Volume 152, Commencement Issue

Photo by Amherst College

Schedule of Events

FRIDAY, MAY 26 - SUNDAY, MAY 28

FRIDAY

2 p.m. - 9 p.m. Welcome Center and Housing Check-in for seniors and families. Alumni House

5 p.m. Commencement Rehearsal. Mandatory for seniors; families need not attend.

Main Quadrangle (Johnson Chapel in case of rain)

SATURDAY

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

Welcome Center and housing check-in for seniors and families. Alumni House

10 a.m.

Baccalaureate Celebration Johnson Chapel

11 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Conversations with Honored Guests

12 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Luncheon for seniors, families, faculty and staff. If there is inclement weather, additional seating will be available in Valentine Dining Hall. Valentine Quadrangle

1 p.m. Sigma Xi Meeting Lewis-Sebring Dining Commons

2:15 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.

Conversations with Honored Guests See College Website

3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Conversations with Honored Guests See College Website

4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. President’s Reception President’s House

8:30 p.m.

Choral Society Concert

Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Center

SUNDAY

8 a.m. - 2 p.m. Welcome Center Open Alumni House

10 a.m. The 202nd Commencement Main Quad

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

Luncheon for seniors, families, faculty, and staff

Valentine Quadrangle

Photo by Amherst College

STAFF

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Sam Spratford

Liam Archacki

HEAD PUBLISHER

Robert Bischof

EDITORS

Kei Lim, Leo Kamin, Tapti Sen, Stacey Zhang, Madeline Lawson, Caelen McQuilkin, Noor Rahman, Cassidy Duncan, Sonia Chajet Wides, Dustin Copeland, Yasmin Hamilton

CONTRIBUTORS

Julia Gentin, Nathan Lee

MANAGING DESIGN

Brianne LaBare

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Claire Beougher

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.

The Year in News

AUGUST

College Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Affirmative Action Cases

The college filed an amicus curiae brief on Aug. 1 in support of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina in the Supreme Court cases challenging their use of race-conscious admissions practices.

Michael Elliott ’92 Begins Tenure as College’s 20th President

Michael Elliott ’92 began his tenure as Amherst College’s 20th president on Aug. 1.

The Emily Dickinson Museum Reopens After Two Years

Following more than two years of closure, the newly restored Emily Dickinson Museum reopened its doors on Aug. 16.

False Active Shooter Alerts Rattle Campus on First Day of Orientation

False AC Alerts warning of a possible active shooter on campus were sent out on the afternoon of Aug. 26, first-year move-in day, inciting panic across the college community.

SEPTEMBER

Amherst Labor Alliance Stages Protest at Trustee Dinner

The Amherst Labor Alliance gathered on Thursday, Sept. 8, to protest staff working conditions at a “Pizza with the Trustees” event which hosted board members, President Michael Elliott, and specially-invited students.

OCTOBER

Due to Budget Deficits, AAS Faces Depletion of Funds

The Association of Amherst Students was facing a significant depletion in its funds, due to reductions in the student activities fee — its only source of income — during the pandemic.

Community Honors Memory

of Professor Franklin Odo

John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer Franklin Odo passed away on Sept. 28. A renowned scholar and inspiring teacher, he left his mark on both the field of Asian American studies and the lives of many students.

Students Targeted by Phishing Attacks Impersonating President

A handful of students and faculty members received text messages soliciting personal information from a sender claiming to be President Michael Elliott.

College Opts Not To Approve

J-Term for January 2023

No for-credit classes were to be offered in January 2023 due to a number of logistical and staffing issues with J-Term.

NOVEMBER

Plimpton Basement Destroyed

During Saturday Night Party Plimpton House was left trashed with its basement destroyed after a large party on the night of Saturday, Nov. 12, the repairs estimated to cost more than $5,000.

DECEMBER

AAS Senate Votes Not To Impeach President

The Association of Amherst Students held an impeachment trial of AAS President Sirus Wheaton ’23 on Dec. 6, voting not to impeach him by a 19-12 vote. The hearing drew a massive student turnout and laid bare the tensions within AAS.

FEBRUARY Students Mourn Loss of Professor Tanya Leise

Tanya Leise, the first woman mathematician tenured at the college, died on Jan. 18 after persevering through a cancer diagnosis.

Schwemm’s Transformed into Merchandise Store

The Mammoth Market at Schwemm’s no longer offers hot

food and is in the process of being converted into the college’s official apparel store.

Mead Art Museum Reopens After Steeple Repairs

On Tuesday, Jan. 3, the Mead Art Museum opened its doors to the general public for the first time in nearly three years.

Faculty Approve Changes to Latin Honors Policy

On Feb. 7., the faculty voted to approve new criteria for the college-level determination of Latin honors, based on a student’s median grade and the fulfillment of a breadth requirement instead of class rank.

Students Respond to Earthquake in Turkey and Syria

Following an earthquake that has caused nearly 50,000 deaths in Turkey and Syria, The Student spoke with students from the affected region about their experiences in the aftermath of the tragedy, the college’s response, and efforts to raise relief funds.

MARCH

Fizz Captures Attention, Draws Criticism

The arrival of Fizz, a college-oriented and anonymous social-media app, has garnered praise for its community-building potential, but some are concerned by its failure to moderate objectionable content.

Climate Action Plan Construction Begins

On March 13, construction began on the college’s project to transition all buildings to carbon-free heating and cooling systems.

APRIL College Ends PCR Testing Program, Vaccine Mandate

On April 12, the college announced that, in addition to ending its Covid vaccine mandate, the Testing Center will be closing its doors.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

A malfunction in one of the college’s software vendors led to a series of false active shooter alerts being sent out on Aug. 26, first-year move-in day.

→ On Oct. 28, the college community gathered to watch the inauguration of Michael Elliott ’92 as the 20th president of the college.

Police Log Roundup

>>Sept. 7, 2022

5:24 p.m., Humphries House

A CSA responded to a complaint of loud drumming. Upon arrival, the drumming had stopped and no one was found in the area.

6:35 p.m., Frost Library

ACPD responded to an intrusion alarm. It was found to be set off accidentally by an object falling against the alarmed door.

>>Sept. 10, 2022

12:38 a.m., Charles Drew HouseSouth Lawn

While on patrol, a Sergeant observed students carrying industrial sized boxes of paper towels and bath tissue down College Street. When they noticed the officer they dropped the boxes and walked away. Items were then recovered.

>>Sept. 11, 2022

10:01 a.m., Emily Dickinson House

ACPD took a report of vandalism after someone broke a window at the Emily Dickinson House.

>>Sept. 16, 2022

9:45 a.m., Frost Library

A sergeant investigated a suspicious note left on the floor in the library.

>>Sept. 18, 2022

12:33 a.m., Valentine Loading Dock

A sergeant observed a person urinating on the door to Valentine. The person ran away as the sergeant approached.

>>Sept. 23, 2022

11:40 p.m., Greenway C Hall

A Sergeant took a report of a person tampering with bicycles on campus.

>>Sept. 30, 2022

1:11 a.m., College Street

ACPD responded to a report of people throwing rocks from the railroad overpass at people walking on the sidewalk.

>>Oct. 9, 2022

5:44 p.m., Northampton Road

While on patrol, a Sergeant observed a verbal altercation occurring because of a road rage incident. Amherst PD arrived to assist.

>>Oct. 11, 2022

1:47 p.m., Barrett Hall

A Sergeant investigated a report of harassing and verbally abusive voicemails being left for a staff member. The caller was contacted and they realized they were calling the wrong phone number. He then apologized for his actions.

>>Oct. 14, 2022

7:01 p.m., Marsh House

A Community Safety Officer responded to a report of people spraying silly string on Marsh. CSAs reported removing two people not affiliated with the college.

