places on each moment extends to each aspect of his Amherst career.

“I’ve timed it, and it takes me about two minutes to walk from the back room of Val to the exit,” Flemming’s friend Jesse Pagliuca ’16 said.

“With Khalil, it usually takes 10, regardless of how much time he has.

Khalil is late to everything, mostly because he loves people. As Khalil meanders around, he cannot help but interact with every person along his path. He is the antithesis of Amherst awkward; even if you only met for a moment, he’ll remember your name and make a playful joke the next time he sees you. Khalil can’t help it. He places equal weight on every conversation and person. Even the little interactions are important to him.”

Theater Major Continuing his interest in the entertainment industry, Flemming chose to be a theater and dance major. Despite his interest in film, Flemming chose theater and dance because “it is a bit more flexible in terms of the creative options you have.” Flemming gained the hands-on, creative practice experience he was seeking in Rosh Bashford’s course directing studio.

Bashford, now Flemming’s adviser, noted how Flemming’s attention to human interaction helped him become a “creative force, a facilitator of other people’s work.”

“I feel super fortunate to have worked with Khalil,” Bashford said.

“He naturally created a great atmosphere in the rehearsal room — a top priority for any director. Khalil also has an innate ability to convey his ar-

Photos courtesy of Khalil Flemming‘16

Flemming will continue his interest in film and entertainment at United Talent Agency, working with their agent training program. tistic vision by simply sharing his infectious and generous personality. He has a genuine quality — in life and in his work — that is captivating.”

Thesis Flemming’s thesis started off as a shorter play titled “Nirvana,” written for the course playwriting. The play followed a character that was a satirical version of Flemming as he navigated high jinks with friends, girls and professors. The following semester Flemming took directing studio in which he was tasked with directing a full production. For the assignment, he wrote a longer version of “Nirvana” in which he added a film component in which the main character’s conscious was depicted behind him on a screen.

“The audience could see the conscious and it gave the effect that his conscious was looking over him and living his life with him,” Flemming said.

Flemming fostered a community among the cast in order to produce a visually interesting play that encapsulated the nature of human relations.

The decision to transform the play into a thesis was in large part inspired by the audiences’ reaction to this rendering of consciousness.

He wrote a loose version of the script over the summer, and allowed the actors to build upon it via improv in the spring. Characters were morphed and added to produce a play that told the story of a character Zeke and his consciousness as he interacted with the people in his life, including his advisor, his close friend, his friend that was growing distant and a love interest. “Equal Weight” was cast in early fall, rehearsed and presented in November.

Mr. Gads & Track and Field

Flemming, alongside Romey Sklar ’15, performed with the improv group, Mr. Gad’s, every Monday night, beginning in the fall of his first year.

Flemming joined Mr. Gad’s the fall of his first year and said it has been “dope dope dope” ever since. It’s no surprise that what he values most about the group is the ability to communicate with new people.

“It’s been cool to have a group of friends like that and also being able to perform for people all the time and having people that you see around

campus show up,” Flemming said. “A big part of being in Gad’s for me has been finding out who comes to Gad’s and why they do and what they like and getting to know them as friends.”

For the track and field team, Flemming came on as a long jumper and short sprinter. His second year, he started triple jumping and came close to breaking the school record. Unfortunately, the season ended in a hamstring injury. This year, Flemming is finally back on track with his jumping and has been excited to contribute to the team — as both an athlete and a friend.

“Especially this year, there’s a strong community,” he said. He attributed this in large part to the assistant coach’s ability to bring in more teammates.

Future Plans Flemming has always been interested in film, particularly independent film. He has worked on several sets in a variety of different roles.

“There is a certain raw energy, because everyone is working very earnestly, making things happen as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Flemming said of independent film productions. “I think it taught me a lot because I had to take on a lot of responsibility in new positions really fast.”

Next year, Flemming will be working toward his goal of becoming a “creative, influential and involved member of the universal entertainment community.” He’ll be working at United Talent Agency headquarters in New York within their agent talent program.

“I’ll meet a lot of people and spend a lot of time learning what its like to be in the agent world,” Flemming said. Flemming noted that it was an interaction with an Amherst friend that contributed to him getting the job.

Flemming’s time at Amherst has been an array of moments, interactions and people that have fit together to make him who he has grown to be. Whatever he’s doing in the future, we all know he’ll be somewhere great paying attention to the little things — giving every interaction equal weight.

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 15

CONGRATULATIONS DANIEL NUSSBAUM!

“IT’S ALL GOOD”

LOVE YOU!

16 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Congratulations from your grandfather, “Grandbob” Robert Weil, class of 1956, and your mom, Linda Weil, class of 1981, to Seewai Hui, on your graduation! Thank you for carrying on the family tradition! We love you and are very proud of your accomplishments during your four years at Amherst College!

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR A&L EDITORS

MARQUEZ CUMMINGS LIZ MARDEUSZ

Love, The Amherst Student Staff

CONGRATS TO SPORTS EDITOR, ANDY! Ϫп цщѐп щяь ϙуьпощсэδ Ϡльх Ҫ Ϟльпш ϖльюпь

Love, The Amherst Student Staff

Congratulations little guy.

XO

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 17

Dear Nathan, This is a time for celebrating all your achievements! Congrats on your graduation. May the next chapter of your life bring you joy, passion and inspiration.

Kan, Lily, and the rest of the family

We are so proud of you Reeven You have a bright future ahead of you We love you Helene, Jorde, Sophie, Chase & Levy

CONGRATULATIONS THOMAS W. KEATING! We love you! Your ENTIRE Family.

Appearing on stage: Mom & Dad Aunt Cheryl, Aunt Barbara, Uncle Jack, Veronica and Lisa

Congratulations Daphne! We are proud of you and your many achievements, academic and extracurricular, while at Amherst. You have made wonderful use of your time and we look forward to celebrating all that lies ahead for you!

We Love You, Daddy, Mommy, Stadtler and Luke

Robert,

Congratulations to the graduating members of the Amerst College Field Hockey Team - Catie Downey, Annika Nygren, Katie Paolano, Abigail Rose, Annie Turnbull - You are a tough act to follow!

We are so proud of you today. As parents we dreamed of having a son who is vibrant and excited to live a life of passion and purpose. Our dream has come true. Go and fulfill your dreams, find your purpose and live a life with no regrets. We are excited to see your journey. Always know that you are loved and never alone. May God bless you.

Now spread your wings and fly.

18 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Congratulations Catie Downey! We are very proud of you!

Love, Dad, Mom, and Patrick Nana and Grandpa The Day, Konkey, and Street Families

CONGRATULATIONS WRITERS The Amherst Student would like to thank and congradulate our graduating writers. These students have contributed reporting to the Student that will be dearly missed. Good luck with your pursuits, graduates!

Shruthi Badri David Chang Dave Cunningham Andrew Lindsay James Liu Devin O’Connor

Lizzie Paul Matt Randoplh Chris Rigas Sam Rosenblum Jason Stein Thanks to our Opinion editor, Johnathan Appel. Congrats!

Devyn, It is hard to believe that four years ago we drove 1,400 miles and left one brave young woman off at college.

Watching you embrace your collegiate experience with zeal, curiosity, humor and patience has made us one proud Mom and Pop! Congratulations Sweets!

Commencement Greeting for Darienne Madlala We are so proud of your accomplishments at Amherst! Your hard work has finally paid off.

We know that you will go on to do exciting things with your life.

Congratulations! Your loving family

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 19

Senior Profile | Rachael Abernethy

A Caring Listener Finds Joy in Connections Rachael Abernethy has defined herself outside of the typical student-athlete construct in her willingness and enthusiasm for meeting and caring for new people.

—Julia Turner ’19 “You have a girl crush,” my teammates responded, after I finally stopped raving about the hour I spent interviewing Rachael Abernethy at breakfast.

I opened my mouth to protest, but further consideration resulted in unabashed agreement. I was starstruck. Abernethy was everything I, as an incoming first-year, imagined an Amherst student would be. We met for a crowded 9 a.m. Val breakfast, but even amongst the gossip, debate, and chatter, Abernethy made me feel as though I was the only person in the room.

So yes, maybe I do have a “girl crush,” as my teammates jokingly told me. But then, according to fellow senior and friend Sasha Burshteyn, everyone does: “it’s no exaggeration to say that everyone who meets her falls at least a little in love with her.”

Stepping Out Comfort Zone

of

her

A San Diego, California native, Abernethy had always loved the idea of traveling across the country for college. At first, she resisted the idea of Amherst, trying to branch out from familial ties to the college, but she couldn’t stay away for long.

Smiling at the memory, Abernethy reminisced about the first time she stepped on campus, realizing that she “could see [myself] reading under the trees and talking to people as they passed by.” She was sold almost immediately.

Before she knew it, Abernethy was waltzing through her first year.

She recalled one of her favorite memories as a surprise dance class with her first-year seminar classmates led by Professor Christian Ro-

gowski of the German department in the basement of Newport. From the very beginning, Abernethy said she worked to shape her Amherst experience to be “way out of [her] comfort zone,” and with high risk came high reward.

Like so many incoming firstyears, Abernethy was set the conventional professions, “I came into Amherst thinking I was going to be a lawyer, [and] I remember there was a solid week where I thought I’d be a doctor,” she told me.

Being the passionate person that she is, however, Abernethy soon realized that these were not the concepts, subjects or classes that truly grabbed at her attention and hunger for personal connections through narrative.

Finding Black Studies Abernethy spoke extensively about her initial reluctance to commit to the black studies major. “I thought people would look down upon me for studying something that I should know everything about,” she said.

Her passion for the subject and for representing marginalized voices soon overtook this concern, however, and she realized that the major incorporated so many unique aspects of the liberal arts education. She credits many of her realizations to her time studying abroad in Cuba during the spring of her junior year.

Abernethy spoke excitedly about her experiences in Cuba — discussing the ways in whih race is defined differently in Cuba than it is in the U.S. In Cuba, she discovered “race” often has more to do with education and social status than the color of your skin and that these categories

we form are more often than not, completely arbitrary.

The experience, Abernethy said, helped her realize “that it’s really about listening to someone’s story.”

A Love for Stories Narratives and storytelling stood out as a theme throughout Abernethy’s discussion of her passions and her time at Amherst. She has been a resident counselor two out of her four years at Amherst in addition to one summer on campus, and cites it as one of her most meaningful activities.

“It’s a privilege and really humbling to have students come to you for great moments in life or sad moments in life,” Abernethy said.

“They feel like they can trust you and that maybe you know something that can help them.”

She loves to hear the stories of her residents and loves working with first-years, a byproduct of her genuine compassion for others. This compassion is manifested in her other involvements around campus, which include the Professions in Education group, a cohort of students that meet to discuss educational policy, and the Women of Color Forum, an event for students and alumni that Abernethy took over organizing her sophomore year.

Inspired to Teach Abernethy will take this passion beyond Amherst as an English teacher at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts through the University of Pennsylvania fellowship program.

She will spend two years at the elite boarding school, living in the dorms serving as a residence counselor, En-

“She’s a force to be reckoned with, and I have no doubt that she will continue to change the lives of others,” said Megan Kim ’16 on the impact Abernethy will make beyond Amherst.

20 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Photos courtesy of Rachael Abernathy ’16

Abernethy will continue exploring her passion for education and connecting with others at the Northfield Mount Hermon School. glish teacher and soccer coach, while simultaneously working towards her Bachelors of Science and Education.

Abernethy said she is excited to work with high school students “because [she is] interested in encouraging students to complicate their previous assumptions and understand in an effort to give space and attention to multiple perspectives and opinions.”

Her motivation and passion for teaching stems from many of her qualities, but above all she cites the desire to be “the teacher, [she] needed most in high school, which she describes as, “someone to challenge, comfort, listen, respect, and humble students; someone they can look up to and who would offer support in becoming the best, most authentic version of [themselves].”

