Commencement 2022

VOLUME CLI COMMENCEMENT EDITION

FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2022

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

COMMENCEMENT CCI

Photo by Amherst College

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

Schedule Events of

FRIDAY, MAY 27 - SUNDAY, MAY 29

FRIDAY

staff Tent on Valentine Quad

3 to 8:30 p.m.

Welcome Center and housing check-in for seniors and families Coolidge Cage

1 p.m.

Sigma Xi Meeting Lewis-Sebring Dining Commons

5 p.m.

Commencement Rehearsal Main Quadrangle

2 p.m. - 3 p.m.

Conversations with Honored Guests See College Website

SATURDAY 9:30 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Welcome Center and housing check-in for seniors and families Coolidge Cage 10 a.m.

Baccalaureate Celebration Johnson Chapel

3:15 p.m. - 4:15 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

SUNDAY 8 a.m. - 2 p.m.

Welcome Center Open Location TBD 10 a.m.

The 201st Commencement Main Quad Rain Location: LeFrak Gymnasium 12:30 p.m. - 2 p.m.

Luncheon for seniors, families, faculty, and staff Tent on Valentine Quad

8:30 p.m.

Choral Society Concert Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Center

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

Luncheon for seniors, families, faculty, and 2 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

Photo by Amherst College

STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Yee-Lynn Lee HEAD PUBLISHERS Robert Bischof Ethan Samuels EDITORS Tara Alahakoon, Liam Archacki, Alex Brandfonbrener, Sonia Chajet Wides, Dustin Copeland, Tana Delalio, Nick Edwards-Levin, Ethan Foster, Theo Hamilton, Yasmin Hamilton, Brooke Hoffman, Leo Kamin, Liza Katz, Brianne LaBare, Madeline Lawson, Kei Lim, Caelen McQuilkin, Alex Noga, Sam Spratford, Eleanor Walsh, Aniah Washington CONTRIBUTORS Ellis Phillips-Gallucci, Sofia Rodrigo PHOTOGRAPHERS Emma Spencer, Cayla Weiss The Amherst Student is published weekly except during college vacations. The offices of The Amherst Student are located in the basement of Morrow Dormitory, Amherst College. All contents copyright © 2022 by The Amherst Student, Inc. All rights reserved. The Amherst Student logo is a trademark of The Amherst Student, Inc. Additionally, The Amherst Student does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or age. The views expressed in this publication do not reflect the views of The Amherst Student.

May 27, 2022 | The Amherst Student | 3

Table of Contents SENIOR PROFILES

12

Rebecca Picciotto Stewarding Stories With Care and Perspective

14

Sebastian Son Facing the Music: Storytelling Through Song

16

Audrey Rosevear Leaping to Topology, Theater, and Transitioning

18

Joelle Crichlow Leading the Charge to Make Change With Care

20

German Giammattei A Legend On and Off the Pitch

22

Alexis Scalese Asserting Indigeneity at Amherst and Beyond

24

Jiajia Zhang Teaching, Telling, Painting Asian American History

26

Cole Graber-Mitchell Making His Voice Heard

28

Lauren Kisare Critical Language Scholar With Future in Publishing

30

Abner Aldarondo Creating a Community of Love Through Culture

32

Arzoo Rajpar Crafting Art, Empowerment, and Agency

6

4 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

The Year in News

&

8

Fellowships & Scholarships

60

The Year in Sports

&

Juanita Jaramillo A Track Star With a Passion for Policy

34

Scott Brasesco Seeking an Understanding of Humanity

36

Angelina Han AAS President and Extracurricular Extraordinaire

38

Jorge Rodriguez Learning and Teaching “the Art of Living”

40

Ella Peterson A Community Builder With a Love for Democracy

42

Teo Ruskov From Religious Studies Major to World Traveler

44

Sage Innerarity Creating Community and Championing Change

46

Sophie Koh A Drive for Inclusion in Intellectual Spaces

48

Anna Smith An Archivist’s Journey Through Amherst

50

Kalidas Shanti Finding Joy and Meaning Through Writing

52

Shikha Jha Finding Her Rhythm: Leading Through Dance

54

Troy Colleran Quietly Setting the Standard

56

Ryan Yu Living Life on His Own Terms

58

63

Senior Sendoff

May 27, 2022 | The Amherst Student | 5

The Year in News AUGUST Delta Covid Protocols Amid concerns surrounding the Delta variant of Covid-19, the college tightened its public health rules for the first two-and a-half weeks of the fall semester.

All Students Arrive for In-person School Year Almost 2,000 students moved onto campus between Aug. 20 and Aug. 29 for a semester closer to a pre-pandemic campus experience.

SEPTEMBER Overworked and Underpaid: College Employees Report Mistreatment The college struggled to fill crucial positions in a number of departments amid a nationwide hiring slump, and staff members reported worsening workplace conditions.

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The Class of 2025 is greeted by upperclassmen for move in day on the freshman quad.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

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Biddy attended several of her last celebration events, including the college’s City Streets festival, in her bid farewell to the college.

Biddy Martin Steps Down as President On Sept. 13, President Biddy Martin announced that she will be stepping down as president of the college at the end of the 20212022 academic year.

OCTOBER Bicentennial Party The college held a lavish Bicentennial Party for the campus community on Oct. 15, featuring an array of New England foods, a Ferris wheel, and a performance

by Grammy Award-winning artist Common.

College Ends Legacy Admissions and Increases Financial Aid On Oct. 20, President Biddy Martin announced that the college will end its legacy admission preference starting in the 20222023 academic year and has expanded its financial aid program.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

6 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

NOVEMBER College Converts Casual Staff

to Benefited Positions President Biddy Martin announced on Nov. 17 that the college will be converting some of its casual staff positions to benefited positions, an initiative that had been under discussion throughout the year.

Judiciary Hearing Addresses Constitutionality of Palestine-Aligning AAS Email The Judiciary Council held two separate hearings to address an anonymous complaint filed against the Amherst Association of Students Senate questioning the constitutionality of an email they sent last May. DECEMBER Class of 2022E Graduates Seventy-four seniors graduated at the end of the semester as members of the Class of 2022E, one of the largest E classes in the college’s history.

FEBRUARY ShareYourStory Instagram Account Confronts Sexual Misconduct The Instagram account @amherstshareyourstory posted over 40 anonymous accounts of sexual misconduct at the college since its first post on Dec. 10, garnering much attention from students, alumni, and the administration.

Glee Club Expands Range to All Voices The Amherst College Glee Club merged with Chorus in an effort to boost membership and retention, as well as promote inclusivity. Comprised solely of tenor and bass vocalists since its founding in 1865, the group is now open to singers in all vocal ranges.

MARCH Reflecting on Two Years of Covid On March 9, two years ago, the college announced it would

switch to remote learning due to Covid-19. The Student asked members of the college community to reflect on what they’ve learned through the pandemic.

Russia Invades Ukraine The Russian invasion of Ukraine threw into turmoil the lives of Ukrainian and Russian students at the college, who had to worry about the safety of their families thousands of miles away.

APRIL ACPD Unmarks Vehicles; Trustees Vote Not To Disarm ACPD The Amherst College Police Department (ACPD) made its fleet of five vehicles entirely unmarked, leaving many students feeling increased fear and uncertainty from the change. Shortly after, President Biddy Martin announced that the Board of Trustees had voted not to disarm ACPD. Loosened Masking Protocols Starting on April 4, community members could choose whether to wear a mask in a number of spaces that previously required it, and testing was reduced to once a week.

MAY Roe v. Wade Protest On May 5, approximately 400 Amherst college students participated in a class walkout and protest on the Amherst Town Common in response to a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion poised to overturn the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade.

College To Hire Three New A/P/A Studies Professors The Committee on Educational Policy recently approved the hiring of three tenure-track professors with backgrounds and expertise in Asian American studies to the college, who are expected to arrive for the 2023-2024 academic year.

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Amherst celebrates its 200th year with a bash including fireworks, food, and games.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Seventy-four seniors graduated in the historic Class of 2022E, one of the largest E classes the college’s history.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Police Log Roundup >>July 28, 2021 10:28 p.m., Campus Grounds An officer responded to a report of a bear walking in the area. No bear was found. >>August 7, 2021 7:23 p.m., Charles Pratt Dormitory An officer responded to an alarm and found it was set off by a bat.

The bat was caught and then freed from the building. >> August 31, 2021 10:09 a.m., Lipton House An officer responded to an alarm and found it was set off accidentally by hair products. >> September 1, 2021 2:38 a.m., Hills Lot Officers responded to a report from the town police regarding an individual missing. The person was located at their home. >>September 18, 2021 6:05 p.m., Campus Grounds Amherst Police Department (APD) and Amherst College officers responded to a report of someone who was unauthorized and cutting trees on Amherst College property.

The person left the area upon officers’ request. >>September 20, 2021 4:25 p.m., Campus Grounds An officer took a past report of an unknown individual possibly following the caller and mocking their walking gait. The caller then walked toward a residence hall and the unknown individual left the

area.

Course and confiscated it.

bat from the building.

ple holes in the walls and whiteboard.

>>Sept. 25, 2021 2:09 a.m. College Street An officer assisted the town police with two individuals that took a cone from the town.

>>November 2, 2021 10:16 a.m., Jenkins Hall A detective took a report of an individual’s concern about a drinking game.

>>Dec. 15, 2021 10:31 a.m., Garman House Residential Life staff confiscated two rice cookers, which are not permitted in the residence hall.

>>Feb. 21, 2022 9:43 a.m., Rodeway Inn An individual not affiliated with the college attempted to remain in the lot overnight at the Rodeway Inn.

>>Sept. 30, 2021 2:53 p.m. Alumni House An officer took a report of a possible phishing attempt.

>> November 6, 2021 1:00 p.m., Frost Library A staff member reported area closed signs were posted and there was no known reason for these.

3:38 p.m., Hitchcock House Residential Life staff confiscated a toaster, which is not permitted in the residence halls. The toaster was placed in storage.

>>Nov. 18, 2021 6:07 a.m., Mill Lane A sergeant spoke with two individuals looking to hunt in the area. They left without issue.

>>Jan. 24, 2022 8:15 p.m., College Street Detectives responded to a report of an individual approaching students and engaging them in unintelligible conversation before walking away.

The individual left the area prior to detectives’ arrival and area search did not locate the person on campus.

>>Feb. 28, 2022 5:46 p.m., Amherst College Police Department A student contacted the Director of Environmental Health & Safety requesting permission to have a fire in a metal trash can. Request was denied and the student was referred to Student Activities.

>>Oct. 1, 2021 4:50 pm, Science Center An officer responded to a report of four individuals skateboarding in an area that was damaged possibly by skateboarding. There were no issues in the area. >>Oct. 11, 2021 1:30 p.m., Jenkins Dormitory An officer took a report of a past incident where someone entered an unlocked room, then defecated and urinated in the room.

2:30 p.m., Cohan Dormitory An officer responded to a report of an unknown individual walking into a student’s unlocked room and urinating on the student’s belongings. >>October 23, 2021 10:18 p.m., Hitchcock House Student Affairs staff confiscated a cooler used to contain a common source of alcohol. >> October 30, 2021 2:39 a.m., Golf Course A detective observed a golf flag pole stolen from the Amherst Golf

>>Nov. 20, 2021 12:28 a.m., Alumni Parking Lot A sergeant took a report of someone’s vehicle having eggs thrown at it.

11:54 a.m., Hitchcock Road A sergeant responded to a report of buses idling. The buses moved out of the area. >>Nov. 22, 2021 5:55 a.m., the Quadrangle A sergeant assisted a parent that was lost. >>Nov. 27, 2021 9:24 p.m., Appleton Hall A detective assisted in removing a bat from the building. >>Nov. 28, 2021 7:24 p.m. Lipton House Detectives assisted in removing a

>>Jan. 25, 2022 8:12 a.m., The Quadrangle The senior detective responded to a report of an individual not affiliated with the college stapling flyers to trees. The person left upon request. >>Jan. 31, 2022 4:30 p.m., Off Campus Locations A detective took a report of an issue with a possible counterfeit bill. The bill was not found to be counterfeit and there were no additional issues. >>Feb. 1, 2022 4:27 p.m., Hitchcock House A Residential Life CSA staff member and a detective took a report of multi-

>>March 2, 2022 5:45 p.m., Seelye and Mayo-Smith Houses Residential Life Community Safety Assistant (CSA) staff found an unauthorized fire in a metal trash can between Seelye and Mayo-Smith Houses. Fire was then extinguished. >>March 4, 2022 2:24 p.m., Keefe Campus Center A detective responded to a report of students taking firewood from the campus center without authorization.

Firewood was then returned. >>March 15, 2022 11:34 a.m., Greenway Lawn A detective responded to a well-being check of an individual laying on the ground near Greenway dorms. After contact was made it was determined the student did not need further assistance.

May 27, 2022 | The Amherst Student | 7

Fellowships & Scholarships Marshall

COLE GRABER-MITCHELL ’22 Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22 is a math and law, jurisprudence, and social thought double major who will be headed to the London School of Economics next year on a Marshall Scholarship.

A longtime community organizer, Graber-Mitchell has worked for the Youth Social Change Fellowship in Providence, Rhode Island; for the Minneapolis-based climate

justice organization MN350; and for the Brown University Leadership Institute.

At Amherst, Graber-Mitchell has been an Association of Amherst Students senator, a member of the Glee Club, an actor in Greenroom productions, and an opinion-section columnist for The Student. He is the only college student currently serving on the Town of Amherst’s Cultural Council.

After his Marshall Scholarship, Graber-Mitchell plans to attend law school and eventually run for public office, where he will fight for political and social change to combat crises like climate change.

Truman GABRIEL ECHARTE ’23 Gabriel Echarte ’23 combines scholarship with activism to spur change in the world. At Amherst, he worked to create Students for Climate Action – a group that successfully pushed for a more aggressive Climate Action Plan on our campus.

A political science major, Echarte has done research for the U.S. State Department, interned at the MA Attorney General’s Office and for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, and worked for the Joe Biden presidential campaign.

For his academics, service, and leadership, Gabe was awarded the Truman Scholarship, which provides funding for graduate study, leadership training, and special opportunities in the federal government.

Gabe will pursue a joint J.D. and MA in environmental science. He aims to live up to his ideal of being a “peaceful warrior” by eventually working in the Department of Justice in the Environment and Natural Resources Division.

Beinecke GILLAN CHALONO ’23 Gillan Chalono ’23 is a philosophy major and one of only 16 students in the U.S. this year to be awarded with a Beinecke Scholarship. Chalono considers the scholarship, which provides financial support for a graduate education, “a community achievement,” citing the help of a variety of professors and mentors from both Amherst College and Santa Fe College, where he received his associates degree.

This focus on community is a constant for Chalono, who has previously worked as an organizer for the Miami Work-

8 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

ers Center, Gainesville’s Dream Defenders, and Atlanta’s Working Families Party. This summer, he’ll be interning at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a nonprofit providing legal representation for poor defendants charged with capital crimes.

Looking forward, Chalono is considering both applying to master’s programs in Philosophy and the possibility of law school. “I know that I want to empower and elevate my community,” he says, “no matter what profession I choose to pursue.”

Watson ADEBOLA OSHIPITAN ’22 Adebola Oshipitan ’22 is a psychology major who has been awarded a Watson Scholarship to explore “how the fascination for Black popular culture contrasts with the treatment and appreciation of Black people within various global communities.”

Oshipitan has studied this topic at Amherst, as part of a special topics course with Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Rebecca Totton. A pre-med student, he worked

as an EMT in his hometown of Chicago during the Covid pandemic and has also worked with Harvard researchers to study the use of psychedelics in the treatment of mental illness.

Oshipitan’s research project will take him to a number of different countries, including France, Italy, Japan, and South Korea. Each has been selected for its unique relationship with Black culture and will supply a different perspective to Oshipitan’s research.

TEO RUSKOV ’22 A religion major whose family immigrated to the U.S. from Bulgaria when he was four, Teo Ruskov ’22 says he grew up with “all sorts of little embarrassments about pronouncing things improperly, or not saying things the right way.” As a Watson Fellow, Ruskov will use pronunciation “as a lens through which to explore various religious, political, economic, and cultural realities.”

Through the fellowship, Ruskov will travel to India, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. Along the way, he’ll ob-

serve the intersections of life and pronunciation in a rich variety of way. He plans to study classical Indian singing, volunteer at a Swedish instruction program, and observe Hindu ceremonies at London’s Shree Ghanapathy Temple.

“It was really important to me not to go into graduate school with just a lot of textual studies under my belt,” Ruskov said, “the most exciting thing for me is going to places and actually having experiences.” After this fellowship, Ruskov, who aspires to become a professor, will certainly be in a good place to start.

Critical Language VIVIAN WEI ’22 Vivian Wei ’22 is an Asian languages and civilizations major who will head to National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan, this summer on a Critical Language Scholarship.

For Wei, the opportunity will provide more than a chance for language study. “I hope to bring my perspectives and experiences to China and provide a more diverse and complete picture of what it means to be American and, more

specifically, an American-born Chinese,” she said.

In the long term, Wei aspires to be a dentist. While attending dental school, she wants to join “a global outreach program to provide oral health care in China.” And after graduating, she aims to practice dental care in an underserved community similar to the one in which she grew up. She thinks that her scholarship opportunity will help her “gain the cultural competency necessary to become a compassionate, empathetic and understanding health care provider.”

LAUREN KISARE ’22 An English major, Lauren Kisare ’22 will study at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea, on a Critical Language Scholarship. Kisare says that she hopes the scholarship will aid her in her “journey to become a bilingual book editor.”

Kisare has previously interned for Little, Brown and Co., a book publisher, and with two literary agencies. She believes that the increased influence of Korean popular culture in America has opened the door for Korean fiction

and nonfiction to have a wider impact. “By developing my linguistic and cultural understanding of the language, I hope to become an editor who can take on editorial projects in Korean and work with Korean authors to set them up for success in the U.S. market,” she said.

Kisare first studied in South Korea this past fall. After her scholarship, she intends to spend a year at Sogang University’s Korean Language Education Center, and then apply to work at the Literature Translation Institute, located in Seoul.

May 27, 2022 | The Amherst Student | 9

Fulbright SAMUEL SCHULZ ’22

A physics major, Samuel Schulz ’22 will travel to Paris next year to study the role of Andreev bound states in superconductivity through a Fulbright Research Award. Afterwards. he plans to earn a Ph.D. and “teach the next generation of physics researchers.”

NAYA BURSHAN’22

An economics major interested in intersecting cultural traditions, Naya Burshan ’22 will work in Cyprus as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. Afterward, she hopes to work as a teacher for “high school students in underserved communities.”

SOPHIE EWING ’22

Sophie Ewing ’22 looks forward to her time as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Taiwan, where she hopes to volunteer at nonprofits and visit queer-friendly businesses and arts spaces. An English and Asian languages and civilizations double major, Ewing aspires to a career as a museum educator.

MAGGIE WU ’22

A double major in statistics and sociology, Maggie Wu ’22 believes her time as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant will allow her to pursue her interests in “teaching, social research and storytelling.” She eventually hopes to study computational social science in graduate school, focusing her research on race relations in the United States.

MOLLY SANDERSON ’22

Molly Sanderson ’22 is a math and education studies double major who plans to explore her interest in the art of sewing while in Taiwan as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. She hopes to earn a master’s in education and explore social justice’s role in math education.

Goldwater CAILIN PLUNKETT ’23

Cailin Plunkett ’23 is a double major in physics and math. In summer 2020, she used a database of exoplanets to investigate the differences between planet and star formation. After graduation, Plunkett plans to pursue a Ph.D. in astrophysics and become a professor at a research institution.

ETHAN SPINGARN ’23

Ethan Spingarn ’23 is a physics and math double major. At Amherst, he has worked to design a circuit board and contributed to efforts to develop a discrete theory of quantum mechanics. After graduation, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. and become a mathematical physicist.

JACQUELINE SHEN ’23

Jacqueline Shen ’23 is a biochemistry and biophysics major. At Amherst, she is examining slime mold to better understand the role of a protein called phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase in cell movement. After graduation, Shen plans to pursue a Ph.D. in immunology and eventually found her own biotech company.

10 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

Honorary Degrees Ken Chenault Chairman and managing director of General Catalyst and former chairman and chief executive officer of American Express Ken Chenault is chairman and a managing director of the venture capital firm General Catalyst. Previously, from 2001 to 2018, Chenault was chairman and chief executive officer of American Express. Fortune magazine named him one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2014 and 2021.

TIME celebrated Chenault together with Ken Frazier in its 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list for their corporate and social activism — specifically, for mobilizing hundreds of corporate leaders to advocate for equitable voting rights in the United States and for co-founding OneTen, a coalition of leading executives committed to upskilling, hiring and advancing 1 million Black Americans into family-sustaining jobs. Chenault serves on the boards of Airbnb, Berkshire Hathaway, Chief, Guild Education and the Harvard Corp, as well as numerous nonprofit organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Advisory Council for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Nadarajan “Raj” Chetty William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard University Nadarajan “Raj” Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the director of Opportunity Insights, which studies the science of economic opportunity: How can we give children from all backgrounds better chances of succeeding? Chetty’s research combines empirical evidence and economic theory to help design more effective government policies. His work on topics ranging from tax policy and unemployment insurance to education and affordable housing has been widely cited in academia, media outlets and Congressional testimony. Chetty received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2003, moving on to work as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, and now Harvard. Chetty has received numerous awards for his research, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the John Bates Clark medal.

Charles Gilbert ’71 Arthur and Janet Ross Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology at The Rockefeller University Charles Gilbert graduated summa cum laude from Amherst in 1971, with a focus on biophysics. He obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard Medical School in 1977. In 1983, he joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University as assistant professor of neurobiology. He currently serves as the Arthur and Janet Ross Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology. Gilbert’s research focuses on the brain mechanisms of visual perception and learning, including how cortical circuits operate to analyze visual images and to encode visual memories. Gilbert has also served on a number of scientific advisory committees for foundations supporting the research of early-career investigators, including the Klingenstein-Simons fellowship program. He has served on advisory committees for numerous research institutions, and on the editorial boards of several neuroscience journals. Gilbert is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport ’84 Deputy director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at New York City’s Madison Square Park Conservancy Brooke Kamin Rapaport ’84 graduated cum laude from Amherst in 1984.

Today, she is deputy director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York, where she is responsible for the outdoor public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists. She was commissioner and curator of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with the exhibition Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà. Through the Conservancy in 2017, she founded and launched the Public Art Consortium, a national initiative of museum, public art and sculpture park colleagues. She was assistant curator and associate curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized numerous exhibitions and wrote corresponding catalogues. She also served as guest curator at The Jewish Museum in New York.

She was board chair of Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum from 2008 to 2012 and continues on the Mead board.

May 27, 2022 | The Amherst Student | 11

Senior Profile | Rebecca Picciotto

Stewarding Stories With Care and Perspective Rebecca Picciotto has a deep passion for connecting with people through journalism. But she also understands just where journalism can fall short.

—Yee-Lynn Lee ’23 “If my job was to have a conversation like this every day with someone, I would really, really love that, actually,” said Becca Picciotto ’22.

It was over three hours into our interview, long after we had strayed from the list of questions I had prepared. We were sitting across from each other under the fluorescent light of The Student’s newsroom in the basement of Morrow Dormitory, where Picciotto had spent many a long night as editor-in-chief. At this point in the interview, she had started talking about her idea of starting a Substack and dedicating it to writing profiles of people.

“The thing I like about journalism is talking to people, and I feel like profiles give you an excuse to actually talk to someone for a while,” she explained. “[And] of course there are ethical questions there, but in terms of story selection, I feel like it’s a bit more straightforward. I’m really cognizant of [the fact that] the stories that get represented in the news are a product of the journalist’s story interests — what they find newsworthy is their own biases, right? Everyone, though, has a story.”

In many ways, the conversation was emblematic of how Picciotto approaches journalism: with a deep passion for storytelling and generosity in connecting with others, but a sober understanding of how the work can be limited by one’s own subjectivity.

And while this interview was the first time I had heard Picciotto explicitly express her love for connecting with people, it didn’t surprise me. I first met Picciotto during last spring’s remote semester when I joined as a new member of the editorial board.

When the editorial board would connect over Zoom for its weekly meetings, I was struck by her level of engagement even in the virtual space, as her warm smiles reacting to the discussion would often cut through the Zoom awkward that we were all too familiar with.

I also eventually became aware of how Picciotto brought this same attentiveness and care to her writing, telling stories with a kind of artistry and creativity that I, accustomed to the more straightforward style of news writing, often struggle to access.

Funnily enough, just days before Picciotto told me about her dream of profiling people in our interview, after tasking each of the paper’s editors with writing their own profile for this issue, I had told a few of them, “You know who writes good profiles?

Becca does.”

It’s definitely a bit daunting writing the profile of someone who has written some of the most beautiful profiles I’ve read out of The Student. But in the same way Picciotto approached the many daunting tasks she faced in her tenure as editor-in-chief, I will do nothing less than try to

12 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

rise to the challenge.

Finding Connection Through Storytelling Picciotto was first introduced to news writing through an assignment in her eighth-grade English class. Inspired by the experience, Picciotto decided to join her high school newspaper freshman year — and in doing so, fell in love with the reporting process. “It didn’t feel like hard-hitting journalism, but …

I think that was just fun for me as a 14, 15-year-old — I was like, ‘Oh, I have a purpose here.’”

This sense of purpose is what eventually led Picciotto to The Student during her sophomore year at Amherst. She noted that she was very sporadically involved with extracurriculars her first year because she wanted to see what lay beyond the regimented lifestyle she had followed in high school. “I had [a] good year of being very fluid and stuff like that, and I definitely think I was coming back to wanting to feel a little bit more connected to the community and just wanting to find my role here a little bit more,” she said. A posting in the Daily Mammoth that fall about a managing opinion editor opening caught her eye, and soon, she was back in the newsroom.

That semester, Picciotto also pursued an investigation of how Amherst’s position as a college town uniquely influences its housing dynamics for a piece

Photo courtesy of Rebecca Picciotto ’22

Engaging and generous in conversation, Picciotto loves talking to people and telling their stories. published in The Indicator’s Fall 2019 issue, “Home.” Although the final product wasn’t “hard news,” she was glad to get a taste again of the reporting process she enjoyed so much in high school.

After the pandemic hit the following semester, Picciotto also began writing news stories for The Student, documenting the experiences of a community adapting to remote learning and an uncertain future. And in Fall 2020, amid a remote semester she described as mentally difficult and marked by disconnection, Picciotto started “Tusk Talks,” The Student’s first-ever podcast, continuing to tell the stories of Amherst students from hundreds of miles away.

Coming Into Her Own in the Newsroom But it took a while for Picciotto to get comfortable in the newsroom. Although she had ended up running her high school paper, her lack of formal training

left her feeling intimidated when she first joined The Student. “I was really terrified, actually,” she said with a laugh. “I think I just got into the space and was like, ‘I’m gonna take this super slow and just do exactly what I’m told.’”

While the editing eventually became more routine and the crisis of keeping the paper going through Covid allowed her to feel more in solidarity with the rest of the newsroom, Picciotto was still shocked when then-editors-inchief Natalie De Rosa ’21 and Olivia Gieger ’21 approached her that spring about becoming editor-in-chief. “I was genuinely like, ‘I’m confused,’” she said.

“But then with that confusion was like, ‘Oh, would I actually do that?’ Because I had literally never thought that was on the table.”

Becoming editor-in-chief presented an opportunity to integrate herself even more in the community, Picciotto said, as well as an opportunity to grow through the difficulties and de-

Senior Profile | Rebecca Picciotto mands of the role. Ultimately, the decision made itself, with Picciotto joking that the only thing holding her back at all was her early-pandemic optimism that study abroad would still be an option her junior year.

And while the role continued to make her nervous, Picciotto embraced the challenge with an openness and drive to improving herself. Noting that co-editorin-chief Ryan Yu ’22 seemed to have from the start a precise intuition for the work that she felt she was just beginning to develop, she said she expected that “there would be a learning curve for me, so I kind of did my best to not hold anything back and just learn.”

In her own words, Picciotto still doesn’t think she has a “rock-solid intuition,” but she does concede that she grew into herself as an editor-in-chief.

“You kind of have to,” she said.

“That’s a beautiful part of the role.”

“Becca would always insist that I had more of a particular

intuition for news,” said Yu. “I’m not sure that’s true, and more specifically, even if I did have that intuition initially, I think she has that intuition now.”

Yu added that Picciotto’s determined nature and more systematic approach was often what allowed them to see things through “in a more direct and detail-oriented manner.” “I think we complemented each other very well,” he said.

“I don’t think that she always gives herself enough credit for things that she does,” said her friend Gavi Forman ’22.

Grappling With the Shortcomings of Journalism Indeed, it was from Picciotto that I was first introduced to thinking consciously about the framing of a news article, the importance of which only became more apparent across many production nights, when she and Yu would stay up agonizing over how to present a story in a way that would do the most justice to those represented in it.

“As much as you can just consume an article and a headline, there are so [many] choices that have been made every step of the way that decides why you’re reading it the way you’re reading it,” said Picciotto. “Some of our conversations were about how to report on something or how to frame something in a way that wouldn’t be harmful. But that’s a really, really hard question.”

A philosophy and math double major, Picciotto would also bring a grounding in philosophy to broader ethical discussions with Yu about journalism at large. In our conversation for this profile, Picciotto spoke often about the harms journalism has caused historically and continues to cause in the present.

“As much as journalism has moral value and moral positive value, it also has equally, if not more — in the way it’s been practiced — moral harms, and has been an institution that has harmed communities, as it has done its own work,” she said.

“Like the way it has created nar-

ratives about communities and people and has been extractive about that, using people as sources and characters in the story rather than human beings.”

“Becca was especially cognizant of her own positionality,” noted Yu. This awareness motivated Picciotto’s thesis in philosophy, which weighed in on the debate over the norm of objectivity in journalism. She explained that she was interested in this debate because she had always thought objectivity was “a pretty essential ingredient” in journalism, but didn’t feel it was her place to stand up for it. “I was like, I’m a white person. Because the version of objectivity that journalism currently functions under is a mask for white values — or caters to a white mainstream — it was hard for me to say, ‘Let’s uphold objectivity.’”

“Historically, journalism has said that values — personal bias, subjectivity and all that stuff — are contrary and cannot coexist with a norm of objectivity,” she

said. “I argue that objectivity is enhanced by personal values and understanding your perspective.

First of all, objectivity does not exist — you cannot have a ‘value-free objectivity’ [because] we are perspective-inhabiting creatures. If I acknowledge that perspective, I can be more objective in terms of understanding where I can’t see certain truths.”

While joking that the process of finishing the thesis was akin to an emergency C-section, Picciotto feels more able to deal with the question of objectivity now. “I always was really ready to concede [to the anti-objectivity stance], but now I think this idea that [the assumption of value-free objectivity] is just an incorrect application of objectivity and not a problem with the objectivity norm itself helps me, because I’m not necessarily just gonna say we shouldn’t be objective.”

“There’s an ideal of objectivity that we might never achieve,” she concluded. “It’s not to say it’s not worth pursuing. But it is to say that we should be aware of the misapplications that are currently in this industry.”

An Open-ended Path Forward

Photo courtesy of Emma Spencer ’23E

Picciotto is deeply aware of the importance that framing has in determining how a story is read. She spent many long nights in the newsroom with co-editor-in-chief Ryan Yu ‘22 thinking about how best to present a story.

The ways that journalists can do harm is still something Picciotto is coming to terms with, particularly as it relates to pursuing a career in journalism herself. “There’s a dilemma at every point,” she said. “And you kind of have to accept that.”

After graduation, she’ll be completing an internship with the Wall Street Journal to try to figure out whether or not she can accept it. “It’s three months and then open-ended,” she said.

Whatever Picciotto chooses to do, I’m confident that she will continue to touch lives through the care with which she connects with others, all while leaning into any challenges she encounters along the way.

And if she ends up making that Substack? I’ll be the first to read it.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 13

Senior Profile | Sebastian Son

Facing the Music: Storytelling Through Song Whether he’s performing onstage, writing behind the scenes, or simply being a steadfast friend, Sebastian Son has made innumerable contributions to the Amherst arts community.

— Eleanor Walsh ’25 Sebastian Son ’22 looked right at home on the couches of Arms Music Center, where I interviewed him immediately after his MUSI123 class, “Sacred Sound” (he’s still fulfilling music major requirements).

It felt a little like talking to a celebrity, since I’ve watched Son shine onstage as part of Mr. Gad’s House of Improv and at virtually every a cappella showcase. I wasn’t sure what to expect from our interview.

Would he constantly crack jokes?

Break into song? Although neither of these things ended up happening — in fact, Son’s in-person demeanor is much quieter than his onstage one — he possessed an unmistakable gravitas. There was a thoughtfulness to his answers that I’ve rarely felt during other interviews. In talking to Son and the people around him, I’ve learned that he applies this thoughtfulness to every aspect of his life — and does so with unfailing kindness.