>>Oct. 29, 2022

5:56 p.m., Eighmy Powerhouse

ACPD took a report of a past theft of inflatable Halloween decorations.

>>Nov. 6, 2022

10:57 a.m., Nicholls-Biondi Hall

A student reported their bed was stolen from their room. It was later

recovered.

>>Nov. 12, 2022

12:03 a.m., Cadigan Religious Center ACPD responded to a report of loud voices in the Lycium construction site. The voices were found to be coming from Newport.

>>Nov. 19, 2022

8:40 p.m., Amherst College Police ACPD arrested Paul Leon of St Petersburg, Florida for trespassing.

>>Nov. 23, 2022

1:22 p.m., Bike Path ACPD took a report of cars driving on the Bike Path that runs along the south edge of campus. Cars are not allowed on the path.

>>Dec. 2, 2022

9:39 p.m. Tyler House ACPD, AFD and Community Safety responded a report of an odor of natural gas. After investigation, no source of natural gas was found and the odor had faded.

>>Dec. 15, 2022

4:31 p.m. Amherst College Police

An employee reported receiving suspicious text messages asking them to purchase Steam gift cards.

>>Dec. 20, 2022

8:08 p.m. Humphries House

ACPD responded to take possession of psilocybin mushrooms that were found during room inspections.

>>Jan. 9, 2023

8:15 a.m. Alumni House ACPD took the report of a past bur-

glary after a staff member reported evidence of someone sleeping in the building after hours. Items were reported stolen as well.

>>Feb. 17, 2023

5:04 p.m. Barrett Hill Drive

ACPD responded to a report of a person yelling and not making sense on Barrett Hill Rd. A check of the area was made and no one was found.

>>March 1, 2023

1:25 a.m. Newport Parking Lot

ACPD discovered a student vehicle fully engulfed in flames. AFD responded and extinguished the fire.

>>March 8, 2023

12:43 p.m. Seeley-Mudd Parking Lot

ACPD responded to a report of a suspicious male taking photos of a student vehicle. The male was found to be an insurance claim adjuster.

>>March 19, 2023

6:07 a.m. Webster Hall

ACPD and Community Safety responded to a report of person talking to themselves. A check of the area did not locate anyone.

>>March 21, 2023

5:07 p.m. Campus Grounds

ACPD took a report after someone posed as a staff member online with the intent to defraud a student.

>>March 27, 2023

8:23 p.m. Morrow Hall

Students report someone is trying to scam them out of money via social

media apps. ACPD responded to investigate.

>>March 29, 2023

5:13 p.m. Lyceum ACPD and AFD responded to a fire alarm. The cause of activation was contractors accidentally cutting a wire. There was no smoke or fire.

>>April 1, 2023

1:07 a.m. Lee Hall

ACPD responded to a report of someone screaming “help.” A search of the area did not locate anyone in need of assistance.

>>April 5, 2023

9:10 p.m. Valentine Loading Dock ACPD responded to a suspicious person trying to get into someone’s vehicle. The individual realized they were trying to gain access to the wrong vehicle.

>>April 7, 2023

12:25 a.m. Charles Pratt Dormitory ACPD responded to a beam alarm, which was activated by students hanging decorations.

>>April 19, 2023

11:20 p.m., Boltwood Avenue

ACPD discovered a vehicle that was uninsured, which caused the registration to be revoked.

>>May 6, 2023

8:39 p.m., Bunker Parking Lot ACPD assisted Hadley Police with checking the Bunker area for lost hikers.

The college bagan the latest phase of its Climate Action Plan on March 13, with construction to decarbonize its heating and cooling system.

The faculty voted to approve new eligibility criteria for summa and magna cum laude honors on Feb. 7.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Photo courtesy of Erin Williams ’26

Fellowships & Scholarships

Fulbright

GABRIEL ECHARTE ’23

Gabriel Echarte ’23 is a political science major who will head to Mexico as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. There, he hopes to learn more about Mexico’s political atmosphere and perform non-profit work. In the long term, he hopes to earn a law degree.

SIKA ESSEGBEY ‘23

Sika Essegbey ’23 is a Spanish and Black Studies major who will head to Colombia as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. The opportunity pairs Essegbey’s language abilities with her interest in education, as she has held a number of prior teaching positions.

JAKE KIM ‘23

Jake Kim ’23 is a neuroscience major who will head to Taiwan as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. In addition to teaching, Kim plans to volunteer with the Taiwan Root Medical Peace Corps. In his career, he is an aspiring health care provider. A self-described outdoorsman, Kim is also excited to explore Taiwan’s natural scenery, especially the forests of Yangmingshan or the gorges of Taroko.

ANN GUO ‘20

Ann Guo ’20 graduated with a major in anthropology and will now head to Ghana on a Fulbright research grant. They will be studying the phenomenon of women being accused of doing harm through witchcraft and exiled from their homes. Guo plans to use the tools of anthropology, women’s advocacy, and storytelling in their research project.

VIVIAN WEI ‘22

Vivian Wei ’22 is a recently graduated Asian languages and civilizations major who will be heading to Taiwan as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. She plans to draw on her previous experience teaching ice-skating lessons and tutoring younger students in her work as a teaching assistant. Wei will also draw on her identity as an Asian American, who has lived in very different parts of the United States.

RYAN KYLE ‘23

Ryan Kyle ’23 is a law, jurisprudence, and social thought major who will be heading to Uruguay as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. Kyle has a long history of education-related experiences — she has previously worked as a teaching fellow with Breakthrough Miami and a leader of Big Brothers Big Sisters. She is excited to learn about Uruguayan educational policy in her time as a teaching assistant.

KATE REDMOND ‘23

Kate Redmond ’23 is a psychology major who will pursue an M.A. in education, health promotion, and international development at University College London on a Fulbright study grant. She plans to conduct interntational health policy research.

ELLA ROSE ‘23

Ella Rose ’23 is a biology and Spanish major who will pursue her research in marine ecology on a Fulbright Chile Science Initiative Award. Rose will rely on both the field methods and language skills she has gained at Amherst. Concerned with the overexploitation of fisheries, she will investigate whether blue whale population sizes can be used as an indicator of how healthy fisheries are.

RACHEL ROZENFELD ‘22

Rachel Rozenfeld ’22 is a Russian and Greek major who will head to the Slovak Republic as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. In addition to teaching, she is excited to join the local theatrical community, having acted in Green Room productions while at Amherst.

CAMILO TORUÑO ‘21

Camilo Toruño ’21 was a Spanish and English major who will pursue a master’s in migration studies in Mexico on a Fulbright graduate studies grant. He is the son of a Central American migrant, and is currently employed as a paralegal.

‘24

ALEXANDER DELFRANCO

Alexander DelFranco ’24 is a physics and astrophysics major who was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for his academic success and research experience. DelFranco has long been fascinated by physics and what it can teach us about the nature of the universe. He performed research in the subject at Amherst, Oxford University, and Harvard University. In the future, he intends to study the formation of small, rocky planets.

Critical Langauge Scholars

NOOR RAHMAN ‘25

Noor Rahman ’25 is a religion major who has been awarded a Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic at the Arab American Language Institute in Morocco. An American Muslim, Rahman has long wanted to be able to understand the Qur’an in its original language. A newfound appreciation for Arabic poetry inspired Rahman to redouble her efforts to learn the language.In addition to becoming fluent in Arabic, Rahman hopes to deepen her appreciation for the Middle East.