Abernethy also attributes some of the inspiration of her love for teaching to the professors she has encountered while at Amherst. When I asked her if there were any professors that stood out for her from her four years here, she laughed and her eyes brightened. Looking at me sheepishly she said, “okay are you ready, this is a big list.”

She went on to describe men and women from all walks of life, all departments, and all types of classes.

Professor Rogowski was again the first that came to mind, as her firstyear seminar professor he was the first person to encourage her to think abstractly.

Abernethy spoke next about Professor Aneeka Henderson and how she helped inspire the idea of creative resilience when it came to the writing of Abernethy’s thesis; an exploration of the narratives of three black women, titled “We Are Here But Where Does the Eye Belong: The Struggle for Self Definition and Liberation in Three Black Women’s Life Stories.” She also spoke passionately about professors Dubrinski, Brooks and O’Connell. This portion of the interview lasted longer than any other question I asked; yet another testament to Abernethy’s passion for learning and the people around her.

A Balancing Act

There is no doubt that Abernethy has been a force in every aspect of her life at Amherst for the last four years. Coming into the interview, however, I knew Rachael as a soccer player. So imagine my surprise when it took us 16 minutes before the word “athletics” was mentioned.

Abernethy spoke fondly about the sport, but as I’ve come to expect from such a bighearted individual, her love of it truly stems from the people around her on the field. The team’s fourth leading goal scorer described her team as a family, and said proudly that the “supportive, positive and family oriented” culture that this year’s seniors have brought back to the program, is the greatest legacy that they leave behind.

“You can be a student, you can be an athlete, you can be a friend to other people,” Abernethy told me in response to my questioning the balancing act of being a student-athlete. She described the pull of being a young student and making friends only inside your team or the athletics world. The “social privilege” that comes with being a student athlete is one that she has been learning to both respect and to juggle since the moment she arrived on campus.

Now, she said, she is comfortable with her relationships within and outside of the team, and that having and maintaining both is the key to having a fulfilling experience at Amherst and beyond.

Looking back at her time at Amherst, Abernethy shook her head, “I don’t have any regrets, to be completely honest,” she said with a smile. “Any mistakes I’ve made, any successes I’ve had have really shaped the woman I have become.”

This is a woman who has undoubtedly made an impact on the Amherst community, who has redefined the idea of a student-athlete, and who has, in the words of one of her closest friends and teammates, Megan Kim ’16, “[touched] the hearts of her residents, her teammates, her coaches, her peers and faculty. She’s a force to be reckoned with, and I have no doubt that she will continue to change the lives of others,” Kim said. I can’t help but agree.

Senior Profile | Tomi Williams

AAS President Leaves Long-Lasting Legacy President of the AAS and his own nonprofit organization, Tomi Williams uses his background, charisma and penchant for conversation to connect with his community.

— Drew Kiley ’18 Born in the United Kingdom to Nigerian parents but raised in the United States, Tomi Williams was forced to learn how to make himself at home in any environment. At Amherst, this adaptability led to a successful political career for the two-term Association of Amherst Students president.

“An Overconfident Little Kid” “I had the luxury when I was younger of being oblivious,” Williams said. At a young age, Williams’ family moved from England to Ann Arbor before moving again to the Baltimore area. Williams found that he frequently didn’t know how to operate within the norms of the new place, so he learned to find the universal commonalities in his surroundings.

For the young Williams, one of those universals was humor. “I was kinda the class clown when I was younger,” he said. Williams described himself as an “overconfident little kid” with “a pretty strong British accent.” Other members of the community were taken aback by his distinctive confidence.

Williams’ family helped him forge his way forward in a new place. “When you go to a different place and you have to take kids with you, that’s scary,” he said. At first, Williams’ parents kept him and his older brother, Tunji, close.

Tunji served as a role model for Williams and as a sort of guinea pig for their parents.

Going through it with Tunji, Williams’ parents learned how to operate in their new situation. “My parents were a little bit more relaxed with me. I think [Tunji] is still perturbed by that,” he said. Williams attributed many of his successes to the example of his brother. From Tunji, Williams found his love of soccer and saw an example of how to apply for college and balance extracurricular activities and schoolwork.

At the beginning of high school, Williams focused on soccer, playing varsity all four years. However, he soon cultivated interests in politics and the law that would become hallmarks of his college life. His first experience as

president of his first-year high school class, however, was surprisingly negative. “I absolutely hated it,” he said. “I thought we would be doing more policy stuff and helping kids in the school, but our main objective was to plan a float for the Fourth of July parade.”

Still, Williams sought ways to stay involved in politics.

Williams’ passion for representing and helping his community was evident from a young age. He created a Young Democrats club at his high school, which had a two-year speaker series and volunteered for campaigns around the country. He then won a race to serve as the student member of the board of education for Howard County (the county where Williams lived) his senior year. “I was working on substantive stuff, policy that had an effect on students,” he said.

Tom and Jerry Williams entered Amherst with an ambivalent relationship to school. “I always had a Tom and Jerry relationship with my teachers,” he said. “How could I convince the teacher I’ve done enough to do well without really doing it?” Williams said it took him time to adjust to the different style of learning at Amherst. He said office hours, debating with professors and talking questions over with them set the educational experience here apart.

Williams’ passion for politics and the law stayed with him in college. Entering Amherst, he knew that he wanted to become a political science major.

When he entered, Williams said he was focused on “the here and now, things you can touch.” However, Amherst’s political science department and various other classes have encouraged him to not just focus on certain laws but also on abstract concepts and bigger pictures.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more interested in political philosophy, the things that are foundational amongst all human societies. Once you understand that, you can put any template on top of it and find how things go back to your Hegels, your Kants, as opposed to limiting yourself only to

particular policies at particular times,” Williams said.

Aside from academics, varsity soccer played a key role in Williams’ transition to Amherst. Academically, Amherst challenged him to a level he had never seen before, and daily practice added an additional burden.

However, Williams found some of his most important mentors on the team.

“While soccer was taking a lot of my time, I was learning tricks and study resources that I wouldn’t have found if I was on my own,” he said. Older teammates advised Williams on office hours, professors to take and to avoid early in his college career and tips on managing time.

“Yes Man” While Williams grew close to his teammates, the older members of the team encouraged him to branch out.

Williams and two of his teammates responded with a weeklong “Yes Man” pact. Each Wednesday during their first year, Williams watched a movie with teammates Greg Singer ’16 and Forest Sisk ’17 in a different common room on campus. They watched “Yes Man” one week, a movie in which the negative main protagonist decides to change his life by saying yes to everything he encounters.

Williams decided to try adopting this approach: That week, he received an email about writing a weekly column for Her Campus about international students, and he said yes. “It was a great experience.” Williams said.

“And it lasted significantly longer than the weeklong Yes Man pact.”

Williams also became closer to friends outside of the soccer team. “I thought I had my friends, the soccer guys,” he said. However, he found a special relationship with his roommate, Nasir Albashir ’16, and with floormate Doyle Judge ’16. Williams enjoyed going out at night, but he found himself staying in more often second semester and talking to Albashir. “A lot of times when you’re out it’s cool to do things that contradict your moral sensibilities,” Williams said. In contrast, he felt that he could be his “best self ” with Al-

Williams’ political involvement included an internship with U.S. Senator Barbara Milulski in the summer of 2015, as well as founding Hands on Works, a nonprofit.

Photos courtesy of Tomi Williams ‘16

Williams’ interest in politics began in high school as president and then as a student member of the board of education. bashir and Judge.

To Albashir, this is simply attributable to Williams’ outgoing and welcoming personality. “Tomi’s the only guy who literally talks to everyone on the way home,” Albashir said. “You go to Val and then you come back and he makes a point to have a decent conversation with anybody who says hi.”

After his sophomore season, Williams decided to quit the soccer team.

“I loved it as much as my other interests, if not more, but it definitely had the least of a future for me,” he said.

Williams has remained close to the team, but the extra time has enabled him to explore other activities at Amherst.

“I Lost Horribly” Williams entered the AAS the second semester of his first year at Amherst. Over winter break, students received an email that the Judiciary Council chair had gone abroad. Still trying to diversify his experience at Amherst, Williams decided to run.

“It was essentially the chief justice of the Supreme Court for the AAS, so of course I should run for it with no knowledge of the AAS constitution,” he joked. But Williams pointed to experiences from high school in serving as student member of the board of education and his experience with a nonfor-profit to underline his credentials.

Williams served as Judiciary Council chair for two years and then decided to run for AAS president. He fared poorly in the initial election. “I lost horribly; there were four of us running and I came in dead last,” he said. “I avoided the elections tab on the Amherst College webpage.” But after a controversy ensued over one candidate’s campaign sending, the election results were voided. A new election was held in the fall, and Williams won.

Williams recognized that he entered the presidency at a time when much of the Amherst community did not trust the AAS. His initiatives as president aimed to improve communication between the school’s various entities, from the board of trustees to the typical Amherst student. Williams created the position of communications director within the AAS and worked with the administration to make the disciplinary process clearer for stu-

dents. He also worked with the board of trustees to get a recent graduate on it, an initiative to which the board will vote on shortly, and led the Branches project.

“Hopefully we’ve put the next couple of generations in a position where they can regain the trust of the students and implement larger changes,” Williams said. The most striking part of his presidency is not just his concern for improving Amherst during his time here, but also his investment in making the college better in the long term.

Hands on Works While handling the demands of schoolwork, extracurricular activities and the presidency, Williams has also found time to grow his own nonprofit, Hands on Works.

As a senior in high school, Williams began Hands on Works in order to educate members of the Baltimore community, especially high school students, about entering the work world. He recognized the importance of seeing role models in the professional world within his family.

“I knew that someone who looks like me, in fact someone with the same blood running through their veins, could become a doctor, like my dad, or go to law school, like my brother did,” Williams said. He saw that this realization was not possible for many members of the Baltimore community.

Hands on Works has an ongoing speaker series in which students can interact with members of the professional community, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings. The nonprofit also helps members of the Baltimore community in writing résumés and learning how to network through various workshops. Finally, Hands on Works runs a three-year program for aspiring high school lawyers in order to teach them not just how to enter the work world but how to engage with the law as it is now.

Stir Fry Williams will continue his political science education next year, pursuing a law degree at Columbia University.

His continued curiosity applies to all facets of his life. When I asked him about any regrets from his time at Amherst, he said, “I wish I had found stir

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 21

Senior Profile | Becky Danning

A Math Whiz Studying Human Connection The Sabrinas star became famous on campus for setting up students on blind dates — just one of the many ways she has helped her peers forge more meaningful bonds.

—Julia Pretsfelder ’18 A Wise and Caring Voice Becky Danning loves people, and people love Becky Danning. That sentence may sound rather trite, but it truly describes Danning’s relationship with the world around her.

When I tell my friends that I’m writing a profile on Danning, they ooh and ah in a way that would make her incredibly uncomfortable. But these reactions make plenty of sense when you observe Danning, whether she’s surrounded by friends on the first floor of Frost or inspiring an awed silence while singing at Coffee House or a Sabrinas concert.

Danning is one of the most down-to-earth people I have ever met. I first spoke to her about writing this profile after overhearing her dryly talking about how she thinks she dresses like a child in jean shorts and hiking boots. While her kindness, intelligence and wisdom make her far from childlike.

When I interviewed her, Danning asked me multiple times why she was even chosen to be interviewed. I replied that both the math and music departments recommended her.

When I told her about past profiles I wrote for The Student, she said, “I’m not as cool as them!” What she doesn’t realize is that people will be saying the same thing about her in the future.

Amherst’s Surprises Aside from her deeply genuine modesty, Danning clearly cares and thinks critically about how people relate to one another. She came to Amherst in part for something different from her hippie high school in Brookline, Massachusetts. She said she was pleasantly surprised when the school was less preppy than she expected. Even so, when she first got to the college, it bothered her

that there were so many people who knew exactly where they fit in — on sports teams, for instance — or knew exactly what they wanted to do. In her senior year, it seems like Danning thrives on working outside of groups and connecting with people as individuals.