As I pressed record on my phone, I noticed the penny board tucked under Son’s arm. Seriously, what can’t this guy do? The answer, it seems, is not much. During his time at Amherst, Son has completed an English and music double major; been a part of the Asian American Writers’ Group; performed in Gad’s, the DQ, Green Room, and AC Musical; interned at the Emily Dickinson museum; and served as a student member of the Presidential Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion. “I’m the type of person who’s always working on something,” he admitted with a laugh. “So my idea

of free time is not always free.”

Son also took a gap year in order to work on music and to write his thesis, a concert musical entitled “Reasons to Leave.” His gap year played an instrumental role in his decision to pursue the arts as a career. It seems that during those 12 months, he came to the same conclusion I did over the course of our interview: At his core, Son is a storyteller.

“If I were to map my life out, and do all the things I’m interested in, I’d want to write, I’d want to sing my own songs and I’d want to write songs for other people. I’d want to perform on stage,” he said. “Eventually, I want to do it all.” I don’t doubt he will.

Becoming a Band Kid Church was an important part of Son’s childhood in Fort Lee, New Jersey, but not for the reason you might think. Son’s Catholic mother would take their family to church, where singing mass hymns gave Son his first taste of musical performance.

“There would always be this little group of us in the pews, children just singing at the top of their lungs,” said Son. Eventually, when Son was around 10, the church organist took notice. He recruited Son and his siblings, and formed a children’s choir.

Son cited this as a crucial moment for his future interests: “The repeated act of singing and being exposed to music that way, I think that’s what drew me [to music].” Son sang in

14 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

that choir until he left for college.

Son continued to pursue the arts at Fort Lee High School, where he dabbled in orchestra, choir, the thespian society, and was the drum major in marching band. Although he did a little of everything, “identity-wise, I was definitely a band kid,” he said.

Even so, Son rarely practiced music at home, in part because he didn’t have space to, and “the walls were very thin.” As one of four siblings, Son didn’t have his own room until he got to college.

Finding Community at Amherst “Amherst was a very, very fortunate accident,” said Son. “I admittedly did not do a lot of research before applying to colleges … My Common App essay was written the day before it was due.”

Son’s aunt, who graduated from Smith, was the one who encouraged him to apply to Amherst. He put about as much effort into the application as he did his Common App essay. As Son described it, “I looked on the website and copy-and-pasted enough information to make my supplement sound OK.” The copy-and-paste job must’ve been impressive, because Son received his acceptance and financial aid letter a few months later.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, Mom, look at this.’ … She looks at the [tuition fee] and she’s like, ‘You have to go here. You have no other choice.’ I’m like, ‘Are you sure? I’m still waiting

Photo courtesy of Sebastian Son ’22

After he graduates, Sebastian Son hopes to continue songwriting at the Musician’s Institute in Los Angeles. on other decisions.’ And she’s like, ‘No, you’re going here.’”

And so Son went. But his transition to college was less than smooth.

“My first semester, I didn’t really do much. I didn’t know what clubs were out there, so I had a lot of free time, and I didn’t really know what to do with it. I didn’t really have a lot of friends either,” he said. Son spent his time wandering, and often found comfort in the solace of a practice room.

After that first semester of not knowing anyone, Son decided to return to his roots and seek out opportunities to perform. “I would read all the posters in Val and if I saw something like music, or singing, or musicals, I would just write in my calendar and then make an effort to go out,” he said. That year, Son joined the DQ, and has been a staple member of campus a capella ever since.

“I think I met most of my community through arts and that sort of thing,” Son told me. What he failed to mention is how much he helps foster that arts community.

“He ran my a capella group’s indefinite rehearsal last semester when we were going through a difficult time, and he stayed with us until we ended rehearsal at 4:30 a.m.,” said Kelly Huang ’22, a friend of Son’s since they met three years ago in the class “Form in Tonal Music.” “We’re not even in the same a capella group, and he did this out of the goodness of his heart. He is also a great teacher, and he is so patient. He is one of the busiest people I know, yet he still manages to do all of this and more.”

Son also found community in other areas. Last school year, he joined the newly founded Asian American Writers’ Group.

“I thought I wanted to be a writer when I was younger, and it’s still something that means a lot to me,” he said. “It’s really a space where I feel comfortable sharing, writing, and getting feedback, and it really helps me grow as a writer.”

The group mostly discusses writing pertaining to Asian American identity — which for Son was heavily influenced by the environment in which he grew up.

Senior Profile | Sebastian Son “Growing up in Fort Lee … was important for my identity. A lot of Asian students grow up in predominantly white areas … but luckily for me, Fort Lee is a very Asian community, it’s about 40 percent Asian …

So growing up, I felt very comfortable in my identity. I didn’t feel like an outsider, and I think that was big.

That’s huge,” he said.

At Amherst, Son’s perception of his identity shifted slightly. “Saying things like, ‘As an Asian American, I believe,’ — that was not really a concept to me [before]. Coming into Amherst, my race was something unspoken, that you just knew. … It wasn’t something you intellectualized or spoke at length about; it was just a part of you,” he said. “Any discussion about race would sort of make me uncomfortable before I got to Amherst. And what’s really changed is that I think I’ve embraced that part of me a lot more, and I have new vocabulary to talk about some of the things I’ve experienced.

It’s really helped me open up.”

Son frequently encountered discussion about race in his introduc-

tory sociology class, which “really revamped the way I saw the world,” he said — so much so that he almost declared a sociology major. Since he was going into junior year and it seemed a bit late, though, he stuck with English. When he told me this, I was confused — isn’t he also a music major?

It turns out that Son added a music major solely because he had to find a home for his thesis, a concert musical. He first proposed it to the English department, arguing that lyrics were a form of poetry, but was shot down. He then tried to declare an interdisciplinary major, but this, too, failed. Finally, he turned to the music department, which accepted his thesis with open arms.

Reasons to Leave (For a Gap Year) Son took a gap year during the 2020-2021 school year for two main reasons: One, he didn’t see the point in college without extracurricular involvement. And two, he wanted to write a musical.

Son knew he wouldn’t be able

to accomplish his vision while taking classes and participating fully in on-campus life. His thesis, “Reasons to Leave,” is a musical but “not a fully fleshed-out one.” It’s a concert musical featuring four singers and a band of guitar, bass, piano, strings, violin, cello, and drums.

The musical is about a rocket ship that’s going to leave Earth and never return. People come from all walks of life to get on the ship, each with their own reason. Hence, “Reasons to Leave.”

Son’s thesis advisor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Music Eric Sawyer, commended Son for a “very self-driven thesis.” Sawyer has known Son for three or four years, and described him as being exacting, communicative, and self-motivated.

Son definitely knew which stories he wanted to tell. He spoke to me about the most autobiographical song in his musical, “Translation.” The song is about a college student whose grandmother passes away, and at her funeral he realizes that since he can’t speak her native

Photo courtesy of Sebastian Son ’22

Sebastian Son performs with Voices of the New Class in Fall 2021. Voices is an annual performance based on excerpts from incoming students’ admissions essays.

tongue — he was unable to ever truly connect with her.

“I knew from the start that that’s not an experience everyone’s going to relate to. … But I was sort of very set,” said Son. “I know this is an experience that people have, I’m not the only one. And even if it’s a minority of people that will sort of get what’s going on here, I wanted this to be for them.”

Sawyer also spoke to Son’s storytelling ability.

“I think that Sebastian is ambitious, musically,” said Sawyer. “He’s also very honest about wanting to make his music express the things that he feels.”

During the pandemic, Son was also simultaneously working on other music.

“It ended up being a very fruitful spot for my creativity, because I was unhappy, and I didn’t know how to voice that or articulate it,” he said.

“So I ended up trying, in different ways. … A lot of it is questions like ‘What is ahead?’”

A large part of that unhappiness was from the third and final reason Son took a gap year. Before his gap year, Son was planning on going into finance. But his resume was not competitive in that area, so he worked a nine-to-five banking job, where he “wore a button-down shirt and dress shoes every day, had a little lunch bag, and sat in a cubicle.”

“Everyone that worked there was 45 and older. They had families. And there was a sort of sense that they were going to hold this job until they retired. And me being there at 22, I just could see this pathway ahead of me. All the steps were laid out, and it ended here.

And I didn’t know that I wanted my life to end in this bank,” he said.

Son turned to music instead: “At my desk, I was just writing lyrics in between typing on the computer.”

But he still wasn’t sure about his path forward. In the end, it was his colleagues in finance who inspired him to turn away.

As part of his networking, Son cold-called a lot of people who had “made it” in finance.

“What they seemed to be urging was to find something that was

fulfilling. And I especially asked the ones with children what their children were studying in college. And it usually wasn’t finance. It was usually like sociology, or philosophy, you know, something more liberal arts. That really struck me — like, if I become this sort of person working this respectable career making a lot of money, I’m just going to want my children to end up pursuing something that fulfills them. So why shouldn’t I just start now and break that cycle and make my life into that?”

Son cites his gap year as “maybe the most impactful thing I did in my time here. And I would also say, to talk to a lot of people because someone else’s life won’t be a perfect representation of your life, … but the more stories you hear about other people, I think the more patterns you start to see, and the more you understand where your life fits in with that pattern. If I didn’t talk to all those people over the gap year, I don’t think I would have come to this firm conviction of what I should be doing with my life.”

Writing His Own Path Son looks ahead to a lifetime of creating art. “If what I put out there can make someone’s day better, I think that’s all that matters,” he said.

This summer, he’ll be teaching music composition at a music camp, and after that, he might be headed to Los Angeles. Son received a grant from the Office of Fellowships to fund a year of artistic training, and he plans to use the money to attend the Musician’s Institute in Los Angeles. There, he’ll study songwriting.

“I think Sebastian has the passion and the patience to really make a go of writing theater music, and I’m excited about his future,” said Sawyer.

In the distant future, Son thinks going on tour “would be really cool.” He also wouldn’t mind having his own Wikipedia page.

His advice to current college students?

“It’s good to have a plan, but write it in pencil.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 15

Senior Profile | Audrey Rosevear

Leaping to Topology, Theater, and Transitioning Audrey Rosevear has spent her time at Amherst devoted to her passions of mathematics and theater, all while embarking on a personal journey to come out as trans.

—Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 Audrey Rosevear ’22 has moved through life by taking leaps instead of steps. She has been an active member in the math and theater communities at Amherst, all while undergoing significant personal change in discovering her gender identity and transitioning.

She attributes her many accomplishments to the leaps of faith she has taken, starting long before her time in college.

What Kind of Child Are You? “From a very young age, I had these hyperfixations on different things that would last from months to years,” said Rosevear.

Her parents tell stories about her love of submarines and matchbox cars. But the earliest fixation that she can recall is Legos, with both problem-solving and artistic aspects that seem to reflect her current intellectual interests.

She also noted that her parents pushed her to explore her interests at a young age. “[My mom would] try to get me excited about math sometimes, and she’d sit me down and I would eagerly listen to her tell me how binary worked or how to multiply big numbers on paper.” At the same time, she learned from witnessing her dad’s “strong dramatic interests,” including his work as a journalist for the auto industry, and his love of cars, electric guitars, and craft cocktails.

Her twin brother Ian also shaped how she thought of herself, a “self-reinforcing dynamic” of

mutually exclusive traits between them: “We were both deeply envious of each other, but for different things. I was always the outgoing child, the child who was good with adults, the child who would talk to the cashier when we went shopping, the one who all the teachers loved, and who had more academic success,” Rosevear recalled.

“Conversely, Ian was always the popular one. I don’t really consider myself as having friends before I was 12 or 13, because I mostly just tagged along with Ian’s friends, and he always had plenty.” Rosevear also remembers that she was talented at sports and games, beating their grandfather at chess when she was six. These identities extended to how she was perceived at school, in a negative way. “They called me ‘professor’ in third grade. It was not conducive to making friends.”

But by seventh grade, her social circle opened up, and she found herself with friends who were not just her brother’s. She grew close to the other kids in her neighborhood, particularly because of the unique nature of Mosaic Commons, the cohousing community where she grew up: “You buy a joint plot of land that everyone has their houses on. It’s a little bit like a college campus but for adults.”

The other people who lived there shaped her. “We have queers, we have Jews, pagans, polyamorous couples, people who work in tech, people who go to Renaissance fairs. Very, very crunchy

16 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

… These were my parents’ friends, this was the environment which I was born into, which didn’t help me fitting in at public school…”

Indeed, Rosevear struggled to set down roots at school, particularly in her Technology and Engineering class. “Basically, I had the worst teacher of all time,” Rosevear reflected. “He gave us multiple choice questions as homework, but to answer them, we had to hand copy the entire question and all four answers, and then answer it because it’s better for memorization. So I patently refused to do that.” Looking back now, Rosevear sees at least one victory in the experience: “This professor also later turned out to be an anti-vaxxer and a Trump supporter, and I felt very validated.” Fed up, she decided to take the leap and transfer from public school to Sudbury Valley School, the private school where many of her neighborhood friends went.

Much like her cohousing community, Sudbury Valley School, or SVS, embraced an atypical structure: “It has no classes, no grades, no teachers. It’s in this old, beautiful, converted mansion, and the kids just hang out there and do whatever they want all day.”

She spent her time playing piano and teaching herself Algebra II and French. “That turned out to be very hard to do,” she noted, “because self-teaching is extremely difficult, especially when all of your friends are saying, ‘Come play board games with us.’”

Photo courtesy of Cayla Weiss ’23

Rosevear has cultivated a deep interest in differential geometry, leading to her thesis about topology and 4D manifolds.

Still, being at SVS was an invaluable experience for her. “Instead of doing anything academic, I spent all of my time hanging out with my friends, which in some ways was very good for me. It was a great way for me to learn a lot of social skills very fast, in a somewhat kind of brutal process. So I learned a lot that year, just not much of it was academic.”

What Is a Limit?

Eventually, Rosevear’s academic yearnings caught up with her, and she decided to leave SVS before eleventh grade, an equally daunting leap as leaving public school in the first place. In preparation, she took a pre-calculus course at a local community college. Soon, she was back in the classroom, staring at logarithms and trigonometry for Calculus II. She recalls a week in that class vividly. The teacher told the class that they would be reviewing pre-calculus. “And I [said], ‘I just learned this, this is boring.’ So I [went] home, and I [went] on

Khan Academy. And I watched the video about ‘what is a limit.’”

“It is hard to overstate how much that one decision changed my life,” Rosevear said. “This was my first time having my mind blown by math. It changed everything.I was like, ‘This is the reason I came back to public school, because I wanted to be introduced to topics that I would not be able to find on my own.’”

She binge-watched more and more videos about calculus and fostered a fixation-like interest in math during the remainder of high school, while also enjoying her French and history classes.

Soon, she was already applying to colleges. From the start, she was drawn to top schools because she says she wanted to be around “a bunch of other people who’d spent their entire life being called the smart one, because then they wouldn’t think of me as the smart one.”

One particular liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts stood out to her: “I fell absolutely

Senior Profile | Audrey Rosevear in love with Amherst. I really liked the vibe, and I heard good things about the math department. [I thought,] ‘Yeah, this is the place for me.’”

How Do You You’re Trans?

Know

Rosevear told me that the story of her transition began in her first-year seminar, “Keywords in American Culture” with Professor of History and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies Jen Manion: “One of the keywords that we talked about was ‘trans.’ And I distinctly remember walking up to Professor Manion in office hours at some point, and saying, ‘How do you know if you’re trans?’”

“They were like, ‘I don’t know if that’s a question I can answer, both as your professor and also, I think you’ve got to figure it out yourself.’”

Rosevear had known queer people during her childhood, both at SVS and in her cohousing community. She also noticed that she was naturally gravitating toward female and queer friends, and that she was often perceived as the “token cis straight man in social situations,” which contributed to feel-

ings of internalized homophobia and transphobia.

“Some of my friends [began] playing around with gender a little more,” she remembered, “and by the time I hit my sophomore year [of college], I started going by he/ they pronouns as an experiment. I didn’t feel super comfortable with it, but I was like, ‘Well, I kind of hate being a man.’”

But the people in her life did not fully respect her new pronouns: “It was just like something that happens during introductions, and then everyone [called] me ‘he.’”

Halfway through her sophomore year, a friend asked her, “Do you prefer going by they/them pronouns or he/him pronouns?”

“And I thought about it. I said ‘they/them,’ and from that moment on, people called me they/ them. But I didn’t really feel comfortable with it, like it didn’t feel right. I felt like I was like invading queer spaces still and pretending to be queer.”

Right at this point, Rosevear returned home during Covid, and she put her ruminations about gender to the side. She was not able to ignore it for long. Her

younger sibling introduced her to the YouTube series ContraPoints, hosted by Natalie Wynn, a trans woman. “At some point during the video she makes a joke about being trans. And I’m like, ‘Wait, she’s trans?’ This kind of blew my mind: I’d never had the experience of encountering a passing trans woman who I didn’t know was trans.”

“I had a lot of internalized transphobia, and I had this image in my head of trans women as men in dresses, just because society really likes to tell you that trans women can’t even resemble women.”

It was enough to open up her perspective. She promptly took the leap, started using she/her pronouns and came out to her parents, siblings, and friends. For Rosevear, it was a moment that explained the discomfort she had felt in her childhood: “Finally I had a name for all of these feelings of not fitting in or being confused as to why I spent a lot more time with women than men, and why I didn’t feel comfortable in male-dominated spaces.”

Who Is Audrey Rosevear?

Photo courtesy of Grace Walker ’24

Rosevear performed in “The Bacchae” as Dionysus, a “dream role” that she feels is a culmination of her love of theater at Amherst.

During her time at Amherst, Rosevear has been heavily involved with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. She often attended the Math and Stats table during her lunchtime, and appreciated being able to learn about professors and their research. She was a founding member of the Math Club, serving as President, in addition to working as a TA. In recognition of her engagement with the math and stats community, she won the Walker Award for Leadership in 2021.

She has developed a close relationship with Assistant Professor of Mathematics Ivan Contreras, who was her advisor as well as her research mentor under the SURF program. “During these years of interactions with her,” Contreras reflected, “I can safely say that she is one of the most outstanding and talented young mathematicians I’ve ever met. Her passion for research and excellence in academics are equally matched with her exceptional kindness, thoughtfulness and commitment to make the Amherst community a better place.”

For her thesis, she studied four-dimensional topology with Associate Professor of Mathematics Michael Ching and UMass Professor of Mathematics Weimin Chen. Reaching out to Chen, whom she approached because his research fit her interests more closely than any Amherst professor, was another leap that changed the trajectory of her life.

When asked to describe topology, she said it “is kind of like geometry but it’s squishier. A donut is [topologically] the same as a coffee cup because you can kind of squish one into the other.”

Connecting tools from quantum field theory and discrete algebra, her thesis forms a single, elegant picture about the ways that two-dimensional surfaces can live in four-dimensional space. Her methodology reframes easy-to-understand techniques from three dimensions so that they can be applied to work in four dimensions.

She feels that she has been

working on the thesis for longer than her time at Amherst. “I conceptualize everything that happened [in my life] starting in my junior year [of high school], with the moment I [learned about] calculus. So my thesis has been a really nice sort of capstone and coalescing all of the things I’ve been interested in over the last six years,” Rosevear said.

She also spent her time at Amherst deeply involved in theater with the Green Room, which she notes is “a part of the way in which I found community in college that I didn’t have in high school.” She had her first role during the spring semester of her first year, and even considered being a theater and dance major for a time.

Theater at Amherst has been a learning experience for Rosevear, especially because she had not acted seriously before. “I was behind a lot of the other people because a lot of people did theater in high school,” she said. “So I worked really hard to get the acting roles I wanted and mostly didn’t, right up until the show that I’m currently in: ‘The Bacchae,’ where I will be starring as Dionysus. It’s kind of my dream role, and I finally got it at the very end of college.”

Going forward, Rosevear will be pursuing a Ph.D. in pure math at the University of California, Berkeley. From there, she hopes to enter academia, get a post-doctorate degree, and maybe a tenured position at an education-minded institution like Amherst.

Finally, I asked her what advice she would give to herself a few years ago. She responded, “A lot of my story is characterized by me taking these leaps that were terrifying, and there were leaps I didn’t make because they were too terrifying. I think all of the best opportunities that have come to me in college have come from me stepping out of my comfort zone and just doing something that I’d been thinking about doing. That’s what transitioning was: just going for it.”

To put it simply, she says: “Don’t be afraid.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 17

Senior Profile | Joelle Crichlow

Leading the Charge to Make Change With Care Guided by a passion for changemaking and a commitment to making Amherst a better place, Joelle Crichlow has done just that — and she will continue to effect positive change wherever her path takes her.

— Sonia Chajet Wides ’25 Joelle Crichlow ’22 is the definition of a doer. “People come up to me all the time and say ‘You’re friends with Joelle, right? How does she do everything?’” said her friend Sonja Lazovic ’22. I wondered the same thing when I first arrived at Amherst; Crichlow was the Peer Advocate (PA) who led my orientation workshop on sexual respect, and when I began writing for The Student, I read past articles and found that her name appeared everywhere. She was president of the Black Students Union (BSU), she is on the student anti-racism task force, she is a Student Equity & Inclusion Liaison, she was leading initiatives like #IntegrateAmherst. She is a model of community engagement, a hard worker who makes it look effortless.

Over the course of my twohour conversation with her, sitting in the late-afternoon sun at a picnic table outside Morris Pratt Dormitory, it was clear to me that Crichlow’s engagement comes from a deep care for the people around her, an understanding of the meaning of community, and serious thought about how to make change. This passion has led her to incredible academic and extracurricular heights, and defines her role on campus. Her friends agreed: “She gets things done because she cares a lot,” Lazovic said. “Her growth in leadership is just a natural development.”

President Biddy Martin, who has worked with Crichlow on the

Anti-Racism Advisory Group, agreed: “I have been impressed

by Joelle’s clarity of thought and purpose, her incisive contributions to discussion, and her strength of conviction and purpose,” Martin said, “Joelle is a talented thinker and leader … she combines these qualities with warmth and humor.”

Expanded Community Crichlow first learned about Access to Amherst (A2A ) weekend — an all-expenses-paid fly-in visit for students of color and low-income students — then called the Diversity Open House (DIVOH), while doing college research as a high school junior. Attending A2A helped Crichlow decide to apply early to Amherst. “I felt like diversity was something that I was lacking in my high school,” she said.

“And so going to DIVOH, I felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a school that really cares about diversity.’”

Crichlow grew up in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, an “overwhelmingly” white, affluent community. She attended the same school from elementary school through high school. While her surroundings were largely homogenous, her parents “always placed an importance on being in the Black community,” and Crichlow and her brother “had a Black network outside of high school” through the organization Jack and Jill and their family’s social circle.

This network “supplemented the fact that there weren’t that many

18 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

of us [at my high school],” Crichlow said. “It was like, ‘Alright, this is just what this is. And I have somewhere else I can go.’”

While this connection to the community was helpful, Crichlow discussed the difference between her experience and the experience of “growing up wholly enmeshed in and around a Black community.” This was one of the reasons that she was interested in coming to Amherst, and knew that she would also major in Black studies.

“This was something that I felt like I hadn’t gotten exposure to in high school,” she said, “Everything was very whitewashed. I wanted to be involved in that community more, and I wanted to do it in an academic lens as well.”

Once she arrived, Crichlow became situated in Amherst’s Black community: “God, it was so great,” she said. “I think I came into my own.” On the experience of being a Black woman at Amherst, Crichlow said, “To be clear, it has not been perfect,” but she added that the community made it so “I didn’t feel like I was censoring parts of my identity … it just was a place where I could actually just have fun and be myself wholly for the first time. Which also made learning more fun.”

Commitment to Change Crichlow is someone who is deeply involved at Amherst, guided by a passion for changemaking and a commitment to making Amherst a better place.

Photo courtesy of Joelle Crichlow ’22

President of the BSU, a member of the anti-racism task force, and a Student Equity & Inclusion Liaison, Crichlow has been involved in many social justice initiatives at Amherst, effecting much change along the way.

She pinpointed her sophomore year as the time where her “activism at the college picked up, at least in relation to race matters.”

At the time, she was serving as the vice president of the BSU, and Amherst had just been rocked by a racist incident involving white members of the men’s lacrosse team verbally assaulting a Black player. The BSU leapt into action, forming the #IntegrateAmherst movement, which included a series of demands to the college via a letter signed by over 2,000 students from across the nation in 48 hours. “That was kind of an interesting position for me to be in,” Crichlow recalled. “It sounds horrible to say that I’ve been lucky in horrible instances of racism, but I was in leadership positions to affect tangible change at those moments. So I was very much able to be involved.”

In August of the same year, Martin was forming a Student Anti-Racism Task Force and reached

out to Crichlow to ask for member recommendations. Crichlow herself ended up serving on the committee, which continues to meet with Martin weekly.

At the time that she got involved in the task force, Crichlow described going through a change in outlook about how to effect change at the college. After taking Lembo’s classes and dealing with the lacrosse incident, “I honestly was feeling very cynical,” Crichlow recalled. “I was like, ‘Burn the institution! Everything sucks!

It’s never gonna be better, screw the school, screw everyone!’”

But during the pandemic, facing the possibility of being overwhelmed by interrupted learning, mass death, and political unrest, she found herself looking for “positives” as she saw people come together. During this time, she began to think about changemaking from a more pragmatic standpoint. “This was around the place where I would say I got a lit-

Senior Profile | Joelle Crichlow tle less cynical,” Crichlow said. “I feel like being away, I was like, ‘We can’t do everything all at once, so how do we take a step back and really prioritize? How are we strategic about what change we want to happen? And when? Also understanding what the school has already tried or already done that hasn’t been effective?”

The task force was a compelling (and compensated) way to engage in those questions. But they also reflect a deeper quality of Crichlow’s that I found to be a through-line in our conversation: her commitment to fully understanding the way things work in order to truly make change. Crichlow described feeling that, because she had taken “Dilemmas of Diversity” and written her term paper, she knew about Amherst’s bureaucracies and “how the administration worked.” “I think one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about Amherst is its governance structure,” she said, emphasizing the significant role that faculty and trustees have in making decisions.

She also thinks that it is difficult to have continuity in movements here due to the four-year timeline.

“You can only do so much in four years, and then you’re gone,” she said. “And within that cycle, you constantly have people coming through and not knowing what’s already been tried, or what’s already been done.” She highlighted the time between the Amherst Uprising and #IntegrateAmherst as helpful in seeing the actual effects, or lack thereof, of the college’s changes in policy.

This can stall effective progress, Crichlow thinks. “Amherst Uprising, to me, … [contained] very baseline demands,” Crichlow said in a 2021 quote in The Student.

“A lot of what’s being asked on behalf of the administration are the same things that were asked [in the] 1980s. I think that it can be a little bit disheartening when you see the same things being asked for almost 50 years later.”

I brought this quote up to Crichlow, and asked her what she

thinks would move Amherst beyond these repeated “baseline” demands. On one note, Crichlow said that “I think that there’s a lot that we can do around increasing resources for victims of sexual assault on campus,” noting this as “a challenge” due to the legal constraints that Title IX and Health Education interact with.

More broadly, Crichlow said that a better Amherst would involve “alleviating some of the social dynamics” that reinforce harm at Amherst, from the culture of sexual violence to the enabling of racism, to the severity of the student-athlete divide. This, she said, will have to come from both administrative changes and student “buy-in.” “There’s no right way to [be involved],” she said, “But that doesn’t mean that everyone doesn’t hold an equally important part in driving that culture change.”

Crichlow also voiced an optimistic attitude about Amherst’s past and future evolution. She pointed to a variety of factors such as diversity, social culture, available resources for students, and the visibility of campus advocates like the PAs — all of which she thinks have improved during her time here.

“A lot has not changed at this college, a lot has not improved,” she said. “But I’m also sitting here watching them actively try to hire more Black faculty members, … watching them have a meaningful conversation about how we retain staff members of color. It’s not that everything has gotten better ... But thinking about the different kinds of conversations that are being considered in the college, I’m like, ‘Okay, I see the impact.’”

“Whether I directly impacted that or not, that makes me really happy and really proud to have gone here and to [have seen] that change over the course of four years. Because things are better,” Crichlow said.

To me, it seems like Crichlow has had an undeniable impact. It has been her voice that has spoken up in areas of power, her thought

and intention that has contributed to multiple successful movements at this college. “She’s initiating a lot of changes,” Lazovic reflected. “She just has genuinely really wonderful ideas, and she knows how to command a room.”

Academic Roots In high school, Crichlow spent a semester at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership (SEGL) in Washington, D.C., a domestic study program that focuses on ethics and leadership in national and international affairs. While attending SEGL, Crichlow and the rest of her cohort lived on Capitol Hill and engaged in a curriculum rooted in politics and the environment of D.C. “I feel like it was the first time … learning with people who actually wanted to learn for learning’s sake,” she said. She also described the experience as one of her first tastes of independence, something that motivated her to attend Amherst.

Crichlow’s participation in SEGL was part of a broader context of her strong interest in politics, and her desire to attend law school. “I knew that I wanted to do something in the political realm and what felt like the most tangible way to do that was law,” she recalled. Learning about the law, jurisprudence, and social thought (LJST) major at Amherst drew her to the school. The open curriculum was also “a big sell” — Crichlow felt that the style of learning at her high school, which she described as “traditional” and “less about how you think,” was too confining.

Crichlow took an LJST class during the first semester of her freshman year, but she didn’t enjoy it. “I probably shouldn’t have written off the whole department based on that one class, but I was like, ‘F — k that, I’m done.’” She tried out political science, too, but didn’t enjoy it either.

During her sophomore fall, Crichlow took her first sociology class: “Dilemmas of Diversity” with Edward N. Ney ’46 Professor in American Institutions Ron

Lembo, who later served as her thesis advisor. She recalled immediately knowing that she wanted to major in sociology. “What I liked about soc[iology] is that I was able to analyze dynamics and issues that were influenced by politics and influenced by institutions specifically, but it felt a little bit more human,” she said. “I also liked the fact that kind of everything is sociology. There weren’t really any concrete boundaries … You can make anything into a sociology class or a sociological problem.”

Lembo described Crichlow as having a “sociological imagination, where she can take issues in her own life and the lives of those around her as objects of study.” In class, “she is always attuned to the nuance of things: Nothing gets by her … It’s no exaggeration to say that as a result of her participation in class, we all came to see challenging issues in new ways. As an instructor, you can’t ask for more than that.”

Crichlow recalled feeling intellectually invigorated by the topics she was learning about. In Lembo’s “Dilemmas of Diversity,” she wrote a term paper comparing the impact of programs like A2A and Amherst’s legacy admissions practices. “That was the first academic project that I actually feel like I got caught up in,” she recollected. Her paper ended up being 12 pages over the limit, encouraged

by Lembo.

She later felt similarly excited when she began researching and writing a sociology thesis after remote learning “ruined me as a student.” Crichlow’s thesis focused on an intergenerational analysis of how “social mobility and class identity affect the way that we form or understand our racial identity,” based partially on her own family. She conducted interviews with 10 different affluent Black families, and analyzed each generation’s conception of their racial identity as shaped by their class upbringing. Lembo called it “a terrific piece of sociological research.” Writing a thesis “reinstated some of my intellectual curios-

ity,” she said.

Reflections and Future Crichlow has accomplished a tremendous amount in her time here, and said that “at every phase, I’ve learned something different.”

She emphasized that students here have more capability and power than they might be aware of. “Our voice really does matter as individuals and as a collective and there’s a lot that can be done if you can harness that to create the change that you want to do,” she said. She also highlighted the important role of care, rest, and boundaries in her journey as a student leader.

Moving out of an educational institution context, Crichlow is continuing to consider the best way for her to have an impact while maintaining her own interests and rest. She does not want to go into policy work, but while she became disillusioned with the idea of law school at the beginning of college, she maintains that it is still on the table, as are other forms of graduate school. She expressed a desire to “feel like I’m living a very fulfilled life where it’s very impactful socially, but isn’t necessarily that I’m at the forefront of fighting policy in the same way.”

For now, she is “liv[ing] a little more life before I decide exactly what that looks like.” Next year, Crichlow will move to New York City and work in marketing at American Express, which she described as a creative outlet and “a career that’s just gonna be fun, that I can learn a lot from.”

“Then we’ll come back to the table and we’ll figure out okay, how can I come back to this?” she said. “What is the way that I want to create meaningful change? How does that look different outside of an educational institution?”

Crichlow said that she will miss her Amherst routines and traditions, including the serenity of Val-sitting and the Emily Dickinson trail. I am confident that Amherst will miss Crichlow in return.

Every community member here is better off for her hard work, initiative, and deep care.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 19

Senior Profile | German Giammattei

A Legend On and Off the Pitch Though perhaps the best player in the history of Amherst men’s soccer, German Giammattei is better described as a humble teammate and a phenomenal friend.

—Alex Noga ’23 Anyone who pays even the slightest bit of attention to Amherst athletics knows the name German Giammattei ’22. In his three seasons playing forward for the men’s soccer team — he lost one year when the Covid-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 season — Giammattei has displayed an almost superhuman ability to glide through the tightest spaces in the box, shrug off larger defenders, finish on the run, and position himself in the most dangerous areas on the field. He has started 60 total games for the Mammoths and accumulated 45 goals and 12 assists, earning accolade upon accolade along the way.