Udall Scholarship

JUSTIN SU ‘24E

A biochemistry and biophysics major, Justin Su ’24E has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for his significant research experience in immunology. He studied epigenetic regulation at Amherst; antibody responses to Covid vaccines at the University of California, San Francisco; and HIV antibodies at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his science classes, he credits his English classes with giving him the writing ability necessary to produce strong research papers. Su will return to UPenn to continue his research into HIV this summer.

SYDNEY WISHNER ‘24

A biochemistry and biophysics major, Sydney Wishner ’24 will continue to learn Swahili this summer on a Critical Language Scholarship to Tanzania. She first encountered, and began to learn, the language during a semester abroad in Kenya. In addition to learning the language, Wishner is excited to gain a greater appreciation of the region’s culture. In the long term, she hopes that what she learns will help her career aspiration to promote health equity around the globe.

ROXANNE MAIN ‘25

Roxanne Main ’25, a double major in biology and American studies, has been awarded an Udall Scholarship for her devotion to issues related to Native American concerns about the environment. In the past, she has tested polluted water, raised awareness about the Red Hill environmental disaster, and worked as an Indigenous Archive Assistant. Main, who cites the influence of her indigenous family as a key influence on her efforts, is the first Udall winner in Amherst’s history.

Honorary Degrees

Elizabeth Kolbert Staff Writer at The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Previously, she worked at The New York Times, where she wrote the Metro Matters column and served as the paper’s Albany bureau chief. Her three-part series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest. In 2010, she received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. Last fall, she was recognized with the BBVA Foundations’ 4th Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication “for her extraordinary ability to communicate in a rigorous and attractive manner the fundamental environmental challenges of our time, climate change and the biodiversity crisis, to a wide global audience.” She edited “The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009” and is the author of “The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit, Field Notes from a Catastrophe” and “The Sixth Extinction,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. She received the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017. Her latest book is “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.”

Freeman A. Hrabowski III President Emeritus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Freeman A. Hrabowski III led UMBC from 1992 to 2022. His research and publications focus on science and math education, with special emphasis on minority participation and performance. Among many other achievements, he chaired the National Academies’ committee that produced the 2011 report Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads, as well as the 2012 President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans, to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. Hrabowski was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022. That same year, he was named the American Council on Education Centennial Fellow and Harvard University’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture Speaker, both of which were inaugural appointments. That same year — and in recognition of its namesake’s work — the Howard Hughes Medical Institute launched the $1.5 billion Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program.

P. Gabrielle Foreman ’86 Professor of English, African American Studies, and History at Penn State University

P. Gabrielle Foreman is a poet’s daughter who hails from the South Side of Chicago and Venice, Calif., Foreman is the founding faculty director of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project, which brings the history of early Black organizing to digital life, making once-rare records fully and free available for the very first time at ColoredConventions.org. For a decade, she has also been part of a trio that engages choreographers, poets, student researchers and performance companies to bring early Black history to the stage. She is author of five books and editions, including, most recently, “The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century” and “Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake.” After graduating from Amherst, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

Polman Business Leader, Campaigner, and Author

Business leader, campaigner and co-author of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, a Financial Times Business Book of the Year, Paul Polman works to accelerate action by businesses to tackle climate change and inequality. As CEO of Unilever from 2009 to 2019, Paul demonstrated that business can profit through purpose, marrying a long-term, multi-stakeholder model with excellent financial performance. During Polman’s tenure, the company consistently ranked first in the world for sustainability. Today, Polman works across a range of organizations to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which he helped develop. This includes his work to drive systems change with Systemiq and bold new industry coalitions, including in fashion and food. He leads the UN Global Compact, is an ambassador for the Race to Zero and works to develop a next generation of leaders through the Oxford University Saïd Business School, INSEAD, One Young World and others. Polman actively campaigns on a range of human rights issues, including promoting disability inclusion through the Valuable 500 and the Kilimanjaro Blind Trust.

Paul

Honorary Degrees

Stephen Hoge ’98 President and Head of Research and Development for Moderna

Stephen Hoge serves as the president and head of research and development for Moderna. He has led the company’s science for nearly 10 years, overseeing the creation of platform and therapeutic areas and one of the world’s first mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. He currently leads all R&D, from basic science through clinical development and regulation. He joined Moderna in 2012 after working for McKinsey & Co., where he was a partner in the healthcare practice. Prior to that, he was a resident physician in New York City. After graduating from Amherst with a degree in neuroscience, he received his doctor of medicine degree from the University of California, San Francisco.

Tracy K. Smith Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a Professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Tracy K. Smith is the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, “Life on Mars,” and twice served as poet laureate of the United States, during which time she traveled across the country hosting poetry readings and conversations in rural communities; edited the anthology “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time;” and launched the American Public Media podcast “The Slowdown.” Some of her other books include “The Body’s Question,” “Duende,” the memoir “Ordinary Light,Such Color: New and Selected Poems” and the collection “Eternity: Selected Poems.” Her next book, “To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul,” will be published in November.

Human Rights Lawyer and Head of

Ukraine’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties

A human rights defender in Ukraine and other Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) nations, Oleksandra Matviichuk has led since 2007 the Center for Civil Liberties, which promotes human rights legislation, exercises public oversight over law enforcement agencies and the judiciary, conducts educational activities for young people, implements international solidarity programs and works to foster democracy in Ukraine and the OSCE region. Matviichuk also coordinates the work of Euromaidan SOS, a grassroots legal assistance initiative that was created in response to the violent dispersal of a peaceful student demonstration in Maidan Square, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 30, 2013. Most recently, after Russia’s invasion into Ukraine in February 2022, Matviichuk created, with partners, the “Tribunal for Putin” initiative to document international crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in all regions of Ukraine that have been targeted by Russian attacks.

Students Elected to Phi Beta Kappa

Huichen Wang

Aiqi Sun

Chloe Metz

Sara Kao

Olive Amdur

David Xu

Colin Weinstein

Helena Treiber

Charles Sutherby

Christopher Rivera

Cameron Matsui

Siyang Wu

Hantong Wu

Augusta Weiss

James Trent

Claire Taylor

Jack Stephens

Patrick Spoor

Melanie Schwimmer

Esteban Sanchez

Alice Rogers

Gillian Quinto

Cailin Plunkett

Andrés Peña Tauber

Ethan Opdahl

Masahiro Nishikawa

Keane Ng

Thomas Meyer

Kevin Ma

Emma Lew

Tessa Levenstein

Eugene Lee

Ryan Kyle

Nina Krasnoff

Jacqueline Kim

Quentin Jeyaretnam

Steedman Jenkins

Tracy Huang

Jiwoo Han

Nathaniel Grove

Laura Gottesfeld

Ethan Fine

Helen Feibes

Ryder Coates

Anna Buswell

Mikayla Brenman

Lorena Bergstrom

Oleksandra Matviichuk

A Track Star Energizing Education

Ellis Phillips-Gallucci ’23 was anxious about coming to college. So, as any incoming freshman would do, “I went on Google and asked my parents about what I could read to get prepared,” Phillips-Galluccis told me. “Whenever you Google the great books, it’s always going to have Plato and Aristotle, so I ended up reading quite a bit of philosophy [that summer], both primary and secondary texts.”

As a result, Phillips-Gallucci came in quite ready for his first meeting with his advisor, Associate Professor of Philosophy Rafeeq Hasan.

“I was blown away by how much he had read,” Hasan said. “I don’t have many students who sit in my office and tell me they prepare [for college] by reading very difficult, dense, philosophical texts.”

Phillips-Gallucci’s extensive preparation for college comes from his genuine love for learning, which has contributed to his philosophical growth academically and career aspirations to educate others.

But Phillips-Gallucci’s evolution is not just intellectual: He has celebrated tremendous achievements on the track in his progression from walk-on to nationally-ranked, record-setting hurdler.