Her favorite thing about Amherst is her peers. She appreciates the music scene at Amherst because its broadness brings people from different walks of life together. She has also worked to connect people from a range of groups. Even while she was working on a math thesis this spring, Danning somehow found the time to start a blind date project for fun in which she set Amherst students up on dates at local coffee shops.

She did this based on her own observations about their compatibility and a short questionnaire. The questionnaire featured questions about rational decision-making and quirky multiple choice questions such as “If I were to travel from Massachusetts to California without restrictions on time or money, I would travel by: plane, train, bicycle or car.”

She did not necessarily intend to have these dates lead to relationships, although this did happen in at least one case. Rather, she hoped to create opportunities for Amherst students to meet their peers one-onone.

“I see a lot of potential for friendship and connection in the drunken bathroom conversations you may have on a Saturday night, and one of my dreams is to just talk with everyone for an hour. I enjoy when people talk about themselves,” she said.

In tune with her receptiveness to other people, she asked me to have someone who does not know her very well offer observations about her as a reference for this article. But of course those close to her also had

glowing things to say.

Individuals and Networks Danning has an innate sensitivity to understanding how people connect, and further studied group dynamics in her math thesis titled, “Measuring Centrality in Undirected Value Networks.” One of her goals for the thesis was to predict people’s behavior in a social network with her background in math and psychology research. Over the course of the year, she studied how real life social networks function by using an algorithm program she wrote in Python to find people with the strongest networking abilities.

She wanted to extend this beyond a binary study of social networks like those on social media, where network analysis simply looks at whether or not people are friends.

A key part to her study was looking at communication among different members of a group. “You only have one friend in that network, and that person decides to stop talking to you — then all of the sudden you have no more access to that network,” Danning said. “The person who has the ability to cut you off has a lot of social influence in that way.”

Her study of the delicate workings of friendship makes plenty of sense within the small, tightly-knit fabric of Amherst. Danning was one of few STEM majors who designed her own thesis instead of conducting research with a professor, which forced her to be more creative. She lamented the fact that while the math department largely has gender parity in its classes and majors, observably fewer women in the department write theses.

Her decision to use math in a socially relevant and accessible way attests to many of Danning’s so-

Photos courtesy of Becky Danning ’16

“It’s a little embarrassing that my senior math thesis is that accessible,” Danning joked. “But I like that it has real-world applications.” cial and academic tendencies. She thought she was done with math after high school AP Calculus stress.

Yet, she was pleasantly surprised and inspired after finding that it could apply to the real world in a practical way after taking Linear Algebra with Applications with Professor Tanya Leise.

“What I really like about my thesis is the extent to which it’s accessible to people who aren’t math majors,” Danning said. “It’s a little embarrassing that my senior math thesis is that accessible, but I really like that it has real-world applications.”

Danning is extraordinary in her ability to connect what she has gained from her education to support other people. She has a distinctive intelligence in how she sees the potential for a continuum across academic and social environments.

It is almost too perfect that after graduation, she will be doing policy-oriented data analysis dedicated to improving public wellbeing at a company called Mathematica in Washington, D.C. Professor Harris Daniels of the math department, remembered each class Danning has taken with him and praised her intellectual and emotional maturity. “Throughout every course that I taught Becky she has shown me that she is capable of constantly performing at the highest level regardless of the challenges she faces,” Daniels said. “From everything that I have seen from Becky over the past three years, I am certain that she is destined for great things.”

Energizing Leadership and Friendship

“She is the kind of person you want around during a crisis, a celebration and a boring, rainy day,” said Karla Rondon ’18 on Danning’s distinct ability to connect with others.

22 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

It is inspiring to find a senior who does not feel at least somewhat jaded about the Amherst community.

When asked for a piece of advice she’d give to underclassmen, she said, “Commit to things and try being less ironic.” Danning notes that

in her first two years, she befriended many older students who were fairly checked out from the campus, before she went abroad to the Netherlands.

Wearing her Maastricht University sweatshirt during our interview, she explained how formative study abroad was for her. It was freeing to be in a place with fleeting relationships, where she did not have to think long-term as she did at a small school like Amherst. “I believe in cutting things off while they’re good instead of letting them die,” she said.

These experiences revitalized her. When she came back, she committed to enjoying her community more. While she does remember each song she has performed, one of her proudest moments at Amherst was making an intramural soccer team for many people who had never played soccer before. The group dramatically improved their soccer skills and even organized a formal event.

In Danning’s classic humble fashion, she asked if one of the “action shot” photos printed in this profile could be a group photo of the team.

When I asked if anything has steadily grown on her nerves over the years here, she struggled to find her main flaw with the college, saying, “I’m an optimist.” Ultimately, she said that her main source of disillusionment has been noticing the inability to make progress in addressing issues of racial discrimination on campus.

Danning’s warmth and dedication resonate broadly. After leaving Amherst, she wants to remain committed to going out of her way to meet those around her with different views who do not conform to just one experience. As summarized by close friend and fellow Sabrina, Karla Rondon ’18, “Becky goes out of her way to make those around her — close friends or not — feel welcomed, comfortable and appreciated. She is the kind of person you want around during a crisis, a celebration and a boring, rainy day.”

Senior Profile | Annika Nygren

Mentor Fosters Community Across Boundaries Whether it be through her senior thesis or as a first-year resident counselor or as a member of the field hockey team Annika Nygren exudes compassion in all that she does.

—Elaine Jeon ’17 When describing Annika Nygren, no one could have done a more eloquent job than her friend Mercedes MacAlpine ’16, who presented Nygren as “pretty much sunshine in human form.”

“Her smile is radiant, her positivity and sincerity are contagious, her mind is always working, and her resting state is one of compassion and harmony,” MacAlpine said.

This captures exactly why Nygren has made a profound impact on the Amherst community. one doesn’t have to be a triple major extraordinaire, a class president or a musical prodigy to be remembered by their peers after graduation. Nygren will be remembered because she was the friend who always extended her compassionate hands to anyone who felt overwhelmed or insecure at least once on this campus that often exhausts us. And during her four years at Amherst, Nygren reminded her peers that despite the college’s flaws, there is still gratitude and love to be shown about the opportunities present at Amherst.

Bleeding Purple On and Off the Field Raised in Sudbury, Massachusetts, Nygren was searching for three main criteria in her dream college: an academic challenge, a great field hockey program and somewhere only a driving distance away.

Nygren knew that she wanted a small community, in which she had the opportunity to not only get to know the professors, but also have them get to know her on a personal level. “I was always a big nerd,” Nygren confessed with a laugh. “I loved school and always got along with teachers — not to say that I didn’t struggle at all.”

Once she learned of the open curriculum and the availability of discussion-based courses at Amherst, Nygren decided, “I’m applying early decision, and I’m going to have purple babies, and that’s that.”

Field hockey was another important facet of Nygren’s life that she wanted to continue pursuing in college. “I

always knew I wanted to play sports at college because I love being on a team — I love working towards a common goal together with other people,” Nygren said. She added that she needed sports as an outlet for the amount of energy she emits.

While field hockey played a significant role in her life, the field hockey team at Amherst was even more important in shaping her time at the college. Some of the biggest role models in her life were her teammates and she couldn’t imagine what her four years at Amherst would have been without the team.

“I’m biased, of course, but field hockey has always had a badass set of people,” Nygren said. “When we are in season, we are all 100 percent in it. But we also all do so much on this campus from environmental work to dancing to student government — someone is involved in something. I was so lucky to come into school with older role models who told me to get involved.”

Surely enough, Nygren channeled her teammates’ wisdom into action by staying involved on campus as best as she could. She served as the captain of the field hockey team during her senior year, as well as being an Athletic Team Engagement Leader. And in the past four years, Nygren was a resident counselor, a tour guide, a Mental Health Task Force Representative, a Mental Health and Wellness Team Member and an Amherst College Student Support Network facilitator. In addition to this illustrious list, she puts a cherry on top that is the most apparently related to her character: Nygren is the president of the Random Acts of Kindness Club.

“She jumped into Amherst with both feet from day one and never looked back,” her friend Cristian Navarro ’16 said. “She made the most of each day here through her extensive involvement in leadership across campus and the way she connected with those around her.”

Teaching at the Prison As a European studies major,

Nygren took complete advantage of the open curriculum and bolted full speed ahead to pursue her interests.

She attributes some of her most exciting ideas to courses taught by Professor Ilan Stavans, with whom she took six classes. Ultimately, her fascination with Stavans’ teaching led to her becoming a teaching assistant for his seminar course, “Shakespeare in Prison,” this spring.

Taught at the Hampshire County Jail, the class combined Amherst students and inmates in an intellectual pursuit of better understanding Shakespeare’s masterworks. The course met once a week, but as a TA, Nygren had the opportunity to also spend time with inmate students on Mondays and Fridays in order to tutor them one-onone.

It was “by far the coolest thing I’ve done at Amherst,” Nygren exclaimed.

“This semester, we haven’t lost a single student and almost every single student came to the TA sessions. This has been a beautiful culmination of my Amherst education because it reminds me of how lucky I am to go here and go to college in general.”

As a student interested in teaching, it was rewarding for Nygren to see her inmate students’ “excitement for school.” She felt sheer joy each time they were excited, even if just for a moment, and collaborated with one another. “Imagine reading Shakespeare without ‘No Fear Shakespeare’ or the Internet,” Nygren said. “And their papers have been wild. For them, writing five pages was hard at first and it took a lot of coaxing, brainstorming and editing and more editing. But in the end, they did it.” Her experience reaffirmed her passion for teaching.

Exploring Modern Romances in American Colleges As senior year rolled around, Nygren was committed to writing an honors thesis that would encompass her education and the interactions she had during her four years on campus.

After studying abroad in Madrid, she

In addition to her role on the field hockey team, Nygren followed teammates’ advice to involve herself in many facets of the Amherst culture and community.

Photos courtesy of Annika Nygren ’16

A European Studies major, Nygren’s thesis explored the nature of romance on college campuses. became more curious about romance and intimacy on college campuses, and eventually narrowed it down to an exploration of “hookup culture.”

“I was interested in this topic because hookup culture is obviously something that is so prevalent on this campus, and after talking to friends at other schools, it seemed pretty real everywhere,” Nygren said.

She was alarmed by hookup culture as a concept. She said she had been personally affected by this social phenomenon at a certain point in college and she felt it caused problems in areas she was passionate about: mental health education, community building and human interaction. Nygren didn’t intend for her thesis to be a solution for anyone, but rather a fight for a significant community change to happen on the Amherst campus and elsewhere in the United States.

“I was so tired of watching my predominantly female friends, who I see as passionate, driven, intelligent and successful people, put their worth into one person on some Saturday night and become shattered and baffled,” Nygren said.

After a year of academic exploration and many interviews, Nygren created a collection of short stories and essays that juxtaposed romances on U.S. college campuses with her experience studying abroad in Spain.

Her thesis touched upon a variety of topics including technology, parental relationships and influences, sexual assault and former relationships. And Nygren’s work allowed her to seize incredible opportunities like attending the United Nations conference on women and sustainable development.

“It was empowering to hear lawyers and activists and all these professionals fight for our sisters — it was really beautiful,” Nygren said.

Stavans found Nygren’s thesis to be a fascinating way of combining her education with modern-day problems that are so pertinent to our lives on campus. Stavans remarked that questions like “Is romance an endangered feeling? Has sex become the only objective? Do young people still experience the mystery associated with love?” were imperative aspects of Nygren’s work, and said, “Annika is courageous, passionate and inquisitive.

It is difficult to imagine anyone being more profoundly shaped by a liberal arts education. I have learned much from Annika.”

The Next Step Just as many other seniors typically are, Nygren was reluctant to think about her future, but one thing was clear to her. “I wasn’t ready to leave academia and the world of education,” she said.