“An absolute comet of a career. Legendary,” said Head Men’s Soccer Coach Justin Serpone. “In only three seasons … he became one of the most accomplished players in DIII men’s soccer history.”

But behind all the accolades is a humble, kind, and caring soul.

“Incredibly — and it sounds cliche, but it’s true — he’s a better person and teammate than a player,” said Serpone. “He’ll be long remembered around Hitchcock Field and [by] anyone connected to Amherst soccer.”

Finding His Footing Growing up in Pinecrest, Florida, just outside of Miami, Giammattei began playing travel soccer with local team Pinecrest Premier.

Later, at 14 years old, he moved to Kendall Academy, a member

of the Development Academy League, the top youth league in the United States.

When asked if he experienced similar levels of dominance in his youth as he has at the collegiate level, Giammattei, chuckling, said, “I mean, it’s kind of awkward to talk about, but I think overall I’ve always considered myself to be one of the best. I think it really took off [at the] end of my sophomore and junior year, and then senior year I did really well.”

“Really well” is an understatement. In his senior year of high school, Giammattei ended the regular season with 30 goals in 29 games, the second most in the entire country.

Giammattei committed to Amherst late in his junior year of high school. He visited numerous schools, mostly within Division I, but while on a visit at a nearby school, Serpone gave Giammattei a call to come see what Amherst had to offer. Reflecting on his visit, Giammattei remembers feeling a strong connection to Serpone. “I really liked [Coach Serpone] and the staff and just the way he ran things,” said Giammattei.

Though not an easy decision to make, Giammattei affirms that he has no regrets. “It’s [obviously] never easy just being like, ‘Oh, this one for sure’ if you have a few options because you’ll [be thinking], ‘Oh, what if I pick wrong,” he said. “But I don’t regret it [at all]. I’ve had a great time [at Amherst], especially with the team.”

20 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

A Mammoth Legacy Giammattei had no trouble acclimating himself to the competition of college soccer. He finished his first collegiate season by winning NESCAC Rookie of the Year after playing in all 20 games and tallying seven goals and three assists.

When asked about his mentality during his first year, Giammattei said, “I’ve always pushed myself to be the best. So, I did have expectations to go and make an impact. I feel like, if I didn’t expect that [from myself], then I couldn’t expect it from others.

I’ve always seen it as, if you don’t see yourself as being good, then why will other people think you’re good?”

Giammattei’s mindset was certainly justified, as his 2019 sophomore campaign was one of the greatest individual seasons in Division III soccer history. Leading the Mammoths to a 19-2-2 overall record, Giammattei started all 22 games and finished the season with an almost unfathomable 26 goals, five assists, and 57 points, tied for the most goals in all of Division III that year. His tally tied the NESCAC single-season scoring record and set the single season goals and points record for Amherst — he only needed 13 games to break the previous record of 16 goals and 35 points. Giammattei was named NESCAC Player of the Year, selected to the NESCAC First Team and both the All-Region and All-America Team, and

Photo courtesy of German Giamattei ’22

As two-time NCAA DIII Player of the Year, Giammattei is the most accomplished player in Amherst men’s soccer history.

But those close to him say, “He’s a better person and teammate than a player.” was ultimately named Division III Men’s National Player of the Year, the first Amherst player and only the fourth non-senior to ever receive the award.

Although the 2020 season was canceled, Giammattei carried the momentum from his sophomore season over into the 2021 campaign, during which he served as a senior captain and again led the NESCAC in goals, points, and game-winning goals. For the second straight season, he was named First Team All-NESCAC, All-Region, and All-America, voted D3soccer.com Forward of the Year, and maintained his title as NCAA DIII Men’s National Player of the Year, becoming the first player to ever win the award in consecutive seasons and only the second two-time recipient.

Despite his individual success, Giammattei laments the fact that the Mammoths never won any team awards during his time at the college. The Mammoths came

devastatingly close in Giammattei’s three years with the program but could never quite seal a conference title — losing twice in the semifinals and once in the quarterfinals — or a national championship, reaching the Sweet 16 in his first year before going out with consecutive losses in the NCAA Championship Game.

“Obviously, we came short a few times of the National Title and the NESCACs,” Giammattei said. “I guess in a sense, [the individual awards do] somehow reward me for all the work that I have done and [especially] my teammates because obviously without them, I can’t get the ball.

So, it does show a bit of all the work that I put in with everyone — my coaches, the training staff, everyone — but at the same time, it does still feel like missing a bit since we didn’t get the team trophy.”

Smiling, he added, “But it’s still, like, a pretty good run.”

Senior Profile | German Giammattei Above All Else, A Teammate and Friend Throughout my conversations with Giammattei, his coaches, and his teammates, one aspect of Giammattei became incredibly apparent — his humility.

“My favorite memory of German was in the post-game press conference after the National Semifinal in 2019, when he scored three goals in our 3-0 win over Centre College,” said Serpone.

“When asked about his performance, he spent two minutes talking about all of his teammates — mentioning seven of them by name — and deflecting every bit of attention from himself to the team. That moment spoke volumes to me about the type of person German is.”

Teammate and sophomore roommate Bernie White ’23 echoed this sentiment. “I think his best quality as a leader is his humbleness,” White said. “It would be easy for him to act above the rest of the group after winning so

many individual awards, but he constantly praises his teammates and deflects attention.”

This aspect of Giammattei’s personality shone through when asked about his favorite moments of his collegiate career. Rather than commenting on his many hat tricks or game-winning goals, he instead cited the team’s victory against Middlebury in his senior season. He wasn’t talking about the NCAA quarterfinal victory, in which he scored the lone goal; rather, he meant the regular season 1-0 victory in which he only played a half and was kept off the scoresheet.

“I enjoyed beating [Middlebury] a lot … because my class hadn’t beaten them,” Giammattei said. “Sebastian Derby [’22] scored a crazy goal — it was just great.”

He also brought up the team’s overtime victory against University of Chicago, in which Ignacio Cubeddu ’23 scored the winner in overtime, once again singing his

teammate’s praises rather than his own. Even when mentioning the victory against rival Tufts in his sophomore year, a game in which he scored two goals — including the winner nine seconds into overtime — he diverted all the attention away from himself, instead commenting on the brilliant buildup play between Dane Lind ’20 and Alex Shahmirzadi ’22 that led to his deciding goal.

An Amateur sional

Profes-

When the 2020 season was canceled, Giammattei trained with Dundalk FC, a professional club in the top division in Ireland.

While there, however, Giammattei remained committed to return to Amherst for his senior year, choosing to take online classes while simultaneously training as a professional soccer player. “[Balancing classes while training in Ireland] was a lot harder than it is here,” Giammattei said, laughing.

Because of the time difference, Giammattei was able to schedule his classes for later in the day to accommodate his training schedule. On most days, he would be at the club from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., then return home for a short break before attending his classes around 4 p.m., ending the evening by completing the remainder of his work.

To remain eligible for his final collegiate season, Giammattei had to follow numerous NCAA guidelines. He could train with the senior side, the top team at the club, but was unable to participate in official games, only being permitted to play matches with the under-19 side and select senior-side friendlies.

“It was great but at the same time a bit frustrating because of NCAA rules,” said Giammattei. “I saw some of the guys in the youth teams who I was playing with get brought up to some of [the senior side’s] games — one of my friends got to play against Arsenal — and I could only watch. It doesn’t mean that I would have played, but I didn’t have the chance to compete for a spot.”

Still, though Giammattei said that it was an incredible experience, he was firm in his decision to return to Amherst for his senior year.

“I came to Amherst to get a degree at the end of the day,” he said. “[That was always] my plan.”

The Road Ahead

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Giammattei, a sensational soccer player, moves up the field with the ball at his feet in a 3-0 victory against Saint Joseph’s College this past season.

After graduating from Amherst, Giammattei will attend the University of Maryland for a final year of collegiate soccer while getting his master’s in technology entrepreneurship. However, he is committed to giving the professional soccer route a real shot.

“My plan is to basically play for a year [at Maryland] and just try to keep playing after that,” he said.

There are many options open to a player of Giammattei’s caliber, but after his experience during the pandemic, Europe is

the goal. “I’ve thought about the [MLS] draft but I’d rather play in Europe just because I’ve always wanted to play there. After playing in Ireland, it’s just a great place to be for soccer.”

Giammattei remains a realist, however, knowing the incredible challenges that come with pursuing a career as a professional athlete.

“In soccer, it works differently — you don’t have the American system of college and then pro,” said Giammattei. “Most kids are 17, 18, 19 years old when they’re breaking into first teams. I’m 22 and considered old for soccer, which is crazy to think about, but to get into a pro environment at 22 is super late.”

“I’ve always talked to my parents and I know that soccer isn’t forever, so [that’s why] I chose to come here and that’s why I’m continuing to do my master’s and study while I play,” he continued.

“And, hopefully, I’ll do it for as long as I can.”

A psychology major, Giammattei said that he is more interested in the business side of psychology rather than the clinical side. If a professional soccer career doesn’t pan out, he hopes to leverage his psychology background to break into the business world. However, Giammattei’s ideal career remains playing in one of Europe’s top five leagues.

“One of the top five leagues has always been the dream, but I know it’s not easy … you need everything to go basically perfect to get there. But there are [other] great leagues in Europe as well … so if I got to play there it would still be amazing.”

One thing is for certain — the Amherst community will continue to follow and support Giammattei through and through.

“I feel very lucky to have German as a teammate, friend, and roommate,” said White. “[The team and I] are going to miss him on and off the field next year, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for him at Maryland and beyond.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 21

Senior Profile | Alexis Scalese

Asserting Indigeneity at Amherst and Beyond A dedicated researcher, thoughtful friend, and driven activist, Alexis Scalese has been an instrumental force in the creation of an assertive Native American presence on campus.

— Ethan Foster ’25 Upon meeting Alexis Scalese ’22, I was instantly struck by her warmth. She has an inviting smile and a bubbly laugh, both of which quickly set you at ease. Scalese is an accomplished scholar, leader, and researcher, but she is also incredibly humble. Before we began our interview, she expressed her bewilderment at the fact that anyone would want to profile her, even though the reasons are obvious to those around her. Since our first meeting, I’ve come to understand that Scalese is the kind of person who always strives to lift up those around her; self-aggrandizement does not figure in her vocabulary.

Away From Home Scalese is a member of the Pueblo of Isleta, a federally recognized Native community located roughly 20 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

However, the majority of her formative years were instead spent away from her homelands in Gainesville, Florida, where she was born and raised, a source of complication for Scalese’s understanding of her Native identity. “Growing up away from my community was really difficult,” Scalese said. “I had a lot of questions, like who was I as a person?”

The difficulty Scalese faced in connecting to her native roots was exacerbated by the lack of exposure to Native his-

tory offered in her public school classroom. “My education made me feel like there was a missing piece — high school does not do the best job of teaching the history of Native people in the United States,” she said.

Despite these difficulties, Scalese’s connection to her nation grew throughout her high school years as her family took trips to Albuquerque to visit her pueblo. “My parents really wanted me to know the people I come from, my biological family members, and maintain those kinship connections as best I can, considering that we were on the other side of the country,” Scalese recalled. While on these trips, she forged a strong connection with both the land and her people despite growing up largely distanced from them.

“There’s just this connection that I have to that space. I always felt at home,” she said.

In 2020, Scalese’s father accepted a job working near her homelands, and her family decided to move back to the Pueblo of Isleta. Though her initial experiences were complicated by the throes of the pandemic, Scalese’s connection to her Native identity quickly grew as she was enabled to put her culture into practice with those around her and connect with her community. “I knew a lot about my culture, but just to be able to practice it with people and be in relation with the land really

22 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

solidified my identity as an Isleta woman,” she said. “It’s just a feeling that I can’t describe.”

The Road to Amherst As a public school student in Florida, Scalese had little knowledge of Amherst prior to participating in College Horizons, a fly-in pre-college program that allows Native students to spend time on college campuses and receive advice from admissions recruiters. After her experiences on campus at Amherst through both the College Horizons program and Amherst’s own Early Opportunity for Native Students (EONS) program, Scalese knew that Amherst was where she wanted to be, and applied to the college through Early Decision.“Things were just lining up, and I felt really welcomed into the community,” she said.

Scalese was also heavily influenced by an idea repeated throughout both programs.

“They told us multiple times that Indian country needs people with degrees,” she said, “Not to say that degrees are the only way to be successful in life and to make Indian country proud, but the people who have these degrees don’t look like us, and they’re making decisions on our behalf.” This idea would be a motivating force for Scalese throughout her four years at Amherst.

First

Moments

on

Photo courtesy of Cayla Weiss ’23

A proud member of the Pueblo of Isleta, Scalese has been relentless in advocating against the erasure of Native peoples.

Campus Upon her arrival at Amherst, Scalese immersed herself in the Native community on campus, crediting the seniors at the time as well as Lisa Brooks — Henry S. Poler ’59 presidential teaching professor of English and American studies — and Kiara Vigil — associate professor of American studies — with fostering a tight-knit Native community. Scalese was struck by the number of Native students in her first American studies class with Vigil, which presented her with her first opportunity to interact with other Native people in an academic setting.

The Native community on campus also provided Scalese with a support system as she faced a difficult transition to life on campus. “Even though I’d been to campus before, this was a huge culture shock for me,” she said. “It was a hard transition, but I felt like I could lean on the Native community and my professors.”

“I felt empowered to speak in class and be my authentic self.

People were really caring for me,” she added.

Scalese quickly made her own creative contributions in this new learning environment.

In her first year, Scalese oversaw the creation of a Three Sisters garden at Book and Plow Farm for the course “When Corn Mother Meets King Corn: Cultural Studies of the Americas.”

Working with other Native students and current artist-in-residence Elizabeth James Perry, she ultimately used the garden to create a space for community building while honoring Native and Indigenous women.

“It really was a visionary project,” said Brooks. “She put such care into [the garden], and she took care of it long after class and continued that embodied learning.”

Passion and Drive in Advocacy Over her time at Amherst,

Senior Profile | Alexis Scalese Scalese has only become more active in advocating for her community, taking on leadership roles within the Native and Indigenous Studies Association — contributing in large part to its expansion — and serving on the Student Anti-Racism Advisory Committee.

Through this work, Scalese has played a key role fighting for Native representation and rights on campus, for instance writing several of the land acknowledgments used by various organizations on campus. “It’s a good step to recognize whose spaces we are occupying, most of it without consent,” she said.

Underlying such consistent advocacy against the erasure of Indigenous people in all spaces is a mantra Scalese learned in her time with College Horizons.

“Indigenous, educated, unafraid. That really empowered me to push through and remem-

ber why I’m here, which is to ensure the futurity of my community and of Indian country as a whole,” Scalese said.

Nathaniel Ashley ’22, a close friend of Scalese, commented on this unwavering dedication, noting that it extends to all aspects of her life. “I think what stands out to me most about Alexis is her passion and drive — her passion for her loved ones, for her academics, for her hobbies, for her nation, for everything that she sets her mind to,” Ashley said. “She has so much love for the people in her life, whether it’s celebrating our accomplishments, planning birthday parties for us, paying attention to our problems, or so much more.”

A Model Leader and Researcher In the classroom, Scalese has also become known for her unique leadership capabilities.

“She’s a phenomenal leader, but she’s able to lead in such a way that she’s always collaborating,” Brooks noted. “She was able to connect disparate ideas and weave them together in such a way that she would lead the whole class to a deeper insight. She’s really a model leader in that way and I’ve learned so much from her.”

Such thoughtfulness has informed Scalese’s work in research as well. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a student worker in Frost Library’s Archives and Special Collections, research has been an especially important aspect of Scalese’s time at Amherst.

Missy Roser, head of research and instruction for Frost Library, described Scalese as “a model for student researchers at Amherst. She’s spent the past four years being curious, taking advantage of every opportunity,

asking questions, [and] developing a very inclusive network.”

Scalese’s interest in the archives shines through in the way she explores the archives’ recent acquisition of Native periodicals as a hobby. “It’s just really cool to see what’s in that collection and learn about other stories from Native communities,” she said.

Ultimately, the research skills Scalese developed over her four years at Amherst culminated in a thesis on Corn Mother stories, mythologies from Indigenous groups that relate the story of Corn Mother, who is depicted as responsible for the origin of corn. Through the thesis-writing process, she was able to incorporate her own experiences being removed from her community in her childhood, in addition to what she’s learned as a writer and researcher in her time at Amherst.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Scalese teaches students at Amherst beading techniques as she leads a traditional beading workshop in the fall of 2019.

Life After Amherst Following graduation, Scalese will be pursuing a career as an archivist. Though she was previously drawn to the idea of being a professor, her time working in the Frost archives, as well as at her Pueblo’s Cultural Center as an intern in 2021, solidified her dedication to the preservation of her culture through the archival process. Immediately following graduation, Scalese will begin an internship at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia as a member of their Native American Scholars Initiative, where she will work with collections pertaining to Indigenous peoples across the United States.

Following her internship, Scalese will be attending the University of New Mexico to pursue a Master’s degree in Museum Studies, where she has received the Hidden Museum Partners Fellowship. Through the fellowship, she will continue her work at the Pueblo of Isleta’s cultural center as a caretaker for the center’s collections, seeking to create a unifying space for Isleta people of all ages. “I really want this to be a space for young people and elders in my community to really connect,” she said. “My community has lost so much because of colonization, so I really hope that [the center] can be a space of healing.”

In the long-term, Scalese plans to remain in New Mexico to continue building relationships and connecting with her community. Yet, regardless of where life takes Scalese, her goal remains clear: ensuring the preservation of Indigenous communities.

To future and current Native students, Scalese imparted this wisdom: “Don’t be ashamed of who you are … Lean into it.

We’re all here for a reason. Our elders and ancestors fought so hard for us to be here, so make sure you have a good heart and mind in everything you do.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 23

Senior Profile | Jiajia Zhang

Teaching, Telling, Painting Asian American History While Jiajia Zhang is on her way to becoming an Asian American studies scholar, her life has encompassed so much more: art, activism, and even social media management for a Belarusian rock band.

—Leo Kamin ’25 From the liberal-arts focus to the open curriculum and the Loeb Center for Career Exploration, Amherst College markets itself as a place for young people who do not yet know what they want to do with their lives. But Jiajia Zhang ’22, an American studies and studio art major, has known that she wanted to be an Asian American studies scholar since she was in seventh grade.

Her story, one of fierce and consistent intellectual vision, is a reminder that there is not one kind of Amherst student, and not one kind of Amherst experience.

Zhang was born in Aba Tibetan Prefecture, in Sichuan Province in Western China. She moved to Wuhan when she was two months old, before relocating to Denton, Texas, when she was four-and-a-half years old.

In Denton, located in a “working-class part of North Texas,” Zhang was the only child of Chinese ancestry in her public elementary school.

For as long as she can remember, Zhang loved listening to and telling stories. They were “a way to experience solidarity and unpack my contemporary experiences and connect them to the events of the past,” Zhang explained. Naturally, she was interested in the humanities from a young age, but she was typecast by her peers as a “math kid.”

When she would speak up in humanities classes, her classmates would make fun of her — she

had a stutter. The only Asian person she saw in middle school was an exchange teacher; anytime the teacher tried to speak about anything besides math, Zhang’s peers would snicker. From this early experience, Zhang began to think that a person like her did not belong in the humanities. “It was those kinds of memories that made me feel like it was impossible for me to become a historian,” she said.

But as Zhang grew older, things changed. In seventh grade, one teacher changed her life. She was assigned to read the book “Journey to Topaz” by Yoshiko Uchida, which tells the story of a young Japanese girl sent to an internment camp during World War II. Though Zhang is not Japanese, the book resonated deeply with her. “I remember reading that book and realizing for the first time [that] I had a right to complain and stand up for myself because this entire time, I had felt that everyone else had roots in this country [except for me].”

She had learned about Black history and Latino history, but never about Asian American history. As she began to study Asian American history on her own, Zhang realized that “we’d been coming in waves for centuries, that we had been protesting and standing up for rights for as long as we’d been here.” She retains a close relationship with the teacher who assigned the book to this

24 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

day.

As Zhang, then still in middle school, began to learn about the stories of the generations of Asian Americans who had come before her, she also desired to share them with others. She had had a passion for teaching from a young age. In second grade, she began teaching Chinese lessons to children at her local library, the same library where a volunteer from the local community had taught her to speak English.

As her interests combined, a new dream emerged — to teach Asian American history.

From that point, Zhang set out to learn as much as she could about that history. Because there were few books catering specifically to children, she dove straight into the academic literature, discovering the discipline of Asian American studies. One of the early books she read was “The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience,” a 620-page survey of Asian American history written by John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer Franklin S. Odo, who Zhang described as “one of the founding fathers of Asian American studies” and who has been teaching at Amherst since 2015.

Though there were a number of reasons why Zhang ultimately chose Amherst, the prospect of studying with Odo was a major one. Odo remembers his first interaction with Zhang, while she was still a high-school

Photo courtesy of Jiajia Zhang ’22

Zhang poses with “The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience,“ by Amherst’s Franklin Odo, a book that ignited her interest in Asian American studies. senior making her college decision. “She introduced herself and said, ‘I want to be an Asian American studies professor,’” he said. “That about floored me.

How many high school kids know what they want to be in the first place? And how many kids want to be an Asian American studies professor?”

It was the beginning of a four-year working relationship between the two. Zhang said that she worked with Odo, either in classes he taught or in special topics courses, during each of her eight semesters at Amherst.

While at Amherst, Zhang not only studied Asian American history, but advocated for it. She served as president of Amherst’s Asian and Pacific American Action Committee, leading protests and facilitating dialogue with the administration in hopes of establishing an Asian American studies department at Amherst and organizing the “Stop Asian Hate” protest in March of last

year. The campaign is already showing results in the form of the hiring of three new Asian American studies professors, but the administration has not yet committed to establishing a department.

Odo celebrated Zhang’s activism and her academic prowess; he said that, from the beginning, he could tell that Zhang was “unusually intellectually mature.”

But his favorite part of the relationship has been that he “keeps learning things about her.”

Such is the experience of getting to know Zhang. Though her intellectual life has long been anchored by a love for Asian American history, she seems to have an almost infinite array of interests and talents.

She was a competitive figure skater growing up. She is an exceptionally talented artist; she recently sold one of her works to the college’s Mead Art Museum.

She sang in Amherst’s Choral Society. When she was in middle

Senior Profile | Jiajia Zhang school, she began managing the English-language social media accounts of the Belarusian pop rock band Litesound.

Nevertheless, during her last year at Amherst, Zhang focused on that passion she discovered all the way back in seventh grade: Asian American history, working on theses in both the American studies and art departments. Her American studies thesis focused on the discriminatory practices faced by Chinese sailors in Norway, England, and the United States during World War II, with a central goal of understanding “Chinese Exclusion” as more than simply a legislative era in the United States, but a trans-na-

tional movement. In order to access texts that had never been translated to English, Zhang learned Norwegian to complete the project.

She explored similar themes in an thesis titled “This Too Was Violence: A Critical Autopsy of Asian American Suicide;” Zhang’s goal was to connect images of lynchings during the Chinese Exclusion era to present-day Asian American suicides.

Though the top-line resume items might not show it, Zhang made sure to emphasize in our conversation that, even though she has enjoyed academic success and a sense of intellectual purpose, her time at Amherst has

not always been easy. She was open about going through mental health struggles and facing relationship issues that distracted her from her studies. Earlier this semester, she had a bout of Covid that Amherst employees described as “the most serious case they had seen.”

Most consequentially, she broke her wrist on her dominant right hand while ice skating midway through the semester. She couldn’t type for a week. She still cannot comfortably hold a pencil. She had to type parts of her American studies thesis with just her left hand. When she was finally able to type normally, she could only work for an hour at

a time because the pain was so severe. Nevertheless, she got the American studies thesis in on time, turning in a project that Odo described as a legitimate “contribution to the field.” He said that it’s the kind of work that would be impressive for a graduate student.

Though she was originally told by the doctor that she would be able to complete her art thesis, drawing ended up being too painful. Zhang initially tried to make up for her lost time after getting her brace off, but ultimately could not bear the pain. She ended up dropping the thesis, a project she had been thinking about since sophomore

Photo courtesy of Jiajia Zhang ’22

“Your Seas Are Not Free,“ by Zhang. The painting won Amherst’s Wise Award for Studio Art in 2020 and was bought by the Mead Art Museum.

year. Zhang described walking by the completed art theses in Fayerweather Hall, knowing her half-completed work would never receive the same recognition, as one of the most difficult moments of her college experience.

Through the disappointment, Zhang made it clear that art will continue to be a part of her life. She sees herself continuing to engage in a private practice and perhaps selling some of her works.

Overall, whether she is operating as an artist, a historian, or an activist, Zhang’s experience is best described with two words: stories and mentors.

It was those early stories of the Asian American experience that ignited her passion for Asian American history. Her art seeks to highlight the stories of individual Asian Americans throughout history. She holds personal stories at the heart of what it means to be a historian: Her American studies thesis sought to redefine “Chinese exclusion” based on lived experiences, not acts of Congress.

Zhang also credits her mentors with making her the person she is today. They taught her English, taught her that she, and people like her, deserve to have their stories told. She says that the reason she engages in activism, the reason she has fought so hard to establish a department of Asian American studies at Amherst, is to ensure that future generations of Asian students can have the same experiences that she has had.

And perhaps, one day not too far in the future, she will serve as one of those mentors. She will attend Oxford University next year, seeking a master’s degree in history. She hopes, from there, to pursue a career in academia. She admitted that her ultimate goal is to return to Amherst, to teach in a newly-created Asian American studies program — instituted, she hopes, thanks to her own activism, and the future waves she has inspired.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 25

Senior Profile | Cole Graber-Mitchell

Making His Voice Heard Cole Graber-Mitchell is committed to civic engagement, whether it be as an AAS senator or an opinion columnist. The Marshall Scholar’s world revolves around three principles: persistence, community, and joy.

— Sam Spratford ’24 I met Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22 on Webster Circle on one of the first hot days of spring.

Wearing a lilac T-shirt proudly emblazoned with the logo of the Amherst College Choral Society, Graber-Mitchell sat across from me with the sun in his eyes, head framed by trees flowering in all shades of pink and purple.

It was only months ago that Graber-Mitchell had been awarded a Marshall Scholarship, one of the most prestigious American fellowships, only weeks ago that he had completed his senior thesis in law, jurisprudence, and social thought (LJST), and (most likely) only minutes since he had been attending to one of his many roles in campus politics. In his time at Amherst, Graber-Mitchell has been an AAS senator, a longtime student member of Amherst’s Committee on Educational Policy (CEP), an organizer, an opinion columnist for The Student, and the only college student serving on the Town of Amherst’s Cultural Council; Graber-Mitchell even found time to co-write a book with William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat.

Yet, the ensuing conversation was peaceful, with Graber-Mitchell’s steady and eloquent speech accompanied by the chirping of May birds. What I came to learn is that as much as Graber-Mitchell has devoted his time and energy to the Amherst community over the past four years, it is only because

he has learned to stay tethered to one central principle: joy.

A Minnesotan Political Education The roots of Graber-Mitchell’s political consciousness lie in his Minnesotan upbringing. Attending Minneapolis public schools his whole life, he told me that his high school teachers were the first to open his mind to the troubled and essential world of politics. First, his AP U.S. History teacher assigned the class Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” alongside their standard AP U.S. History textbook. Zinn’s text problematizes the nationalism that you would find in a typical history textbook, and this new lens was integral to Graber-Mitchell’s realization that a lot of work needed to be done to make America a place where all people could flourish.

On top of this progressive awareness, Graber-Mitchell described his hometown of Minneapolis as a uniquely civically engaged city, boasting one of the highest voter turnouts in the country. Southwest High School, which Graber-Mitchell attended, was no exception: His teachers were union stewards and campaign volunteers. In this environment, Graber-Mitchell was the recipient of a long-held tradition of civic duty.

“I was embedded in this world where the expectation was that you would vote, that you would care,” he said. “And I had role models that showed me how to do

26 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

that.”

Integral to Graber-Mitchell’s democratic participation was the realization that he possessed the power to change the things that he saw were wrong in the world. His AP Government teacher taught him the essential maxim: “Decisions are made by those who show up.” And “show up” he did. When Graber-Mitchell campaigned for Minneapolis Attorney General Keith Ellison the summer before coming to Amherst, he was only beginning a long journey of determined civic engagement.

Finding Joy and Voice at Amherst Though Graber-Mitchell told me that he had initial difficulty integrating himself with the Amherst community, it didn’t take long for his instinct for activism to kick in. Graber-Mitchell’s first major political action at Amherst was organizing the 2019 Climate Strike, which successfully pressured the college to commit itself more wholeheartedly to climate action.

“Thanks to the strike, we began to receive frequent progress reports on core climate projects, and built coalitions that fought for divestment [from fossil fuels] and a new sustainability director,” he said.

But most of Graber-Mitchell’s political life at Amherst has been centered around his participation in more official political roles: He has served as an AAS senator for

Photo courtesy of Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22

Graber-Mitchell has always felt a strong sense of civic duty, and he has never failed to act on it. three years and, more recently, as a member of the Cultural Council in the Town of Amherst. Particularly formative was his two-and-ahalf-year stint as one of the only students serving on the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP): a rotating group of five faculty members, the provost and dean of the faculty, and at most three student members. As a representative of students’ needs, Graber-Mitchell said his time on the CEP challenged him to trust his Minnesotan instinct for civic responsibility and find an authoritative voice among a group of people who would normally be his teachers and superiors.

“We all had equal voting power, so I had to learn how to assert my place as an equal member of the committee,” he reflected. “I had to learn that just because someone you respect disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

Having joined the CEP just before the onset of the pandemic, Graber-Mitchell was placed in a particularly fraught situation, but

one that was also full of possibilities for him to speak out for students’ needs in a room of people who would not otherwise understand them. For instance, he took the initiative to write up a proposal for a universal flexible grading option (FGO) when classes were remote.

“It would not have been right to expect students to use the normal pass/fail option during such an extraordinary time,” Graber-Mitchell asserted, “and we ended up finding much-needed relief for a lot of students.” It is this empathetic drive to help his community find “relief,” and more importantly, joy, that motivates many of Graber-Mitchell’s political commitments. “My politics [are] all based on joy, enjoyment of life — something I think everyone deserves,” Graber-Mitchell said with a smile.

But a focus on joy certainly doesn’t preclude having difficult conversations — rather, this end goal motivates Graber-Mitchell to talk about the difficult things.

Senior Profile | Cole Graber-Mitchell As someone who can be, self-admittedly, “pretty intense and stubborn,” Graber-Mitchell also devoted energy to the world of journalism and public speaking as another medium for speaking his mind and, more importantly, teasing out the core of his beliefs.

For three of his years at Amherst, Graber-Mitchell contributed to a weekly column for The Student entitled “Seeing Double,” in which he often went head-to-head with co-columnist Thomas Brodey ’22 on issues ranging from moon mining to Court-packing.

“Being able to write articles is one way that I think and figure out what I actually believe. It’s a fantastic way of putting what you believe out there and getting back feedback and learning and growing,” Graber-Mitchell said.

This is another way that Graber-Mitchell’s focus on joy feeds into his politics: His generosity and public involvement are enabled by self-awareness and emotional in-

telligence. When I asked him if he had any advice for current Amherst students, he immediately replied, “To say no to things, to not do too much.”

“We have to prioritize our joy in order to bring joy to others. And I can’t be good at helping people enjoy their lives if I’m not enjoying [mine].”

For this reason, Graber-Mitchell gushed about his four-year involvement with Amherst’s Choral Society. “I’ve met some of my best friends through singing,” he said.

“It’s not productive, it doesn’t look good on a resume, but I feel joy when I sing with other people, so I do it.”

It surprised me to hear something like this coming from someone who works so tirelessly to make the world a better place; it surprised me that someone so embedded in political struggle could remain so optimistic. But humility and idealism are the qualities that make Graber-Mitchell so unique-

ly capable of making change, of translating his instincts into action.

Martha Umphrey, Bertrand H. Snell 1894 professor in American government in the department of law, jurisprudence and social thought, echoed that curiosity and self-awareness are two of Graber-Mitchell’s most distinctive qualities.

“I’ve known him well over the past two years [as a thesis advisor and an academic advisor]. I admire him as a brilliant student and a polymath equally comfortable writing a thesis, making beautiful woodcuts, working backstage on a theater production, singing with the Glee Club, and constructing elaborate computer games for relaxation,” Umphrey said. “Never content with surface understandings of ideas or people or events, Cole wonders about the world, thinks deeply about what he cares about, and situates himself with generosity and humility in conversations with others.”

Photo courtesy of Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22

Graber-Mitchell speaking at Amherst’s 2019 Climate Strike. Through his Marshall Scholarship, Graber-Mitchell hopes to learn how to facilitate strong, collaborative political communities who can work together to ameliorate crises like climate change.

In his thesis and upcoming research as a Marshall Scholar, Graber-Mitchell has stayed grounded in his humanism and passion for real-world action, using academics as a means of clarifying his beliefs and learning how to enact the change he wants to see in the world.