Journey to Amherst

Windham, where Phillips-Gallucci grew up, is a majority-Latino community, surrounded on the east by sprawling, rural Connecticut and on the west by built-up cities.

“It’s a place that has changed a

lot since I’ve grown up. It was known not to be a great spot, and it was one of the lower income schools in the state,” Phillips-Gallucci said. “But it has definitely improved its economy and developed a lot more. The school system used to be the worst in the state public school system, so it’s gotten a lot better.”

In fact, Phillips-Gallucci and his parents, who are both professors at University of Connecticut, were part of a Connecticut Supreme Court case challenging the state’s ability to provide an adequate education for students, particularly disadvantaged ones being left behind. The case, which unfolded over 12 years, argued that Windham, along with other majority-POC schools in the state, did not receive as much funding as other districts, and that the educator turnover rate was worrisomely high. In 2016, a lower-court judge ordered the state to reform its educational policies to be more equitable, but a 2018 Connecticut Supreme Court decision countered the ruling.

“In a lot of ways, early on, I questioned the education system, not only in Connecticut, but more generally,” Phillips-Gallucci said.

But though the teachers “were in and out the door every few years, they were always really caring” Phillips-Gallucci said. “And I learned as much about life and American society as I could through books.” These books were not about political philosophy — at least not yet. Phillips-Gallucci read “Percy Jackson,” “Harry Potter,” “Sherlock Holmes,” and “A Series of Unfortunate

Events” at least three times each.

Aside from being studious, Phillips-Gallucci was extremely energetic, constantly playing games — from chess to basketball — with his younger brother and older sister.

“We didn’t have cable, and I didn’t have a phone until I was in high school, so it was a lot of outdoor play and a fair amount of reading,” Phillips-Gallucci said.

Phillips-Gallucci’s father, who is from the United Kingdom, fostered his son’s competitive spirit. His father is the reason Phillips-Gallucci started playing soccer from the day he could walk, so naturally, he assumed he would continue to pursue soccer in college.

Phillips-Gallucci actually didn’t know about Amherst until November of his senior year. The counselor from an agency providing services to his school attended Amherst, and because it was a free application Phillips-Gallucci sent in his materials.

“There was this website where you could put in your GPA and SAT and you could see what percentage you had of getting into a certain school,” Phillips-Gallucci said. “I did it for Amherst and it said I had a 1 percent chance of getting in, so I was like: ‘Okay, I’m going to UConn, because my parents work there, and I’ll try to walk on to the soccer team.’”

After getting into Amherst, Phillips-Gallucci immediately reached out to the soccer coach to try out for the team. He didn’t make it. Little did he know at the time that this would open the door his later,

nationally-ranked performances on track.

There were a lot of track athletes in his orientation group, and because he had run for two years in high school, Phillips-Gallucci emailed Head Track Coach Steve Rubin a few weeks later.

“I came in a bit casually, but at the same time, I wasn’t aware of how intense [Rubin] was. He definitely tested me,” Phillips-Gallucci said. “Having friends on the team and structure to my days was very helpful to getting situated the first semester.”

Educating Himself: Reading Against the Grain

During his first semester at Amherst, Phillips-Gallucci took “Philosophical Questions” with Assistant Professor of Philosophy Lauren Leydon-Hardy, which cemented his passion for philosophy. Phillips-Gallucci felt prepared for the class as a result of his summer reading, and his interest grew under Leydon-Hardy’s guidance. The class focused on free will and epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Phillips-Gallucci said these topics represented his first stage of philosophical exploration.

One of his favorite classes was “Freedom and Responsibility” with Leydon-Hardy, which he took in his freshman spring after “Philosophical Questions” because it had piqued his interest in free will. A piece that he is the most proud of from college, to this day, was a response to Leydon-Hardy’s dissertation about the unique type of epistemic infringement and lack of free will in predatory grooming. Epistemic harm means that someone’s capacity for knowledge is taken away from them, and because knowledge is power, they are left powerless, Phillips-Gallucci explained. During our interview, Phillips-Gallucci pulled out his computer to make sure that he was accurately summarizing Leydon-Hardy’s argument, and shared with me the Google document of his response.

In an extensive, clear paper co-written with Jaden White ’23, Phillips-Gallucci expanded this critique beyond interpersonal relationships to relationships between the media and viewers. Drawing on Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, Phillips-Gallucci said that “the media can infringe upon people’s epistemic agency by providing false accounts of reality.”

With a voracity for philosophical texts, and an excitement to share them with others, Ellis Phillips-Gallucci is poised to leap into a teaching fellowship on Capitol Hill.

— Julia Gentin ’26

Phillips-Gallucci’s interest in political theory converged with his participation in the #ReclaimAmherst movement to create more institutional space for students of color.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

When the pandemic hit, fewer philosophy courses were available, so Phillips-Gallucci turned to courses in sociology or political science, even considering majoring in the departments. Just like in his summer before college, Phillips-Gallucci read foundational political and sociological texts from thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and John Locke.

“I came back in the fall of 2020 and was interested in new questions,” Phillips-Gallucci said. “And this aligned pretty well with my interest in Black studies.”

Phillips-Gallucci served as historian for Black Student Union (BSU) his sophomore year, and wrote weekly pieces about the college’s racial history in the BSU newsletter.

He was also part of #ReclaimAmherst, a racial-justice movement spearheaded by the Black Student Union and the Black Amherst Speaks Instagram account, which culminated in a 16-page program outlining a set of institutional demands. The BSU believed such reforms were necessary to address Black students’ claims to the institution and create an environment more responsive to the needs of students of color. As part of Phillips-Gallucci’s involvement in #ReclaimAmherst, he was interviewed by The Student and asked if he wanted to write a column.

“I was like, ‘Sure, but that’s a lot of responsibility,’” Phillips-Gallucci said. “So I asked my friends Sirus Wheaton ’23 and Sika Essegbey ’23

if they’d like to co-write it with me. That first semester, we co-authored a column called ‘Black Perspective.’ We covered whatever interested us — there wasn’t too much structure to it, touching on Black history and the Black history of Amherst.”

The next semester, Phillips-Gallucci began writing regularly for the news section, which he said improved his writing and relationship to Amherst. Phillips-Gallucci covered the annual City Streets Festival, an event that brings in food and culture from around the world, at a time where two important movements from his time at college converged: labor struggles and the pandemic.

“It was the first entire campus event with no masks and few precautions. It was a celebratory time,” Phillips-Gallucci said. “But at the same time, there was a student protest of the injustices that the Val workers and Amherst workers in general were experiencing. Those two things made it an article which I look back on as important.”

In addition to writing collaboratively, Phillips-Gallucci makes space in his relationships to share his love of learning, and continued to do so during the pandemic.

“[A few friends and I] were in a group chat together, talking about being bored, and then Ellis sent a copy of the Communist Manifesto,” said Kelechi Eziri ’23. “He was like, ‘Here’s some reading for y’all.’”

Hasan, Phillips-Gallucci’s academic advisor, emphasized that he is an intellectual mentor to others.

“I had students who showed up to my philosophy classes who said they didn’t really think they were going to take a philosophy class but were convinced to do so by Ellis,” Hasan said.

Through taking more philosophy classes, Phillips-Gallucci’s interests have converged with those of his advisor: ethics and political philosophy, and what it means to be truly free in the world. Phillips-Gallucci considers this to be the current stage in his philosophical journey.

“When it comes to ethics and political philosophy, analyzing and penetrating the implicit beliefs behind whatever preposition someone’s making is something I’m very good at doing,” Phillips-Gallucci said. “That comes from my intellectual progression and reading Nietzche, Freud and Marx — all of these people who had suspicions of dominant narratives.”