So much of the work she has done on campus has all centered on the theme of how to give back to the community through teaching. Furthermore, Nygren spent last summer leading two bike tours of 14-17 year olds across Montana. These puzzle pieces finally came together and she decided that she’ll be moving to Boulder, Colorado to teach kindergarteners. She also plans on working towards a graduate degree in early childhood education.

“Talking to and working with people — that’s what I do best,” Nygren said. “It’s a good next step for me. I foresee myself working with young people for the rest of my life … It’s because I will always be 12 years old at heart.”

As Nygren wraps up her senior year, she has been reflecting on what she has seen, felt and experienced on campus. She recognized that she had an “epic freshman year” and that she “was reluctant to notice a lot of the stress amongst my peers.” When she became a resident counselor her sophomore year, she began to see a need for fundamental changes to create a more cohesive community at the college.

“It comes down to being willing to put your work aside to create the community,” Nygren said. “I miss sitting in the freshman common room until 3 a.m. and I feel like we sometimes lose that excitement to learn about each other after freshman year.”

But she said ultimately, being part of this community is still what pushed her through any struggle. One of her favorite recent moments at Amherst was attending the Amherst Soul showcase this year. The event presented student acts of spoken poetry, dancing and yo-yoing, among others, and she said watching these performances made her realize “now that is why I came here.”

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 23

Senior Profile | Chris Gow

Leading in Faith, On and Off the Football Field Chris Gow balanced athletics, academics and his faith with a confidence and grace that shines through in all aspects of his life.

—Jingwen Zhang ’18 A captain of the football team and a leader Amherst’s Christian Fellowship, Chris Gow fulfills his roles with a combination of purposeful direction and easy charisma. In addition to being a natural leader, he has sought academic challenges, double majoring in religion and mathematics. His dedication to playing passionately, learning deeply and serving wholeheartedly is clear to the many whom Gow has influenced in some way.

Team Player Gow comes from a family of seven in Houston, with three brothers and a sister. Faith was a regular part of Gow’s life starting from his childhood with church attendance, and he bonded with his father and brothers through playing football in their yard.

Starting from his elementary years, Gow’s favorite classes were math and science, owing in part to a close relationship he had with his science teacher. Those early experiences and exposures to “experiments” and “blowing stuff up” set him on a more quantitative academic path.

Another major part of his life, football, officially began in second grade. He then added lacrosse and basketball in middle school. He captained his high school’s football and lacrosse teams, and the experience of playing and winning as part of a team was integral to Gow’s social life growing up.

“I’ve always loved the team element,” Gow said. “That’s why I play sports — it’s for my teammates and the relationships that you can build.”

Gow knew about Amherst early in his application process because his father had attended Williams, and applied Early Decision to Amherst. Football and academics were both important factors to him when he decided upon Amherst. “The best combination of athletics and academics” here stood out to him.

He also liked the “thriving metrop-

olis of Amherst” — at least as compared to Williams.

A Two-Track Mind During the fall of his first year at Amherst, Gow explored a variety of departments and took a religion course that influenced his path, American Religious Thought: From Edwards to Emerson — and Beyond, taught by professor David Wills.

“I loved the small classroom vibe, and I was just going with what I liked: theology,” he said.

As more semesters passed, Gow explored Christian theology and biblical writings in close detail like never before, especially with religion professors Robert Doran and Susan Niditch, whom he described as “the most intellectually high-powered biblical scholars.”

Just as Gow found his professors to be formative for his religious studies on campus, they found Gow to be an important presence in their classes.

“His lively curiosity and thoughtful questions have often made me think in new ways about the Hebrew Bible, its cultural context and wider implications,” Niditch wrote about Gow. “Those are exciting class moments for the teacher.”

While religion interested Gow more than mathematics, he majored in mathematics to challenge himself.

He took math, a subject he had always enjoyed, during his first year.

His adviser, math professor Danielle Benedetto, encouraged him to take more courses, and Gow decided to pursue a math major after taking discrete math and linear algebra with professor Robert Benedetto, who described him as looking “like the stereotypical popular football star” but with a “math geek streak.”

“I assigned a problem which amounted to working out the odds of a given outcome in one of the simpler dice rolls that can arise in the board game RISK,” Benedetto said. “Chris apparently got interested in the problem and, just for kicks

and with no input from me, worked out the odds for a couple of more complicated dice rolls ... and that’s above and beyond his meticulous and organized work all through both of my classes.”

Gow said that because math was challenging, it brought together fellow students into study groups through which they benefited from teamwork.

“One of the things I love about math is that you have to go through every thought with the person who wrote the proof,” he said. “To do math with someone else is literally to think the same thoughts as them for a while. It builds strong friendships, oddly.”

A Passionate Captain While Gow grew as a mathematician and religious thinker, he also developed into a stronger player on the field.

As with most varsity athletes at Amherst, Gow had trained and practiced with the football team since before the first day of classes as a first-year student. Initially, he admitted, getting used to football was difficult for him, especially combined with the general struggles of academics and fitting in socially.

“I didn’t know anyone and I also wasn’t great friends with the guys on the team yet,” Gow said about his earliest days here. “It didn’t help that I didn’t do well in football — I think almost everyone who comes here and does sports was probably the best in their high school team, and then you come here and you’re not the best anymore — which happens academically, too.”

With time, the alien feelings faded and he cultivated closer relationships with his teammates during his sophomore year. He also took on a larger role within the team. The combination of deep friendships with his teammates and being acknowledged as an important contributor on the field restored his joy in playing football, which had been missing since he left high school. He

“I love my teammates and it was an honor to be a captain. It’s the thing that these guys care most about, so for them to elect you...it is a real honor” said Gow on the importance of leading on the field.

24 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Photos courtesy of Chris Gow ’16

Gow proposed to his fiancée, Katie Burdine, in the midst of his undefeated senior football campaign and will get married in July. continued to contribute more to the team throughout his junior year as a defensive player, and his hard work cumulated in being elected to the role of team captain for his senior year.

“I love my teammates and it was an honor to be a captain,” Gow said. “It’s the thing that these guys care the most about, so for them to elect you to be in charge of it is a real honor.”

The pressure to perform well was on for Gow’s final year at Amherst , since the football team had won every single game the previous year.

The squad went undefeated again in 2015, making them the first football team in the college’s history to campaign for two consecutive undefeated seasons. Gow atributed much of this success to the team’s skill and preparation, especially in the offseason.

Gow tore his ACL during the second-to-last game of the season, marking the end of his football career.

“It was harder not to be able to suit up with my teammates for the last game,” he said. “But it was awesome — it didn’t really matter that I couldn’t play, I was just excited that we could finish the season strong.”

Leading in Faith Off the field, Gow also leads Amherst Christian Fellowship, which was just a fledgling group of a few students when he arrived on campus. But, however small, the group provided “an outlet or a sense of community” for Gow, who “felt alone in a lot of ways” without it.

During his sophomore year, Gow watched the fellowship swell in size, due in large part to the incoming first-year class. It was then that he fostered close relationships within the community and began serving and guiding the fellowship more seriously. Similar to football, he assumed greater responsibilities within the fellowship in his junior year, which grew into a more defined leadership role. After football season ended during his senior year, he focused his energy on the fellowship, often leading Bible studies and weekly meetings.

Gow, who had been considering a career in finance, interned with JP Morgan in New York during the summer before his senior year.

“Wise people, they say, don’t turn that down,” he said, adding that he enjoyed the work and all that he learned about economics from it.

However, when offered a position with JP Morgan post-graduation, Gow decided not to accept it.

“For me, there’s nothing more joyful than to be serving God in Christian community,” he said.

“The end goal for me was always to be serving in ministry in a full-time capacity, so once I determined that, I decided that I was going to chase that passion full-time.”

Instead of choosing the more conventional route of working on Wall Street, Gow began to investigate careers in ministry and academic Christian theology.

New Beginnings During his time at Amherst, Gow has been unusually willing to push the boundaries of his intellectual comfort zone, embracing the challenge of taking difficult math classes and having his ideas challenged by his professors.

“I think that intellectual tension creates growth like nothing else does,” Gow said. “So that’s my biggest takeaway.”

In the coming fall semester, Gow will be returning to the Amherst campus, this time as an adviser.

He will be working for InterVarsity USA, a nationwide Christian campus ministry that has chapters in many colleges, each run by a staff member. He will be the staff member in charge of Amherst’s chapter for the next few years.

Joining him will be Katie Burdine, Gow’s fiancée, on staff for UMass Amherst. The two have been dating since middle school, were engaged in the fall two weeks after Amherst’s homecoming football game against Wesleyan and will marry in July.

“At the time when we got engaged, neither of us had a job,” Gow said. “We just decided, whatever it is, let’s just decide to be together, no matter what, and then we’ll do life.”

Senior Profile | Raizel DeWitt

Devoted Volunteer Shapes Her Own Narrative Raizel DeWitt’s remarkable kindness permeates everything she does, from her unusual interdisciplinary major to her work as Peer Advocate.

—Sarah Whelan ’17 When considering the time and care that California native Raizel DeWitt has invested in Amherst, it is clear that the community is lucky to have her. A keenly empathetic intellectual, DeWitt has distinguished herself not only on campus in a multitude of student groups — from the mindful to the musical — but also in the wider world. A dedicated volunteer at a camp for children living with illness, DeWitt has not only provided hours of care and love at camp, but has since turned her experience with children into an interdisciplinary thesis in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the nature of medical narrative. Talented, generous and fiercely dedicated, too much good cannot be said of DeWitt.

An Easy Transition from California to Amherst After spending her childhood and high school years in the community of Berkeley, California, DeWitt’s decision to come to Amherst was motivated by her desire to find another community that would allow for the same level of academic discourse. “I really love the east coast, and Amherst has provided me with such a great community that I don’t really feel the distance,” she said. “High school was kind of a lot like Amherst to be honest, a small, private, liberal arts type of high school and that led me to want something like that for college as well. This fits me.”

While many students are lucky enough to transition smoothly, few can boast about having such an enviable connection with their firstyear year roommate. Hitting it off

from the start, DeWitt and Emily Bai have been roommates ever since.

It is a testament to their bond that four years later, Bai said, “Living together allowed us the opportunity to reflect with each other on the classes we were taking, as well as each stage of our Amherst experience. Whenever we talked about our future, we would have our respective freak-out moments. But when it came to my turn, she would focus solely on me and ask me probing questions to help me think through what I was looking for in my future. She has taught me so much by modeling her generosity and kindness, but also her views and ideas always push me to think more and think differently about any topic.”

This ability to listen and offer genuine kindness has served her well beyond her dorm room. DeWitt arrived at Amherst the same semester that Angie Epifano’s account of her sexual assault caused an uproar on campus. DeWitt joined the Peer Advocates of Sexual Respect to “find a way to keep building the campus in a direction that would allow women to thrive and really foster a community of respect, and Peer Advocates was a group that was doing that.”

Hitting the High Notes, at Home and Abroad Armed with her curiosity and seemingly boundless warmth, DeWitt found another small community on campus to call home: the women’s chorus. DeWitt, a soprano, cited the family-like atmosphere as a big factor in easing her transition to Amherst, both socially and musically. In particular, DeWitt fondly refers to “Mal,”

or Mallorie Chernin, the choral director, as “kind of a mom, and that made a big difference for all of us.”

This experience of looking for community in a singing group was repeated during her junior year when she went abroad to Madrid. Living in a foreign country with only one semester of Spanish class under her belt, DeWitt found the search for human connection being far harder than she ever anticipated. The breakthrough came the day that she found and joined a local women’s singing group.

According to DeWitt, “It was really hard for me to walk into that room and be like ‘Hi, I’m a random American person who can’t speak to you, but I really like to sing so can I join you?’” We sang American show tunes, which was hilarious because there were all of these Spanish women trying to sing American show tunes, and I fit in because I got to coach them on how to pronounce all of the words.”

Creating Her Own Narrative Unsurprisingly, her ability to thrive outside of her comfort zone has allowed her to craft an academic experience all her own. Though she came in expecting to major in neuroscience, she found herself most inspired by Professor Sanborn’s class, Poe, Faulkner and the Gothic.