Teaching and Learning Community In his academic life, Graber-Mitchell decided to double major in LJST and mathematics.

Much like his time with the Choral Society, Graber-Mitchell told me that he completed the Math major just for the fun of it. I was still wondering, however, why Graber-Mitchell would choose LJST over political science given his passion for politics: He chalked up his decision to the desire to think abstractly, creatively, and deeply about what it means to be a member of society.

“LJST felt more anthropological. We didn’t do surveys, we didn’t do statistics, we didn’t do anything like that — it was all interpretative, which I really loved, and more necessarily interdisciplinary,” Graber-Mitchell reflected.

Maintaining this commitment to interdisciplinary thinking, Graber-Mitchell wrote a senior thesis focusing on the way religion has and does encroach on the hegemony of law in America. Ultimately, he thinks that religious influence in the courtroom poses a major threat to the endurance of our political communities.

“What we’re seeing in society [are] battle lines being drawn between a secular universalist version of the world and religious traditionalism that I think doesn’t serve our nation well,” Graber-Mitchell asserted. He pointed out the leaked Supreme Court opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as the most recent, and far from unprecedented, example.

In the early days of his thesis writing, Graber-Mitchell told me that he had a fledgling desire to

use his research as a way to delve into pure theory and academia.

But in order to produce good work, Graber-Mitchell realized that whatever he researched also had to feel useful to him, connected to his political mission to bring communities closer together.

So, while other Marshall Scholars will be using their rarified opportunity to start off on a career of pure academia, Graber-Mitchell will head to the London School of Economics in the fall with an evidently practical question in mind: How do communities stay together despite division, crisis, and disagreement? The Marshall Scholarship is highly selective, offering only 50 awards each year to fund two to three years of graduate study at a U.K. university. It is indicative of Graber-Mitchell’s integrity, in all facets of his life, that when filling out this high-stakes application he prioritized authenticity more than anything else.

Director of Fellowships Christine Overstreet told me, “There is a temptation, sometimes, to squeeze oneself into a particular model in order to ‘give them what they want to hear’ — all in hopes of winning.

Cole stayed true to himself, articulating his opinions and values with conviction, trusting that if who he is was what they wanted, he would have a fighting chance.”

After he completes his Marshall Fellowship, it isn’t a question of what Graber-Mitchell will do next, but what he will do first. He might attend law school, run for local or state office, or teach math to high school students so that he can sow new seeds of democratic idealism, as his own teachers once did. Knowing all that Graber-Mitchell accomplished during his time at Amherst, there’s no doubt that he’ll do all of this, and more. His persistent faith in the power of democracy, discussion, and joy has enabled him to strengthen the Amherst community, and wherever he goes next, Graber-Mitchell is certain to be a changemaker: After all, “decisions are made by those who show up.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 27

Senior Profile | Lauren Kisare

Critical Language Scholar With Future in Publishing A natural community builder, Lauren Kisare’s time at Amherst has seen her excel at everything from journalism to studying Korean — all while bringing joy to the people around her.

—Theo Hamilton ’23 A few things stand out immediately when you talk to Lauren Kisare ’22: her infectious humor, her sharp intellect, and her modesty about her own achievements. The last of these has made her, in the words of Professor of English in Film and Media Studies Amelie Hastie, “one of Amherst’s best kept secrets.”

But, as Hastie points out, “she’s not really a secret anymore.” Between journeying into the world of publishing, winning a Critical Language Scholarship to study in Korea, and keeping The Student’s Arts & Living section running through a pandemic, Kisare has both left a clear mark on the campus and carved out a meaningful career for herself.

Embracing English When applying to colleges, Kisare decided early on that she was interested in the flexibility and community offered by liberal arts colleges, but was initially hesitant to apply to Amherst.

She credits her father, a Tanzanian immigrant with family in Kenya, with encouraging her to do so. “Uhuru Kenyatta [the current president of Kenya] had gone to Amherst, so he was always like, ‘You should go to Amherst.’” Kisare was convinced, and by the time she was accepted she considered Amherst her top choice.

Arriving at Amherst, the eventual English major initially thought that she would focus her studies on anthropology or sociology. “I was already really starting to like English,” Kisare recalled, “but [at the time] I didn’t know if English would take me anywhere.”

Over the course of her first year, Kisare explored a variety of courses that eventually changed her mind. These ranged from “An Introduction to Economics,” which Kisare looks back on as “the worst mistake I ever could have made, in my entire college career,” to Samuel Williston Professor of English Geoffrey Sanborn’s “Engaging Literature: Craft, Conversation, and Community.” The latter of these was a revelation. “The literature we discussed was similar to what I’d studied in high school, but the way Professor Sanborn was approaching [it] was a lot more interesting and engaging,” Kisare said. “I saw my interest in writing grow because I realized that I could go in all of these creative directions.”

After taking that course in the spring of her first year, Kisare decided to delve deep into English. “If you look at my transcript after that,” she laughed, “it’s just four English courses, four English courses, four English courses.” Hastie, Kisare’s advisor, said, “As she would tell you, one of my goals was to

28 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

get her to not only take English classes.”

“I was not always successful,” she added jokingly.

Introduction to Editing Kisare’s engagement with the English Department and constant interest in improving her writing also shaped her extracurricular pursuits. During the fall of her sophomore year, she took “Nonfiction I” with Writer-in-Residence Min Jin Lee and realized that one of her favorite aspects of the class was editing assignments with other students.

Kisare says she was inspired by the experience to start writing for The Student, hoping to both hone her writing and get the chance to discuss and edit pieces along with other students.

“It just so happened that that semester [then Managing Arts & Living Editor] Seoyeon [Kim ’21] was looking for another editor,” Kisare recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh, that could be me!

Why not?’” Kisare applied and got the position, continuing to edit for the newspaper until this past fall, when she left to study abroad in South Korea. Beyond editing, Kisare also continued to write for the paper throughout this period, penning insightful reviews of artistic works from blockbusters like “Knives Out” and “Black Widow” to novels like “Where the Crawdads

Photo courtesy of Lauren Kisare ‘22

Kisare plans to continuing to work in publishing after graduation, where she hopes to use her knowledge of Korean to take on editorial projects with Korean writers.

Sing.”

I started working with Kisare as a co-editor of the Arts & Living section about a month later, just after Covid had forced us all off campus and onto Zoom. Her attention to detail, smart comments, and constant kindness made her a natural community builder for the section. She also made use of what Carla Costa, program director for careers in arts and communication, called “her remarkable ability to keep that humanity alive, even in

Zoom life,” coming up with “Performance Gone Virtual,” a series which highlighted the creative ways Amherst students managed to continue building community through art during the remote semesters. At the time, I was so impressed working with Kisare that it didn’t fully dawn on me until this interview that she had only started editing a handful of weeks before me.

“Seizing the Moment” It was also while taking “Non-

Senior Profile | Lauren Kisare fiction I” that Kisare began developing an interest in publishing, which she now considers to be her first-choice career path.

“I saw a life-altering Instagram,” said Kisare. “[Lee had] posted that her publisher put the spine of her book on the wall. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. She was published by Hachette Book Group, they’re a huge publisher.’

I thought that was so cool, and I [started to] look into how to intern for that publisher.”

That year, the Hachette internship evaded Kisare, but she was determined to find something similar. To help with her internship search, Kisare began meeting with Costa, who she considers a major influence, for career counseling. The admiration goes both ways. “[Kisare] struck me as someone who was not only motivated by her professional goals but [who] puts her whole heart into everything,”

Costa reflected.

By the end of the year, Kisare had two part-time internships lined up with literary agencies.

She decided to take on both internships and work to fit them together into a cohesive schedule.

Kisare found working with the agencies, which mostly involved reading manuscripts and putting together critiques and recommendations, to be both engaging and rewarding, simultaneously allowing her to read a variety of interesting (and occasionally less interesting) texts, and to meaningfully comment on and shape them.

With more experience under her belt, Kisare decided to try applying to Hachette again during her junior year. The process was intimidating. “I feel like the resume and cover letter have to be so spot-on with publishing; literally, it’s all English ma-

jors reading your application,” Kisare said. This time around, however, she landed an editorial internship with Hachette’s Little, Brown and Company division, where she worked over the summer.

Since returning from studying abroad in the fall, Kisare has also returned to working with Hachette, now as an editorial assistant for Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, Hachette’s primary branch publishing children’s books.

Kisare found the change in field to be surprisingly rewarding. “[When] I did literary fiction and narrative nonfiction,” Kisare recalled, “the manuscripts you’d get sent were huge … In comparison, with children’s fiction you have so much time …

I can give way more in-depth editorial comments, I get to do so much more, and creatively it’s just so fun.”

Travel Abroad Given Kisare’s focus on English at Amherst, her decision to spend five months of her senior studying abroad in South Korea might seem random.

But for Kisare, who had originally hoped to study abroad at the start of her junior year, her interests made South Korea a natural choice. “People would sometimes ask me, ‘Why do you want to go to Korea?’ I would say ‘Why not?’” she reflected.

“I already really liked the music, the pop culture, the food.”

Like anyone, Kisare faced challenges studying abroad in a country whose language she was still learning. “There were definitely times when I thought, ‘I don’t feel like speaking Korean today,’” Kisare said, “but I still need[ed] to get to X or Y place.”

Nonetheless, her enthusiasm to learn helped her settle in and work through courses covering

everything from intensive language learning to Korean cinema — she even took a literary stylistics course in Yonsei’s English department. Alongside her educational interest and excitement at being in a new country, Kisare cites South Korea’s public transportation system as an important factor in helping her enjoy the visit: “So much better than the PVTA” is her review.

Kisare ended up enjoying her time in South Korea so much that she decided this spring to pursue a Critical Language Scholarship, an educational program funded by the U.S. Department of State which offers around 600 students opportunities to pursue intensive language study abroad each year. Kisare received the scholarship and will be returning to South Korea for an eight-week program after she graduates, this time in Gwangju.

“I can’t wait to go back,” she said, noting that “I’m just really eager to dive back into intensive language learning and pursue something I’m truly passionate about.” Kisare also says she thinks her language skills will be useful when publishing, noting that she “hopes to work with Korean authors to set them up for success in the U.S. market“

A Future in Publishing

Photo courtesy of Lauren Kisare ‘22

Kisare at Nami Island during her time studying abroad this past fall in South Korea. Having been awarded with a Critical Language Scholarship, Kisare will return to South Korea for eight weeks after graduating.

After her time in Gwangju, Kisare sees a variety of paths in front of her. “I’m just excited to see what the possibilities are,” she said. “[The Critical Language Scholarship] reminded me that there’s so much more out there than Amherst.” Right now, Kisare is planning to continue working in publishing, where her deep interest in literature and capacity to creatively reexamine texts will surely help bring sharp insights to the fore. Whatever path she takes, one thing is certain: As Costa put it, “Lauren is someone who will bring a lot of joy to the people around her, and someone who will just be hitting her stride, actualizing, both professionally and personally.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 29

Senior Profile | Abner Aldarondo

Creating a Community of Love Through Culture With an abundant amount of charisma, Abner Aldarondo invites love into their life constantly, whether it is in their academic, artistic, or community-based work.

— Aniah Washington ’22 I first met Abner Aldarondo ’22 during Amherst’s Summer Bridge Program before the start of our first year. From day one, I knew there was something incredibly special about Aldarondo. This was evident in their heart-warming smile, their contagious giggles, and their selflessness. Aldarondo is a person that puts the people they love before themself — they are deeply committed to helping others, and this is something that makes Aldarondo an incredible friend, scholar, and human being. Eliza Brewer ’22 reflects on Aldarondo’s commitment to others: “Abner is so hard-working, not only at school but also in the relationships and hobbies they maintain. They have this magical ability to fill up everyone’s spiritual cups.” Throughout my own time at Amherst, I have had the honor of being close friends with Aldarondo, observing their kindness and brilliance in all of our interactions.

Self-Discovery demia

in

Aca-

Aldarondo was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and has been a Western Mass resident since birth. Holyoke is home to a thriving Puerto Rican community — 44 percent of the city’s population is Puerto Rican — and Aldarondo has been committed to supporting and uplifting that community even before coming to Amherst College. On any given day, you may pass Aldarondo on

the way to Val sporting a graphic T-shirt adorned with one of Puerto Rico’s adorable native tree frogs and shining with pride.

Holyoke is just 30 minutes from Amherst, but despite being so close to home, Aldarondo has been able to create a new home here. Aldarondo and I are currently neighbors, and at the end of each incredibly busy — and productive — day they send me a message saying “I’m on my way home!” or “I’ll be home soon!”

It seems to me that Aldarondo’s relationships to others is what defines home for them. Wherever they can share their love is a place they can call home.

At Amherst, Aldarondo double majored in Latinx and Latin American studies (LLAS) and Spanish. Discussing their major selection process, Aldarondo simply stated, “I’m Puerto Rican and that’s why I picked [them].”

Aldarondo’s majors are deeply rooted in their identities, and they have used their time here to explore not only Puerto Rican studies, but also their intersecting identities as a first-generation, low-income, non-binary, Latinx student.

As often as possible, Aldarondo has pursued independent research projects on Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora.

“I’m a firm believer that you should use your identity as a place of research because there’s a lot that you can learn from it. You don’t have to just make yourself

30 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

an impartial observer of all these different phenomena. You can do that, but also center yourself,” they said. “I also do this because Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. And for me, doing all these Puerto Rican studies projects in all of my courses, is to basically say ‘screw you’ to settler colonialism.”

Aldarondo is also a proud Spanish heritage speaker who has used Amherst’s campus as a site for improvement. Both of Aldarondo’s parents were born in Puerto Rico and raised their two children speaking Spanish. Most of their family communicates in Spanish, but when they started attending public school in Holyoke, their education began to be conducted completely in English.

As is the case for many heritage speakers in Aldarondo’s situation, their Spanish speaking ability started to decline. In high school they took a few Spanish courses, but knew that they wanted to continue studying and familiarizing themself with the language in college.

Their decision to pursue the Spanish major at Amherst grew out of a desire to stay connected to their first language and expand their possibilities for interaction with different loved ones, scholarship, and communities. “I could continue speaking Spanish and so that my Spanish could get better when I am talking with my family on the phone.” With a bright smile on their face, they contin-

Photo courtesy of Abner Aldarondo ’22

Aldarondo plans to pursue their creative and academic passions simultaneously as they attend the Amherst Humanities Folger Fellowship after graduation. ued, “And lo and behold, my family, when I do talk to them, they say ‘Oh my gosh, your Spanish is so good!’”

Connecting With Others Today, Aldarondo uses their bilingual abilities to do translation work for different classes and organizations including the Holyoke Public Library, Lorgo Mentorship Program, and Mead Art Museum. It is truly inspiring to see how dedicated Aldarondo is to their community and culture; they have never compromised any part of themself during their time here. Instead, they have touched the lives of many students, professors, and community members at Amherst by being their true genuine self in every room they enter.

Diana Tiburcio ’22 said that their favorite thing about Aldarondo is “their never-ending curiosity and bubbly energy.”

Tiburcio and Aldarondo have worked together in leadership roles for La Casa and Amherst’s

Questbridge First-Generation Low-Income Community, two different affinity groups on campus. During the summer of 2020, they conducted research side by side after Aldarondo was selected as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow. The two young researchers even presented some of their co-conducted work at a first-generation low-income convention at Stanford University in the spring of 2020. Tiburcio noted how compatible Aldarondo’s thought process is with their own: “There’s no one else I can theorize with like Abner.”

Aldarondo is a creative theorist with a thirst for knowledge and community. Most notably, Aldarondo was the event coordinator for Amherst’s Questbridge First-Generation Low-Income Community — an affinity group that supports first generation low-income students at the college. This role allowed Aldarondo to plan intentional events that built community among members

Senior Profile | Abner Aldarondo and offered clear-cut support for disadvantaged students at Amherst. Additionally, Aldarondo has been a member of La Causa, Amherst’s Latinx affinity group.

They also spent two years living in La Casa, the Latinx culture theme house based in Newport

House, and serving as the house relations officer for the community. In these two spaces, Aldarondo was able to celebrate their culture and make important connections with other folks in the diaspora.

Aldarondo is naturally a giving person. They give valuable

advice in formal and informal settings across campus. They give music recommendations on their weekly WAMH show “Dreaming Histories”. Aldarondo also gives comfort to their friends, family, and acquaintances. When they walk into a space, they want to

feel welcome and make sure that the others around them feel just as welcome. There is an unmatched beauty in the way Aldarondo carries themself in their day-to-day interactions with other people.

This is why I believe that Aldarondo is destined to move mountains in this lifetime — I have never met someone so dedicated to the growth and comfort of others.

Aldarondo has spent much of their time at Amherst building important connections with others, and I have been lucky enough to be one of the people they have chosen to build a friendship with.

“Building” a relationship means something really special to Aldarondo — as any of their friends could attest to, they go out of their way to ensure that all of the people they love are taken care of in every way. Aldarondo is always quick to take a walk into town with me for a late night Insomnia or Antonio’s pick-me-up, and we have shared countless hugs and tears together in our time at Amherst.

Off to Change the World

Photo courtesy of Abner Aldarondo ’22

During their time at Amherst, Aldarondo has worked closely with the Mead Art Museum to curate exhibits such as the 2019 “Embodied Taste” exhibition. They can be spotted admiring the art in the museum in their free time.

In between curating exhibits for the Mead, doing library work in Holyoke, attending as many on-campus events as possible, and chit-chatting with all of their besties, Aldarondo always seems to find a way to take care of themself. They will always have on a fresh coat of nail polish and dainty gold jewels glistening all up and down their ears. I have seen Aldarondo’s self-care habits improve tremendously over their time at Amherst. Not only has this done so many good things for them, it has also allowed their friends such as myself to see a model for resiliency. This is not the only thing I have learned from being friends with Aldarondo, I have also learned to think critically about art and culture as they have introduced me to their passions over the years.

Aldarondo loves all things that are theoretical, beautiful, and abstract. They admit that if they hadn’t already been pursuing two

majors at Amherst they would have considered majoring in art history. Instead, Aldarondo decided to blend their interests in their senior thesis project: “Imaging and Imagining Environmental Justice: Puerto Rican Visual Culture in the Anthropocene.” The thesis considers the malleability of cultural identity and its entanglement with environmental justice in Puerto Rican artwork from the homeland and the diaspora.

Now that their thesis is complete and Aldarondo has left their loving mark on Amherst’s community, they will be traveling to Washington D.C. to continue their professional development through the Amherst Folger Humanities Fellowship. Aldarondo will be working closely with two world-class institutions during their year-long fellowship: the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

What Aldarondo will miss the most about Amherst are the people and the beauty: “I think Amherst is just a really beautiful place. Especially on a warm sunny day … I just love walking and seeing all the green, people playing frisbee or soccer. I think [the beauty] really lightens up the campus in general, but I think that people especially are the most important thing about Amherst,” they said. “I think there’s a lot of good people here and a lot of really caring people who work hard.”

When I think about what I will miss the most about Amherst after graduation I also think of the people. I will miss waking up across the hallway or just down the stairs from Aldarondo. I will miss our breakfasts, our long walks, and our adventures. What I think is the most beautiful thing about being friends with Aldarondo is that I know they will be in my life forever because that is just who Aldarondo is — a deeply dedicated friend and life partner who has invited me and so many others to be a part of their ever-growing community of love.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 31

Senior Profile | Arzoo Rajpar

Crafting Art, Empowerment, and Agency Arzoo Rajpar has created intersections between her passion for design and her interest in creating community-based solutions, uplifting herself and those around her.

— Caelen McQuilkin ’24E “I think that art can be whatever it is,” said Arzoo Rajpar ’22, “but I was interested in making it meaningful in the ways I wanted to.” Even just a ninety-minute conversation with Rajpar provides a strong sense of how she brings this idea to fruition in every community she reaches, from her home country of Tanzania to Amherst College. Rajpar cares deeply about making change through art, design, and other forms of creativity, and the approach she takes centers on the people and places that have shaped her life — stories that she carries with her wherever she goes.

Learning Change

to

Make

Rajpar grew up in Dar es Salaam, a city on the coast of Tanzania. She reflected lovingly on the city, speaking of its beautiful beaches and tropical climate.

“I definitely love the city where I’m from,” she said. Raised by a single mother alongside her twin sister, Rajpar lived in Dar es Salaam until she moved to Mombasa, Kenya, to attend boarding school.

Rajpar is of South Asian descent, but her family has been living in East Africa for four generations now. Both of the cities that Rajpar has lived in, Dar es Salaam and Mombasa, have significant South Asian populations due to their long histories of immigration from the west-

ern part of India, among other places. “There’s a very unique culture and cultures that are present in those places,” she said. “Through food and music, and the way people dress, and architecture, they’re very unique places.”

Many of Rajpar’s passions, including her love for art and community engagement, are rooted in the environments in which she grew up.

“I come from a family of musicians and singers. Everyone in my family can sing, and we all love to dance,” she said. “It’s just something that I grew up surrounded by and kind of was encouraged to get into it.”

Even when she was young, Rajpar had what she called a “save-the-world attitude.”

“My personality was very like, ‘Why aren’t we doing anything about this?’” she said. As she’s gotten older, this trait has remained consistent. Jesmyda Viyano ’22, who has known Rajpar since their first year at Amherst, said, “One of the things that really struck me about her is that she stands up for what she believes in. She speaks up and backs it up with her actions.”

While Rajpar says she is a bit less “idealistic” in this passion now, her passion for making change has remained steady throughout her work in high school and at Amherst. Among many of the projects she undertook in high school, Rajpar

32 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

made a short documentary film about people with albinism and the stigma and discrimination they face. As the documentary began to raise awareness about the issue, she continued the work by writing one of her final high school papers on the topic, working alongside the local rotary group to raise money.

Rajpar described this work as being a “blending [of] my love for visual arts, or photography and film, [while] creating impact.”

Reckoning herst

with Am-

After graduating high school, Rajpar decided to leave her home and move 7,000+ miles to Amherst to begin college.

Upon starting, Rajpar soon began to realize that her background distinguished her from many of her peers but also set her apart from much of what she knew back home. “Now I have this really different experience that not many people can relate to. I have a lot of friends who can, but also a lot of friends who just didn’t relate to that. Even explaining things to my family, they’d be like, ‘What are you talking about?’” She described feeling a sense from back home that “Oh, now you’ve gone to America, and you think you can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Now you have these ideas that don’t align with our values.”

Photo courtesy of Emma Spencer ’23E

Rajpar attributes much of her passion to the family, stories, and experiences she grew up around in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

At Amherst, too, Rajpar experienced some dissonance as well. “I think I’m a very confusing person to the typical American eye,” she said. “Because I’m from Tanzania, and [people are like,] ‘Oh, well, you look Indian.’ And I’m like, well, I am Indian, but I’m not from India.

I am both of those things. Coming here [to Amherst] was really difficult, actually. Because I felt like I always had to justify my identity. I remember going home and really thinking about that and being like, I’ve never felt like this before, but now I feel like it.

Where do I belong now?”

Much of Rajpar’s time at Amherst has been spent creating a sense of belonging for not only herself but others around her.

As Cynthia Henry ’22, one of Rajpar’s close friends and a fellow Tanzanian, described it, “One thing about Arzoo is that she creates community wherever she is.”

As president of the Interna-

tional Students Association and program coordinator for the Center for International Student Engagement (CISE), Rajpar said that some of her best memories at Amherst are associated with the international student community. “I have my international community, and they understand where I’m from,” she said. “To know that that community will hopefully keep existing is really reassuring. I’ll speak for myself, it’s helped me make the most of the experience and have fun and look back on positive memories.”

For everything she’s gained from the international community at Amherst, Rajpar has contributed just as much. “As a program organizer at the Center for International Student Engagement, [Rajpar] thoughtfully developed her programs to help international students feel safe and comfortable when engaging with topics of social identities and international experiences,” said David Dongseong Ko, direc-

Senior Profile | Arzoo Rajpar tor for the CISE. “Arzoo had the highest skill set to incorporate informative workshops, community building, resource sharing, and opportunities for international students to explore and adjust to the Amherst campus. Her advocacy, dedication, and love for international students are truly inspirational. We will miss her dearly.”

Rajpar has also been an active member of the African Caribbean Students Union (ACSU), serving as the African chair during her junior year. She is also a choreographer and dancer in ACSU Dance — another way in which Rajpar uses art and creativity as a means for change-making.

Rajpar recounted that over her time at Amherst, she eventually overcame the initial feelings of dissonance she experienced when she reached a point where “I think I just stopped caring” and realized the burden of explaining or validating her cultur-

al and racial background didn’t have to rest on her shoulders. In the end, she said, “I think the people that mattered the most didn’t care as much as I thought they did or weren’t judging me, or invalidating me, thinking I was less something. They were viewing me the exact way I thought of myself, and that’s what mattered.”

Designing Space for Passion in Architecture Alongside her work to create community, at Amherst has Rajpar developed new academic interests that aligned with her love for activism and design. A math and architectural studies major with a Five College Certificate in African studies, Rajpar’s curiosity and passion about the place she comes from shines through in her academic work in addition to her activism. In fact, her work blurs the line between those two

ideas in the first place.

Upon first arriving at Amherst, Rajpar knew she had some interest in architectural studies, so she figured she would try taking some classes. She came to enjoy all of the classes she took in the department, in part because “you can kind of create your own pathway with it,” and she was able to concentrate on classes that focused on low-income housing, natural-disaster relief, and working with Indigenous communities, among other topics that emphasize how design relates to the telling of history and exacerbation or easing of social issues.

Rajpar referenced several architectural studies classes that emphasized the use of critical thinking. “I’ve always been a very critical thinker. If someone says something, I’m like, ‘Hmm, why are you saying this?’ That’s just how I am,” said Rajpar. “I’m also very forthright about what I

think. And I think those classes allowed me to kind of embrace that.”

Olufemi Vaughn, Alfred Sargent Lee ’41 and Mary Farley Ames Lee professor of Black studies, highlighted Rajpar’s use of critical thinking. “In many academic and intellectual interactions with her, Arzoo consistently explored major social, political, and economic problems confronting contemporary African societies,” he said. “In wide-ranging discussions and scholarly readings, Arzoo’s works underscore African human agency as the critical space to explore meaningful solutions to the challenges confronting African communities.”

Building on this passion for critical thinking and correcting narratives of empowerment, Rajpar’s thesis in the department centers around Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania where her great-grandparents first moved when they immigrated to East Africa from India. Her thesis focuses on the “impacts of tourism on the physical, architectural, and cultural landscape of urban Zanzibar,” and she argues that “holistic portrayals of history” are needed to “prevent Orientalism and exoticizing the past, and brushing over things that have happened to people.”

“That would help us acknowledge the systems of oppression in place, that have been in place and are still in place, and also tell real stories, and allow local people to tell their actual stories,” she said. She also noted that thinking through this framework will allow for more effective development projects in the future.

Looking Ahead, turning Home

Photo courtesy of Arzoo Rajpar ’22

Rajpar, who grew up in a family of musicians and singers, has followed in her family tradition, as pictured here.

Re-

Rajpar hopes to continue impactful work like this after graduation. “I definitely always knew that I wanted to play a role in actually making systemic change,” she said. “I’ve realized that there is so much to learn about where I’m from and the African conti-

nent in general.”

She hopes to pursue a career related to development and design to uplift communities and provide real solutions for housing and poverty. She recounted two internships from the summer after her sophomore and junior years. During the summer of 2020, she worked at a construction firm in Tanzania where she helped design a low-income community housing project. Through the experience, she learned about the way that “low-income housing has to be accessible … you can’t just put people in the middle of nowhere and expect their socioeconomic status to increase.” The following summer, she worked at a healthcare NGO where she learned that “it’s usually the simpler designs that are inspired or built through active participation from local communities, based on what the local community actually wants — not built for, but by, people — that have had the most success.”

Rajpar hopes to continue work like this, and part of that, for her, means going back home.

“I don’t want to be one of those people who just leaves and never goes back,” she said. “I want to go back … and use what I’ve learned … and actually do something. I grew up always being told, ‘There’s nothing good that’s going to happen for you here when you come back home,’ ‘This country is going nowhere,’ and all these things. I don’t want that to be the narrative anymore.

I do love my country, and I am grateful for everything I’ve gotten from it. I want to play a small role in breaking that cycle.”

It is this passion for the places she is connected to and her desire to make a difference in the world through building power and solidarity within — not outside of — her community that strikes me as so inspiring about Rajpar.

Wherever she chooses to bring this passion next, I am confident it will continue to strengthen and uplift the community there.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 33

Senior Profile | Juanita Jaramillo

A Track Star With a Passion for Policy Juanita Jaramillo came to Amherst as a track recruit, but her time on campus has been about far more: She found a passion for policy-related research, which she will pursue as a predoctoral fellow at MIT. — Nick Edwards-Levin ’25 As Juanita Jaramillo ’22 cites her track coach Steve Rubin as saying, “It’s not about the results, it’s about the process.” For Jaramillo, a school record-holder and future MIT predoctoral economics fellow, plenty of results have come — but, still, it’s been all about the process.

Jaramillo’s journey to Amherst began with a comment from a friend’s mother. NESCAC schools were not a popular destination for students at her magnet high school in Washington, D.C., so Jaramillo had never even heard of Amherst until her friend’s mom brought it up.

“I was mostly looking at really big schools near the city, so Amherst was really the outlier for me,” Jaramillo said.

Even though Jaramillo ran track in high school, she wasn’t considering running in college until she heard about Amherst.

“I think I literally just googled ‘best DIII academic schools,’ saw Amherst on the list, and was like, ‘Sure, I’ll fill out this recruiting questionnaire.’”

Soon enough, after a conversation with a coach, Jaramillo came on an overnight visit to Amherst.

“I sat in on a class, I really liked that it was small, I saw people participating and asking questions, and I realized that a smaller school might be a better academic fit for me, since it just seems like the kind of place where I would feel comfortable

engaging with other students and the professors,” Jaramillo said.

Once she arrived, Jaramillo’s life has been nothing if not busy.

Between various campus jobs, two majors and a two-season varsity sport, Jaramillo’s free time is hard to come by.

One of the most important parts of her time at Amherst has been track and field, a sport in which she holds both an indoor and outdoor school record as a member of the 4x400-meter relay.

Jaramillo, who is a long sprinter, came into her first year at Amherst with an unusually large amount of recruits in her event group. Some of her best memories, she said, come from spending time with her teammates in the long-sprints group.

“I think with a relay in particular, as much as it’s been successful in that we’ve been to nationals and broken school records and stuff like that, it’s been all the more rewarding because I’ve gotten to do it with them,” Jaramillo said. “I think it’s kinda rare that you have a relay team where most of the people are in the same grade, and so we’ve gotten to work and keep building our success over the four years, which has been really special.”

When Jaramillo was recruited, she and her classmates were specifically selected to be part of a relay team — a team that has been especially successful throughout its run at Amherst.

34 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

“We pretty much came in knowing that we would be a relay team and we’d try to do well together. I came in kinda put in that box, and I guess stayed there,” Jaramillo said. “it was definitely intimidating at the beginning — I feel like there were some expectations to fulfill, but I think that over time, you just grow a lot more confident and comfortable in yourself.”

Looking back on the evolution of the team, Jaramillo is happy to see that the group has become more socially cohesive — and successful on the track.

When Jaramillo joined the team, Rubin, the current head coach, had only been at Amherst for one year, and the men and women’s teams had only been training and competing together for two years.

“Just seeing the way it is now, in the freshman class, how immediately close the track versus cross country groups are, or the men versus the women are, it’s been very rewarding to see the culture change and grow, and then exciting to see how the success of the team has changed as well with our performances at NESCACs or DIIIs,” Jaramillo said. “I think there’s been a better experience over time, so that’s been really cool to see throughout my four years here.”

Track has not been the only area in which Jaramillo has excelled, though. An economics and psychology double major, Ja-

Photo courtesy of Juanita Jaramillo ’22

Jaramillo’s interest in economic policy research was spurred by her work with Assistant Professor of Economics Caroline Theoharides. For the next two years, she will work as a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at MIT Blueprint Labs, continuing to explore policy-related research questions. ramillo has worked as a research assistant with Assistant Professor of Economics Caroline Theoharides, a development economist.

Much of Jaramillo’s work with Theoharides has focused on policy-adjacent questions.

“She does a lot of development research in the Philippines, so I’ve worked with her on a variety of her projects, and they have to do with things like child labor intervention, or changes in compulsory education laws, or overseas Philippino workers,” Jaramillo said.

“Working with her got me kind of exposed me to the kinds of questions you can look at with economics, and so that kind of got me interested in the research side of things, which has definitely influenced my career path moving forward,” Jaramillo said.

Jaramillo wrote her senior thesis for the economics department about the impact of refugee flows

on the U.S. labor market and education outcomes. Through writing her thesis and doing research with Theoharides, Jaramillo decided to do research next year as a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at MIT Blueprint Labs.

“I’ve figured out I really liked doing research — econ research — and policy-relevant research more specifically, and so I’ll be pretty much doing research next year, and then thinking about pursuing grad school, like a Ph.D. in either economics or public policy or some sort of related field.”