Hasan said that Phillips-Gallucci is “really good at reading against the grain.” When the class read Robert Nozick, a right-wing, pro-property thinker, Phillips-Gallucci “read beyond surface politics and found surprising areas of convergence between Nozick and Karl Marx,” Hasan said.

“Ellis makes extremely interesting points, in such a soft-spoken manner … He is extremely congenial,” Hasan said. “Ellis is genuinely interested in the views of other people, even those who he disagrees with. That’s a difficult skill and it would be good for American society in general to have more of it.”

Phillips-Gallucci had the opportunity to put his beliefs into practice when he worked at Mosaic Mental Health, an institution in the Bronx for disadvantaged communities in the summer of 2022.

“There’s an ethics to how people are treated. There’s a big connection between philosophy and teaching and the care I was doing at the hospital,” he said. “Philosophy can allow you to communicate across different social, historical and economic backgrounds because you’re taught to confront a variety of beliefs.”

Hasan added that Phillips-Gallucci is a passionate advocate for

both himself and others.

“It was as a result of a very powerfully argued letter that he wrote to the [philosophy] department that we actually changed our course requirements during Covid-19,” Hasan said. “He made a very powerful case for the way in which Covid-19 has affected people from different economic backgrounds in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. I showed the email he sent to my mother, who is a lawyer, who said, ‘That young man will go far.’”

Team Bonding: Success On and Off the Track

At this year’s track banquet, Phillips-Gallucci delivered a senior speech, in which. he joked that Rubin never clarified that he had actually made it on the team.

“But it was clear since October of our freshman year that everyone cared for him like a brother,” Eziri said. “Fast-forward to our senior year, and he became a team captain. It’s a perfect representation of Ellis’ evolution on the team into a leader … from walk-on to team captain.”

In terms of on-paper achievement, Phillips-Gallucci went from never having jumped a hurdle to breaking the school record in the 400m hurdle event. He is currently tied for third nationally in Division III.

“The memories I have with the track team are some of the ones I hold most dear,” Phillips-Gallucci said. “Whether that be NESCACS this season … or winning Little Threes my freshman year for the first time in thirty years, they are fond memories of mine.”

When Eziri and Phillips-Gallucci lived in New York this past summer, they would sneak onto Dewitt Clinton High School’s fenced off track to stay in shape. That fitness carried through to this season.

Eziri said he values his relationship with Phillips-Gallucci both as a workout partner, and as a conversation partner: “We would spend a lot of time on the balcony [of Phillips-Gallucci’s apartment complex] watching the stars, and just talking for hours about random things … life, ideology, the difficulties of track

and school,” Eziri said. “I’m going to miss talking to him. He’s one of the most empathetic, understanding individuals I’ve met.”

Eziri added that Phillips-Gallucci has spent countless hours helping him with his thesis, and “prodded at the ideological assumptions that I wasn’t looking at entirely.”

“He asks the questions that no one else is asking and is trying to understand on a different level than other people,” Eziri said.

Eziri mentioned Phillips-Gallucci in the acknowledgements of his thesis, even though, Eziri joked, he didn’t end up using the title that Phillips-Gallucci suggested.

After Amherst: Educating Others

With two professors as his parents, Phillips-Gallucci said that education came naturally to him. Next year, Phillips-Gallucci will be a teaching fellow at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington, D.C., Phillips-Gallucci will co-teach an ethics course, shadow other teachers, and advise students.

In the wake of 9/11, the school’s founder, Noah Bopp, established the semester-long program for globally-minded high school juniors. With locations in London, England, and Johannesburg, South Africa, the school has a strong international focus, Phillips-Gallucci said.

“Education is something that has been important for my own development and something which I felt that kids at my school weren’t as fortunate to have,” Phillips-Gallucci said.

“I hope that by being an educator, I can help people.”

This time, Phillips-Gallucci feels more prepared for the transition into teaching than he did the summer before college, but who knows what new books he still might turn to for guidance. Or maybe Phillips-Gallucci’s students will be the ones toting books by Plato and Aristotle to their first advising meetings. Either way, these students will be lucky to have Phillips-Gallucci as their teacher.

“I wish that everyone had an Ellis in their lives,” Eziri said. “He is one of the most empathetic, understanding individuals I’ve ever met.”

Photo courtesy of Ellis Phillips-Gallucci ’23

Phillips-Gallucci ran the 400-meter hurdles in 52.31 seconds, a school-record time.

Amherst’s Resident Polymath

There is surely no member of the class of 2023 who has spent as much time in Amherst as Haoran Tong. He arrived from Beijing, China in the late summer of 2019, and, as a result of pandemic travel restrictions, remained on campus from the spring semester of 2020 until the summer of 2022 — and even then, he only left for an internship in Boston. Tong has not left Massachusetts, or seen his parents, in more than three years.

Amazingly, he insists that what might appear to others to be a pandemic horror story is anything but. Instead, his time at Amherst is a testament to Tong’s belief that home is a verb, not a noun.

After the virus emerged and the campus closed, rather than despairing, he actively worked to make the deserted campus his home, throwing himself into the (then mostly virtual) life of the college. Throughout his four years, Tong has held at least ten campus jobs, completed nearly four majors, written two theses, won four undergraduate awards, and served as a sought-after mentor to dozens of younger students.

The engine behind it all has been Tong’s unceasing curiosity about seemingly every person, department, and idea on offer at Amherst. He is always asking questions (even of those employed to ask questions of him), and he awaits answers with a broad smile and excited eyes.

One professor described Tong as a “polymath.” He has taken at

least five classes every semester he was allowed to do so. He will graduate as an economics and LJST major, though he could have also completed english and physics majors. In 2017 Tong was the Youth Poet Laureate of China; this year, he wrote an economics honors thesis about the impacts of algorithmic pricing on consumer welfare.

Despite an imposing workload, Tong has continued to create while at Amherst. Though he had previously worked in traditional Chinese meters, at the college he began to write poetry in English, often incorporating the topics he thought about in classes — yes, even his economics classes. At President Michael Elliott’s inauguration in October of 2022, Tong was invited to read an original poem, “Our Story Keeps Writing Itself.”

Perhaps one can make sense of Tong’s engagement with so many subjects, departments, and people on campus through his self-described commitment to “living poetically,” which for him entails finding beauty in the everyday and tracing the connections between “seemingly unconnected” ideas. It also probably helps that he only sleeps four to five hours a night, from 2 to 6:30 am.

Into Orbit

“Amherst was a shock to me,” Tong said, remembering his first days on campus. He arrived in Amherst, with its rolling hills and cows, from Beijing, a metropolis

nearly three times as populous as New York. Nevertheless, he describes his first semester as a “high point” of his college career. He delivered a TED talk on poetry and social media. He got into Choral Society, despite having only learned to read clef notation five days before his flight across the Pacific.

When the pandemic hit and the college emptied out, Tong found another new passion. He began to take photographs of the deserted campus and submit them to the communications department, transmitting glimpses of the Pioneer Valley to a college community scattered across the world.

Tong said that his photography in those months helped connect to a campus that became “both foreign and oddly homelike.” The photograph also epitomized his approach to Amherst more generally. “Nobody else was submitting pictures to Instagram,” he remembered thinking, “so I might as well just do it.”

Again and again throughout the last four years, from designing and teaching informal courses on Chinese poetry, to serving on at least five college committees, to serving as a coach for the Model United Nations team, Tong has lived this philosophy — I might as well just do it. With few students on campus in 2021, he volunteered to serve as a tour guide. That year, he also served as an event planner for the Department of Student Affairs, and a Community Advisor in

James Hall.

Tong concedes that this sense of duty might have been borne, to a certain extent, out of his desire to seek “distraction from realizing the fact that I’ve been stuck on campus forever,” but all of those who know him emphasize his deep and genuine desire to help others.