“It changed my life,” DeWitt said.

“I fell in love with Faulkner. I was like, this is mind-blowing. My high school had very good English, but that introduced me to college English and just really blew my mind. I real-

Photos courtesy of Raizel DeWitt ’16

DeWitt’s interest in healthcare, English and anthropology spurred her to create her own major. ly loved how he was able to draw out the depth in those writers, and I had never read a bunch of pieces from the same writer before. I really appreciated watching that kind of development.”

However, even as she fell in love with her English classes and let go of the neuroscience major, her interest in health remained strong. She recalls Five College Anthropology Professor Felicity Aulino’s class, Case Studies and Global Health: a Biosocial Perspective, in particular.

“That was an interesting class for me because I had never thought about how once you have the diagnosis, how do you actually get to the medication?” she said. “What does it mean to introduce a vaccine to a new culture? There were all of these different puzzles that I hadn’t thought about before. I feel like at Amherst that sometimes you get so liberal artsy that you don’t want to look at the gritty details of what it means on the ground, but that class did a good job of balancing theory and practical application.”

Instead of choosing between narrative development and healthcare, DeWitt crafted a major focusing on the intersection of these two interests.

Thus, her interdisciplinary major, Narrative, Culture and Illness, was born. Marrying English and anthropology, her major explores “how people interact with stories, and how the stories that we tell ourselves about our personal lives and about our cultural lives influence the way that we exist in the world.”

From Camp to Page

“In a world that tends to view things in black and white, Raizel sees all the shades of gray that make issues she cares about complex and nuanced,” said Julia Rothacker ‘16.

DeWitt’s thesis, a study into the narrative development of children with chronic illnesses, is a perfect marriage between her passion for storytelling and the realities of modern healthcare. However, her inspiration for her thesis has been years in the making: DeWitt spends her summers and weekends volunteering at The Painted Frog, a camp for children with chronic and life threatening illnesses.

“I wanted to be able to write about

[summer camp] in a thesis and understand what was happening there and why it was such a profound experience for me and for the campers,” DeWitt said. “So, I decided to write this thesis to say how camp changes a kid’s life story, so I got really into this idea of how we enact our narratives, live out our narratives, and whether the spaces where we exist limit or enable us to be our truest selves.”

Though the task of writing about children with major health concerns was emotionally taxing at times, her close friend and fellow senior, Julia Rothacker, gushed that DeWitt was perfectly suited for the job.

“Raizel takes intellectual risks and explores ideas comprehensively,” Rothacker said. “In a world that tends to view things in black and white, Raizel sees all the shades of gray that make issues she cares about complex and nuanced. Her thesis provides a holistic commentary on health and healing. She understands both the scientific and spiritual aspects of health and recovery.”

For her own part, DeWitt approaches the demands of her field by slowing down and participating in meditation with the Mindfulness Club.

“Working with healthcare is hard, grueling work, and you’re working with a lot of really painful experiences,” DeWitt said. “I think the intellectual processing part of things is really helpful, but our bodies hold so much stress and hold so much pressure that things like yoga and meditation and hiking help us get through those on a somatic level.”

Who Will She Help Next?

Hoping to move to DC with friends, DeWitt would like to expand upon her healthcare knowledge to pursue a career in medical social work or direct care, perhaps as a nurse practitioner.

Whatever she may choose to do, evidence from her time at Amherst suggests that she will not follow the prescribed, or even the easy path towards her future. Her path will be completely her own.

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 25

Senior Profile | Miu Suzuki

Dancer Discovers Passion for Diversity and Policy After fighting to make Amherst more supportive of its diverse student body, Suzuki will tackle a new challenge: reforming housing policy.

—Alida Mitau ’18 Miu Suzuki is well known among her peers for her impressive performances in Dance and Step at Amherst College (DASAC) and her strong commitment to building community and fighting for progressive causes on campus — both officially and unofficially. Her friends agree that she has an infectiously friendly, conscientious and insightful air about her. When asked to describe Suzuki, her close friend Andrew Lindsay ’16 said, “Sublimity connotes a type of majesty that exceeds representation. Miu Suzuki is sublime.”

Expanding Horizons Suzuki was born and raised in Las Vegas, but her entire family is from Japan and Japanese was her first language. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s and settled down in Las Vegas to raise Suzuki and her older brother. “It’s been interesting coming from a second-generation immigrant family,” Suzuki said. “It wasn’t until recently that I started realizing how Japanese my upbringing was and how culturally isolated I was to a certain degree, just because my parents never really assimilated and I think our home was a small piece of the island that they brought with them.”

She attended a large public high school in Las Vegas. “The only private schools in my area were Catholic, so I assumed that all private schools were religious,” she admitted, laughing.

“So, when I came to Amherst, I was shocked, thinking that there were so many religious people here. I think this is a funny example of how different my high school is from Amherst.”

Suzuki first visited Amherst during the Diversity Open House as a prospective student and started seriously considering it as her college choice after that. “The amazing people I met and the open curriculum really drew me in,” Suzuki said. And she has been able to explore her own interests since coming here, adding, “I haven’t done a single problem set since coming to Amherst!”

Amherst Involvements Once at Amherst, Suzuki became heavily involved in the campus community by becoming a tour guide, working for the theater and dance department and joining DASAC, Amherst Dance and Girls, Inc. during her first year. As a sophomore, she began going to the Black Student Union, which she considers to be a particularly formative aspect of her college experience. “There was no Asian affinity group back then and the BSU taught me the differences and similarities of experience that come with being a part of a different marginalized group,” Suzuki said. “I really learned to qualify when it is a good time to speak and when it is a good time to listen.”

She also became a Diversity Intern for the admissions office as a sophomore and now calls the admissions office her “second home” on campus.

Assistant dean of admission Will Cummins worked closely with Suzuki during her time there. “Miu’s commitment to the work of our office was impressive; she was not only a Diversity Intern, but also a tour guide and cared deeply about recruiting exceptional students of diverse backgrounds and perspectives,” he said.

Suzuki declared an English and political science double major after taking Narratives of Suffering with Professor Geoffrey Sanborn and other inspiring classes based on literary existentialism, as well as a particularly enlightening class on public policy with former Amherst professor Ashley Burns.

As a junior, she studied abroad in Prague, where she wholeheartedly embraced the opportunity to learn about a new culture. Studying film theory in Prague sparked her interest in film and media studies. “I think I’m more proficient in Czech than I am in Spanish now just because I talked to a lot of the locals,” Suzuki said. “I didn’t want a typical abroad experience and I wanted to say that I lived in a place where I otherwise would not have been able to go. And now I’m a pseudo FAMS major at Amherst.”

As a senior, she also served on the search committee for the new chief diversity officer, performed in a dance opera and co-chaired DASAC.

Role of Dance Suzuki has been dancing since the age of five. She started off doing gymnastics as a child and went on to participate in a traveling dance competition group. Before Amherst, she was mainly a ballet and tap dancer, and having been part of a ballet company for six years. The studio that she practiced in had many professional dancers, including some who performed in Broadway’s “The Lion King” and Cirque du Soliel.

Many of Suzuki’s friends from home have become professional dancers, but Suzuki had no intention of continuing to dance when she first arrived at Amherst. However, after meeting and becoming friends with members of DASAC, she auditioned and began enjoying the DASAC community and being able to perform again.

“That’s when I realized how much I can’t let dance go — it’s a different language,” Suzuki reflected. “Junior year of high school, I felt like the only way for me to release and express myself, in a certain way, was through dancing. I think that dancing is just an extension of the music that I listen to, and I’m transcribing the musicality of the songs onto my body. I think that losing that part of me would be losing a part of my identity.”

She has plans to continue dancing after college and hopes to take classes at the Broadway Dance Center in New York City.

Suzuki also connects her interest in film and media studies to her involvement with dance. She is a visual learner, so she sees the framing of a shot as “a beautiful, holistic orchestration.”

After taking a class with visiting Professor Andrew Johnston, Suzuki said she started getting emotionally invested in the cinematic image.

Finding Community Suzuki had a difficult time ac-

Photos courtesy of fMiu Suzuki ’16

Suzuki credits her Japanese upbringing with helping her understand her place in Amherst as a Diversity Intern. climating to Amherst because she realized that her International Baccalaureate program in high school didn’t necessarily prepare her well for reading and writing at Amherst. “I started problematizing myself because it seemed like everyone else was perfectly succeeding,” Suzuki said. “Then I started realizing that that wasn’t the case and that Amherst just demands a lot from its students.”

She began really loving Amherst when she felt a very tangible community forming around her, “and I think it’s ultimately about the community that you actively make,” she said. During her junior year, she moved to the Zü and felt isolated by a lack of community.

“I got really sad,” Suzuki said.

“But Professor Burns reached out to me after three weeks of class because she noticed that I was acting differently. I think that Professor Burns saved me from a really difficult semester, which actually turned to be one of the best semesters here. She was actively conscious and reached out to me. It was a very touching moment and I hope to do the same for others that are suffering here. I think the community is available and finding it is essential to succeeding here.”

Throughout the rest of her time at Amherst, Suzuki continued working to give back. Not only did Suzuki work as a Diversity Intern to create a more inclusive community, but she also expanded, integrated and strengthened DASAC and worked tirelessly on the small things, like reaching out to strangers. “I think the most harmful myth at Amherst is that everybody has it together, so reassuring people that we’re all a mess is really important,” Suzuki said.

“The resilience I’ve created at Amherst based on who supports me is what I will carry on with me into the rest of my life,” Suzuki said. She believes that her investment in relationships and communities, as well as the friendships she has developed over time, are what shaped Amherst to be the college experience she will always remember.

Activism “I’m transcribing the musicality of the songs onto my body. I think that losing that part of me would be losing part of my identity,” Suzuki said of her decision to continue dance after Amherst.

26 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Suzuki hopes that after she leaves Amherst, the college will do a better

job of supporting the needs of its diverse community.

“I have a lot of faith in the new chief diversity officer,” Suzuki said.

“It’s hard to say that you’re going to create a cultural shift and that things are going to change within a semester, but I think the new officer will be someone who is always talking to students and who is committed to integrating the faculty and staff.”

She explained that her job on the search committee was to think about whether the officer was going to stand up for the students who need it. “It all goes back to the Tony Marx administration that diversified the student body so quickly and didn’t allow the institution to change along with it,” Suzuki said. “But I personally think it’s important to bring those conversations outside of structured spaces in order to work towards genuine diversity.”

After college, Suzuki will be working as a paralegal in New York City with an Amherst alumnus. She hopes to go to law school or grad school in public policy. She became interested in public policy after taking a class called Politics of Place with Burns and learning about housing policy and gentrification. This made her want to work reforming housing policy.

“It comes down to how much is associated with where you’re born — like you can estimate what your income is going to be and your real estate taxes will be based off of this, by virtue of something that you really can’t control,” Suzuki said.

Suzuki’s interest in social activism also greatly influenced her desire to go into law. “I think there’s something so magnetic about law and its ability to very tangibly change the world. Even though the process might appear futile, you can still change a small piece of someone’s life — especially through public policy,” she said.

Idan Cohen, the director of the dance opera in which Suzuki starred this year, described Suzuki in a way that summarizes the energetic force behind the legacies she is leaving behind on campus. “Miu holds a rare combination of natural talent, intelligence, discipline and generosity,” Cohen said.

“It is not every day that you get to work with such a talented student, who is also eager to learn and listen.”

Senior Profile | Nico Pascual-Leone

A Soccer Standout Turns to His Next Goal Shining as a leader on the soccer field and working toward a career in medicine, Pascual-Leone pursues success with relentless determination.

—Jason Darell ’18 Nico Pascual-Leone has become somewhat of a campus celebrity over the past few years. Most people know him as one of the captains of Amherst’s national champion soccer team. In addition to this, Pascual-Leone is an unflappably kind resident counselor and a chemistry major who has long had his heart set on medical school. He has pursued his twin passions for medicine and soccer with a remarkable degree of focus, never losing his warm smile along the way.