The goal of the position, Jaramillo said, is to spend two years gaining research skills and getting experience doing research.

As of now, Jaramillo’s plan is to apply to graduate school after her two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then work in a public policy field.

At a previous internship, Jara-

Senior Profile | Juanita Jaramillo millo worked at a non-profit doing education- and inequality-related research, which she said she really enjoyed.

“I think that’s something I’d really like to do, working for PEW Research Center or Brooking or any of those kinds of places, and so the pathway up there is to just keep pursuing research, get some practical experience, and then hopefully from there I’ll jump into a policy research position,” Jaramillo said.

Looking back at Amherst, Jaramillo said her fondest memories come from all over campus, but her friends were there for

each one.

“I have especially fond memories of the Greenway volleyball courts,” Jaramillo said. “I’ve been there many times — any volleyball game with a group of people where it’s just a beautiful day outside and your friends are there, and people you know walk by and you’re like, ‘Come join.’

You just find yourself spending all day out there, laughing, listening to music — it feels kinda like the quintessential college experience, being out there. You’re like ‘Wow, this is what they pitch to you at the admissions tour.’ So, yeah, I have really good memo-

ries of those days in the spring.”

Surprisingly, Jaramillo also said some of her best memories are of late nights spent working at Frost Library.

“It’s kinda Stockholm Syndrome, but I have lots of fun memories in Frost,” Jaramillo said. “Late nights there with your friends, as much as it’s just like grinding and getting your work done, in a lot of those moments you like get into these random conversations with your friends, go take a study break and go to Schwemm’s and grab a milkshake and come back, so I think a lot of those more simple mo-

ments have brought me a lot of joy and really represent my Amherst experience.”

Overall, Jaramillo said she is incredibly grateful for one aspect of her time at Amherst above all: the relationships, including everything from connections with professors to her community on the team.

“I think that’s something very unique to Amherst that I don’t think I would have gotten at other schools, just having gotten the help and support and mentorship from professors during my time here and also just relationships with people, whether it’s meet-

ing people through CACSAC [Council of Amherst College Student Athletes of Color] and getting closer with people in that community, or having the team and having that as a community to make memories with and get support from,” Jaramillo said. “I think it’s just a small place, but it’s a good place to build close relationships with people, and I think that’s what’s made it such a good experience — it’s who I’ve gotten to have that experience with.”

In other words: According to Jaramillo, it’s all about the process.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Jaramillo, a long sprinter and runner on the 4x400-meter relay, has set multiple school records with her relay team and competed at both the indoor and outdoor national championships.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 35

Senior Profile | Scott Brasesco

Seeking an Understanding of Humanity Scott Brasesco has always had a passion for the history of humanity and society. At Amherst, he has pursued that passion in every way he could — always with unending calm, constant brilliance, and a mug of tea to start the morning.

—Dustin Copeland ’25 Scott Brasesco ’22 used to read all the time. He read nonfiction especially — antiquity, ancient cultures, empire, anything that brought him closer to civilizations that weren’t his own, removed from him in space and time. But these days, Scott doesn’t do any of that for fun. He reads nonfiction “basically for a living now,” leaving him without much room for reading for leisure. But he still manages to read for fun with that most special of literary inventions: the short story.

Scott wakes up every morning, has a mug of tea, and reads a short story to start the day.

This kind of fiction reading is a novel thing for Scott, for whom historical narrative and argument have been foundational in every aspect of life. From editing The Student’s Opinion Section to writing a 90-page thesis in political science to triple-majoring in history, political science, and anthropology, Scott has been absolutely uncompromising in his pursuit of his passions, and has done so throughout his academic career with unparalleled calm and brilliance. On top of that, he’s without doubt the best mentor an aspiring opinion editor could ever ask for.

From The Current to The Student Scott was born in Hillsborough, California, about half an hour south of San Francisco. He went to public schools in the area until high school, when he applied to The Nueva School, then a brand new

high school in the area. He got in, becoming a member of the school’s second ever class of freshmen.

Scott valued his time at Nueva not only as a different kind of high school experience, but also as a unique opportunity to help build a new school environment.

After joining the yearbook in his freshman year, he realized that he wanted to produce a more substantive publication, so he started a newspaper, the Nueva Current.

What he described as a “ragtag group of volunteer freelance writers and editors” quickly expanded, and soon Scott was lobbying the administration for a journalism class.

By his senior year, the newspaper was supported by that class, and it quickly grew in size and became more structured. This was Scott’s first foray into journalism. He fell in love with editing and realized one of his most important skills as a manager: “finding talented young people, to do my job better than me after I’ve left.”

When Scott first came to Amherst, he was interested in looking for an editing role at The Student.

But because there were no editor positions open his freshman year, Scott joined The Student in 2020, just in time for the pandemic to upend the world completely.

Getting to know the newsroom on Zoom meetings multiple time zones away from school was “nowhere near as nice as being in the newsroom together,” he says, but Scott quickly formed close bonds with his fellow editors, and before

36 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

long was making a weekly habit of “staying up really late on publication night with Ryan [Yu ’22] and Becca [Picciotto ’22 ] … to get everything ready for publication.”

The trials of the pandemic bore some fruit. Scott is most proud of the work he did with the Black Student Union to publish their #IntegrateAmherst campaign, and felt honored to be able to help refine those arguments and eventually bring them to the school at large.

Scott worked to ensure that The Student’s editorials reflected the voice of the paper in order to ensure that they would be more effective at reaching their audiences from the student body to the highest levels of administration. Above all, he wanted writers to create arguments that engaged with the campus community and said something about themselves.

Scott says that one of the most important reasons for his engagement with the paper in the first place was a desire to get closer to the community he was a part of, to understand the experiences of as many people at Amherst as possible. As an editor, this desire meant that Scott read every single submission with genuine interest and a desire for the writer to be published and for the article to succeed. That’s why Scott called being an editor a “beautiful experience.”

He said, “there’s something about watching people get better with every consecutive article and helping them … that feels just really, really wholesome and uplifting.”

Photo courtesy of Scott Brasesco ’22

Scott’s haircut has not changed since at least the 12th grade, according to his headshot in The Nueva Current.

Scott was the first person to edit the first article I wrote for The Student. It wasn’t anything particularly important, just a miniature personal essay inspired heavily by the style of pieces like Cole Graber-Mitchell’s ’22 “Amherst Reorientation,” but Scott’s thorough, thoughtful comments awed me not just because of their effectiveness but also because of the palpable awareness they had of the purpose of the paper as a whole. Working with Scott was inspirational not just because of his immense skill and extraordinary experience in editing, but because of his absolute commitment to the ideals of journalism and to the purpose of our paper. Nothing has taught me more about the practice of good journalism than watching Scott work.

Protecting Democracy, One Thesis at a Time I interviewed Scott on the first really warm day of the year, just a few weeks after he had defended his thesis. By talking to him it would have been impossible to guess that

he had just finished one of the most stressful projects of his life. Scott never seemed to be discouraged by a workload. His thesis advisor, Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science Javier Corrales, agreed, saying “you would never know [Scott] is under pressure. He is always in a good mood, optimistic, balanced, and ready for more.”

When he encountered Corrales in one of his first-year classes, Scott was immediately struck by Corrales’ energy, saying “He’s got this youthful, energetic, queer energy, and I really enjoyed that.” Especially considering what Scott calls the political science department’s “curmudgeonly … rigidly straight-man energy,” he felt incredibly supported by Corrales as a queer student entering the political-science space.

At the same time, Corrales said, “Since I met him in class, I knew we were talking about a specially talented young adult. He accomplished so much in class that I had to recruit him as my R[esearch] A[ssistant].” In that position, Scott researched topics in connection

Senior Profile | Scott Brasesco with Corrales’ many projects, from Venezuela and the Maduro regime to the state of gay rights (“really fun research”) and women’s rights (“really sad research”) in Latin America.

Corrales would constantly assign him tasks which required, according to the professor, “the very best reading skills in Spanish,” and Scott would handle them with ease.

His skill at doing anything in the field, from “literature reviews, to data gathering, to text analysis,” was unmatched, and his level of understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of complicated texts was outstanding. Corrales even said, “Without Scott, I would not have met my deadlines or caught some of the mistakes in my first drafts.”

After defending his thesis, Scott was recommended for summa cum laude in the political science department, an honor which Corrales said befit Scott “from the very start of his career at Amherst.” Corrales seemed to have a similar impression of Scott as I do: He “represents calm and brilliance.”

His thesis focuses on the protection and promotion of democracy, fueled by a passion for democracy informed by long study of anti-democratic movements through classes like “A History of the European New Right” and “Democratic Backsliding”.

For his thesis, Scott used the political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes dataset which, when controlled for points relevant to his research, yielded 286 case studies.

He modified the set with a measure that accounted for the support for democracy in the movements that were part of the case studies, and discriminated between movements that were institutional (working within formal governmental structures) and extra-institutional (aligning more with tactics like coups, protests, or strikes).

Going into this massive undertaking, Scott wanted to prove that radical movements were effective at creating positive democratic change and to examine how those

movements have changed tactics over time. However, this outsider examination wasn’t wholly satisfying, and so he ended up making that investigation into the first half of a two-part thesis, adding a second section focusing specifically on movements likely to lead to democratic improvement of the country.

Where the first half of his thesis focuses on the patterns of opposition movements and how they adapt to the regimes they oppose, the second half uses large numbers of case studies to establish patterns in long term democratization, and focuses on a few cases specifically to see how choices made within movements determined the impact of those movements on long term democracy.

“Writing a thesis is a nightmare,” Scott reflected to me. “But also,” he added, “it was super rewarding. There’s something that feels just incredible about looking at this huge thing, and all these things I’ve shown … It’s just thrilling seeing the results of all of this research.”

“It Would Have Been Sillier to Not Declare Anthro” Though Scott’s thesis displays a deep interest in political science, his passion has always been for history. In his bio on The Nueva Current’s website, Scott is said to have “attended The Nueva School with a passion for history and journalism,” something which remained unchanged throughout his time at Amherst, even if his path has changed considerably since freshman year. Scott has long been especially interested in ancient history. When he came to Amherst, he thought he would be a history major for certain, probably with a classics double major. But it soon became clear that his ancient history focus wasn’t going to satisfy him.

The classics department was small and there were few classes that even focused on ancient history, so it was impossible to really study the subject area.

Scott concluded that he would drop the classics major, but he was

intent on keeping that history major — after all, he wrote his admissions essay about his dream of going into history as a professional academic.

“What would Augustus do,” little high school Scott asked himself.

Apply to Amherst, apparently. So it was clear that he would stick with history no matter what, and even as he fell in love with his area of study in the political science department, he continued to take as many history courses as he could. That class on the European new right that led him down his political science pathway was actually offered in the history department, for example, and he’s jumped around classes focusing on the modern middle east, South Africa, religion in West Africa — that last one taught by Olufemi Vaughan, the Alfred Sargent Lee ’41 and Mary Farley Ames Lee professor of Black studies, who Scott describes as a “chef ’s kiss, an absolute sweetheart.”

All of Scott’s jumping around led him to complete the thought and culture concentration in the history department, a theme which resonates deeply with Scott personally and with all of his academic pursuits. “When it comes to my three majors,” Scott said, “what’s really at the core of all of them for me is that I am so interested in understanding and learning about other people, and how people do things differently.” Political science allows for a quantitative sort of measurement of the ways in which people interact at a governmental level. History presents narratives that trace the lives of people and civilizations, telling stories which are unique to a culture and which all mean something profound for the present. Indeed, Scott believes that “History is the best one … at communicating to the public, which is a skill that I think is super important for academics.”

Anthropology, Scott’s final major, ends up actually being the one most obviously connected to his goal. Not only does anthropology, like his other majors, fill his desire for a “sort of scholarly empathy and communication across cultures,” but it connects deeply with

his identity. “There’s this thing where anthropology is always full of people who are marginalized in their own societies. In the discipline, they say that’s because those people are situated in such a place that they’re always wondering what it’s like [to exist] in another society, in the rest of the world,” Scott has always been drawn to the classical civilizations and especially to Rome precisely because of “their approach to queerness and sexuality.”

He added, “I thought it felt really beautiful.” He qualified that there certainly have been better alternatives to the Roman approach that have been created since, “but even just seeing that there’s a place in time where, like, the straight people were the weird ones, felt cool.”

Anthropology “makes you challenge your own assumptions about what’s natural and … what’s just a cultural thing.” As such, jumping around in the discipline was really enlightening, and some of the professors in the department, like Olin Professor in Asian Studies Vanessa Fong, have created very different kinds of classrooms (Fong has only two assignments to be handed in during a semester, and if a student’s midterm gets a good grade, the second assignment is optional) which meant that Scott was able to “really focus on the discussions in class instead of having to worry about all these papers and [things] to turn in.” Moreover, the content of her classes and others showed a side of anthropology that seemed to be in opposition to the discipline’s staid and colonial reputation. Contemporary anthropology, Scott found, was able “to focus more on the cultural understanding element of it, and less on the exoticism and the focus on “foreign” things.”

At one point, because so many of his classes were cross-listed in these three departments, Scott figured that he “was going to end up like two courses away from an anthropology major,” which “felt almost silly.” All three, Scott said, “speak toward a similar place for me, which is an understanding of humanity and society. And for me that’s really important in thinking

about how we can change our own society and improve it.”

What’s Next?

Scott came to Amherst wanting to be an academic. Has that held true through his four years?

“I’m leaving Amherst still probably wanting to be an academic.” So mostly, yes, but his options remain open. Journalism is on the table, as are different types of academic work, “either within the university or with a think tank … some sort of research.” That tracks with Scott’s time at Amherst, from his classes to the time I’ve known him in the newsroom.

When I met Scott, I was one of a few freshmen who wanted to get more involved in the campus community and believed that journalism would provide a kind of connection that would be impossible to get elsewhere. From the beginning it was clear that Scott truly believed in the paper and in the work he did, and that faith never ever wavered.

It is clear to me that Scott is careful with his passions — If he is to follow one, it is a complete kind of devotion.

The level of effort, time, and energy necessary to perform at the level Scott does when it comes to his passions necessitates having as few as possible — which makes it all the more incredible that Scott managed the Opinion Section while writing an enormous thesis for one of his three majors. Though, in talking to Scott over the course of this past year, it has become clear that all these things aren’t very disparate at all. Scott loves humanity, loves the people around him, and wants to do everything he can to not only understand them but make the world a better place for each and every one of them. I am so grateful for everything he’s done for the paper, for the school, and for me personally. He has pursued an Amherst education with utmost calm and unending brilliance, and will certainly carry that on to whatever project he works on next. Thank you, Scott. I wish you luck on anything you take on next, but it seems fairly clear that you don’t need it.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 37

Senior Profile | Angelina Han

AAS President and Extracurricular Extraordinaire A double major in geology and economics, former AAS president Angelina Han had a busy four years at Amherst. Her commitments to public service and helping others shine through everything she says and does.

—Yasmin Hamilton ’24 When I asked about the origins of her frequently-used nickname “Shark,” former-President of the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) Angelina Han’s ’22 eyes lit up as she erupted into laughter. She recalled being unsatisfied with the nicknames “Ang” or “Angie” her freshman year. “By the end of my four years, I want[ed] to be able to walk around campus and [have] people just call me ‘Shark,’” Han said. “[And] it happened!” When later asked about her most significant personal achievements, Han joked, “My first instinct is to just say ‘Shark!’”

Han’s humble response to this question — one of many — is a testament to her character. In truth, Han’s (or Shark’s) reputation and the great things she’s achieved at Amherst precede her. Even if you do not know her personally, you are likely to have heard of her or encountered her through the many spaces on this campus that she occupies and enriches — whether serving as AAS president, taking photos of campus events, Val-sitting, hosting her aptly-titled radio show “Val Sits,” participating in Juggling Club, rowing on women’s crew, as a CA, as an economics TA, or working on research within the geology department.

It is clear to anyone that Han values all of these involvements and achievements for one reason above all others: the ways that they bring her close to others.

“The people,” Han responded without hesitation to my question about what she cares about most at Amherst. “I think the relationships that I’ve been able to build and establish have been the most meaningful for me. With friends, with just random acquaintances, with the staff and faculty, with professors and classes. I think those are what I’m taking away obviously. So I put a lot of care into those.”

This commitment to people is something that seeps into all of Han’s actions, and is noted by everyone who interacts with her.

“Angelina is an inspiring person to me because she believes that the better is possible and that she can do something to help achieve that progress,” said Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies Katharine Sims, her major advisor. “She tries to find a way to help others in everything that she does.”

Growing Up in Upper Dublin, Pennsylvania How much Han cares about people was evident in the ways that she spoke about her time growing up in Upper Dublin, just outside of Philadelphia. One of five siblings and a twin, Han described her upbringing as “very loud, and very, very supportive.”

She attributes much of her motivation to work hard and get through college to this “very encouraging support system.”

Han’s involvement in her

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community and engagement with the people around her is not something that started in college. She has participated in service-oriented clubs from a very young age, like the reading buddies group she joined in middle school, where she would help elementary schoolers work on their reading skills. Once she got to Upper Dublin High School, Han was involved in “quite a few extracurriculars,” Her participation in student government in high school, where she was also student body president, was particularly influential for her trajectory at Amherst. Han gleefully recalled the time she helped organize a “Dancing With The Stars” night for charity — instead called “Dancing With The Cards” for the school mascot, the Cardinals. One year, dancing a routine that a friend choreographed for her and her partner, Han had to step out of her comfort zone but ended up winning second place. In addition to this accomplishment, Han was also able to help with the fourth annual “MiniTHON,” in which the school had set a fundraising record for raising about $35,000 for pediatric cancer awareness and research.

As Sims remarked about Han, “She does so many things well! She always seems to have another hidden talent waiting to be revealed.” This is reflected by the host of other activities Han was also involved with in high

Photo courtesy of Emma Spencer ’23E

Han participated in several extracurricular activities during her Amherst career, including rowing for Amherst women’s crew. school, which included the business leadership Club — which she described as “just a fun club” —, tennis, and school musicals.

While chuckling about her time in the school orchestra, Han modestly remarked, “I played the cello, not well! I was always there, though, much to the chagrin of everyone else who was very good.

But I had a great time.”

This commitment and perseverance in the face of potential failure is something that Han herself attributes her success to: “I think I learned to fail a lot. I think I struggled and [...] I struggled in my classes and I ended up doing well, but just from [...] learning how to work very hard.”

She attributes her ability to take academic and social risks to these foundational experiences.

Adjusting to Amherst Life This ability to step out of her comfort zone is something that Han has carried with her to college. Her decision to attend Am-

herst was a risk in itself since very few people in her town attend liberal arts colleges. Nonetheless, the people and atmosphere on campus made Han confident in her decision. “I had been touring a bunch of more elite institutions and I think I only remember feeling very comfortable and very welcomed by the people I saw around [at Amherst] and really ran with that during the college application process,” she said.

Aside from the personal accomplishment of coining her nickname, Han described feeling very happy and “affirmed in the choices that I made” during her first year at Amherst. She attributes this to the people she found on campus: “I was so surprised at how kind I thought people were. It felt like summer camp at the beginning.” Although it took a little bit for her to get out of her comfort zone and open up to people, when she did, she was able to develop friendships that have lasted throughout her time at Amherst.

Senior Profile | Angelina Han Han has made Amherst her home, even being called the “quintessential Amherst student” by Henry Buren ’22. The connections Han has formed are visible in the ways people speak of her. Buren says of Han, “She has this unstoppable gravity that makes you want to be friends with her. You cannot fight against her gravity [...] I don’t know what it is about Angelina that gives her this gravity. I’m no scientist. However, I think no one would disagree that she has it. Her smile brightens your mood, and her laugh forces you to laugh. I’m going to miss Angelina’s gravity.”

Juanita Jaramillo ’22, another friend of Han’s, would agree with the notion of Han’s “unstoppable gravity,” providing some possible explanations: “She is one of the most welcoming, generous, and thoughtful people I know.

Her authenticity is disarming, making everyone around her feel like they can be their most genuine selves. She is deeply intentional in forming and maintaining relationships, and serving her community [...] Angelina is incredibly humble amidst all of her academic and personal accomplishments. Overall, she has touched the lives of so many people [on] this campus, brightening the day of everyone she interacts with.”

she was interested in, Han decided that she would take introductory geology with Massachusetts Professor in Chemistry and Natural History Tekla Harms as a “throwaway class.” Han joked about her mindset at thxe time: “[I thought,] ‘Whatever, [I’ll] learn how to use some rocks.

Cool.’ Um, turns out I love it.”

Harms’ teaching style made her fall in love with the way geology works. “The way Professor Tekla Harms teaches it was just like, I just loved how [...] geology material really builds on itself. It’s like a puzzle that’s [been] split together. And it’s all like, once you put the pieces together, it really makes sense. So that’s why I keep doing it.”

Like most of her activities, what really drew Han in was the people. “What really clinched it for me was [that] I really liked

the community in the Geology department, like people talking on first-name basis. It was just so welcoming and collaborative, and [...] there [were] just [...] so many great resources and just such a close relationship with all the professors that I felt really able to push myself in a very safe environment.” She has been impressed with every geology professor she has taken a course with: “With every semester, with every professor, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m really glad I took this class.’”

Han’s love for geology and the geology department eventually led her to pursue research in the field. She began research in geology with Professor of Geology and Environmental Studies Anna Martini, with whom Han got exposure to lab work studying Permian-Triassic extinction.

This exposure to a geology lab

led her to conduct her thesis under Assistant Professor of Geology Victor Guevara. For her thesis, Han studied the exhumation of young, high-grade metamorphic rocks from the western Himalayas, working with diffusion modeling and the department’s Scanning Electron Microscope to measure the chemical composition of small mineral grains in the rocks.

According to Guevara, Han was the first to use this microscope, which meant she was “also the first person to discover its problems.” Guevara elaborated, “In times of adversity over the course of her senior thesis project, when I think many would have given up out of frustration, Angelina maintained an admirably positive attitude through it all. Her tenacity in collecting data for her thesis project was

unyielding.”

Parting Wisdom Han plans to return to school and attend graduate school in the future. She is excited to pursue a career in public policy, and to continue helping others. When I asked her what her parting advice was for underclassmen, Han’s response once again showed her love for the people around her. “I think it’s important to really open yourself up to new friendships and just relationships in general.

Just being open to lean into it and just nurture those relationships,” she said.

“Oh, this is one,” she added.

“I think people should romanticize their life more. People don’t do it enough. That is my advice for the undergrads. Romanticize the heck out of your life. It just makes things a lot more fun.”

Discovering Geology More academically, Han’s risk-taking abilities led her to be interested in geology. A geology and economics double major, Han originally became interested in geology through her fascination with the environmental aspect of economics. Han was a little nervous about entering a white-male-dominated field like economics, but she says that taking “Introduction to Economics with Environmental Applications” with Sims made the space feel very accessible.

This course inspired Han to pursue more environmental economics, but when she couldn’t get into an economics elective

Photo courtesy of Angelica Han ’22

Han (bottom left) with several other geology majors. She attributes the geology department’s sense of community to her decision to major.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 39

Senior Profile | Jorge Rodriguez

Learning and Teaching “the Art of Living” Prioritizing self-discipline, service, and faith, Jorge Rodriguez has all the necessary tools to achieve his ultimate goal: living a beautiful life.

—Liam Archacki ’24 “Think of holding a flower in your hand. Beautiful flower, openpalmed. And you just behold it, you gaze at it. You enjoy its beauty,” Jorge Rodriguez ’22 said, offering an analogy for his personal sense of self-discipline. “But when you’re not disciplined, you’re clenching the flower in your hand, you’re grasping at it, and then you can’t see its beauty.”

This was just one of the many seeds of wisdom sprinkled throughout my two-hour conversation with Rodriguez. Topics of discussion included the joy of poetry, the role of religion, and what it means to be fully human. There’s no doubt that the literary-minded philosophy major has a penchant for the big questions of life.

Minutes after sharing his flower analogy, Rodriguez took a long pause, eyes skyward, deep in contemplation of one of my questions.

The May sun beamed on the Frost balcony, a breeze blew the cherry blossom trees down below, a bird chirped.

Then, without any warning, Rodriguez made an untranscribable sound akin to the gobble of a turkey.

“I make random filler noises,” he explained between spurts of self-aware laughter. “You’re not gonna put that in, right?”

There’s no question of authenticity with Rodriguez. And this strong sense of self has fueled his development into a dedicated scholar, a servant to those in need, and a caring mentor and friend. As the ultimate source of his dogged pursuit

of what he calls “the art of living,” Rodriguez credits one pervasive factor: his unceasing dedication to the Catholic faith.

Finding Faith Rodriguez’s faith was not always his own. In Puerto Rico, where Rodriguez lived until age nine, Catholicism is part of the culture. But beyond his religion, the Spanish language, and his family, Rodriguez doesn’t retain much from this period of his life. He didn’t leave behind many friends when his family moved to Cary, North Carolina — just outside of Raleigh — after the 2008 financial crisis wreaked particular havoc on Puerto Rico’s economy.

Though the transition was jarring for his parents, who had to give up the home they had known their entire lives, Rodriguez had little trouble assimilating. His time in a dual-language school meant that he had a strong command of English, and his love for basketball made it easy to make friends at the neighborhood park.

Catholicism had yet to become personal for Rodriguez — it remained something only instilled in him by his parents. So when his father decided that he would attend a private Catholic high school, St. Thomas More Academy, rather than the local public school where all of his friends would go, Rodriguez was understandably apprehensive. But he now regards the decision as life-changing.

At St. Thomas More, Rodriguez experienced, for the first time, the

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transformative power of religious faith. “They’re doing this as more than just a set of rules,” he said of his new Catholic role models. “It was about this encounter with God and this invitation. I was like, ‘Do I accept and live my life differently? Or do I just go back to my old ways?’” Rodriguez decided to embrace his personal relationship to his religion.

The rest of Rodriguez’s high school experience went smoothly.

He found community on the basketball team, which he played on all four years. And his academic interests broadened as he took courses on topics including World War I, ballroom dancing, and the moral philosophy of Jane Austen’s works.

When it came time to select a college, Rodriguez was torn between Amherst and Davidson College. In addition to the colleges’ locations and academics, Rodriguez’s faith proved to be an important factor.

He recalled being told by a Catholic representative from Davidson that it was “‘super easy’” to be Catholic at the school. “I actually got taken aback by that because it’s not supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be a very difficult thing,” he said. So despite knowing that it would be harder to practice his faith at Amherst, Rodriguez embraced the challenge.

Building Bonds Remaining connected to his faith wasn’t the only challenge Rodriguez would face at Amherst. Upon his arrival, he was overwhelmed by the wealth of social opportunities

Photo courtesy of Jorge Rodriguez ‘22

Despite his love for poetry, Rodriguez pursued his interest in answering life’s important questions, majoring in philosophy. available to him. “Your first week of school here, you’re staying up late; you’re talking; you’re meeting people; you’re saying ‘hey’ to everyone you meet. … I started to notice the starts of my days were getting later and later,” he said.

Rodriguez soon came to a realization: He had to be aware of his own limitations. “What am I going to cut off so that I can choose life-giving activities? What boundaries am I going to set for myself ?”

He began to carve out time for sleep, time to focus on his coursework, and even time to get sunshine (“a basic human need,” he said).

Above all, he made time for prayer — for God. “That was the foremost of all, because I knew, for me, that’s the top priority. If that falls, everything else falls,” he said.

But his self-discipline didn’t leave him socially isolated. Rather, it made the time Rodrgiuez set aside for connecting with others even more valuable.

And he formed some of his deepest connections within the Newman Catholic students associ-

ations of both Amherst and UMass, where he found other students just as committed to their faith. He summed up his experience with the communities in two words: “laughter and joy.” Amid this environment, Rodriguez’ own faith continued to flourish.

Interestingly, some of Rodriguez’s closest friends are people who don’t share his faith. He sees value in “having those conversations with people who have distinctly different worldviews, where they don’t agree.”

The Covid pandemic, which hit during Rodriguez’s sophomore spring, threatened the comfortable groove he had established at Amherst. “Socially, it was a huge factor.

Friendships don’t get built quickly.

They are things that develop, and they take time to flower. So friendships here that are made for a year and three quarters — once Covid hit, the gel kind of dissipated,” he said.

While Rodriguez lost some connections during Covid, the pandemic also enabled him to deepen several

Senior Profile | Jorge Rodriguez friendships. He spent the remainder of his sophomore year and his entire junior year sharing an apartment in Sunderland, Massachusetts — a 10-minute drive north of Amherst — with two of his closest friends.

When he was finally able to return to campus as a senior, the occasion was surprisingly bittersweet: “It was a little difficult for me because I was living with my two best friends. Why would I want to leave living with my two best friends?”

Nevertheless, Rodriguez appreciated the opportunity to complete his education in the setting where it had begun.

The Beauty of Learning An eventual philosophy major, Rodriguez’s first love was poetry.

His literary spark was kindled in high school — he recounts that one of his teachers, Dr. Wesley Kirkpatrick, would read poems aloud in his class. The effect on Rodriguez was instant. “I was enamored, enchanted. I fell in love with the sound of poetry as I listened to it, the rhythm of it,” he said.

He began to read poetry on his own and hasn’t stopped ever since.

His favorite poets are Gerard Man-

ley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, and Robert Frost, the namesake for the very library outside of which we sat.

At Amherst, he encountered a professor — Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus William Pritchard — who utilized the same technique that had struck Rodriguez in high school. “He just taught us how to enjoy the stories, and draw the joy out of reading the story, by bringing it to life in his reading of it,” Rodriguez said.

While taking a creative writing workshop as a sophomore, Rodriguez even began to write poetry of his own, a practice which he has kept up ever since.

Has he ever tried to publish his poetry? “No, I haven’t. That’s not what it’s about for me,” he explained. “I just like to create beautiful things — and share them with my friends.” Rodriguez and his friends never fail to read their newly written poems to each other.

For Rodriguez, writing poetry is a spiritual outlet in addition to being a creative one: “Poetry is like a participation in God’s work in the same way that I believe he created us.

And, yeah, that’s beautiful, right?”

Despite his deep-seated love for poetry, Rodriguez found himself drawn in other academic directions after Pritchard’s retirement. He spent some time in geology classes (“Everyone’s fascinated by dinosaurs,” he said), which provided a respite from his otherwise humanities-oriented course load. But after taking “Ethics” and “Freedom and Responsibility” with Professor of Philosophy Nishiten Shah, he knew he had found his home.

“I see philosophy as definitely not only theoretical at all, and definitely not at odds with the same questions that religious people ask,” Rodrigez said.

As a final twist in his academic career, Rodriguez began to take classes in Ancient Greek over his last few terms — initially so that he could read the New Testament in its original tongue. But he quickly gained proficiency, reading Homer’s “Iliad” in its entirety this term. At the senior assembly, he was awarded the classics department prize for Ancient Greek.

Living to Serve Among all his successes, what stands out most about Rodriguez’s

Photo courtesy of Jorge Rodriguez ’22

A devout Catholic, Rodriguez sees self-discipline as a means to unlock life’s most profound beauties.

college experience is the time he has dedicated to serving others.

Christian Williams, who met Rodriguez during his first week at Amherst through the UMass Newman Center, told me about a mission trip that he and Rodriguez took to Belize. The goal of the trip was to establish a medical clinic. Accordingly, each of the participants had some level of medical expertise — except for Rodriguez. But he found other ways to help out.

First, he decided to write a song, which he taught to both the other people on the trip and the local people they were serving. Then, Rodriguez led everyone in a multiple-round, tension-reducing singalong.

Later, the team was assisting a person dying of cancer who had had multiple limbs amputated.

Amid the somber scene, Rodriguez lightened the mood by playing with the person’s child, a boy around the age of four. “Jorge took off his shoes.

He got into the bed with the little kid and started having a pillow fight with him,” Williams said.

As a senior in college, Rodriguez felt drawn to do more for Amherst’s local community. He and his friends decided to bring food to people experiencing homelessness around town. “And then to honor their dignity as human beings and as persons, we would offer them a meal with a conversation,” he said.

Rodriguez and his friends have also started a “blessing-bag drive.”

They fill a bag with important items — including food, water, and basic toiletries — and give it to someone in need. Rodriguez makes sure to ask for the person’s name so he can include them in his prayers.

Rodriguez has also volunteered his time at Bethlehem House, a Northampton organization that offers resources and emotional support to pregnant women experiencing crises.

“Ever since coming to Amherst, my love for the poor — that’s been something that’s grown,” Rodriguez said.

Turning to Teaching In his time at Amherst, Rodri-

guez found the challenge he sought as a high school student. Now he’s looking toward the next one.

Upon graduation, Rodriguez will first drive down to North Carolina to visit his mother, who’s recovering from surgery, and spend the rest of the summer at home with his family. But after that, Rodriguez will live for a year with the Discalced Carmelites, an order of Catholic monks, where he will decide if he wants to dedicate his life to the priesthood.

Though the experience is something Rodriguez feels called to, he’s not sure what the outcome will be.

“I have to know if this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” he said.