David Ke, director of the Center for International Student Engagement, spoke to the supportive role that Tong has played in the international student community. He fondly remembers Tong, who served for three years as an international-student orientation leader, spending hours on international-student move-in day ferrying red carts loaded down with luggage between the Alumni House and the first year quad. By the end of the day, Tong was soaked in sweat and out of breath, but he was also smiling ear to ear, still excited to help the next student who arrived.

More generally, Tong is a cherished mentor for younger students

attempting to make a home at Amherst. Ke said that Tong even has his own online scheduling service, which students use to set up (free, Tong emphasizes) meetings about classes, internships, or other issues related to campus life. In an attempt to save pre-pandemic institutional knowledge, Tong also wrote a 50-page guidebook for international student orientation, covering issues from navigating Logan airport to utilizing the various academic supports available on campus.

Ke went so far as to describe Tong as the “pride” of the international community at Amherst. “International students often think they are international students first, and then Amherst students,” he said. “What Haoran taught us is that, ‘no, we are Amherst students first. We can enjoy all these resources — plus we are international students.’”

Spacewalk

In a more general sense, to

Described by his thesis advisor as a “dodecahedron,” Haoran Tong is universally-known for his boundless intellectual energy, many creative pursuits, and the mentorship he provides to so many of his peers.

— Leo Kamin ’25

Hailing from Beijing, the pandemic left Tong separated from his family for four consecutive years. While many would falter, Tong threw all of himself into making the campus a home.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

describe Tong by any one of the identities or skills he brings to the campus community — as an international student, or a mentor, or a poet, or a talented scholar — is to miss so much.

Tong’s LJST thesis advisor, Professor David Delaney, had a quote to this end carefully prepared ahead of our interview. “Haoran has more sides than a dodecahedron,” he said, proudly. (A dodecahedron has 12 sides.)

As a scholar, he completed an array of diverse projects. He wrote an award-winning paper on the history of bubble tea. He examined the legal implications of global markets for surrogate pregnancies. He applied Confucian generational ethics to population theory. He TA’d four economics classes, and, to bolster the offerings in the Chinese department, designed and taught three (not-forcredit) courses.

He also collaborated with professors on a number of projects. As a Schupf Fellow, he helped Professor Ilan Stavans put together an anthology on the particularly American strain of the English language. He shared and interpreted Chinese texts for Professor Adam Sitze’s project on

rights-based international law. He assisted Professor Mesay Gebresilasse with an analysis of Rwanda’s unique system of performance contracts for public officials.

Tong’s multidimensionality certainly extended to his theses. Both approached a similar topic — antitrust regulation — but from different perspectives, and both theses were, within themselves, interdisciplinary.

The economics thesis considered the implications of algorithmic pricing, where companies like Amazon use individuals’ data to provide each shopper with a unique price, on consumer welfare. He said he intended it to be “a clear guideline for the U.S. enforcement agencies” regarding under which circumstances algorithmic pricing would have either pro- or anti-consumer effects.

Tong’s LJST thesis approached this same issue, but from a totally different angle. Delaney, who worked closely with him on the thesis, described it as a complex but tightly argued treatment of the topic that transcends the form of a simple legal analysis or doctrinal history. In it, Tong traces the various conceptions of the antitrust regulation problem that have pre-

dominated in different periods of American history, applying an almost literary approach to the law. For Tong, this is a history of different metaphors — at one point, for example, monopolistic firms were imagined as octopuses, slowly encircling smaller companies and the levers of power.

Delaney said that the thesis ultimately makes a broader, philosophical point. Though the concept of rhetoric (persuasive argumentation) is often seen as “a contaminant” to reason (logically-driven deduction), Tong argues that “rhetoric is indispensable to reason.” Focusing specifically on metaphor, he draws on the work of some cognitive linguists to argue that thinking and reason themselves are inherently metaphorical, that humans can only understand new things by applying models of the world based on things they have learned before.

It’s hard not to see a connection between this position — that metaphor is the basis of reason — and Tong’s more general commitment to living poetically. It is not that one side of him writes verse and the other writes theses; for Tong, rhetoric and reason are not opposites.

It is worth noting how excited those who know Tong were to speak to me about him. All were happy to set aside the time in a busy part of the year, and all seemed genuinely grateful to have the time to reflect on his time and impact on the college.

Brilliance

Arianne Abela, the director of Choral Society, found the time to speak to me from maternity leave, singing Tong’s praises while her one-month old cooed in the background. She remembered when she first met Tong, at his audition during his first semester on campus. He warned her that he had no experience singing, then proceeded to deliver “one of the best auditions I’ve ever heard.” He had learned to read clef notation in just a matter of days. She said that Tong could easily have made a great music major if he wanted, noting that he has “perfect pitch.”

Nevertheless, what she really wanted to talk about was Tong’s positivity. During the pandemic, singing in a room with others became dangerous and the choir was forced to move online. Nevertheless, Tong found ways to continue singing and to encourage those around him. “He was just, you know, a beacon of hope for everybody during that really dark time,” she said. Tong eventually became president of the Choral Society after delivering a stirring speech about music as a universal language.

Throughout our interview, Delaney kept searching for new ways to describe how highly he regards Tong. “I’ve been teaching here for over 28 years,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of theses. This was easily the most enjoyable.” He went on to describe Tong as “the closest I’ve had to a graduate student.”

Attempting to explain how Tong has devoted himself to so many classes, jobs, and student organizations, Delaney responded, “That’s just the kind of brain he has.”

Delaney made a point, though, of ending our conversation by talking about Tong the person,

not Tong the brain. Earlier, he had said that Tong “just strikes me as a very decent human being.” Just as I moved to stop the recorder and end the interview, he emphasized it again: “His brilliance is not his most distinctive characteristic,” he said.

Ke struck a similar note. Though he raved about Tong’s intelligence and what he described as an almost photographic memory, Ke ultimately emphasized that what he will remember about him is his smile and his energy — the way he almost never seems to be running from place to place, those days he spent during orientation helping newly-arrived students in the hot sun.

Touching Down

All of those I interviewed seemed amazed that Tong remained not just sane but seemingly quite happy during the many months he spent on a nearly empty campus, what Delaney described as “Haoran’s space station.” As I’ve thought and written about Tong, that metaphor keeps coming back to me — Tong orbiting alone, far from his hometown, with only his camera, his poems, his boundless energy keeping him going. Soon, however, he will come back down to Earth. After more than three years apart, Tong’s parents will attend Commencement.

Delaney doesn’t usually attend graduation, but he will make an exception this year. He wants to see Haoran walk across the stage, he wants to meet his parents. Ke cannot attend graduation, but he still hopes he can meet Tong’s parents.

Soon after I interviewed him, I followed Tong on Instagram. Over the next couple weeks, he posted a few photos on his Instagram story. It was what I expected, pictures he took of buildings on campus and photos of blossoming trees, the sort of photos that had so often made their way to the college Instagram. Then, on May 25, a new post: A table from above, set for four. The caption, “First meal with parents for almost 4 years.”

Photo courtesy of Haoran Tong ’23

Before Amherst, Tong was the 2017 Youth Poet Laureate of China. In his LJST thesis, he extended his penchant for metaphors to analyze legal rhetoric.

An Astronomical Researcher and Spirited Leader

To those in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Cailin Plunkett ’23 is nothing short of a star. She has a singular commitment to the department that manifests in her impressive academic track record, research resume, and community leadership.