The Spanish Influence While Pascual-Leone has lived the vast majority of his life in the United States, both of his parents are Spanish, and this European influence played a large part in his childhood development. He was born in Washington, D.C., during his parents’ four-month stay in the U.S. due to a job opportunity. When he was a couple months old, he and his parents moved back to Spain, where they stayed until his father was offered a permanent position in the Boston area. At three years old, Pascual-Leone had moved between continents twice. Even though he has no memory of these early years in Spain, Pascual-Leone has managed to visit his home country almost every summer, sustaining this influence on his life. For Pascual-Leone, Spain and the United States are intertwined in more than just a geographical sense; at home, his family speaks a hybrid of Spanish and English, using different languages for specific words and emotions. In addition, it is from his parents’ European influence that Pascual-Leone’s passion for soccer was born.

A Passion for the Game From a young age, soccer was an integral part of Pascual-Leone’s life. “Growing up, instead of sleeping with teddy bears, I slept with my soccer ball,” Pascual-Leone said.

Even though he tried many sports growing up, most notably tennis, he found himself gravitating exclusively toward soccer around the age of 10.

The sport soon took up most of the time he wasn’t spending in the classroom — he committed to his club and town team practices during the week and games on Saturdays and Sundays. In surviving this grueling schedule, Pascual-Leone emerged with an excellent work ethic and some lifelong friends.

“I stay in contact with around three or four of my old teammates, and consider them among my closest friends,” he said.

Since a young age, soccer also played a pivotal role in developing the bond between Pascual-Leone and his younger brother, Andres.

The three-year age difference between them did not prevent them from constantly trying to one-up each other. Even though they played on the same club team, they were in different age groups, and thus were frequently in different places on the same weekend.

“It made it extremely hard on my parents because they’d have to split up every weekend to see each of us play,” he said.

Beyond the Pitch In addition to influencing their son’s athletic aspirations, Pascual-Leone’s parents played a crucial role in shaping his academic interests. His

father is a physician-scientist, while his mother is a nurse. His parents didn’t push him toward pursuing medicine, but it’s unsurprising that Pascual-Leone found himself gravitating toward the field anyway.

“Growing up, I just found myself liking the sciences more than the other subjects,” Pascual-Leone said.

Many members of his extended family are physicians as well. “A lot of my family, and not just my parents, have supported me in pursuing the sciences,” he added.

Carrying on this tradition, Pascual-Leone planned on pursuing medical school even before coming to Amherst.

When the time came for Pascual-Leone to think about his college decision, his priorities were clear. “I knew I wanted to play soccer and I knew I wanted a good academic experience,” he said. After narrowing his options down to three choices, Pascual-Leone visited Amherst and found that “there was just something about it; I could just see myself fitting in here.”

Beyond the sense of belonging that Pascual-Leone immediately felt upon his visit, he also chose Amherst because he wanted the opportunity to have an impact on the community that extended beyond his on-field contributions. “Nico was recruited

by DI schools — he’s a DI soccer player for sure — but he came here because he wanted to be known as a student, as a member of the community,” Amherst soccer coach Justin Serpone said.

Pascual-Leone actively branched out of his athletic role on campus by seeking ways in which he could stay involved in the greater college com-

Captain and leading scorer Pascual-Leone netted the game-winning goal in double overtime against Trinity to earn Amherst a Final Four berth en route to the team’s national championship.

Photos courtesy of Nico Pascual-Leone ’16

Pascual-Leone has known since childhood that he wanted to pursue a career in medicine. munity. When the application to be a resident counselor opened during Pascual-Leone’s first year, it was pretty much a given that he would apply. “During my first year, I would frequently take care of my friends, and found it really rewarding to do that,” he said.

Driving his desire to care for others, Pascual-Leone also felt that there was much to gain from interacting with the extremely diverse group of people that make up the RCs. “When you’re on a sports team you find that you’re in a bubble and you take it for granted,” Pascual-Leone explained. “If you can get out of that bubble, you find that lots of really cool people that you wouldn’t have met otherwise.” As the RC of Cohan, Stone and finally King Dormitory, Pascual-Leone has succeeded in creating communities in dorms that would otherwise lack them.

Breakthrough When Pascual-Leone arrived on the soccer team his first-year fall, it was very senior-heavy, and thus he didn’t have a chance to take the leadership role that he was used to during his prior high school and club experiences. As soon as the senior class graduated, however, Pascual-Leone almost seamlessly became a leader both on and off the field. Possessing much more than just immense playing ability, Pascual-Leone has the natural disposition and abilities necessary to be an effective captain.

“I think it’d be easy to say that his on field ability gives him a leadership role, but I think given the personality and character that he has, even if he hadn’t played a minute for us, he would’ve been a leader anyway,” Serpone said. Most know Pascual-Leone as an easy-going and likable guy, but he also holds himself and his teammates accountable to the highest standards.

There is little doubt that Pascual-Leone’s experiences as an RC and as a captain have complemented each other, resulting in his phenomenal success in shaping the soccer team’s positive and supportive team culture. In particular, his abilities manifested themselves when

welcoming new players into the team. “Even though he always erred towards taking care of the younger guys, he also expected a lot from them,” Serpone said.

Pascual-Leone’s on-field abilities showed on the biggest stage possible, when he scored the game-winning goal in double overtime against Trinity in the Elite 8 this past season.

Serpone described it as “one of the biggest goals that’s been scored in Amherst soccer history.” After three years of suffering heartbreaking losses in the NCAA tournament, the men’s soccer team was finally able to break through and win a national championship, with no small help from their captain and leading goal scorer.

Senior Year Reflecting on his four years at Amherst, Pascual-Leone is happy about all that he has accomplished, but he’s most proud of the way in which he’s developed and how he’s been able to impact others in the community. “I’ve had many mentors: coaches, captains, chemistry professors, chemistry graduates, and they’ve all played their part in showing me how to act,” Pascual-Leone said. “If you succeed, people respect you and like you and want to be around you.”

By virtue of his glowing reputation on campus, Pascual-Leone has undoubtedly succeeded in creating a long-lasting legacy at Amherst. Serpone said he considers Pascual-Leone to be one of his close friends, and will always value the opportunity he had to coach Pascual-Leone for the past four years. “Nico is way more than just a great soccer player — he’s the type of person that makes Amherst special,” Serpone said.

Pascual-Leone will be remembered at Amherst not only for playing a critical role in bringing a Division III national championship to the soccer team, but also for the way he has shaped the Amherst community through his unrelenting efforts to improve the lives of those around him. Following graduation, he hopes to play soccer in Spain while he prepares to apply for medical schools.

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 27

The Year in Sports

Photos courtesy of Amherst Ahletics

FALL SEASON Women’s Cross Country The women’s cross country team ran to second place at Little Threes, fourth at NESCAC championships and seventh at NCAA northeast regionals. Savanna Gornisiewicz ’17 and first-year Lizzie Lacy led the team on the season. Lacy impressed in her rookie season by winning the individual title at NESCACs with a time of 21:48. Lacy was the first rookie to win the conference since 2003. The first-year followed her win with a 21st-place finish (second on the team) in NCAA regionals. She then completed her season with a 73rd-place finish running as an individual at nationals. Gornisiewicz finished 12th at NESCACs, earning second team All-NESCAC honors, 18th at regionals, and 65th at nationals. The team also led eight NESCAC teams named All-Academic with a cumulative GPA of 3.58.

Men’s Cross Country Led by standout sophomore Mohamed Hussein, the men’s cross country team raced to second place finishes at Little Threes and NESCACs, a first place finish at ECACs, and finished their season ranked 10th nationally. Hussein won five individual titles on the season, including wins at both Little Threes and NESCACs. One of the top Division III performers in the country, the sophomore was named NESCAC and USTFCCCA runner of the week three times each, a new program record. Senior captain Dan Crowley rounded out his impressive career by earning First Team All-NESCAC honors and leading Amherst’s performance at nationals by finishing in 18th place. Raymond Meijer ’17 garnered second team

All-NESCAC honors, while brother Tucker Meijer ’19 was named NESCAC Rookie of the Year. Jeff Seelaus ’16, Craig Nelson ’18 and Kevin Connors ’17 formed the remainder of Amherst’s seven-man team, one of Amherst’s best in recent history.

ing at the ECAC Division III Championship to close out the fall portion of its schedule. The team used its course time in the fall to prep for their impending spring season, where they compete in the NESCAC tournament.

Women’s Golf

Field Hockey

The women’s golf team showed tremendous consistency in the fall, finishing four of their five tournaments in fourth place while claiming second at the Middlebury Invitational.

First-year Kate Weiss entered her first collegiate season and led Amherst in scoring at the NYU Invitational with an eighth-place finish and at the Mount Holyoke Invitational with a third place finish.

Senior captain Devyn Gardner then finished tied for first at the Middlebury Invitational, helping Amherst to a second place finish, their best of the season.

First-year Katie Rosenberg then led Amherst to a fourth-place finish at the Williams Fall Invitational with a second-place individual finish. The Invite also doubled as the inaugural NESCAC championship, in which Amherst finished third.

The purple and white then finished fourth at the Wellesley College Invitational behind 13th-place finishes from Rosenberg and Zoe Wong ’18.

Led by a talented group of upperclassmen, including Annie Turnbull ’16, Annika Nygren ’16, Emily Horowitz ’17 and Sara Culhane ’17 the Amherst field hockey team impressed with a 12-5 overall season, winning six of 10 against NESCAC teams and advancing to the semifinals of the NESCAC championship.

Culhane led the team in goals scored, with 15, while Nygren followed close behind with 13. Turnbull and Horowitz both garnered ECAC All-New England all-star accolades, Turnbull having started every game since her freshman year and Horowitz for her 103 saves, and five shutout games in goal. Horowitz’s .824 save percentage was ranked 19th in the nation among Division III goalies. The team impressed off the field as well, winning the ZAG/NFHCA All-Academic award for outstanding performances in the classroom.

Men’s Golf Amherst, which began its 201516 campaign 10th of 20 teams at the two-day Williams Fall Invitational, added a 16th place mark at the 32nd annual Duke Nelson Invitational hosted by Middlebury. Following the NESCAC qualifier, the purple and white powered to a sixth place show-

28 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

Football Amherst football continued to dominate over the course of its 2015 season, with another undefeated NESCAC run. Their perfect 8-0 season was marked by large margin victories, the closest game coming at the hands of Wesleyan, a 27-18 victory.

Standout players included a group of talented seniors including wide receiver and punter Jackson McGonagle who ranked second in the NESCAC

in touchdowns, fifth in the conference in yards per catch and ninth in yards with 484 on the season. In addition to his impressive receiving season, McGonagle was also voted to the second all-NESCAC second team as a punter.

Senior safety Jimmy Fairfield-Sonn also garnered postseason accolades, as he was named a division III AllAmerican for his 52 total tackles — 27 of them solo — 4 interceptions, 6 pass breakups, 2 blocked field goals and 2 defensive touchdowns. Rounding out the squad, senior offensive lineman Sam Hart was AFCA division III Coaches All-American Selection for his part in the offensive line that allowed Amherst to have the most effective rushing game in the NESCAC.KC Fussell ’15 followed his stellar sophomore season with a second place finish at the Little Three championships. Crowley was close behind in third, while Turissini and Reighard placed seventh and 14th, respectively.

These performances were not enough to push the Jeffs past the eventual champ, Williams.