Father Gary Dailey, a Catholic priest and the director of the UMass Newman Center, has served as a mentor to Rodriguez. Dailey likens the discernment process to dating someone. “You date that person in order to determine whether or not you want to marry that person. So you lay all the cards out on the table, you show them who you are, and they show you who they are, and you discern that and come to the point where you decide, ‘Yeah, we can spend the rest of our lives together,’” Dailey said.

If the priesthood doesn’t work out, Rodriguez can still pursue the job he aspired to when he entered Amherst — becoming a high school poetry teacher.

No matter what path he chooses, Rodriguez’s three and a half years as a Beneski Museum docent, his time as an Ancient Greek tutor, and a summer spent working with elementary school students — not to mention the countless connections he’s forged along the way — have prepared him well for a life of sharing “the art of living” with others.

On that note, Rodriguez has two pieces of advice. One: “Take ownership of your life. Take ownership of the gift you’ve been given, right here, right now, so that it may be a beautiful life.” And two: “Do not be afraid to take a risk on God. You might find that He is the satisfaction to the questions you have or the happiness you want.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 41

Senior Profile | Ella Peterson

A Community Builder With a Love for Democracy Ella Peterson has used her time at Amherst to avidly pursue her interest in the political sphere, effecting positive change and building community along the way.

— Tana Delalio ’24 As I first sat down to chat with Ella Peterson ’22, I was surprised to learn that I didn’t have to introduce myself. I remembered Peterson as my remarkably friendly first-year Orientation Leader, whose positive personality shone through during various rounds of awkward icebreakers over Zoom. The fact that she remembered me from nearly two years ago as a tiny square on a computer screen is deeply emblematic of who Peterson is as a person: someone who sincerely cares about others.

Growing up right outside of Philadelphia in South Jersey, Peterson highly valued being part of a close-knit town. She knew she wanted the same sense of community in college, and fell in love with Amherst after attending Admitted Students Weekend.

It is no surprise, then, that through her four years at Amherst, Peterson has worked tirelessly in the political space and beyond to promote the same feeling of community that drew her to the school in the first place.

A Devotion to Politics and Economics At Amherst, Peterson double-majored in political science and economics, and completed the Five College Certificate in International Relations.

But her interest in politics shone through even at a young age. In third grade, Peterson

answered “Secretary of State” when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. Although she is no longer sure about that answer, she has always felt drawn to politics for its capacity to effect positive change.

“I just always really cared about trying to make this place better for all of us. And to me, with my theories of change, it seems to me that the way to go about that was with policy,” Peterson said.

Peterson’s economics major appealed to her long-held curiosity about “the world around [her] and how places work and people interact with one another.” She enjoyed taking an economics class in high school, which led her to decide on taking economics as well in college.

Through writing a political science thesis senior year, Peterson brought these two interests together and discovered her “deep-seated love of democracy.”

Her thesis compared peace deals in countries that all practiced a form of democracy called constitutionalism and experienced ongoing conflicts. “[They were] sometimes able to make progress and sometimes not; [I would] try to theorize the different ways that that happened. That’s all stuff that’s really interesting and important to me,” she said.

Outside the classroom, Peterson explored her passion for

42 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

politics by joining the Amherst Political Union (APU) her freshman year, becoming co-president during her senior year.

She recalled really enjoying “living out the free speech debate in meetings,” because it resonated with one of her central values: maintaining community through open discourse. She noted that while there was more open discourse her freshman year, there was also less community, which she felt was stronger by her senior year.

Her involvement in the club taught her “a lot about how other people think about how other people process politics, because they think the personal is the political.” She added, “I think that we pretend those lines are separate, but they’re not.”

She felt that the different perspectives within the APU were really valuable. As an example, she cited a meeting during her sophomore year when the club discussed then-President Donald Trump’s policies on China, and Chinese international students came to share their thoughts on the matter. “That was a really different perspective than what you might have seen written in the New York Times,” she said.

Building Community Through Her Work Peterson’s passion for hearing other perspectives and facilitating community also transferred to her campus jobs as a Commu-

Photo courtesy of Ella Peterson ’22

Having performed political research at Amherst, Peterson hopes to find a job in the political space upon graduation. nity Advisor (CA), a tour guide, and an Orientation Leader.

Peterson loved being a CA because it let her “make more connections with students.”

She is known across campus for planning fun and unique activities for her residents, like paint nights, gardening, and scavenger hunts.

One of her fondest memories as a CA was when a resident of her sophomore-year floor knocked on her door and asked Peterson what she should wear to her first formal. In addition to sweet moments like that one, Peterson said there were plenty of rough moments too — she saw people at their best and helped them through their worst.

Peterson feels that being a CA was one of the most meaningful parts of her time at Amherst. “I’ve had such a sense of profound honor and privilege that I get to make people’s experiences on campus a little more comfortable, a little more like home,” she reflected.

However, Peterson also experienced a “really dangerous situation” as a CA on the first-year quad her sophomore year, which her “supervisors kind of continuously ignored until it got to a point where peoples’ safety were at risk, including [her] own.”

Even after trying to get somebody to do something about it, she felt like her concerns were “falling on deaf ears.”

After that experience, Peterson reflected on the number of hours of work she put in, the amount of emotional effort, and the lack of clarity about when she was on-call, in addition to other struggles she and other CAs had experienced working for the Office of Residential Life (ResLife).

As a result, the experience of working as a CA took a major toll on her mental health during her sophomore year, despite her love for the job.

“I didn’t want anyone else at this college to have to go through some of the things that

Senior Profile | Ella Peterson I went through,” Peterson said.

She pointed out that the majority of CAs are on financial aid, and that there are no structures to support these students who experience difficulties working under ResLife.

Fighting for Change

Photo courtesy of Ella Peterson ’22

A dedicated CA, Peterson is known across campus for hosting exciting and fun events for her residents.

Instead of letting the issue go, Peterson got involved. She started talking to people in an effort to let the broader community of students working on campus know that they could improve their working conditions. “We have rights as workers,” she said.

“Even though a lot of our work doesn’t look like conventional work, it’s still important; it’s still a valuable service to the institution.” As a result, she decided to co-found the Union of Student Workers at Amherst College (USWAC).

“Unionizing became a way to try to create or enshrine protections,” she said. “The way you keep good labor practices is that you have a good union fighting for you. … You cannot trust your employer to be benevolent.” While she says that student workers have not yet gained a union, she hopes students will continue the work of trying.

Organizing is frustrating and taxing, but it is also the work that makes Peterson feel the most alive. “I love fighting for a cause, and I love helping others see that they too can fight for their own dignity and self worth,” she said.

In this same vein, Peterson has been vocal about many issues at Amherst that have come to her attention, such as the college’s distribution of financial aid and its failure to address the root problems of sexual violence on campus.

However, she says her passion for working to make Amherst a better place derives from her deep love of the school. “The reason that I’ve always ended up getting myself into scrapes, saying unfortunate things in The Student or, you know, yelling,

or helping organize protests, or whatever it is, is because I truly believe in the mission of this institution, and its capacity to grow and change and be a better place for us all,” she said. “The only way that that happens is to make some noise in the process.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in an environment where I was better suited to learn,” Peterson reflected. She says that at Amherst she learned intellectually, about relationships, about who she is, about how the world works: all lessons she will take into the next chapter of her life.

Next Steps It is no surprise, then, that after devoting her time at Amherst to helping others, Peterson wants to pursue teaching in the long term after spending time in the political sphere.

As a teaching assistant for multiple economics classes, particularly Willard Long Thorp Professor of Economics Jessica Reyes’ class on anti-racist economics, she discovered that she found having conversations with students and helping them think about issues to be deeply meaningful.

“I don’t know if I would like specifically to come back here [Amherst]; there’s a lot of contingencies. But I’ve discovered that I really love teaching,” she said.

In the next couple years or so, Peterson will first look for a job in the political space, and then plans to attend graduate school and pursue a Ph.D. in political science.

She also plans to take a break before going to work full-time.

“I would really love to be able to spend my days not only thinking and writing about democracy, but also living and breathing it,” she said. “That’s why it’s important to me to take a little bit of time off, do a little bit of living and breathing that democracy, before I retreat to the ivory tower, with one foot in the real world.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 43

Senior Profile | Teo Ruskov

From Religious Studies Major to World Traveler Teo Ruskov conveys passion and dedication for religious studies, earning the prestigious Watson Fellowship and winning multiple accolades for his thesis on Buddhism.

— Madeline Lawson ’25 While listening to Teo Ruskov ’22 speak about his interests, you can’t help but smile. His passion infuses his speech in such a way that you want to hear more, even if you previously knew nothing about Buddhism or more general religious studies. This enthusiasm likely contributed to his many academic accomplishments: from winning top prize at this year’s Three Minute Thesis competition to receiving the Watson Fellowship, a stipend awarded to graduating students to develop their personal interests through travel outside of the United States.

As I talked with Ruskov, one thing became especially clear: He didn’t want his love of religious studies to be an isolated interest. This passion pervaded much of his discussion, even when he was talking about something seemingly unrelated.

I never felt like he was trying to do anything other than teach me something he’s passionate about.

One of Ruskov’s friends, Cat Sarosi ’22, mentioned the same thing: “No matter how complicated or in the weeds what he’s working on is, he always has a way to bring it to a level where he can engage with other people on it.” This passion not only for learning, but also for teaching others, has led Ruskov to his dream of becoming a professor and continuing his work in religious studies long after he leaves Amherst.

The Road to Religious Studies Ruskov’s family is Bulgarian, but he immigrated to Cummings, Georgia, at four years old.

He grew up Eastern Orthodox and bilingual, and he developed an academic interest in religious studies in high school. Yet, he entered college expecting to declare a biochemistry or biophysics major. “I just didn’t really have any outlets for non-STEM things [at my high school],” he said. “And I was sure I was going to become a doctor or a chemist.” He knew he had an interest in the humanities, though, and considered a double major in biochemistry and religion or philosophy.

Ruskov’s path to Amherst was not as linear as many of his peers’. He graduated high school a year early, then studied French at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. There, he audited chemistry courses while taking French as a foreign language.

After a year, Ruskov entered Amherst as a freshman. He says he was particularly drawn to Amherst because of its open curriculum. “When you’re doing anything in a European university, you sign up for a course of study at the very beginning, and you don’t really get to pick your classes,” he said, describing the atmosphere as “a little bit suffocating.”

He continued taking chemistry courses, but found that he preferred his other classes. He

44 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

loved Senior Lecturer in Russian Tatyana Babyonyshev’s course on first-year Russian. “My firstyear seminar was [also] particularly amazing,” he added.

“It was on Francisco Goya, the painter, and it was an absolutely amazing class.”

All the while, Ruskov kept inching toward religious studies.

He took more religion classes, such as Global Christianity, and found himself interested in all facets of the department. “[It’s] so exciting because it has a really multivalent methodological approach. There’s something for everyone,” he said.

By his sophomore year, Ruskov was already going above and beyond in his coursework.

When he took “Introduction to Buddhist Traditions” with George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion Maria Heim, who eventually became his advisor, “he approached me to ask if he could write a long research paper instead of the short papers assigned in this 100-level class,” Heim related. “I was a little bit skeptical, but introduced him to an ancient Buddhist text I [was] translating, and we talked a lot about it and the field of Buddhist studies.

Teo plunged in, did extensive research, and wrote a 29page, very well-researched and compelling paper on this text.”

Ruskov’s enthusiasm would only increase during his years at Am-

Photo courtesy of Cayla Weiss ‘23

Ruskov has worked extensively in Buddhist studies, learning Sanskrit and Pali to supplement his work. herst.

Love of Languages Ruskov has supplemented his Buddhist studies with intensive courses on both Sanskrit and Pali. He received a fellowship to study Sanskrit at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal during the summer of 2020, but it was canceled due to Covid. Nonetheless, the next summer, he was able to take classes remotely at both the Institute and at Harvard Divinity School, where he studied Pali.

Languages are a personal interest for Ruskov as well as a crucial tool for his course of study.

He took Japanese in middle school, saying that it’s one of his “greatest failures in life” that he was unable to continue the classes. He also studied Spanish and French before college, German in Switzerland, and Ancient Greek and Russian at Amherst.

One of his best experiences at Amherst, he says, was during his sophomore year, during which

he read “The Master and Margarita” in Russian alongside Babyonyshev.

It was also through serving as a Five College Language Partner in Bulgarian that Ruskov realized he might want to become a professor.

“It’s very hard to learn from a native speaker, because they just don’t know what you do and don’t know,” he said. “You kind of have to commit to your curriculum. It seems so silly to rely that much on a textbook when you know the language, but it was very much like ‘Okay, I know chapter one like the back of my hand.’”

He reshaped the way he viewed Bulgarian to fit a learner’s perspective. As he did whatever he could to make the knowledge he had accessible to others, he started to realize that teaching was an ideal career path for him.

Personal Interests and Thesis Work Outside of the classroom,

Senior Profile | Teo Ruskov Ruskov works at Frost Library and does origami, showing me an impressive paper sculpture with pride. In his first two years at Amherst, he was involved in the theater department, and now enjoys snowboarding and kayaking.

When talking about his personal life, Ruskov was quick to mention his friends. The two I spoke to, Sarosi and Rachel Rozenfeld ’22, both felt certain that their friendship with Ruskov would last long after they left Amherst. “[He’s] definitely one of the most driven people I know here, in the sense that when he knows that he wants something, he goes for it, and doesn’t really stop pursuing it until it happens, and it almost always seems

to happen,” Rozenfeld said. She also noted that he was one of the kindest people she knew, adding, “He likes making people feel good about themselves.”

Sarosi noted his level of intellectual curiosity, saying, “I always tease him that he’s basically been a graduate student for two years, considering the level of work he’s been doing in religious studies. At the same time, there’s an incredible interdisciplinary spirit to the way he approaches everything.”

This interdisciplinary passion for his studies led Ruskov to write a thesis, which focused on Buddhism and the more general way stories are told within religion. “It’s about these stories called Jakatas,” he said. “It’s these 500, maybe 550, stories of

the Buddha’s past lives.” He focused on four different versions of “The Banyan Deer,” a tale which recounts Buddha’s life as a king of the herd. In the story, a human king slaughtered a deer a day, and a pregnant doe was next to be killed. The Deer King sacrificed himself so that the doe didn’t have to die. Two of the accounts were written in Sanskrit, and two in Pali. He wanted to understand how these texts are used, “so that we could get insight into what stories are supposed to do and why we tell them.” For his work, he won the Three Minute Thesis competition, as well as the Moseley Prizes, which “are awarded to seniors for the best essays on a subject approved by the Department of Religion.”

Next Steps Ruskov was awarded the Watson Fellowship this year, which allows seniors to travel outside of the United States for a year with a $40,000 stipend. Ruskov says that the point of the fellowship is that “you are the final project,” rather than your academic interests. He says that the application process was grueling, but Director of Fellowships Christine Overstreet made it easier to navigate.

Ruskov’s proposal revolves around pronunciation. “As a child I was really nervous about pronouncing things properly.

This was something that was constantly in the air. I was always doing little drills with my parents. It was just a big facet of my life,” he said. He intends to

Photo courtesy of Ryan McMillan ’20 Photo courtesy of Teo Ruskov ’22

Ruskov plans to spend the next year traveling with the Watson Fellowship, with plans to go to India and London, among other places.

combine this with his interest in religious studies.

While a component of the Watson Fellowship is spontaneity, there are a few things Ruskov plans on doing during his fellowship, such as volunteering at a Hindu temple in London. “It has developed language acquisition programs for people who are Indian, but they were born in England or maybe they came from India when they were three years old,” he said. “So there’s language classes for people for whom this is their language, and they maybe already know it, maybe they can already understand it, but they speak with accents sometimes, and that makes them really uncomfortable. So that’s a context I’m interested in looking at in England.”

Ruskov also plans on traveling to India, studying chanting with one teacher and classical Indian vocals with another. After that, he is unsure where he will go.

He’s considering Japan: “There’s a large community of Vietnamese refugees right now in Japan.

So there’s this really interesting thing where they’re practicing Vietnamese Buddhism in Japan, and they’re chanting that way.”

After the fellowship ends, Ruskov is attending the University of Chicago to earn his Master’s in Religious Studies.

He kept reiterating how he was amazed that people were intrigued by his work. On winning the Three Minute Thesis Prize, he said, “You don’t think people can be interested in it, and I kind of distilled what I could distill out into three minutes and people enjoyed it, which is the best I can hope for.”

His advice for Amherst students? “Don’t let your ideas about what’s going to make you money dictate your study choices, because you don’t know what’s going to make you money.” He also reiterated that the people at Amherst are the reason he has accomplished what he has. His final piece of advice is this: “Take a religion course!”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 45

Senior Profile | Sage Innerarity

Creating Community and Championing Change Throughout her time at Amherst, Sage Innerarity has made a name for herself through her ability to bring people together and raise the voices of others.

—Liza Katz ’24

Community has always been important to Sage Innerarity ’22. While at Amherst, she has devoted her time to connecting with the people around her, whether through the softball team or the multitude of student clubs she’s been a part of. Innerarity is also a proud member of the Native community on campus, and has spent much of her time at Amherst learning more about her heritage and working to give a voice to her fellow Native students.

When I sat down with Innerarity, I already knew a little bit about what to expect — Innerarity is a self-proclaimed “very direct person” who isn’t afraid to call it how she sees it. However, underneath her outspoken exterior is someone who genuinely wants to help others. Innerarity has dedicated her studies and her summers to telling stories that are seldom told, and the rest of her time to serving as a rock to her friends, peers, and teammates. For all the work she’s done to amplify the voices of others, it’s time to hear hers.

Humble Beginnings Innerarity’s journey to Amherst began almost 3,000 miles away, in the town of Elk Grove, California. About a 20-minute drive away from the state’s capital, Elk Grove is where Innerarity spent the first 18 years of her

life, and it’s a community that she keeps returning to.

One of only a few Native kids in her area, Innerarity learned from a very early age that academic spaces were not always going to feel welcoming. As part of the California state history curriculum, students learn about the Gold Rush and the mission systems — two topics littered with both anti-Native action and sentiment. It was through this experience that she began to embrace and connect with her heritage. During these units, her mother and grandmother would help her with cultural presentations for her classes to help fully convey both sides of the story. “[Those presentations] really helped me find a voice,” she said. “So when I would encounter teachers who would say problematic [stuff], or just instances where I needed to be able to use my voice to stand up for myself — like, my mom had taught me how to do that.”

She credits this experience as driving her to take initiative with her education. Like many students who eventually make their way to Amherst, Innerarity was an academically focused child who was involved in many different activities. One of her main interests was performance art; she participated in theater and dance productions, school talent shows, and even a “Poet-

46 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

ry Out Loud” contest, which she entered during her senior year of high school.

But Innerarity’s dedication to softball took up the largest chubk of her time and energy in high school. A driven and passionate player, one of her earliest goals was earning a scholarship to play at the collegiate level. “I had really, really amazing coaches and mentors, and I learned so much about myself through playing the sport,” Innerarity said.

“It Felt Like Kind of the Perfect Place” It was this love and passion for softball that would eventually land Innerarity in Western Massachusetts, but not without adversity. Coming from California, Innerarity was primarily looking at schools closer to home, but she was unable to find one where she could play varsity softball while also receiving a top-notch education. With her love for learning, going to a school where she could be with like-minded people was a top priority. So she prioritized academics. She would do what she had been doing in school her whole life and let the rest take care of itself.

And eventually, it did. After a softball tournament in San Diego, Amherst reached out to recruit her. She had never heard of the college, but after do-

Photo courtesy of Sage Innerarity ’22

Innerarity initially wanted to study English and math, but decided to switch to American studies after finding her passion for learning and teaching others about her Native heritage. ing some digging, she was sold. “[Initially,] I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard of this place,’” she said. “And then I did a little research into it. I found out, ‘Wow, this is a really good school.’ And from the outside, it was kind of the perfect place [for me] in that I would get to do athletics while also getting to prioritize [my] academics, and do all this other extracurricular stuff because there’s just so many options.”

But for Innerarity, it was her visit and the people she met that sold her on Amherst. Because of her status as a member of the Native community, she was able to take an overnight visit to the college through the college’s Native Overnight program and meet other Amherst students in the community. She cites her desire to “be a part of growing that community” and her love for the people she met as what solidified

her decision.

Finding Her Community It was this desire for community that has guided Innerarity throughout her college career.

While excelling in the classroom as an English and American studies major, she began doing what she does best — forming connections within her community. She fully extended herself: In addition to being a dedicated member of the softball team for three years, she also branched out, participating in the Sabrinas a cappella group and becoming a member of the Native and Indigenous Students Association (NISA) and the Council of Amherst Student Athletes of Color (CACSAC).

In the Sabrinas, Innerarity found a community that welcomed her with open arms.

Senior Profile | Sage Innerarity “From day one that was just such a supportive, kind, encouraging, generative space to be in,” she said. “Those are definitely friendships that will last my whole life.” In CACSAC, she found a group of like-minded people with shared experiences as people of color in athletics.

And in NISA, she returned to her roots, just as she was beginning to do so in other ways as well.

In particular, Innerarity began to connect with her heritage through her academics. She had entered college knowing she wanted to major in English, but she added American studies later on when she realized her initial desire to major in math had been a mistake. And it was in American studies classes that Innerarity found her calling. She decided to complete the Five College Certificate in Native and Indigenous Studies, along with a concentration in Native studies within the American studies major. In focusing on Native studies,

Innerarity reignited her passion for the topic — as demonstrated by her senior thesis on creation stories in her home community.

Activism and Education Work on the project that would become her thesis began during quarantine, after Innerarity had applied for and received the Mellon Mays Fellowship during the spring of her sophomore year. This is also when much of her development into an advocate for others began to manifest. Lisa Brooks, Henry S. Poler ’59 presidential teaching professor of English and American studies, Innerarity’s Mellon Mays mentor and eventual thesis advisor, saw it happen firsthand. “She [became] so good at building conversation, and kind of creating a space where other people’s voices would be heard, where it was safe to speculate,” Brooks said.

This attitude didn’t just apply in the classroom — Danica

Peterson ’22, one of Innerarity’s closest friends, echoed Brooks’ sentiments. “Everyone in her life knows her room is an open and safe space for them to be,” she said. “She also has a lot of courage and passion, and will always stand up for what’s right.”

It was in her thesis research that her knack for both creating community and advocating for others met with Innerarity’s academic interests. During the summers of 2020 and 2021, Innerarity used the stipend she received from Mellon Mays to fund her research with Brooks on Indigenous stories in her own home community, conducting a series of interviews with Native Elders in Sacramento. This work, telling those underrepresented stories, gave her a new perspective. “It really solidified for me the importance of storytelling and the importance of using my place at Amherst to do that [community-strengthening] work,” she said.

This work also bled over into

her extracurriculars. Innerarity got more involved in NISA, becoming co-president and working to improve the resources available to Native students and expand their role on campus.

Some of her biggest projects have included running Amherst’s first Orange Shirt Day Fundraiser to commemorate the legacy of the residential school system on Indigenous peoples, and laying the groundwork for the planting of a medicine garden for Native students on campus.

She was also part of the group of CACSAC upperclassmen that pushed for and participated in the club’s walkout this past October, which aimed to change administrative practices in the athletic department, specifically by making them transparent, diverse, and socio-economically inclusive earlier this year. All of their demands were met.

In March, due to an abusive coaching situation, Innerarity made the difficult decision to step away from the softball team

Photo courtesy of Sage Innerarity ’22

A member of the Sabrinas, CACSAC, and the Anti-Racism Task Force; a Co-President of NISA; and former member of the softball team, Innerarity has made an effort to branch out during her four years at Amherst.

after spending three years as a core member. But rather than simply accepting the situation, she became an advocate, organizing a full-team strike that led to the coach being put on leave and an investigation into her behavior being opened. Despite these incidents having an impact on her softball experience and her passion for the sport wavering as a result, Innerarity doesn’t regret any of it. “Quite honestly I don’t think that I would be the person that I am now if I hadn’t played [softball],” she said. “I think it made me so much braver and so much more. A better friend, a better teammate, a better community member.”

Going Back

Home,

Giving

Innerarity’s community work won’t stop with graduation. She plans to continue the research she started with her thesis this summer, using the information she gathers and the experience she gains to go back to the roots of her advocacy work. Remember those cultural presentations from elementary school? Innerarity plans to take a gap year to create companion curricula like the ones she and her family taught to her classes 10 years ago. Afterward, she plans to apply to graduate school, and get a Ph.D. in either English or American Studies, with the goal of eventually becoming a professor and educating others on Native stories as a way of giving back to the community that provided so much for her.

For all that she has done to shape the Amherst community over the past four year, Innerarity will be missed. Brooks said it best: “[She’s] played a leadership role in really making Native people visible on the campus, but also creating a space of belonging, which has been just extraordinary. We’re all going to miss Sage a lot … because of that leadership role that she’s played, and because of the community that she’s helped to create.”

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 47

Senior Profile | Sophie Koh

A Drive for Inclusion in Intellectual Spaces Sophie Koh pursues her intellectual passions with a higher purpose. Her commitment to cultivating inclusivity encourages us all to contribute to meaningful change in the spaces we occupy.

—Brooke Hoffman ’23E From her work in the physics and computer science departments to her involvement in Electronics Club, Dance and Step at Amherst College (DASAC), and more, Sophie Koh’s ’22 engagement within the Amherst community has been extensive. After sitting down with her, one thing became abundantly clear: For Koh, her time at Amherst has been an opportunity to not only explore her passions, but to use them as avenues for change — to enter spaces and challenge the traditional molds they promote.

Coming to Amherst Koh grew up in Northern Virginia, where she attended a magnet high school for STEM. Describing herself as an “engineering-minded person for as long as I can remember,” Koh initially focused her college search on schools offering engineering programs, like the University of Virginia. After visiting Amherst for Admitted Students Weekend, however, Koh found herself drawn to the liberal arts education and small community at Amherst.

Upon arrival at Amherst, Koh appreciated the intimacy of small class sizes. “It’s weird to be in a place where professors automatically know your name. It was nice for me because I guess I stood out by nature of it being a small place,” Koh explained.

While positive in many respects, Koh’s transition to Amherst also came with its challenges. Amherst was a much different environment

than what she was accustomed to. “My high school was majority Asian, so I went from somewhere where I had a lot of people that looked like me to the Amherst physics department, which is notably smaller and [where] I would be [something like] one of two Asian women in the class,” she reflected.

“I think that was a big transition for me, going from being in the majority to being in the minority, and being able to blend in to automatically being singled out the second you walk into [a] space.”

As a result, Koh explained that she felt a considerable amount of pressure to prove herself within these spaces at Amherst where her identity was not widely represented.

Academics at Amherst Like many students, McMillanKoh has devoted most of her time at Amherst to academic pursuits in the physics and computer science departments. “It’s kind of funny, I feel like I’m sort of counter-institutional wherever I end up. Back at my [STEM-focused] high school, I was very much like, ‘Oh, I like music and writing.’ And here, [at a liberal arts college], I’m very much a physics person, which has consumed a lot of my identity here,” Koh remarked.

Koh was drawn to physics and computer science because she wanted “to end up with something that would look sort of like an engineering degree.”

“I was looking at the majors that would best prepare me for some-

48 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

thing afterwards, but also being able to have that liberal arts education, where it’s very in-depth about concepts,” she said.

Koh playfully remarked, “I like to joke that I think I picked the two departments at this school with the worst vibes. I just sort of planted my feet and established my space there, maybe even out of just stubbornness.”

Koh’s choice of majors was a function of more than just her intellectual interests — by pursuing these majors, Koh felt she could promote diversity and inclusivity in spaces that did not have ample representation. She explained that she became heavily involved in diversity efforts, particularly in physics, to “push for more inclusive teaching styles and practices.”

“It was mostly because it was something that I realized I had to go through that people shouldn’t have to,” she explained. “With that in mind, I felt that in picking majors, [I] could make the most impact while still doing things that I enjoyed, like solving problems and writing code.”

As a capstone of her studies in the physics department, Koh completed a senior thesis, working on research conducted by David Hall, Paula R. and David J. Avenius 1941 Professor of Physics. Hall’s research focuses on Bose-Einstein condensates, simply understood as atoms that are extremely cold, said Koh. Speaking on the research, Koh further explained that when atoms reach such temperatures, there are

Photo courtesy of Sophie Koh ‘22

Through academics and extracurriculars, Koh has worked to promote inclusivity in the many spaces she shares. interesting quantum effects — such as movement or “excitations” — that occur within the matter. Hall’s research is centered on studying these phenomena and Koh’s thesis, in conjunction with Hall’s research, was focused on analyzing images of the ultra cold atoms. As part of this analysis, Koh was able to tie in her studies in computer science, creating an algorithm that identified the locations of the excitations within the images taken of the atoms. Reflecting on the analysis, she explains that it entailed “looking at the picture and being able to create a machine learning algorithm, which is actually sort of computer science, to say, ‘Oh, here’s one of those excitations, here’s another one of those excitations.’”

Commenting on Koh’s work, Professor Hall remarked, “Sophie wrote a fantastic thesis. I should note that it was with very little substantive input from me. She taught me a lot about machine learning, and I look forward to putting her results to use in analyzing data from my laboratory.”

Extracurricular Involvements In addition to her academics, Koh has been heavily involved in campus life at Amherst. As a president of the Electronics Club, a member of Spectra (Amherst’s physics and astronomy club), a baritone saxophone player for the Amherst Jazz Ensemble, and a member of DASAC, Koh’s extracurricular involvement has shaped much of her experience as an Amherst student. It has also been a primary means through which she has continued her efforts to promote diversity and inclusivity in spaces lacking representation.

For Koh, Electronics Club was a way to fuse her intellectual passions with a drive for inclusivity. As president, Koh said, “I’ve really been trying to push the focus from individual projects toward more teaching, so people who are interested [in] but don’t know anything about electronics [can] come and learn.” Koh also spearheaded a light installation project now hanging in the Science Center, which she described as the

Senior Profile | Sophie Koh “magnum opus” of her involvement with the Electronics Club.

She explained that combining art with electronics was a great way to get people of all interests and experience levels involved in the space of electronics.

Spectra was another space in which Koh sought to cultivate a space in which people could feel a sense of belonging: “Spectra is really in line with these ideas of pushing for more inclusive practices in physics and community building within a physics major, because I think doing physics can [often] be very isolating,” she said. “And particularly if you’re underrepresented in physics, it can feel like you don’t really have a place anywhere.”

Among its many activities, Spectra organized collective study nights and career building events, as well as a weekly “scientist of the week” feature on the club’s Instagram account, in which they highlight scientists from underrepresented groups.

Koh suggested that the last of these activities was pivotal for her, not only for her DEI efforts but also for her personal growth.

For Koh, seeing individuals from underrepresented backgrounds in the field of physics has shaped her self-perception. Most of all, she valued learning about Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese American physicist from the mid-1900s. “Seeing an Asian woman in physics, who was really successful, was a big turning point for me, because I think a lot of this happened while there were many hate crimes going on against Asian American women. So it was a big moment of awakening for me [to see] how I could connect things that were happening on a global level, in the news, to how I perceived myself in this space that I exist in,” she said.

Koh’s involvement in Spectra has also helped her come to see herself in the field of physics in a new way, both in regard to her identity and experience level. Reflecting on this transformation, Koh remarked, “I think the big turning point for me was figuring out that there isn’t a hard cutoff for what it means to be a physicist. It’s just if you do physics,

that’s it. And so I’ve come to grow into learning and calling myself a physicist.”

In addition to her involvement in STEM-related extracurriculars, Koh explored other passions through her participation in Jazz Ensemble and DASAC. Koh looks back fondly on her involvement in Jazz Ensemble. “I was a huge music person in high school and wanted to continue music in some form [at Amherst]. I play the baritone saxophone in the ensemble and like the little person, big instrument aesthetic,” she joked. DASAC was also one of Koh’s favorite experiences at Amherst. The group provided a valuable artistic outlet for her and a space in which she felt a sense of community and belonging. She noted that DASAC was also important to her development insofar as it helped her learn how to present confidence, a skill she says she’ll take with her as she heads into her professional life.

it was a physicist or an engineer.

There’s some type associated with that. And if you don’t fit that type, it’s really hard for you to try to fit into it. I think the biggest takeaway for me is that you should just break that mold, just say ‘I’m going to go in here, I’m going to take up space, and I’m going to establish my place here.’ And [when] a whole bunch of people do that, that will change what a person’s view of whatever that role is in the future.”

She further elaborated: “For me,

it was saying, ‘Even though physics is really hard, and really white, and really male, I’m going to come in, and I’m going to establish my place here.’ Hopefully, other people will see me doing that and do the same, and then more people with that same mentality will come in.

And eventually physics won’t be as male-dominated.”

Reflecting on this lesson, Koh affirmed: “I can establish my place in spaces that might not be designed for me. And I want to keep doing

that.”

Sophie Koh’s passion, intellectual curiosity, and desire to promote change, has made a significant impact on campus over the past four years. She has pushed boundaries in a way that is inspiring and has undoubtedly made Amherst a better, more inclusive place. As her time at Amherst draws to a close, one thing about Koh rings loud and true: Sophie Koh is someone who breaks molds, and will continue to do so wherever the future takes her.