But the layperson is probably most familiar with her on-stage presence: Plunkett is an avid actress who, most notably, has starred in numerous productions by Green Room, an Amherst student-theater organization. I, like many others in the class of ’26, knew her first as the person who made fun of my college admissions essay. Allow me to elaborate — she performed this year in Voices, the annual orientation show where student actors satirize the often melodramatic admissions essays written by the incoming class.

I thought at the time that the show would be my first and last encounter with Plunkett — until this profile. After sitting down for our conversation, I came to know the brilliant physics and math major that so many across campus are already familiar with. I learned of her extensive research expanding the horizons of our knowledge of the universe. I learned of her contributions to creating a welcoming community as a leader of Spectra (Amherst’s physics and astronomy student organization) and the Climate and Community Committee.

And, outside of her skills and achievements, I also got to know Plunkett as the down-to-earth person who loves to act, bake, and spend time outdoors. Her time at Amherst paints a portrait of someone driven by their love of knowledge, of people, and of life.

In a way, she was also expressing this passion by participating in Voices: When asked about what originally drew her to Amherst, Plunkett recalled falling in love with the quirky tradition, and, by becoming a performer, she sought to pass down her love for the college to the next class of Amherst students.

The Big Bang Plunkett’s past four years have very much revolved around astronomy. As she recalls, it has always been this way.

As a child living in Oakland, she and her family would visit the Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park, in August, to watch the Perseid meteor shower. “We would go wearing our headlamps down a little trail from the campground and go lie on the rocks at night and watch for meteors,” she said. “And I loved that. You have your dinosaur phase, your paleo phase — all the phases that people go through as kids — and I just never got out of the space phase, I guess.”

Despite her long-standing interest, it wasn’t a straightforward path to studying astronomy and

physics at Amherst — or even attending Amherst at all. At the end of high school, Plunkett was deciding between Amherst and a school that both her dad and sister had gone to, ultimately choosing the former out of a desire to forge her own path. As a STEM student, the then-brand-new Science Center was another plus. As to seriously pursuing her childhood passion, it was a decision that surprisingly involved some serendipity.

“I felt like I’d been pulled in several different directions in high school,” Plunkett told me. “I felt like I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do anymore when I got to college. I knew I wanted to do physics. I wanted to do math. And so I tried those. Then, I kind of took a leap: I took this class [‘Intro to Data Science with Astronomical Applications’] unexpectedly. I didn’t even know it was happening until two days before classes started — I took the PVTA to Target and I was talking to a girl on the bus who was taking that class and thought, ‘That sounds really cool.’ And I did that, and since, I have basically not looked back.”

An Expanding Universe

Plunkett certainly hasn’t looked back — she’s been dedicated to astronomy research all four years of her undergraduate career. The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) she participated in each summer

carried her across the country: She worked a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program at Amherst during her freshman summer, an REU at Caltech her sophomore year, another at the University of Michigan the year after that, and finally returned to Amherst for her thesis research. The subject of her research has alternated between planet formation and gravitational waves. All of her investigations have been underpinned by solving astronomical problems with data science and statistics.

Plunkett experienced some obstacles along the way. SURF was virtual during her freshman year, and her junior year summer spent at the University of Michigan was marred by housing issues. Nonetheless, she looks back fondly on her research experiences, as they provided her with a great community and solidified her love for astronomy.

Take, for example, her sophomore summer, when she landed a spot at Caltech’s Laser Interfer-

ometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO is the leading program in the study of gravitational waves in the world and the largest project ever funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). There, she studied black holes using parameter estimation, a technique used to extract meaning from noisy data.

“In detectors, when you’re trying to search for black-hole signals that have two black holes colliding into each other, they create these ripples in space and time [called gravitational waves],” Plunkett explained.

“And there’s a lot of noise in the detectors because these signals are really, really small. So there’s a ton of other stuff that’s messing up your data. And I was looking at two different models for the noise: One was essentially better than the other model, but is a lot harder to compute. [We’re] trying to understand how badly we can mismodel our noise and still get the same results for our estimates of the masses and spins of

Having translated her lifelong love for space into groundbreaking research on planetary formation, Plunkett exemplifies zealous dedication. Her passion has invigorated Amherst’s scientific community, and will carry over into an MIT doctorate.

— Nathan Lee

’26

Plunkett is quite down-to-Earth for someone who spends so much time looking up into space.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

these black holes.”

“That was like the best summer of my life,” Plunkett told me, referring to her time spent at Caltech. “And I think a lot of that was [because it was] summer 2021. I got to be in person, I got to be back with other people. But [it was] also just a fantastic community to work with and research that really interested me.”

Forming Planets

Plunkett wrote a thesis advised by Assistant Professor of Astronomy Kate Follette. In line with her past research concerning statistics and astronomy, her thesis seeks to correct the bias that is present within our picture of the universe. Astronomers have a large database of protoplanets (that is, still-growing planets) but it is an incomplete picture: Planets that are brighter or more massive are more likely to be detected, while those that are dimmer or smaller can easily slip under the radar. As a result, our data likely gives us a distort-

ed representation of what’s truly out there. Plunkett’s thesis tries to correct this problem.

“I simulated ‘baby planets’ — these still-growing planets — to understand what the probability is of us detecting such an object if it were out there,” Plunkett explained. “And I have these maps that say, ‘Here’s the probability of me detecting some sort of planet.’ And then we have the actual planets we detected, and we can compare them and say, ‘Here’s what I can say about what’s really out there.’”

Plunkett’s thesis is a tour de force of research. She has developed a novel method to analyze the population of protoplanets, which, when expanded in scope, will put prescription glasses on our distorted view of the composition of the universe. The sophistication of her thesis impressed Assistant Professor of Astronomy Daniella C. Bardalez Gagliuffi, who was one of Plunkett’s thesis readers. “Her thesis read like a Ph.D. thesis, and I

wasn’t the only one to say [that],” said Gagliuffi.

She presented her thesis at the college’s annual Three-Minute Thesis Competition, a speaking competition for thesis-writers nominated by their department. Plunkett won the People’s Choice Award, which was decided through audience ballot. In her speech, she placed her research in the context of a grand existential question: “As we increase the statistics, we narrow down the possibilities for how we on Earth came to be,” she said. “We study others to understand ourselves. My thesis brings us closer to understanding how we compare to the others out there, to answering the ultimate question: Are we alone in the universe?”

Forming Systems

But Plunkett’s commitment to her department goes beyond academics. Anywhere space is discussed on campus, Plunkett is sure to have left a lasting impact. She’s the co-chair of the

physics department’s Climate and Community Committee (CCC); co-president of Spectra, Amherst’s physics and astronomy club; and co-manager of Amherst’s observatory.

It’s a long laundry list of titles that may look good on a resume, but Plunkett’s dedication to the astronomy and physics community derives from a genuine interest in bringing people together. For instance, every semester, the department holds a physics formal, and every semester, Plunkett spends hours baking dozens of (delicious) cookies for attendees.

Alyssa Cordero ’23 is Plunkett’s partner in crime in many things — Cordero is also co-president of Spectra, co-manager of the observatory, and co-baker of cookies — and according to her, Plunkett is “one of the kindest human beings [she’s] ever met.”

“She will basically drop everything and help anyone, no matter who it is,” Cordero added.

Plunkett has also used her aptitude for community leadership to make practical changes. As the head of both the CCC and Spectra, Plunkett gets to engage with the community on both the staff and student sides. “I’m kind of this liaison between the students and the professors, trying to make things better for students, have more support and courses, have a better community among the majors, have more resources for success in physics, astro[nomy], and beyond,” Plunkett said, commenting on her position in the department.

Notably, she’s helped run a mentorship program that pairs upperclassmen with freshmen to help them get started in the world of physics. “I had no idea how to apply to a research internship,” Plunkett told me. “I relied heavily on upperclassmen. I took the initiative to reach out and say, ‘Well, how do I write an application?’ — and that was scary. And helping remove that barrier is something that we’re still working on.”