Women’s Soccer For their third consecutive season, Amherst women’s soccer advanced to NCAA championship tournament play, earning an at-large bid to the tournament after a shocking loss to Middlebury in the first round of the NESCAC tournament. The women fought their way into the second round of the tournament, falling in penalty kicks to a talented Brandeis team. The season was highlighted by senior goalkeeper Holly Burwick, who raked in the accolades, including a Division III All-American award, a First Team NEWISA All-New England award, a First Team NSCAA

Scholar All-American honor, a First Team All-East Region accolade, a First Team All-NESCAC mention and a First Team ECAC New England All-Star recognition. On the offensive side, junior midfielder Emily Hester came up clutch for the team again and again, with five game winning goals on the season and three two-goal games, earning her a First Team All-NESCAC selection, a Second Team ECAC New England AllStar and First Team NSCAA All-New England Region praise. The women finished 11-3-3 on the year and are looking forward to another strong season in the fall.

Volleyball The Firedogs enjoyed a successful season, making a postseason NCAA tournament run that lasted two rounds before falling in five sets to a talented MIT squad. The team was led by a strong group of seniors as well as standout underclassmen.

Katie Warshaw was the crowd favorite, earning herself a first Team AllNESCAC selection and AVCA Honorable Mention All-American for her 527 digs — averaging 5.27 per set — 75 assists and 19 aces. Over four years the senior amassed 1,722 digs, 225 assists and 99 service aces. Junior Maggie Danner was also named second-team all-NESCAC with 261 kills, 3.0 kills/game and 37 blocks. The purple and white’s senior class of Ahern, Carter, Newby and Warshaw conclude their careers with an overall record of 78-29, including three consecutive 20-plus win seasons (2013, 2014, 2015); three straight NESCAC semifinal appearances (2013, 2014, 2015) and an NCAA championship tournament appearance.

all-conference honoree. The squad will lose five seniors next year, including Browne, and will look to rebuild for a strong 2016-2017 season.

Women’s Swimming and Diving The women’s swimming and diving team captured sixth place at nationals this season behind an incredible year for senior Emily Hyde. Hyde set a new NCAA Division III record and was named the national champion in the 200-yard breaststroke. Following this performance, she moved on to race to the national championship time in the 200-yard individual medley (2:01.15) during day one with a national runner-up finish in the 100yard breaststroke. At the NESCAC tournament, Hyde was named NESCAC swimmer of the meet and Four Year High Point swimmer; champion of the 100 and 200 breaststroke and 200 indvidual medley. The women’s squad placed eight other swimmers on all-NESCAC teams including Sarah Conklin ’16, Bridgette Kwong ’19, Stephanie Moriarty ’18, Zoe Pappas ’19, Destin Groff ’17, Katie Smith ’19, Livia Domenig ’19 and Dorit Song ’19. The rising sophomores and talented rising seniors look to continue their success next year amidst the loss of Hyde.

WINTER SEASON Men’s Basketball Amherst men’s basketball made their 18th NCAA championship appearance this season with a Final Four run, bringing their all time NCAA postseason record to 41-17. The squad, led by D3hoops All-Region selection Connor Green, was 26-6 overall this season, beating Husson, SUNY Cortland, Babson and Tufts in their postseason run before falling to Benedictine University in the semifinals for their third Final Four appearance in the last four seasons.

The young team will feel the loss of Green, who averaged 14.8 points per game shooting 39.4 percent from the field and 6.4 rebounds per game. The senior graduates with1,739 career points, second all-time on the all-time leading scorers list.

Women’s Ice Hockey Women’s ice hockey, prepped with a talented team, was ready to make a deep NCAA postseason run before meeting eventual champion Plattsburgh State in the first round of the tournament. The women had a wildly successful season nonetheless, finishing 22-3-3 overall and going 13-1-2 in conference. Alex Toupal ’18 had a breakout sophomore season, being named a D3hockey.com All-American selection, the fifth post-season accolade for the Minnesota native. Toupal led the purple and white in all major offensive statistical categories, scoring 23 goals (fifth in the nation), including seven game-winning and three short-handed tallies, to go along with 16 helpers for 39 total points. Erin Martin concluded a fantastic career with Amherst hockey, adding Third Team All-Region East to her decorated career after she was named a Second Team AllNESCAC selection for the third consecutive season and a NCAA Division II/III NEHWA All-Star. The senior had three hat tricks, 22 goals (seventh in the nation) and 15 assists for 37 points during her senior season. In 104 career games, Martin has posted 94 points for the purple and white on 45 goals and 49 assists. Rounding out the standouts this year was junior Caitlyn Ryan, who adds a Second Team All-Region East honor to her impressive resume. A force on both sides of the ice, Ryan notched four goals and 14 assists while leading an Amherst defense that ranked eighth nationally in goals against average (1.43). Ten points and nine assists in league play placed her first among all NESCAC defenders.

Men’s Ice Hockey Last year’s NESCAC champs came up a game short this year after falling to Trinity 5-1 in the championship game of the NESCAC tournament. The squad struggled early in the season, posting an overall 11-12-4 record and a 7-8-3 conference record — failing to earn an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament based

off record alone. The team will lose a handful of seniors including their starting goalie Dave Cunningham who, although impressing in his first three seasons, was battling injury most of this year, which resulted in splitting time between the posts with sophomore Connor Girard. Luckily the young squad will return all three of their leading goal scorers in Thomas Lindstrom ’18, Phil Johansson ’19 and Will Vosejpka ’18.

Women’s Indoor Track and Field After opening with a tough result in Little Threes, the women’s track and field team recovered well to finish fourth at the Smith Invitational and third at the Springfield Invitational. The team placed 24th at Division III New England Championships and sent six athletes to ECAC Championships.

Senior captain Victoria Hensley led the purple and white for the season, setting a school record in the 400-meters at NEICAAA Championships (58.54) before improving her own record at ECAC Championships with a mark of 58.21.

Senior captain Betsy Black led Amherst’s efforts in the distance events with a season best of 18:22.46 in the 5,000 meters at ECACs. Abbey Asare-Bediako ’18 led Amherst in field events with a season best of 11.08 meters in the triple jump, while Leonie Rauls ’18 claimed fifth place in the 1,000-meter run at ECACs. The team loses key contributors Hensley and Black next year, but they return a strong team featuring Asare-Bediako, Rauls, Julia Asin ’19 and Danielle Griffin ’18.

Men’s Indoor Track and Field After second place finishes at Little Threes, the Smith Invitational and the Springfield College Invitational, the men’s indoor track team started championship season by finishing 12th at the Division III New England Championships.

The purple and white then placed 21st of 36 teams at NEICAAA Championships, which featured teams from NCAA Divisions I, II and III. Mohamed Hussein ’18 led Amherst’s performance by finishing first in the 5,000-meter run with a time of 14:33.95.

Two relay teams also earned points to highlight the meet for Amherst. The distance medley relay tandem of Jeff Seelaus ’16, Kristian Sogaard ’19, Brent Harrison ’19 and Kevin Connors ’18 earned eighth with a time of 10:05.63. The 4x800-meter team of Jesse Fajnzylber ’17, Vernon Espinoza ’19, Sogaard and Brent Harrison ’16 then crossed the line in a time of 7:41.89 to claim the eight place spot.

Hussein also competed in the 3,000-meter and 5,000-meter at the NCAA Division III Indoor Championships. The sophomore fin-

ished the 5,000 in seventh place with a mark of 14:30.43 to earn All-American honors.

Women’s Squash The women’s squash team impressed with an 11-6 overall record this season, finished second in the Walker Cup Finals to Bates in several tough matchups. Sophomore Kim Krayacich had a breakout season, spending the whole year at the number one spot and earning Second Team All-NESCAC recognition after posting a 6-10 overall mark against predominantly upperclassmen opponents. Firstyear Rachael Ang also had an impressive first season, tallying a 9-7 overall mark including six straight wins between Jan. 15 and Jan. 31.

Five of Ang’s nine victories this season came by way of a 3-0 triumph and she was named to the first-team allNESCAC squad for her performance.

The team dominated off the court as well, with seniors Khushy Aggarwal, Corri Johnson, Ericka Robertson and Taryn Clary being named College Squash Association Scholar Athletes, which indicates a junior or a senior with a 3.5 or higher cumulative GPA. Although graduating five seniors, the underclassmen-dominated squad looks to thrive next season.

Men’s Swimming and Diving The men’s swimming and diving team had an impressive season overall, placing fourth in the NESCAC tournament and 28th nationally. Jeff Anderson ’16 set a new school record (1:47.60) and finished as the national runner up in the 200-yard fly, earning him All-American honors for this race and for his seventh-place finish in the 400-yard individual medley. Asher Lichtig ’16 was NESCAC diver of the year as well as a Four Year High Point Diver, only the third Amherst diver to ever earn this distinction.

The team placed 11 swimmers and divers on the all-NESCAC teams, including Anderson, Reed Patterson ’17, Elijah Spiro ’18, Connor Haley ’17, Josh Chen ’19, Greg Han ’17, Matt Heise ’16 and Sam Spurrell ’18.

Men’s Squash Senior standout Noah Browne led the Amherst men’s squash team to a 7-10 overall finish this season.

Individually, Browne advanced to the quarterfinals of the Professional Squash Association World Tour Northern Open.

Browne, who played in the first spot all year for the purple and white, was named a First Team All-NESCAC selection for a fourth consecutive season. With this honor, he is one of just three league players to close out his collegiate career as a four-time

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 29

Photos courtesy of Amherst Athletics

SPRING SEASON Baseball Baseball started their season strong, winning all but one of their nine games in Florida.

They went on to win all but one of their series in the NESCAC West division, dropping only their series versus Wesleyan. This performance earned them a spot in the NESCAC championship tournament, where they were seeded second in the West division. The team dropped their first two games in the double elimination NESCAC tournament, and their 24-13 record was not enough to earn them an at-large bit to the NCAA tournament. The squad looks to improve next year, returning many of their key players including Ariel Kenney ’18, who led the team with a .359 batting average, Anthony Spina ’17 — who led the NESCAC with six homeruns as well as leading the team in on-base percentage with .444 — and Yanni Thanapoulos ’17, who led the NESCAC in runs batted in with 33 on the season. On the mound, they will return starting pitcher Jackson Volle ’17 who led the NESCAC with a 1.94 ERA over 10 appearances for a 6-1 overall record.

The Amherst offense was led by a stellar group of seniors, including captain Quinn Moroney ’16, who notched 101 points on 34 goals and a team-high 67 assists (his 3.63 helpers per game leads the country). Classmate and fellow captain Kane Haffey follows with a teambest 47 goals and 13 assists for 60 points.

Ryan Cassidy ’16 anchors a tough purple and white defense with 34 caused turnovers, while Amherst has been lucky enough to have seen two fantastic goalies between the pipes this season. Senior Thomas Gilligan split time with junior Cody Tranbarger, impressing with 55.8 and 52.9 save percentages, respectively.

The squad will lose an extremely talented senior class, but is looking to rebuild and take advantage of the young talent to make another postseason run next year.

Women’s Lacrosse

The men’s gold team rounded out their spring season by finishing third at the NECAC championship. Amherst opened its spring slate at the Hampton Inn Invitational hosted by the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and placed eighth, before securing second place at the Little III Championship against league foes Williams and Wesleyan. They earned a sixthplace finish at the Williams Spring Opener with a score of 159 from Danny Langa ’18, and 160 from first-year Jack Burlison. The young team will graduate only two seniors and looks to come back next year to dominate the NESCAC.

The Amherst women’s lacrosse team (13-4) earned an at-large berth to the NCAA Championship for a 12th time and its first since 2014 after narrowly missing the tournament last season. They are slated to play in the quarterfinal game Saturday, May 21 versus Gettysburg College at 2:30 p.m. at Middlebury after winning their second round NCAA tournament game against York College. Senior attackers and midfielders Rachel Passarelli and Mia Haughton who have scored 35 and 26 goals, respectively, lead the team. Haughton leads the squad with 51 points overall on 25 assists, and Passarelli is right behind, with 48. Senior goalkeeper Christy Forrest has spent 991:30 in goal this season, tallying 122 saves for a 52.4 percent save percentage.

The purple and white will battle Gettysburg this weekend to see if they extend their successful season to the NCAA semifinal round.