Looking Forward After Amherst, Koh will pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She decided to switch from physics to electrical engineering because she has always been “interested in application and the impact research can have in real time.”

Koh’s studies will focus primarily on solar cells as a form of renewable energy. She was drawn to this area because she “wanted to find something to research that is attached to a tangible good in the world.”

“It’s probably the coolest thing I could ever imagine and I’m so excited to do research on something I feel is really important,” Koh enthused.

Looking back on her time at Amherst, Koh shared that her biggest takeaway is the power in breaking traditional molds, and the greater significance doing so will carry in the future.

“Throughout my time at Amherst, I realized that there is [often] a typical mold of what a person who does a specific thing is supposed to look like,” she said. “For my case,

Photo courtesy of Sophie Koh ’22

Koh stands next to her light installation, which is now prominently displayed in the Science Center.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 49

Senior Profile | Anna Smith

An Archivist’s Journey Through Amherst Through exploring the Amherst archives, Anna Smith has uncovered Amhert’s deep rooted connection with slavery.

— Brianne LaBare ’25 I was introduced to Anna Smith ’22 when I first got involved as a writer and designer for The Student during my first semester at Amherst. As a member of the newspaper during her four years at the college, her dedication to the publication earned her the role of Managing Design Editor in her junior year.

I got to know Smith through the late hours we would spend together in the newsroom. She was my mentor, guiding me through The Student’s strict style guide with patience and ease. When the workload lessened, I would watch her click through documents on her computer. As I spent more time with her over the course of the semester, I became more and more intrigued by her work.

But, when I asked what she was working on, her reply was often just “thesis research.” I didn’t know it then because of Smith’s humble reply, but the work she was doing would change the historical perception of Amherst College.

To this day, I regret not pressing Smith on the particular documents she was looking at or even on her thesis topic.

While Smith’s meek and mild persona may make her appear shy, her accomplishments during her four years at Amherst have made a bold impact. “I think we have to say something about that quiet passion,” said Mike Kelly, head of Archives & Special Col-

lections.

Throughout her time at Amherst, Smith solidified her role as an attentive American studies major, led research as an assistant for the Archives & Special Collections’ Racial History of Amherst project and worked as an intern to plan the college’s Bicentennial where she created a timeline of the college’s history.

Ultimately, her research culminated in a thesis on Amherst’s connection to slavery by way of its founders. In many ways, Smith’s work contributes to the broader campus and community conversation about the college’s multifaceted history.

American Studies Major in the Making Originally hailing from Rock Hill, South Carolina, Smith is a QuestBridge Scholar who applied Regular Decision to Amherst because when she first saw the photo of Memorial Hill she “thought it was the prettiest thing ever.”

Smith attended York Preparatory Academy, a small underfunded public charter high school, where she received a broad historical education that included Modern World History and AP U.S. History. Even before coming to Amherst, Smith knew she wanted to do something with history, specifically with U.S. history.

Her choice to major in American studies was influenced by

50 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

her childhood in South Carolina. Smith cites being from the South, which is “enmeshed in the history of enslavement,” as a key motivator in declaring her major. Smith recalls visiting plantations for field trips in South Carolina and realizing that she “didn’t want to keep studying the great white men of America.”

During her first semester at the college, she took “Global Valley,” an introductory American studies course with Karen Sanchez-Eppler, L. Stanton Williams 1941 professor of American studies and English. Even as a first-year, Smith’s passion for the course material and its implications was apparent. “From that first fall, in her first year at Amherst, [she] was an extraordinarily inventive and tenacious researcher, and had a real interest in history and how it’s told,” Sanchez-Eppler said.

While Smith received a taste of what American Studies had to offer, during her sophomore year the #ReclaimAmherst initiative sparked her interest in Amherst’s connection to slavery. Finding out about the college’s unexpected connection to slavery via the #ReclaimAmherst initiative prompted her to seek further knowledge on the subject.

Investigating Amherst’s Racial History Through the Archives Smith deepened and expand-

Photo courtesy of Anna Smith ’22

Smith participated in several archival activities during her Amherst career. ed her knowledge of American studies by joining the Archives & Special Collections team during her sophomore year. Smith attributes her initial curiosity in the archives to the job research she was forced to do in high school and her love for books and history. Later, these interests manifested into a deep desire to reimagine the archive industry. “I came to care less about old love letters and tooled bindings and marbled endpapers — but I still get butterflies holding a book from the 16th century — and instead came to question the representation and description of materials: how archives are made inaccessible and are rooted in white supremacy. Now, I am more focused on reparative description efforts, ensuring accessibility, and thinking about how to change collection development practices.”

As a hired research assistant, she accessed and recorded forgotten archival records. Smith’s dedication to her archival work

did not wane during the height of the pandemic, while at home in South Carolina, she transcribed oral histories of professors and trustees.

Like most researchers first starting out in Archives & Special Collections, Smith worked on transcribing records and categorizing material. Later, her work advanced, and she was assigned more responsibilities, including “a big collection of artist books,” materials that are typically only handled by “professional archivist[s],” according to Kelly.

Kelly remarked that Smith has an “archival brain.” “I think there are some people who just have a knack for public history, and I think she’s one of them.”

Kelly credits Smith’s ability to articulate archival records and eloquently express their importance as a principal component of her successes. “What’s not immediately obvious from the archival record, she’s able to pull out and communicate in a meaningful and engaging way.”

Senior Profile | Anna Smith Examining racial history also led Smith to participate in initiatives outside of the college. The town’s reparations efforts were of particular interest to Smith.

Beginning in Spring 2021, Smith became an affiliate of the Reparations for Amherst effort, her task was to “communicate the history of the college a little more and how the college has been involved with disparities in the community.”

Her work with the community’s reparations endeavors led to her being awarded the Engage Research Program fund, with which she was able to travel to Mississippi and Louisiana to further her thesis research this past summer. Her expedition led her to Jackson, Mississippi where she explored the state archives and the Mississippi Civil Right Museum. As she made her way to Louisiana, Smith observed the Whitney Museum, one of the only museums that exclusively focuses on the enslavement of black persons. “The work she

has done is amazing. She’s done professional-grade research,” Kelly said.

In Spring 2021, Smith found similar success as the lead research assistant for the Racial History of Amherst project where she was a part of one of the first cohorts of research assistants hired for the newfound project. This project allowed her to write and publish a series of four blog posts chronicling her research into the history of race and racism at Amherst, relating it to what she found in Mississippi and Louisiana. In this way, the intended purpose of her travels expanded far beyond the outreaches of her thesis and expanded to other areas of importance.

“I just really wanted people to know this history,” Smith said. “I just thought, ‘How can [people] walk around this campus and not know and have this one relationship with campus when its entire existence was predicated [on] the abuse of Black labor?’”

Arguably, Smith’s most significant accomplishment is her 140-page thesis, titled “Towards Reparative Justice: Amherst College and Interpretations of Slavery in Museums and Archives, North and South,” which addresses Amherst’s connection to slavery through one of the institution’s founders and original charters, Israel Trask.

She uses Trask as a lens to view the varying interpretations of slavery in archives and museums. Smith explained, “One of the reasons that Amherst hasn’t been as forward with exploring its ties to slavery is because, of course, we were established in 1821. And a lot of people place the end of slavery in Massachusetts in 1780, so they think that there couldn’t possibly be a connection. But Trask has the deepest and most clear connection because he went to Mississippi [to start] plantations.”

Smith’s thesis spans far beyond the Amherst College campus: Her thesis also works to

understand the ongoing conversation about the false neutrality of museums and archives. “I am so proud of having been part of this project because it’s important,” Kelly said.

Sanchez-Eppler, Smith’s thesis advisor, described her as “a very graceful and luminous writer” when dealing with sensitive and traumatic subjects. “I think her very meticulous, precise work has been a great boon to the archives too. What’s really remarkable about Anna and about this project is that she is so good at asking the really big questions, so good at comparing things that you wouldn’t think of putting next to each other together. So there’s a lot of imagination and visioning in her work,” she said.

“She’s a great writer and particularly really talented at writing things for a general readership. I think there are certainly little bits of this project that are arcanely about archival methods and how things are cataloged.

She’s really good at pulling up contradictions and writing sentences that have great surprise turns at the end, where hypocrisies or the things that are wrong click into place with the last phrase,” Sanchez-Eppler added.

Smith was honored for her exemplary work on her thesis at the Senior Assembly on May 13, where she was awarded the Doshisha American Studies Prize, given to the thesis judged most likely to “stimulate interest in and understanding of America overseas.”

After Amherst

Photo courtesy of Anna Smith ‘22

Smith when visiting the Sojourner Truth statue in Florence, Mass.

Although Smith has a slew of accomplishments, she is ever cognizant of the trailblazers that led to her thesis pursuits. “I just want to make sure I give credit to the BSU [Black Students Union], especially for starting this work with #ReclaimAmherst. Because without that, I probably wouldn’t have started down this path. [I would also like to acknowledge] all the campus organizations that have cam-

paigned for so long to improve their experiences. Of course, I am a white person attending a PWI [predominantly white institution], so my experience is very different from many students.

Also [I think it’s important to recognize] the people Trask enslaved. It’s easy to say his name and not their names — the [enslaved persons] that he brought to Massachusetts were Caesar, Spencer, [and] Mary Sly.” This attitude has Kelly convinced that Smith’s thesis has a larger destiny. “I kept joking with her about a student, Debby Applegate [’89], who graduated back in the ’80s. She started off doing a senior thesis on Henry Ward Beecher, and after she graduated, she turned that into a published book, and she won the Pulitzer Prize. So I’ve joked with Anna like, ‘No pressure, but I think we have a Debby Applegate situation here,’” he said.

In response, Smith said: “I definitely want to do more with [my thesis] — I said from the start that I didn’t just want my thesis to sit on a shelf, that I wanted the work that I did to matter in some way. Whether that’s a book or just helping to set the stage for the next generation of Amherst students campaigning for change, I’m not sure.”

While Smith isn’t sure you’ll see her book anytime soon, she does have other plans for her future. Upon Smith’s graduation, she plans to take a gap year before attending graduate school. During her sabbatical, she intends to gain experience in other archives. Though she is uncertain of where she will go at the moment, she has applied for several archival positions in New England. The aspiring archivist then wants to go to library school at Simmons University or University of Texas Austin, where she will earn a master’s in library science.

“The museum and library and archive worlds need her,” Kelly said.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 51

Senior Profile | Kalidas Shanti

Finding Joy and Meaning Through Writing Despite his understated presentation, those who know Kalidas Shanti know him to be a deep thinker and compassionate friend who has spent his time at Amherst exploring a wide range of interests.

— Kei Lim ’25 “You know how Kalidas [Shanti ’22] just sort of sits with one headphone in and just has this almost brooding presence. And then sometimes will interject something and then you realize he’s playing Dungeons and Dragons.”

This is what his friend Sadie Gomez ’22 said when asked to describe Shanti. But while Shanti’s presence might be understated, there’s an entire world beneath the surface. Though I first met Shanti at the beginning of this school year at a meeting for The Indicator, for which he served as one of the editors-in-chief this year, I had only gotten the opportunity to speak with him briefly or in passing until I sat down to interview him for this profile. Shanti has always been an enigma to me. My first impression of him was that he seemed introspective yet laid-back, but after reading his poetry for the first time shortly after, I knew there had to be much more. Reading Shanti’s poetry leaves you contemplating and wanting more. The way he manipulates language and thought, merging the real and the hypothetical, simply enthralls you.

After an hours-long conversation with Shanti, it became clear to me that — as his friend Sylvia Lanni ’22 worded it — “whatever’s going on up inside his head is a level of understanding that the rest of us will never reach.” However, Shanti is so humble that you likely wouldn’t know of his abounding intellect from just a short conversation. “He doesn’t show it off, but it comes out

in ways when you get talking with him — you start to realize just how deeply he looks at things,” said William J. Walker Professor of Mathematics Robert Benedetto.

Beyond praising his intelligence, Shanti’s friends spoke of how genuine and supportive he is. Lanni told me that they can always count on seeing Shanti in the audience during their every Choral Society concert. Amira Reyad ’22, who got to know Shanti when they both attended Calculus office hours religiously their freshman year, told me that even though Shanti was sick the day of her thesis defense — and it covered a subject he wasn’t especially fond of — he not only attended it, but was also actively engaged.

Gomez remarked that Shanti will quite regularly “bring up something incredibly specific that you said a month ago, quoted verbatim, that you don’t even remember saying.”

Shanti doesn’t only show this care to those he’s close to. Both his friends and mentors spoke of how approachable he makes himself — he can carry conversation with anyone. “He’d often come to office hours and we’d carry on discussions that had begun in the classroom with his peers but which he wasn’t ready to let go of, but we’d also talk about our upbringings — the worlds that we came from, and the ways in which they’re different from the world that you can find at Amherst,” said Assistant Professor of Philosophy Lauren Leydon-Hardy.

“Sometimes we’d talk for so long that I would be like, ‘Look, I have

52 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

to walk my dog. Do you want to keep talking while we walk my dog together?’”

At times, Shanti will leave the table at Val during dinner and disappear for 45 minutes because he bumps into someone and begins chatting. After talking with Shanti, I can entirely see how this happens.

He’s an English and math major — two vastly different subjects — who’s also quite intrigued with philosophy and political science. He seems to know something about everything, and during our interview, we ended up going on tangents talking about everything from french toast sticks to metrical poetry to Sonic the Hedgehog. I can honestly say that Shanti is one of the most wonderful and interesting people I have ever had the pleasure of talking to.

A Transient Childhood Growing up, Shanti moved around quite a bit because his dad served in the Navy. He remembers living in Virginia and South Carolina before his parents split and he moved with his mother to Georgia, where he began kindergarten. One of his earliest memories, which he recalls with affection, is feeding birds bread during his lunch break.

It was also in elementary school that Shanti discovered his affinity for math — he especially loved multiplication.

Shanti then moved to Sacramento, where he spent his free time on the courts playing basketball.

However, the neighborhood he lived in wasn’t the safest — after a

Photo courtesy of Kalidas Shanti ’22

Once he graduates, Shanti wants to keep his plans open-ended, but is initially considering working in publishing or statistics. kid was jumped by a hammer and a shootout left bullet holes in the wall of his apartment, he moved again to Washington state and then Texas.

His parents got back together for a few years before splitting up again, and Shanti fondly remembers playing the video game “Street Fighter” with his dad and brother. He lived on the Fort Sam military base in Houston and attended military school from eighth grade to tenth grade. Because he was constantly moving, Shanti hadn’t had an easy time making friends and forming connections. So living on base was refreshing in a sense, because everyone there knew what it was like to move all the time.

Shanti ended up transferring to a different school his sophomore year of high school, where he struggled to find motivation and fell into a depressed monotony. “There were a lot of days where I would just kind of lie in the dark and be like, ‘What am I doing?’” Shanti said. However, with encouragement from one of his teachers, he started doing creative writing and ended up working

on the school’s literary magazine.

Writing and working for the magazine became genuine passions of Shanti’s, which helped motivate him academically through the end of high school despite his turbulent personal life.

When applying to colleges, Shanti had no idea what he was looking for. Serendipitously, he ended up applying to Amherst on a whim the day before the deadline, without having seen the campus and only knowing that it was an academically prestigious liberal arts college. When he got accepted, there wasn’t anything attaching him to Texas, and Amherst just seemed like the best option financially and academically. Though he hadn’t initially known much about the college, he was happy to turn over a new leaf.

Growing at Amherst Coming into college, Shanti wasn’t sure what he would study.

Though he knew he had an interest in English, he explored an array of classes in subjects he also found

Senior Profile | Kalidas Shanti compelling, including math, political science, and philosophy. He ended up taking English and math courses every semester of college.

During the fall of his first year, he took “Writing Poetry I” with Assistant Professor of English Shayla Lawson, who ended up becoming one of his thesis advisors and one of his biggest mentors at Amherst.

As Shanti adjusted to college, he found it hard to open up and allow himself to build close relationships, telling me that he struggled to fit in socially. Shanti knew he liked writing, so he did open mics and joined clubs like The Student and The Indicator. However, he was very anxious and had a tendency to hyperfixate on and catastrophize every interaction he had. He spent much of his time in the Catacombs of Frost Library his freshman year.

During his sophomore year, Shanti spent a lot of time self-reflecting. He had already begun to register that he needed a different way of orienting himself to his thoughts from conversations with Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Andrew Poe in his first year, but it was in his second year that he realized that he truly want-

ed to change his relationship with thought and happiness. “You can be positive and critical, but I was negative and critical. I was constantly looking for how things were wrong,” Shanti said. “Then I realized that I did want to be happy and that it was actually something that one could sustain while doing other things.”

A turning point for Shanti was reading Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights” and attending his reading; it was after this that he felt he actually had an idea of how to carry out this desire to be happier. He described opening up more socially, and it was during this year that he decided to explore artistic pursuits beyond writing. He joined a choir group and African and Caribbean Students Union Dance, trying both forms of performance art for the first time.

Though Covid moved these activities to Zoom, he did maintain his interest in dance throughout his time at Amherst.

When Shanti was selecting classes for his junior year, there were courses he was interested in taking, such as dance and Japanese, that he ended up forgoing. “I was like, I need practical skills. I don’t have any practical skills. All I can do is write

Photo courtesy of Kalidas Shanti ’22

Shanti credits Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights” with helping him carry out a desire to live joyfully.

poetry,” he said. But senior year, Shanti again took dance classes and focused much of his time on his thesis, writing a collection of persona poems. Not too long ago, his lung collapsed, but he didn’t let this challenge slow him down. “We’d be sitting doing homework or whatever, and he would keep randomly getting up to try to do different dance moves. And we’d be like, ‘Kalidas, sit down. We’ve talked about this,’” Lanni said.

Shanti seems to have truly found contentment over his time at Amherst. His friends told me that he now embraces joy and is so willing to share it with others, and Shanti said that his only regret is the spring allergies in Western Massachusetts.

A Compelling Thesis What I was perhaps most interested in hearing Shanti talk about going into the interview was his thesis, and I was thrilled that the interview gave me an excuse to ask him about it — its motivations, its intentions, its rationalization. As a collection of persona poems primarily from the point of view of a young Black man who is a MAP (minor-attracted person), Shanti’s thesis might be controversial or unsettling to some. It’s important to note that the thesis isn’t actually about the man’s relationship with a minor — though the man struggles with attraction to minors, he wouldn’t engage in romantic or sexual relationships with them. Rather, the thesis evaluates the secondary effects of the character’s attraction to minors on his life and on his relationship with concepts such as knowing, desire, time, love, and romance.

When I asked Shanti for his motivations behind his thesis, he said, “I think we’d like to imagine that we have fully developed our acceptance of mental illness, where that’s not actually the case. We have better understood and become more accepting of particular mental illnesses, which is great. I don’t want to undermine that. But I think at the same time, there are many mental illnesses which people still contain a lot of stigma toward.”

When people have mentioned Shanti’s thesis directly to me or I’ve overheard them discussing it, I’ve observed that their immediate emotional reactions to the word pedophilia often prevent them from looking deeper into the work. They often seem so taken aback by the fact that the character is a pedophile that they don’t make an attempt to understand what the collection is trying to say. Shanti mentioned that some of his professors and peers weren’t able to remove the persona from Shanti himself, and seemed to psychoanalyze him rather than analyzing the actual text. Because of the character’s pedophilia, “it seems impossible for a lot of people to stay in the integrity of the text and see what it’s saying,” he said.

Throughout his thesis, Shanti uses Black thought and the intersections between the character’s Blackness and pedophilia to unpack the consequences of social and cultural shortcomings, and how someone navigates the world as an abject being. “The abjectness of Black masculinity ha[s] progressed — not everyone thinks Black men are just like hostile creatures or criminals waiting to act — but there are still narratives that treat Black men like that. That’s basically the same way that pedophilia is potentialized. It’s like this moral imperative that because you meet this identity, you will commit a kind of violence and have no kind of self-control.”

Shanti’s thesis captures themes present in a lot of his writing. He often writes about Blackness, consciousness, and friendship. And though he doesn’t write a lot of love poems, he often writes through romance, detailing a romantic relationship to look at other things.

Drawing inspiration from his other artistic interests, Shanti also writes about music and dance. Some of his biggest writing influences are Hanif Abdurraqib, Ai, Ross Gay, and Jericho Brown.

When I asked Shanti about what writing means to him and how it helps him navigate life, he said he hasn’t thought about this question in a long time. He tries not to essentialize anything in his life because it

tends to make his relationship with that thing fraught in a sense and “creates a level of urgency that normally complicates things in a way you can no longer appreciate the thing for whatever it is,” but risking doing that exactly, he told me that he doesn’t know who he’d be without writing.

“Writing is for me, creative or otherwise, is first and foremost a place of reflection and inquiry …

I think once you delineate an idea, the feelings will follow if you give them the space to exist on the page.

I try to make sure that space is always there.”

Beyond Amherst After Amherst, Shanti is hoping to work either in publishing or with statistics. During the summer before his junior year, Shanti worked with Lawson on her anthology on Black women writers, primarily helping with copyediting and research. This position helped Shanti realize he really enjoys editing and gave him a sense of the process of producing and researching a book. In the fall of his junior year, he worked as a math TA for calculus, and the data science and probability courses he was taking helped him find that he was especially interested in statistics.

During the summer before senior year, Kalidas interned for Restless Books where he worked on an independent publishing project, made a budgeting plan to publish poetry over the course of a couple years, and taught a creative writing workshop. Shanti’s work as a TA and leading the creative writing workshop helped him realize he really enjoys teaching.

These job experiences as a whole have shown Shanti that he can enjoy a variety of different work and doesn’t need to pigeonhole himself.

His plans are open-ended, but he’d like to get his thesis published and at some point go to graduate school, possibly pursuing an MFA or Ph.D. Both his professors and friends expressed to me that they can’t wait to see where he goes in this world, and I certainly agree. Wherever Shanti ends up, it’s unquestionable that his future will be bright.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 53

Senior Profile | Shikha Jha

Finding Her Rhythm: Leading Through Dance In her four years at the college, Shikha Jha has played crucial leadership roles for both Dance and Step at Amherst College and the Asian Students Association.

Along the way, she’s found time to rethink her goals and find a path that’s right for her.

— Sofia Rodrigo ’24 The way Shikha Jha ’22 dances is reflective of how she approaches every aspect of her life — every move is intentional.

I’ve never known Jha to be unsure of herself, and I have to admit, when I joined Dance and Step at Amherst College (DASAC) this past fall, I was a little intimidated by her. I admired her ability to command the room and speak without second-guessing herself.

As I sat across from her for our interview at Webster Circle, Jha radiated the same contagious confidence and calm composure that she holds in all of her interactions. I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to spend time with Jha in DASAC, watching her lead the group as its artistic director with a sense of passion and purpose. In Jha, I see a strong leader who is dedicated to putting her 110 percent into every project — even when it means juggling a full plate.

Getting Out of Comfort Zone

Her

Jha’s commitment to her interests has been a constant in her life since her early youth. At the age of six, Jha began playing golf with her father — an activity that instilled in her a strong will to overcome obstacles.

“I remember my dad would take me to the middle school right by my house and we’d play in the baseball field,” she recounted. “It got to the point where they put

a sign that said ‘No golfing’ because it was messing up the lawn mower to have golf balls everywhere.”

From there, Jha went on to continue playing golf throughout middle school, eventually becoming the captain of her golf team in high school. Although she chose not to pursue golf in her college career, Jha spoke fondly of the skills she learned in golf, including the ability to manage her time well.

In addition to playing golf, Jha’s love of dance was sparked around the age of 14. Jha began teaching herself how to dance at home — she recalls watching dances on YouTube, practicing them in her basement, and recording herself doing the dances to post on her Instagram account.

“I would record myself a ridiculous amount of times,” she said. “I have so many videos where I would look back and say, ‘Hey, I did that move wrong. Let me record it the next day and watch it frame by frame to see if I did better.’”

In some ways, the 14-year-old girl who used to critique her own dance moves is still alive in Jha’s current methods of teaching and learning dance. As the artistic director of DASAC, Jha provides constructive criticism to help her dancers grow and reach their fullest potential. Jha is also a devoted student of dance and being able to dance with her illuminated her diligent learning style. Unafraid

54 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

to ask questions and practice the same routine over and over, in every rehearsal Jha proved her commitment to improving her technique and pushing herself out of comfort zone.

Finding Independence Jha’s propensity to push herself out of her comfort zone also applied to her decision to attend Amherst.

As part of the QuestBridge program, Jha explained that she initially applied to Amherst mostly because it was the first one on the list alphabetically and applying was free. While this might seem careless to some, Jha explained that as a first-generation and low-income student, her exposure to higher education was limited to her immediate surroundings. At the time, Jha was debating going to college in Michigan, where she would be closer to home; however, her visit to Amherst immediately cleared her mind and solidified her decision.

“It was a feeling, as soon as I got here, I realized that I really liked this place. I really liked everyone that I was meeting, and the campus was so pretty. It was so different from where I’d grown up and I really liked that,” she said.

In addition to the campus, Jha credits her desire for independence as another factor influencing her choice to attend Amherst.

Despite the challenge of not

Photo courtesy of Shikha Jha ’22

After graduating, Jha is moving to Los Angeles, where she will work at Accenture, a business management consulting firm. knowing any of her peers beforehand and not having any family in the area, Jha was drawn to the “forced independence” that living away from home would give her.

Serving the Community During her time at Amherst, Jha has found the independence she was searching for in her various leadership positions across campus.

For one, Jha served as the anti-racism student leader on behalf of the Asian Students Association (ASA). In this role, she met regularly with the anti-racism committee and President Biddy Martin to discuss various issues on ASA’s agenda. Jha acknowledged that making institutional change is a long process, but she’s proud of the work she put toward making a step in the right direction.

“It’s been a fantastic experience to have the privilege of being able to meet with people that

are high up and have our voices heard, and also to be able to represent different groups,” she said.

Her devotion to improving her community is evident in her other time commitments at Amherst as well. During her junior and senior year, Jha worked as a Peer Career Advisor (PCA) at the Loeb Center, helping students work on their resumes and explore their passions and goals towards their career plans. Reflecting on this leadership position, Jha expressed feeling fulfilled by the opportunity to serve as a reliable resource and guiding hand for her fellow peers navigating higher education.

Jha also reflected on the meaningful personal relationships she developed as a PCA, especially with her boss, Assistant Director for Internship Programs Emily Tareila. Speaking very fondly of Tareila, Jha said, “I haven’t really met a lot of people like her, who are so unfiltered in showing how much they care about other people.”

Senior Profile | Shikha Jha Tareila shared similar sentiments towards Jha: “I personally value Shikha greatly, not only for her excellent work ethic and intellect, but more importantly for her heart, commitment to, and actions toward equity, creativity, strategic problem solving, and the ways in which she brings these attributes to anything she does from DASAC to the PCAs to being a great human on campus and in the world. I feel lucky to be included in Shikha’s journey, and I’m so excited for her next steps.”

In her sophomore year at Amherst, Jha became the Artistic Director of DASAC, humbly saying: “Frankly, I don’t even know why they voted for me.”

She recalled struggling with asserting herself as a leader at the beginning, especially because she was younger than some of the dancers and choreographers that she was in charge of directing, and because she was a self-taught dancer who wasn’t familiar with

technique and terminology yet.

However, Jha credits her role in DASAC with being the cause of a significant amount of growth in her personal and professional life. “I had to manage so much and be so involved in everything that I know I’m going to be able to handle adulting,” she said. “That was by far the best real-world preparation.”

Jha’s Amherst experience was marked by the time she dedicated to each of these groups and her respective position in them.

She valued having the chance to make a positive impact on the community, as well as forming meaningful connections with those around her.

“It’s been nice to join these groups and really feel like I’m contributing to something that will be making a better space for people afterwards, and I don’t know if I did that, but I enjoyed my time just getting closer to other people who have similar passions,” she said.

Life After Amherst Jha is graduating from Amherst as a psychology major. She originally came into the college with the thought of pursuing the pre-med track, but later realized she was more interested in the holistic approach to medicine and felt that psychology was right for her.

In the fall of her junior year, Jha began working as a research assistant in Associate Professor of Psychology Carrie Palmquist’s developmental psychology lab.

She expressed appreciation that she was able to apply her major in a more practical and hands-on way.

Palmquist shared, “It has been a real joy to get to know Shikha and work with her in a research setting. She is a deep critical thinker and a thoughtful collaborator. I know we will miss her after graduation, but I’m very excited to see where the world takes her next!”

When I asked Jha where the

world is taking her next, she could hardly contain her excitement to tell me that she’s headed to Los Angeles to work at Accenture, a business management consulting firm.

Shocked she wasn’t pursuing a career in psychology, I asked her about the motivation behind the switch in career path. “I came into Amherst with a four-year plan, but then I realized that’s not the right way for me to approach my life. It’s difficult for me not to plan everything out, but I think that’s what I need right now. I want to be open to everything and use this time consulting to figure out what feels right for me,” she responded.

She hopes to continue to explore her creative capacity and would love to be in a position where she can flex her creative brain muscles and lead a project that sparks her interests. After getting to know Jha, I’m confident that she’ll make her goals come true.

Looking Back Although Jha is thrilled to be in Los Angeles and live the life she’s “customized for [herself],” she also has bittersweet feelings about leaving Amherst. When I asked her to reflect on her feelings about graduating, she said, “Oh no, I’m going to start crying.” It’s clear that her time at Amherst holds a special place in her heart, especially the people that she’s met throughout her journey.

“I’m sad to leave professors and friends, but I think that the impact that they’ve had on my life has been so valuable that I know that in a way, I’ll still carry their presence with me,” she said.

Ultimately, Jha is grateful to Amherst for providing her a space to explore her interests and develop as an individual.

“Once I knew where I wanted to grow, I was able to access that and accomplish it, and I’m really glad I was able to do that here.”

Photo courtesy of Gerardo Orellana ’22

Jha’s love of dance was first sparked watching dance videos when she was 14. She hasn’t stopped diligently studying dance since, and has served as the artistic director of DASAC since her sophomore year at Amherst.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 55

Senior Profile | Troy Colleran

Quietly Setting the Standard Despite a humble, understated presence, Troy Colleran has made an enormous impact in his two key areas: on the track and field team and in the chemistry lab.

—Ellis Phillips-Gallucci ’23 The first time I came across Troy Colleran ’22 was my freshman year, in the fall of 2019.

It was a sunny and warm afternoon, so, naturally, I took my physical zeal to the poorly lit and unventilated Wolff Fitness Center weight room, excited that few would inhabit the gym on such a nice day. I went downstairs into the free-weights section, which is usually bustling with athletes.

I was right; the gym was empty, with the exception of one other guy. As I peered over at him in between sets, his appearance threw me off. He was wearing big sports goggles (the kind that 90s NBA players wore), a white headband, and a black T-shirt reading “Amherst Track and Field” in purple lettering. My initial thought, having previously run track in high school, was “Who even is this goofy-looking kid?”

A few weeks later, when I began trying out for the track team, I would learn that he was nothing short of a superstar.

That quiet, introverted, and enigmatic guy turned out to be a chemistry whiz and a track prodigy — and a great friend and teammate. To my surprise, we even listened to the same music.

While it may seem a frivolous or trivial anecdote, this story perfectly encapsulates the humble, quiet, and yet wholly assiduous demeanor of someone who has set the standard in all of his endeavors at Amherst.

Out of the Blocks Colleran was born and raised in Sammamish, Washington, a suburb just outside of Seattle. He attended public schools growing up and spent much of his early life playing basketball — the first sport he became enamored with. Just one year after he started high school, Colleran’s family moved to Boise, Idaho, to be closer to their extended family.

Getting situated at his new Catholic school in Idaho took Colleran some time. “Everybody was already socially established,” he said, “so it was hard to find people to hang out with at first.”

He also recounted that school became significantly easier when he moved to Idaho, which allowed him more freedom to take the classes he wanted to take.

“I just took a bunch of chemistry classes; I didn’t really care much about the other subjects,” Colleran said. “Right after I moved, the first science class I took was chem[istry], and my teacher said, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at this, you should take AP [chemistry] next year.’ And it ended up going really well. And at that point, in my junior year, I decided I was going to major in chem[istry] wherever I [went to college].”

The move to Idaho also sparked Colleran’s track career.

After the assistant athletic director spotted him leaping to catch rebounds and darting to loose

56 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

balls, he told Troy he should try out for track in the spring.

“I thought, ‘I’ll just go do track and it’ll help me run a little faster and jump a little higher.’ But then I ended up enjoying it more than basketball, and I was better at it for sure.”

For the next two years of high school, Colleran continued to foster his voracious appetite for chemistry. Achieving success in his AP and elective courses, he was awarded a departmental science award at his high school and graduated summa cum laude. Troy also continued to excel athletically, becoming a Junior Olympic all-American honoree and an all-state jumper and sprinter.

The First Hurdle After living in Boise for three years, Colleran took his talents to the East Coast, becoming one of the few from his area to do so, and the first person from his school to ever attend Amherst.