Women’s Golf

Men’s Outdoor Track and Field

Women’s golf impressed this year, concluding their season by finishing second at the Williams Spring Invitational, led by a third -place overall finish by sophomore Zoe Wong.

Other notable performances include their firstplace finish at the Jack Leaman Invitational, where they competed against Division I programs. Junior Jamie Gracie earned top individual honors for her five-under par-69 performance.

Three golfers earned all-NESCAC laurels when first-year Katie Rosenberg was named a first team selection, while senior co-captain Devyn Gardner and fellow first-year Kate Weiss were honored with second team awards.

The men’s outdoor track team continued their indoor season into a strong showing in the spring. They claimed top-10 finishes in several big meets, including Division III New England Championships, where they finished ninth out of a talented 31-team field, and NESCAC championships, where they finished sixth. The men are currently in the middle of ECAC championships at Westfield State University, a meet that spans over two days. At the end of the first day, the men are sitting at fifth place in a pool of 36 teams.

Standouts for the men’s team this season have included sophomore Mohamed Hussein, who recently raced to a first-place finish in the ECAC championships, cutting five full seconds off of his seeding time to claim first in a time of 14:30.04. An accomplished long distance and cross-country runner, Hussein also set a personal record at the Penn Relays in the 10,000-meter race with a time of 30:05.88. The men excelled in the distance events this season, as senior Jeff Seelaus stuck with Hussein all season, adding

Men’s Golf

Men’s Lacrosse Amherst men’s lacrosse had a successful season, posting an overall record of 14-5 on the season. The purple and white made a deep postseason run, falling only to St. Lawrence in the quarterfinals of the NCAA championship tournament after earning a coveted at-large bid to the postseason showdown.

30 | The Amherst Student | May 20, 2016

depth to the men’s 5,000-meter roster. Seelaus was also a strong competitor in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, setting several personal best times throughout the season and peaking at the NEICAAA championship race, where he finished with a personal best of 9:21.36 to finish third overall.

Women’s Outdoor Track and Field Amherst opened their season with a strong third place finish at the Amherst Invitational.

They continued to finish 10th at NESCAC Championships and 19th of 31 teams at Division III New England Championships.

Victoria Hensley ’16 led the purple and white with another record-breaking season. Racing in the 400 meters at Open New England Championships, Hensley set a new school record with a time of 57.39.

Amherst’s top performers for the season also included jumpers Abbey Asare-Bediako ’18 and Becki Golia ’18. Asare-Bediako jumped a personal best 11.55 meters in the triple jump at ECAC Championships, finishing the season in the top 25 nationally. In the high jump, Golia jumped a height of 1.63 meters at NESCAC championships to claim third place in the league.

For her personal best jump at NESCACs, Golia was also named to the All-NESCAC team.

Softball Amherst softball had a comeback season after narrowly missing the NESCAC tournament last year. The squad brought in six talented first-years and a rookie senior, all of whom helped strengthen the team and lead them to a third place NESCAC finish. Battling injuries all year, the team went 24-12 overall, 7-5 in conference, dropping just one NESCAC series, to Williams, and losing to Tufts twice in the NESCAC tournament. The young squad looks to come back strong and healthy next year, with three first-years garnering All-NESCAC selections.

Kyra Naftel held a .416 batting average and led the NESCAC in triples; Sammy Salustri maintained a .376 average and was voted NESCAC defensive player of the year. This was the first time in history that a first-year was awarded this honor. Salustri recorded just two errors this year for a 0.983 fielding percentage. Rounding out the group, right-handed pitcher Lorena Ukanwa kept a 2.59 ERA in 105.1 innings pitched for an 8-4 record; she led the conference in strikeouts (97) and strikeouts per game with 6.45.

Men’s Tennis The men’s tennis team, which has dominated the NESCAC with a 41-1 regular season record and three NESCAC titles in the past five years, struggled to replicate their recent success.

After going 8-2 during their spring break trip to California, the purple and white started

the season strong with dominating victories over NESCAC opponents Colby and Trinity. They dropped their next matchup with Tufts, 7-2, before defeating Bates and losing to Bowdoin.

Amherst then suffered three hard-fought defeats in a row, including narrow 5-4 losses to Little Three rivals Wesleyan and Williams. The team finished regular season play with a 15-9 record overall (3-5 NESCAC), entering the NESCAC tournament for the 16th consecutive season as the sixth seed.

The purple and white avenged their regular season defeat to third-seeded Williams in the first round, upsetting the Ephs to face second-seeded Bowdoin in the conference semifinals. They fell to Bowdoin, however, and did not receive an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. Amherst No. 1 singles Anton Zykov ’17 and No. 1 doubles pairing Aaron Revzin ’16 and Michael Solimano ’16 earned All-NESCAC first team honors.

Zykov compiled an 8-5 record (2-2 NESCAC) record playing from the first singles spot, while Revzin and Solimano went 18-11 on the year.

The team loses seven seniors this year, including key contributors Revzin, Solimano, Andrew Yaraghi and Ben Fife. However, Zykov and Zach Bessette ’19 return to lead the lineup next year, while Amherst looks to return to its recent dominance.

Women’s Tennis Entering the season coming off of a national semifinal appearance in 2015 and ranked fourth nationally, the women’s tennis team entered its 2016 season with high expectations. Facing some of the nation’s top Division III teams on their spring break trip to California, the purple and white struggled with consistency and returned with a 3-3 record.

Amherst hit its stride upon returning, however, winning seven straight matches, including victories over NESCAC rivals Colby, Bowdoin and Trinity. The purple and white then faced some of the conference’s and nation’s best to finish its season, losing to Williams and Middlebury but defeating Wesleyan and Tufts. The squad finished the regular season with a 14-7 record (5-2 NESCAC) and entered the conference tournament as the third seed. Vickie Ip ’18 and Jackie Calla ’17E garnered All-NESCAC second team honors for their performances from No. 2 and No. 3 singles in Amherst’s lineup, respectively.

After a narrow 5-4 win over Tufts in the first round of NESCACs, Amherst fell to Middlebury 5-4 in a tight semifinal matchup. Earning an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament, the purple and white dispatched SUNY Geneseo in the second round before defeating in-conference foe Wesleyan in the third round. They face Middlebury on Monday, May 23, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, seeking their second straight national semifinal appearance.

— Julia Turner ’19 and Drew Kiley ’18

Amazing Amherst Years

Friends

WE ARE SO PROUD OF YOU, “J”!

Love, Mom, Dad, and Sammy

CONGRATULATIONS REID!!!

We are so proud of you!

Lots and loads of love, Mom, Dad, Cole and Ivy

AWS & Leads RC LIFE

CONGRATULATIONS!

KATIE PAOLANO Happy Birthday!!!

We are so proud of you, and of all that have achieved!

Love, Mommy and Daddy

CONGRATULATIONS, CLASS OF 2016 The Amherst Student wishes you all the best of luck!

May 20, 2016 | The Amherst Student | 31

TEAMS OF THE YEAR

MEN’S SOCCER: NATIONAL CHAMPS

Photos courtesy of Amherst Athletics

The men’s soccer team had a fairytale season, going 18-1-2 overall en route to the program’s first-ever national championship. After falling to Brandeis in the third round of the NCAA tournament in their 2014 season, the squad was back and hungry for more before graduating one of the most talented and decorated classes that the program has ever seen.

Under the leadership of Division III coach of the year Justin Serpone, the purple and white came back from a goal deficit, netting two unanswered to claim the national championship over Loras College.

That game marked only the third time this season that Amherst had trailed in a game, due mostly to the outstanding Amherst defense.

The purple and white lead the country in opponent points against, at 0.23,

thanks to senior goalkeeper, Division III All-American, and goalkeeper of the year Thomas Bull.

Over this stellar season, Bull has notched a .936 save percentage, and a 0.23 goals against average — both led the nation — and registered 16 clean sheets as he set a new NCAA Division III men’s soccer record for shutouts with 50 over his celebrated career.

On the offensive side, fellow senior Nico Pascual-Leone led the team in goals scored and also garnered Division III All-American honors for his success, scoring a team-high five game winning goals.

Looking ahead to next season, the team will have big shoes to fill as they lose six seniors including Bull, Pascual-Leone and offensive powerhouse Greg Singer.

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL DOMINATES Women’s basketball continued to impress under the leadership of NESCAC coach of the year G.P. Gromacki, who improved his outstanding record to 262-24 over nine seasons at Amherst. The women finished 30-2 on the year, 9-1 in conference and made yet another NCAA postseason run, falling only in the Final Four round to a talented Thomas More squad. The women dominated in regular season play, winning by margins of up to 58 points — they won their first game of the season against Albert Magnus 97-39. The 42.6 percentshooting team averaged 69.3 points per game and impressed with their outside game, shooting 33.1 percent from behind the arc. Defense is where the purple and white truly excelled, however, as their opponent point per game average of

42.9 ranked first nationally.

Standouts from the successful season included junior Ali Dowell, who was named fourth team D3hoops All-American for her 14.3 points per game, 5.7 rebounds, at a 42.2 percent from the field. Along with her, senior Marley Giddins garnered second-team all-NESCAC despite being limited to just 18 games following a season-ending injury in late January. Giddins averaged 11.8 points, and 5.3 boards per contest, and hit a sensational 72.8% of her shots from the floor. Hannah Hackley came up big for the women in their final game against Thomas More, her 19 points, 10 rebounds, and two blocked shots earned her a Final Four All-Tournament team nomination. The young squad looks to return to postseason action next year, losing only three seniors.

MVPs: Best of the Class of 2016 EMILY HYDE

Emily Hyde

Hyde has had an overwhelmingly successful career with the swim & dive team, capping off her four years with two national champion races and a national champion runner-up title. At the NESCAC tournament, Hyde was named swimmer of the meet and Four Year High Point swimmer. In the NCAA National Championship tournament, Hyde raced to the national championship time in the 200-yard individual medley (2:01.15) during day one with a national runner-up finish in the 100-yard breaststroke the next day. Following this performance, on the final day of competition, Hyde went out with a bang, setting a new NCAA Division III record and claiming the national championship in the 200-yard breaststroke.

THOMAS BULL

Thomas Bull

Bull, the statistical champion nationally with a .936 save percentage and a 0.23 goals against average, earned himself Division III soccer All-American honors after a phenomenal senior season that helped lead the purple and white to their first national championship. His 16 shutout games this season bolstered his four year total to 50 clean sheets, setting a new NCAA Division III men’s soccer record. Beyond graduation, Bull is looking at professional opportunities, having traveled to Dallas, Texasa for a week to play with F.C. Dallas and catching the eye of several coaches when the team traveled to France in May 2014. Bull will graduate having amassed 203 saves over 83 games for a save percentage of .860 and an overall 67-3-13 record.

ERIN MARTIN

Erin Martin

Canton, Massachusetts native Erin Martin concluded a fantastic career with Amherst women’s ice hockey, adding Third Team All-Region East to her decorated career after she was named a Second Team All-NESCAC selection for the third consecutive season and a NCAA Division II/III NEHWA All-Star.

Martin was a key component to a dominant Amherst offense this season, having started every game this year, contributing three hat tricks, an Amherst season record, 22 goals, ranking seventh in the nation, and 15 assists for 37 points. In her time at Amherst, Martin has recorded 104 career games, and has posted 94 points for the purple and white on 45 goals and 49 assists.

QUINN MORONEY

Quinn Moroney

Senior captain and attacker Quinn Moroney has been a key component to the Amherst men’s lacrosse offense for his four years. This season alone he has contributed 96 points on the season between 34 goals and a team-high 67 assists for the 11th-ranked purple and white; his 3.63 helpers a game lead the country. Moroney has been raking in the postseason individual accolades, this year having already been named first-team all-NESCAC and first-team all New England. His career 267 assists was just eight shy of the NCAA division III record of 275. Moroney will graduate with the Amherst man’s lacrosse all-time record for assists, contributing 376 combined points in his four years with the purple and white.

— Julia Turner ’19 and Drew Kiley ’18