“I knew it was going to be a lot different from Boise,” he said, “but I wasn’t nervous about it, and at that point, I was used to something different, so I just thought ‘hey it’ll be cool.’”

Arriving on campus, Colleran’s introverted personality left him, as it leaves so many college freshmen, wondering how he could connect and make friends in his new and unfamiliar home. “I first started hanging out with people through

Photo courtesy of Troy Colleran ’22

Colleran has performed research in chemistry at Amherst and will continue his studies in the field at CU Boulder. trying to organize pick-up basketball games. That’s how I got acquainted with the school; doing things that I had fun doing, and seeing if there were going to be other people there doing it too.” Henry Buren ’22, a best and early friend of Colleran’s, recounts that the initial social scene for the pair was rough.

“We wouldn’t talk to anyone but ourselves,” said Buren. “[Our] teammates were worried about us because we were so antisocial … until we started competing [for track], we weren’t really close with anyone.”

Luckily, while Colleran was still establishing himself socially, his academic and athletic life had already begun to blossom.

He took an immediate liking to the chemistry department at Amherst. The introductory courses and Amherst professors only furthered his passion for chemistry. “I was lucky to have [Class of 1959] Professor [of Chemistry Mark] Marshall, [Associate Professor of Chemis-

try Sheila Jaswal], and [Lecturer in Chemistry Stephen] Cartier … They are great professors, and [they] solidified [chemistry as my major].” Knowing that he was set to major in chemistry prior to arriving on campus also allowed Colleran to take full advantage of Amherst’s thenbrand-new, state-of-the-art science center.

Moreover, his track career was gaining steady momentum.

In only his second heptathlon as a Mammoth, Troy placed second at the Division III New England Indoor Championships, receiving All-New England honors and qualifying him for the DIII National meet while he was still only a first-year. Additionally, track had become a vital part of his social life, as many of his closest friends were on the team.

“It was nice once we started captain’s practices in the fall, [because] it made it really easy to meet people … [track] was like forced interaction, which was good for me, since, as I said, I’m

Senior Profile | Troy Colleran not apt to go out and try and meet new people,” he said.

Raising the Bar Aside from all of this background information about Colleran, most people probably know him from one of two contexts. Colleran is usually known as either that chemistry guy or that track guy. He has set the standard for his peers and teammates in each of these areas, respectively, despite facing numerous setbacks. “[Colleran] is one of the most hardworking and accomplished people I’ve ever met,” said his

friend Katie Lingen ’22, “but he goes about it in such a casual and humble manner… his work pushes everyone around him to be the best student, athlete, and person they can be.”

Colleran’s accomplishments are many: In addition to being a force to be reckoned with in the chemistry lab, a two-time TA, and a lauded teammate, he holds three school records in the heptathlon, decathlon, and indoor pole Vvult. Moreover, he has won All-New England honors twice and All-American Honors once in the multi-events over the course of his Covid-shortened

career.

Head Track and Field Coach Steve Rubin echoed Lingen’s sentiments, stating that “[Colleran] takes immense joy in the process of self-improvement, and that feeds his ability to be committed, tenacious, and positive. That’s true of his athletic and academic pursuits.” “[Colleran] spends countless hours working in the lab and puts so much passion into his events on the track. It makes you want to work just as hard as he does… If I’m not in the library as much as he’s in the lab, I’m not working hard enough. If I’m

not showing up to practice as early as [him], I’m not putting in enough effort” said Buren.

Colleran has, therefore, been shown to set the standard and raise the bar in all facets of his life, all while remaining quiet and modest. And while Colleran’s success has largely been individual, he nevertheless “brings [those around him] up with him” and “is quick to celebrate others’ successes,” according to Assistant Track Coach Veronica Rocco.

The Bell Lap In his final year at Amherst,

Colleran, never one to slow down, has continued to set the standard in his conduct, academics, and athletic performance.

After performing research the summer before his senior year, Colleran was ready to take on his thesis in chemistry. For his thesis, Colleran compared nanoparticles with dyes and studied their differing interactions with light. “It feels like a culmination of all my academic work,” Colleran said. “I felt very accomplished turning it in … it was a physical representation of a lot of hard work.”

His final year as a member of the Amherst track and field team was filled with several physical tribulations. A host of injuries limited his ability to compete for a large portion of the season, but despite these difficulties, Colleran still achieved a second-place finish and All-NESCAC honors in the javelin throw at the Outdoor NESCAC Championships.

And the entire time, Colleran remained a fearless leader and a captain who inspired and encouraged his teammates.

Going the Distance

Photo courtesy of Troy Colleran ’22

A star of the track and field team, Colleran holds school records in the heptathlon, decathlon, and indoor pole vault. While typically an individual competitor, his efforts catalyze those around him.

Upon graduating, Colleran hopes to continue his academic and athletic careers in graduate school. Colleran is set to return to the west and attend the University of Colorado Boulder, where he will continue his studies in chemistry and his track and field endeavors (the Covid pandemic allowed him an extra year of eligibility).

After graduate school at CU Boulder, Colleran hopes to pursue a career in the chemistry industry or even work at a national lab. Between now and then, however, Colleran will likely continue his favorite daily activities: perusing Soundcloud and Spotify for new music, playing basketball, and finding friends with whom he can share these interests However, I am sure of one thing: The quiet kid alone in the gym will continue to set the standard for all that he does.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 57

Senior Profile | Ryan Yu

Living Life on His Own Terms While Ryan Yu has made a lasting impact on The Student, what’s most notable about him is his unwavering commitment to finding his own path.

—Yee-Lynn Lee ’23 “Bricolage. Spell it. Bricolage.”

It was approaching the eighth hour on the record of my interview with Ryan Yu ’22, an interview that ended up taking place over three separate days and involving very little interviewing, at least in the traditional sense.

Instead, the “interview” included everything from required reading to be completed beforehand, to flat-out refusal from Yu to elaborate on certain answers, to strings of scattered recollections that lost track of the original questions, to a game of Semantle — the linguist’s frustratingly incomprehensible take on Wordle — and, to top it off, an impromptu spelling bee.

Such is the experience of being around Yu: You never know quite what to expect.

Beyond this overarching statement, it’s hard to describe Yu in a way that captures the particular way he embodies any word you might think to use. As Becca Picciotto ’22, who served as his co-editor-in-chief on The Student, put it, “All of these cliche words I’m going to use are Ryan-specific — so it’s like, Ryan-level deep thinking, Ryan-level multifacetedness.”

Although I first met Yu during my sophomore fall as a new writer looking to get involved with the paper, it took a while before I saw the different sides of him. For much of that first semester, during which he was still a managing news editor, he was just a dark gray “R” icon that would show up on my Google Docs (and somehow still look

intimidating). Over the course of that remote year, I came to admire his impressive ability to read things critically, as I took careful note of his comments and edits on my articles.

The more I’ve learned about Yu during this in-person year, the more I’ve come to marvel at him. A triple major in math, political science, and film and media studies who consistently takes five or six classes a semester (and sleeps at the strangest hours), Yu is profoundly curious and intellectual, relentless in his pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the world around him. A decisive leader, Yu approaches difficult decisions with an analytical mind and expresses his opinions with remarkable confidence. At the same time, Yu is incredibly humble and self-effacing.

But again, these words are all inadequate to describe Yu. They do not capture how he manages to command the respect of those around him but also bring them to laughing tears or leave them in utter bewilderment. They do not capture the ways he can incite chaos in others — and the pure (and sometimes maniacal) joy he gets out of doing so. They do not capture the random high-fives he initiates, the probing questions he asks at 3 a.m., or any of the other spontaneous interactions you rarely see coming.

Ultimately, I cannot render a portrait of Yu that will encapsulate the person I’ve had the fortune

58 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

of getting to know these past two years. But perhaps what stood out the most in our interview is Yu’s insistence on staying true to himself.

From Suburbia to Amherst This quality of Yu’s predates his time at Amherst — indeed, it is what brought him to Amherst in the first place.

Yu grew up in Richmond Hill, a suburb in Ontario, Canada. When it came to deciding on a path after high school, he was admitted into top Canadian programs for engineering, computer science, business — programs his parents wanted him to attend to secure a stable and comfortable future.

But Yu didn’t share his parents’ vision. He noticed that all around him, many of his peers were considering similar plans, paths that had been laid out for them and that they seemingly had little part in creating. “I went to [a] magnet school for high school, and so a lot of people had very vacuous and similar ambitions that were just determined by prestige in a lot of ways,” said Yu. “I would just be another person who is funneled down this regimented and boring and already-tread path, and what kind of a life is that?”

It wasn’t that he disliked fields like engineering or computer science. Rather, because it was a future that had already been preplanned for him, it could never be a path he had chosen for himself.

“It felt like if I were to go down

Photo courtesy of Liam Archacki ’24

Whether leading The Student or in his academic pursuits, Yu is driven by the question of how to do good in the world. that path, I would be sort of acceding to the narrative of my life in this neat template of a story,” said Yu. “And I didn’t want that.”

Drawn by the intellectual vigor of a small classroom environment and wanting to experience something outside of the confining and homogenous suburb he’d spent his whole life in, Yu decided to apply to several liberal arts colleges in the U.S. He ended up deciding between Amherst and Pomona College in California. While initially preferring Pomona, “I went to visit Pomona and then I got terribly sick and then I got heatstroke, which I took as a sign from the universe that I shouldn’t go to Pomona,” Yu shared.

Sitting in on a class at Amherst sealed the deal for him.

A Foray Into Journalism During his first semester at Amherst, Yu tried out a plethora of extracurriculars, from crew and Green Room to acapella and, of course, The Student. While he

dropped most of these activities after half a semester, The Student stuck. An avid news reader in high school, Yu had a knack for news writing right away. His editors kept asking him to cover stories, and “magically, by the end of the semester, I was a managing news editor,” he said.

In this way, Yu “stumbled into The Student,” as he put it. But he found himself enjoying the experience of immersing himself in the community and becoming more deeply acquainted with it.

For a while, he thought of pursuing journalism after college and contributing to what he saw as the vital task of disseminating accurate and relevant information in a society.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd the summer after his sophomore year, however, Yu saw a nationwide reckoning with the complicity that news outlets have in perpetuating violence against Black communities that made him think more about the harms

Senior Profile | Ryan Yu journalism can do in maintaining unjust structures. When he became editor-in-chief the following spring, these discussions were high on Yu’s mind, as he and Picciotto grappled with the question of how to position their own coverage to avoid those traditional pitfalls of journalism.

“What resulted from that is a shift in perhaps how we approach news coverage,” said Yu. “Instead of just aiming for a ‘neutral’ representation of what the college offers us, part of our disposition was a shift towards trying to start from the margins and then working in.”

This involved centering the voices of groups not as empowered on campus — whether students, staff, or faculty — instead of reporting from the perspective of the administration. “Ultimately, the power of journalism is vested in the community that it represents,” said Yu. In addition to the ethical difficulties that came with directing coverage, there was also the concrete task of transitioning back

to an in-person newsroom this past fall. As one of a select few members of the newsroom who had been on the paper before the pandemic, Yu bore the brunt of passing down protocols and conventions that most editors had never learned — particularly for putting together the weekly print issue, which had not been done for a year and a half. “It was rebooting the newsroom in a sense … a project in reestablishing things that were,” he said.

At the same time, there was the challenge of revitalizing the newsroom community for an editorial board that, by and large, had only ever experienced the newsZoom. At this, though, Yu was a natural. Sometimes, he would stir up passionate arguments on topics ranging from serious to trivial, such as his stubborn insistence that “Kate” is a valid abbreviation of the name “Caitlin.” Other times, he would expound how Heidegger’s notion of Dasein informs his life philosophy. Starting in December (or perhaps even earlier), Yu

would play Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” on a weekly basis, one time waking Picciotto up from a late-night power nap by blasting it right next to her ear. And on his last production night, he shared a spreadsheet with the 3,000 most common baby names and asked all the editors to rank the top 100 on a scale “from F to S.” But while what Picciotto called “Ryan’s beautiful distractions” made the newsroom a place of lively fun, it was also a place of grueling nights, week after week.

“It’s 7 a.m. That’s insane,” Yu said to me one week early in the semester as he was showing me how to finalize the print issue. Little did he know that production for the Homecoming issue would stretch until 11 a.m. the next day, while production for his and Picciotto’s final issue as editors-in-chief wouldn’t end until 9 a.m. — after going to 6 a.m. the previous night.

And these don’t even include the weeks Yu found himself rewriting entire articles at 3 a.m. because he

Photo courtesy of Emma Spencer ’23E

The task of bringing the newsroom back in person after three remote semesters was no easy one. But Yu’s eccentricities often made the newsroom a place of chaotic fun.

was dissatisfied with the framing of the stories.

Although Yu was a vital presence in The Student’s newsroom, he doesn’t think he’ll continue with journalism after Amherst anymore. The summer before his senior year, he interned with The Christian Science Monitor, a publication he notes he had previously read a lot for its “bias towards optimism.” As the work was remote, the experience underscored to him “the importance of local reporting and the principle that information should be shared and gleaned within one’s own communities as much as possible, as opposed to plopping in from above,” he said.

“I felt like a lot of the reporting just elided important elements from a particular story for concision and sometimes presented an angle which felt like something that was (a) not true to life, and (b) ideological in a way that I didn’t entirely agree with,” Yu added. “It convinced me [that] maybe conventional journalism’s not for me.”

Doing World

Good

in

the

Through his time on The Student, Yu became acutely aware of the role that the framing of information plays in mediating how people understand the world. Besides shaking his faith in conventional journalism, this awareness has also led him to become more uncertain in general about what form his life after Amherst should take.

“One of the questions I think about most often is what it means to do good in the world and how that’s possible,” he said. “The Student has helped to make things uncertain by allowing me to understand the instability of supposed ‘facts.’ … Everything that’s been covered has some kind of angle to it, and so it instantiates a certain uncertainty in all of it which I think I was less cognizant of earlier.”

Yu also thinks the pandemic and concurrent crises of the last few years has shown him how limiting the vantage point at an elite

college can be for bringing change to the world. He feels that his classes have allowed him to answer important questions about the world, but he wonders whether the relentless pursuit of answers to increasingly specific and defined questions has perhaps led him to lose the bigger picture. “Several years of study stringed together has put me in a place where I feel like I need to take a step back and just think a bit about things,” he said.

So when it comes to plans after graduation, Yu’s not looking for anything in particular. “I’m looking, I guess, to resolve uncertainty,” he said. “I think the primary thing that I learned from college is how much I don’t know. With that in mind, it’s difficult for me to make a firm decision about how to live my life in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s missing something.”

And thus the search continues, although Yu thinks he’ll be able to find a more certain place than he is right now. “I’ve never been in a state of absolute certainty. I don’t think anyone’s been in a state of absolute certainty ever,” he said.

“But eventually we find something that’s good enough. I just don’t think I have something that’s exactly good enough yet.”

What is certain to me is the indelible impact that Yu has had on not just The Student, but also the other members of the newsroom he presided over. “So many of the things we published were so much better because of Ryan’s tearing them apart,” said Picciotto. “I think I may have learned more from Ryan than I have in any of my classes.”

As for myself, there’s no way I would have been able to take over in leading The Student this semester without Yu. Seemingly every week, there was something new he had to teach me, whether it pertained to specific newsroom processes or broader journalistic practice. While I can’t match his talent for creating “beautiful distractions,” his commitment to making the paper the best that it can be is something I’ve strived to carry on in all my work.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 59

The Year in Sports FALL SEASON

Football The Amherst football team returned to action in the fall of 2021, attempting to build on a down year in 2019, when they finished 4-5 overall. Led by quarterback duo Brad Breckenridge ’24 and Chad Peterson ’23, tailback Kellen Field ’22, and wide receiver Joe Masterson ’22, the team’s record improved to 5-4.

While they fell short of a NESCAC crown, their season included big wins over Tufts and Middlebury, as well as a hard-fought overtime win over Little Three Rival Wesleyan that ended in a two-point conversion shootout.

While they ultimately came in fourth place in the conference in 2021, individuals on the team made waves with their standout play. Defensive backs Ricky Goodson ’22 and Matt Duburow ’22 made the All-NESAC First Team Defense, and Jacob Ayyub ’22, Flynn McGilvary ’23, and Joe Kelly ’22 made the All-NESCAC Second Team.

Men’s Soccer Coming off a 2019 season where they made a National Championship appearance, the team did not miss a beat this season. Stellar play from reigning Division III National Player of the Year German Giammattei ’22 and goalkeeper Kofi HopeGund ’22E led the team to a third place-regular season finish. After a rocky start, the team recovered to go 17-3-2 overall. While they

fell short of a NESCAC Championship, the team was given an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. After three-straight wins by four or more goals, they battled to tough wins over Middlebury and the University of Chicago, to reach the National Championship Game for the third straight year. A hard fought game against Connecticut College did not go their way in the end — while the score was 1-1 at the end of regulation, they lost a heartbreaker in penalties 4-1.

Giammattei repeated as Division III National Player of the Year.

Women’s Soccer After a successful 2019 season where the team won their fifth NESCAC Championship, women’s soccer continued their momentum in 2021, winning the Little Three en route to a NESCAC regular-season title, and earning the No. 1 seed in the NESCAC tournament for the first time since 2011. With the NESCAC’s most potent offense, led by the conference’s top goal scorers Patience Kum ’25 and Ruby Hastie ’22, and stingiest defense, anchored by Kim Zhou ’22 and goalkeeper Mika Fisher ’24, the team looked to continue their run in the NCAA Tournament. But the team’s season ended in the second round with a 2-1 loss to Johns Hopkins. They finished 2021 with a 15-2-2 overall record, 8-1-1 in NESCAC play.

60 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

Head Coach Jen Hughes notched her 200th career win, 4-0 over Emerson College, on Sept. 27. Fisher was named the NESCAC Rookie of the Year and a first-team All-American.

Zhou was named a second team All-American, while she and Hastie were both named Academic All-Americans.

Volleyball After completing their 2019 season with a NESCAC Tournament quarterfinal appearance, the Firedogs looked to replicate their success during their Fall 2021 season. They did not disappoint, racking up an impressive 16-5 season, including a 6-4 conference record, good for the fifth seed in the NESCAC Tournament. Led by senior Jamie Dailey ’22, who notched a 300-kill season to lead the team, and assists leader Carly Cooper ’24, the Mammoths earned a number of big wins, including a 3-1 victory over Williams and a 3-2 comeback win against Middlebury in the NESCAC Quarterfinals.

Dailey and Sophie Launsbach ’22 were named All-America Honorable Mentions by the American Volleyball Coaches Association for their performances all season, and many other members of the team racked up All-Region honors as well.

Field Hockey Field hockey came back from the Covid hiatus with a ven-

geance, finishing 2021 with a 11-5 record, the team’s best regular season since 2016. Guided by forwards Muffie Mazambani ’24 and Sam Maynard ’25, the team recorded many impressive wins, including a 2-1 win over top10 ranked Bowdoin and an 8-0 demolition of Clark University.

Their impressive season ended with a 1-0 NESCAC quarterfinal loss to Bowdoin.

On the field, Mazambani and defenders Sophia Kaplan ’23 and Beth Williamson ’23E earned All-Region honors from NFHCA, with Williamson making the first team and Kaplan and Mazabani garnering second-team awards. With every starter from this year’s team set to return, there is much to look forward to in 2022.

Men’s Cross Country For the seventh season in a row, the men’s cross country team qualified for the NCAA National Championships, placing 28th of 32 teams. It was an impressive season for the Mammoths. The goal for much of the season was to qualify for the national championships, which the Mammoths achieved. In other championship meets, the Mammoths placed fifth out of 26 teams at the NCAA Mideast Regional Championships and sixth of 11 teams at the NESCAC Championships.

Individually, Owen Daily ’23 led the Mammoths for most of

the year, earning all-conference honors. He narrowly missed out on All-American honors, which are awarded to the top 40 runners at the national meet, placing 50th with a personal record time of 24:29.5. Many members of the team ran personal records over the season.

Women’s Cross Country Qualifying for nationals for the first time since 2014, women’s cross country had an impressive year. Their seven-runner varsity squad featured four first-years.

As the 2021 cross country season was canceled due to Covid, many of the team’s runners were unfamiliar with the 6K race distance.

The team also had a successful season despite missing their top runner, Sophie Wolmer ’23, due to injury. The Mammoths placed 31st out of 32 teams at nationals and fifth of 11 at the NESCAC Championships.

Individually, Mary Kate McGranahan ’23 performed especially well at the NCAA National Championships, placing 77th.

McGranahan earned various other individual honors as well, earning an all-conference distinction by placing eighth at the NESCAC Championships and also earning All-Region honors.

Sidnie Kulik ’25 also had an impressive season, winning the Little Three Championship in one of her first ever collegiate races and earning a NESCAC Athlete of the Week honor.

WINTER SEASON

Men’s Basketball With a new head in Marlon Sears and a young team, this year was one to grow on for men’s basketball. Seniors Garrett Day ’22 and Grant Robinson ’22 led the way offensively, averaging 15.3 and 13.9 points per game, respectively, while also locking down opponents on defense — the two guards also ranked first and second on the team in steals. After winning eight straight to start the season, they went 7-9 the rest of the way to finish at 15-9 overall, 5-5 in NESCAC play. After making the NESCAC Tournament as the fifth seed, a loss to Williams in the quarterfinals ended their season.

Day earned All-Region honors from D3Hoops.com for his performance this season, the team’s first playing without recently retired Head Coach, Emeritus Dave Hixon. On Saturday, May 7, the LeFrak Gymnasium court was formally dedicated to Hixon.

Women’s Basketball Initially, this year’s women’s basketball team was a bit of an enigma — the team had lost a group of seniors, they entered the season with no juniors on their roster, and almost half their team had never played a collegiate game. However, this did not deter them from putting together a remarkable run: The team had multiple win streaks of eight or more games en route to a 25-4 overall record, a NESCAC Championship game appearance, and a trip to the NCAA Division III Final Four.

The team benefited from more than a few noteworthy perfor-

mances — they saw the first triple double in program history from AnLing Vera ’25, Courtney Resch ’22 moved into second all-time in blocks, and Jade DuVal ’22 matched the school record for rebounds in a game with 21, among other standout performances.

But it was Dani Valdez ’22 who racked up the individual honors, earning an All-NESCAC First Team selection, a Regional First Team selection from D3hoops.com and an All-American selection by the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association.

Women’s Swimming and Diving It was a successful year for women’s swimming and diving, with four team members earning All-American honors at the NCAA Championships.

Hannah Karlin ’22 finished out her diving career with a fourth place finish in the 1-meter diving, which was good enough for first-team All-American honors (which is awarded to the top eight placers in an event), and 12th place in 3-meter diving, which earned her second team All-America (which is awarded to places eight through 16 in an event). In total, the women’s team earned 14 total All-American awards, four of them good for first-team distinctions at the NCAA Championships.

Men’s Swimming and Diving On the men’s side of swimming and diving, only Scott Romeyn ’22 qualified for the NCAA National Championships. He finished just one place off of a second-team All-Amer-

ican finish in the 100-yard freestyle, swimming a 44.60 in his final race as a Mammoth. The men’s team finished fourth at the NESCAC Championship for the fourth consecutive year. The Mammoths won a total of eight All-NESCAC awards at the championships, which are given to the top-three finishers in an event. Romeyn had an impressive performance at the NESCAC Championships, earning all-NESCAC honors in three events, including a second place finish in the 100-yard freestyle.

Men’s Squash Men’s squash earned a mixture of results this season. At NESCACs, the men had a disappointing tournament, securing a fifth place finish with a win over Tufts. At the Summers Cup, which is similar to a national tournament for squash teams, the Mammoths were more successful: They secured third place with a thrilling victory over the tournament’s top-seeded St. Lawrence College. The Mammoths finished the season with a 12-9 record.

Individually, the Mammoths picked up various awards, including a first-team All-NESCAC nod for Robinson Armour ’22. The senior played at the top of the ladder for the Mammoths for most of the season. At the CSA Individual National Championship, Adam Lichtmacher ’23 finished in 10th place for the Mammoths, outperforming his seed by four places. Lichtmacher finished the season with an individual record of 14-7.

Women’s Squash Women’s squash

finished

the year with their best record since 2010, going 12-7. At the NESCAC Tournament, the Mammoths finished fourth, losing to Williams. They would avenge this several weeks later in a thrilling win over the Ephs, finishing 13th place in the nation at the Kurtz Cup — the College Squash Association’s tournament for teams ranked ninth through 16th in the nation.

Their win over Williams was the first in 10 years.

Individually, two Mammoths received All-NESCAC honors: Daksha Pathak ’23 and Lauren Weil ’23. Pathak, who was one of 10 women’s squash athletes in the conference to receive firstteam honors, played at the top of the ladder for much of the season. Weil was named to the second team, and played anywhere from the second to fifth spot in the ladder throughout the year. Both players had earned all-NESCAC honors their first year on the team in 2019.

Men’s Hockey After a 2019-20 season in which the team won nine games, the Men’s Hockey team came into this year with improvement as their primary goal. And while their win total may not have risen, led by defensemen Pieter von Steinbergs ’22 and winger Matteo Mangiardi ’22, the team picked up three extra points in the conference standings and improved from seventh in the NESCAC in 2020 to sixth in 2022. Despite many obstacles, the team notched two top-10 wins on the way to a 9-13-2 record. Even though their NESCAC Quarterfinals game versus rival Williams didn’t go their way

in the end, an end-of-season winning streak fueled a run that put them only one conference win shy of hosting a playoff game for the first time since 2019.

Expect an improvement from the team in 2022-23, with the team’s top assist-man and leading point-scorer Matt Toporowski ’25 and second-leading goal scorer Ben Kuzma ’25 headlining a group of talented youngsters poised to take the next step.

Women’s Hockey Having won the NESCAC Championship 2019-2020, the women’s hockey team came into 2021-22 looking for a repeat performance. However, their title defense efforts began tepidly, as they carried a 2-5 record heading into a series of postponements. But this break catalyzed the team to go 12-4-2 the rest of the way, taking third in the NESCAC regular-season standings.

After breezing past Bowdoin in the NESCAC Quarterfinals, the team took down Colby in the semifinals to advance to the final for the second straight season.

While they ultimately lost the title to Middlebury, the Mammoths took down every obstacle in front of them during their Covid-impacted season.

2020 All-American Caitlin Walker ’22 led the way for the Mammoths this season, earning second-team All-NESCAC and second team All-America honors from both CCM Hockey and the American Hockey Coaches Association. She racked up a career high 572 saves this season. Offensively, the Mammoths were paced by Rylee Glennon ’24, who led the team in goals and ranked second in assists.

The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022 | 61

SPRING SEASON

Men’s Tennis While the men’s tennis team returned to action in September, the bulk of the team’s season took place in the spring.

The Mammoths went 6-4 in the NESCAC and earned the number-five seed in the conference tournament, where they took revenge for an early-season loss with a win over Bowdoin in the first round. They were bounced in the second round, though, against ultimate tournament champions Middlebury.

They were led by senior Damien Ruparel ’22, who played at No. 1 singles. Ruparel also claimed first-team All NESCAC in the doubles category alongside Sujit Chepuri ’25, his partner at No. 1 doubles. Fellow senior Harris Foulkes ’22 was named second-team All-NESCAC, and won the conference’s Clarence Chaffee Sportsmanship Award.

Women’s Tennis After a successful spring 2021 season, the team returned in the fall to build on their impressive performances. They delivered, scoring an 8-1 win over rival Williams College on Oct. 16 to build momentum for the spring — and build they did, finishing the spring season at third place in the NESCAC and earning the ability to host the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

With momentum on their side, the team fought their way to an Elite Eight appearance, and a 13-8 overall record.

In addition to winning NESCAC Player of the Year, Jackie Buzkin ’22 was named to the All-NESCAC First Team for

singles in her final season with the Mammoths, joined by Amy Cui ’25 and Deliala Friedman ’25. The first-year doubles duo of Friedman and Mia Kintiroglou ’25 was named to the All-NESCAC Second Team.

Men’s Golf The men’s golf team’s shortened fall season, which consisted of only tournament play, was capped off with second-place finishes at the Jumbo Invite at Tufts and the Blazer Fall Invitational at Elms College. After a winter hiatus, the Mammoths competed four times. They finished sixth of eight at the Western New England classic, lost a head-to-head against Williams, came second at the Little Three Championships (again behind the Ephs), then faced their bitterest rivals again, coming sixth of nine teams at the Williams Invitational. The season came to a close with a fifth-place finish at the NESCAC Championships.

The season was lit up by dazzling play from first-year Steven Chen ’25, who was named to the All-NESCAC First Team and won Rookie of the Year. He came second place at the NESCAC Championships, ending the season as only the second Mammoth ever to win Rookie of the Year.

Women’s Golf It was a banner year for the women’s golf team. They dominated their season, winning the Wesleyan Invitation and the October NESCAC Qualifier tournament, while throwing in several top-two finishes. Their

62 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

worst performance of the season was a third-place finish out of a field of 10 at their home tournament, the Leaman Invitational. They closed out the season with an 11-shot victory at the NESCAC Championship.

The win, the team’s first-ever, secured the Mammoths a spot at the NCAA Championships in Houston, Texas, where they finished 12th.

Several Mammoths earned individual NESCAC honors, too. Gihoe Seo ’25 was named Golfer of the Year in her first year as a Mammoth — she won three tournaments in and was runner-up at two. Classmate Jessica Huang ’25 won Rookie of the Year after winning the individual competition at the NESCAC Championship.

Head Coach Elizabeth Davis rounded out the honors with a Coach of the Year nod. On top of that, three Mammoths — Huang, Seo, and Jenny Hua ’24 — claimed places on the five-member All-NESCAC First Team. Priya Bakshi ’24 earned a spot on the second team.

Men’s Lacrosse The men’s lacrosse team had an up-and-down regular season but were consistently ranked within the national top-20 and finished 7-3 in NESCAC Conference play, earning the three seed for the NESCAC tournament. After defeating Williams in the quarterfinals, the Mammoths fell to Bowdoin in the semifinals. They secured an atlarge bid to the NCAA Tournament, but went out in their first game to MIT, finishing the sea-

son with a 10-7 record.

The team was led by captains P.J. Clementi ’22, Matt Adams ’23, and Jack McHugh ’23.

Four Mammoths were elected to the All-NESCAC Second Team for their strong play over the course of the season: Brock Gonzalez ’23, Bayard DeMallie ’23 Brodie Rayment ’23, and Nicholas Kopp ’25.

Women’s Lacrosse Having not played a competitive season since 2019, the Mammoths returned to Pratt field this spring with a lot to prove. They started their NESCAC campaign with a loss, but rallied to win their next six games, including three by 10 or more goals. While NESCAC play was less fruitful, they notched enough big wins, including a 9-8 overtime win over Tufts, to earn a NESCAC Quarterfinal berth. Unfortunately, national No. 1 Middlebury was too much for the Mammoths.

The team was led by captains Becky Kendall ’22 and Megan Larmann ’22, who earned Second Team All-Region honors for their contributions to the team’s results. Defender Colleen Mooney ’23 also picked up All-NESCAC Second Team, IWCLA First Team All-Region, and USA Lacrosse Second Team All-America honors for her role in anchoring the Mammoths’ defense.

Baseball Having won a NESCAC title in 2021, baseball started their title defense off hot, winning four of six games during their spring training trip to Florida, but

they then lost 12 of their next 13 games. They turned things around in the latter half of the season, defeating Williams in their final series to clinch a playoff berth However, they fell in their first two games of the final-four double elimination tournament, finishing 16-18-1.

The Mammoths were led by their two senior captains: stalwart starting pitcher Sachin Nambiar ’22 and 2021 NESCAC Player of the Year Daniel Qin ’22. Ryan McIntyre ’25 earned All-NESCAC Second Team honors this season.

Softball After a shortened but successful 2021 season, the softball team returned to the diamond for a historic 2022. Finishing the year with an outstanding 26-9 overall record and with wins in all four of their NESCAC series, the Mammoths took their first ever NESCAC Title with a 1-0 victory over Tufts. They earned an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, where they won two games as the one seed in their double elimination bracket but were ultimately eliminated.

The team was led by the only two seniors on its roster, Talia Bloxham ’22 and Virginia Ryan ’22. The Mammoths received stellar play from numerous underclassmen, including key contributor Dani Torres Werra ’25, who pitched a perfect game against Springfield College in April and earned NESCAC Second Team honors. With the majority of the team returning, look for the Mammoths to have another remarkable year in 2023.

To Our Seniors,

Rebecca Picciotto ’22

Ryan Yu ’22

Scott Brasesco ’22

Editor-in-Chief, Emerita

Editor-in-Chief, Emeritus

Editor-at-Large

Zach Jonas ’22

Jae Yun Ham ’22

Lauren Kisare ’22

Aniah Washington ’22

Anna Smith ’22

Emmy Sohn ’22

Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22

Thomas Brodey ’22

Managing News Editor

Managing Design Editor

Managing Opinion Editor

Publisher

Managing A&L Editor

Columnist

We will miss you Thank you for everything!

63 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022

Managing A&L Editor

Columnist

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