“They run the department,

essentially — the students in Spectra,” Gagliuffi joked.

Beyond

Of course, Plunkett’s interests extend past astronomy and physics —“because not everything’s about physics,” Plunkett said. Plunkett has an aforementioned passion for theater, which she has mainly channeled through performances with Green Room. Her favorite shows that she’s done include Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” and the Ten-Minute Play Festival.

When asked about the most memorable classes she had taken, Plunkett named “Ramayanas in History,” which explored the many lives of an ancient Indian epic, and “Climate Dynamics,” a geology class. When asked about her favorite memory at Amherst, she mentioned accidental twohour dinners in Valentine Dining Hall and late-night walks with friends on the bike path.

But it is clear that Plunkett is determined to follow one path, and that path is to the stars. As Plunkett’s academic advisor for all four years, Professor of Physics Jagu Jagannathan has observed her journey intently.

“From the beginning, she has shown strong motivation and ability in pursuing a research career,” said Jagannathan. “From early on, she was attracted to astronomical research. And she has done that with Professor Follette. And she’s going on in that area … this cutting edge, important kind of work.”

This August, Plunkett will begin pursuing a doctorate in physics at MIT. There, she will be continuing her work on gravitational wave astrophysics, proceeding in her journey to answer the big, unanswered questions of our universe.

“I’m very excited to see where she goes in the future,” says Cordero. “I always say that when she gets a Nobel Prize — because she’s going to get a Nobel Prize — she has to thank me.”

Photo courtesy of Cailin Plunkett ’23

When presenting her research, Plunkett speaks with an enthusiasm that reflects both her passion for science and her flair for the theater.

A Passion for People, On-stage and Off

The Friedmann Room stage lights were shining bright as the voice of Luke Herzog ’24 rang through the room: “Let’s consult our resident philosopher with a rich internal life,” he said, “Sterling Kee!” Another voice responded: “You rang?” The voice did not belong to Sterling Kee ’23 himself, however, but to his friend and Mr. Gad’s House of Improv costar, Deb Thayer ’24, who was walking onto the stage.

It was Monday night, and Deb was portraying Sterling in the Gads senior show — Sterling’s last performance on that hallowed stage. As is tradition, the show opened with a skit, which, in equal parts, honored and roasted that year’s Gad-udates.

“We have a deep question for you, Sterl,” Luke said, to which Deb-as-Sterling replied, “I love questions of depth. What is your purpose in life? How do you think your friends reflect who you are? What is your definition of success? Tell me about your mother.”

Later in the skit, Deb-as-Sterling went on a rampage through the audience, shouting personal details about random audience members, saying to one of them, “Wait. I actually don’t know you. Want to get lunch sometime? [Deb-Sterling mimed checking their calendar.] How’s Friday at 12:30?”

The real Sterling, meanwhile, watched in the audience. Then, he walked onstage for his real last Gad’s performance, portraying fantastical characters, like a seductive shampoo bottle. With the rest of

the audience, I watched in awe, as I have countless times before, as Sterling commanded the stage with his quick and vibrant humor. His performance was greeted by laughter and raucous applause.

The Gad’s senior show was part of a suite of final performances for Sterling, each of which I was lucky enough to witness: his final show with Route 9, his final vocal recital in Arms Music Center, his final performance with the Taurus jazz combo, his final song on the Valcony for Music at Val, and most importantly, his final thesis for the theater department, a performance of the musical “Myths and Hymns.” This series of performances made up but a small fraction of the countless times that Sterling has shared his artistic gifts with the campus community.

As a fixture of the Amherst arts scene, Sterling has imbued so many days and nights like that one with melodies, humor, and feeling. He is beloved to the Amherst community for the reasons gently prodded at by the Gad’s skit: his busy involvement on campus, his care for people and their lives, his passion for reflection and “deep conversations” — all qualities that find their way into his art and performances, too.

“I think the people speak for themselves,” Deb said in an interview last week, “Sterling is a crowd favorite for a reason.”

I have been lucky to get to know Sterling both onstage and off. When we had our first one-on-one dinner last fall, Sterling and I ended up sitting in upstairs Val for hours on end

as he asked me to tell him my life story, and kept the casual but perfectly insightful questions coming. Each meal thereafter has been no different. When I interviewed him for this profile, sitting in the lounge of Holden Experimental Theater and, later, on the sunny grass of Webster Circle, the transcript of our conversation filled 33 pages — and that was after I took out the parts where he asked questions of me.

Sterling has played many roles at Amherst: student, friend, actor, singer, comedian, musician, dancer, Association of Amherst Students senator, Judiciary Council Chair, social media coordinator, club member, community advisor (CA), teaching assistant (TA), research assistant — the list goes on. In his own words, from a bio written in 2020: “Does that make sense from a time management perspective? No, it does not.” Sterling’s thoughtfulness and excitement for getting to know people fuels each of these roles.

Chair of Theater and Dance Ron Bashford, Sterling’s advisor, may have said it best in a recent email to me: “Sterling [is] a super-talented student who gets along with everyone — and also for whom ‘still waters run deep.’”

From Maryland to Amherst

Sterling was born and raised in Bowie, Maryland, about an hour’s drive from Washington, D.C. While he always lived in Bowie, Sterling attended Sidwell Friends School in D.C. from third grade onward, so he considers himself “allowed to

say” that he is from D.C.

As a child, Sterling was quiet and observant, and loved to read books like “Percy Jackson” and “Warrior Cats.” While He didn’t participate in any performances until later in his schooling, he was always “interested in the idea of performing.” He would “see the kids on ‘Jessie’ and be like, ‘That seems so fun, I want to be on the TV.’” Though he asked his parents to take him to casting calls, “it never actually happened.”

In high school, Sterling was highly involved in his school community, attending club meetings during every single lunch period, and serving on multiple committees. His attention was largely focused on political activities, both inside and outside Sidwell. “In high school,” he said, “I was way more involved in trying to change the school, which I felt was a little racially violent and a little bigoted.” These issues “definitely weighed” on his overall high school experience, he said.

Sterling chose to attend Amherst because of its small size, open curriculum, “close-but-not-too-close”

location to home, and because he “really like[s] purple.” He entered Amherst excited to explore an environment other than the school he had attended for 10 years. “I think I needed more change to be happening,” he said. “I needed to understand how I fit into different contexts.”

Sterling immediately became involved in the Amherst community upon his arrival, serving as an Amherst Association of Students (AAS) Senator and then the Chair of the Judiciary Council. His attentions also turned more to artistic extracurriculars. Sterling had performed a little bit in high school, appearing in theater productions when he could, and performing in an annual BSU showcase. But he came to Amherst hungry for more.

He joined Route 9 in his first few weeks, acted in his first Amherst production — “Medea” for Maki Ybarra-Young ’20’s senior thesis — and took his first acting class. Through the class, “I understood what it was that acting was trying to accomplish,” he recalled. “That just

Sterling Kee has blossomed at Amherst as both a dynamic performer and an attentive friend, well-known for his thoughtfulness and quiet power.

— Sonia Chajet Wides ’25

Throughout his time at Amherst, Kee has been a powerhouse of the arts scene.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

showed me … the gap … between where I was, and what was possible.” He began to consider majoring in theater.

While he discovered his passion for acting, he continued to take a range of classes, including ones in art, English, and computer science. Most of the classes he’s taken, he said, can be united under the idea that “they’re thinking about people, and about narrative.”

Sterling left the AAS in his sophomore spring, after he was accepted into Gad’s, Amherst’s improv comedy group. Gad’s rehearsals conflicted with AAS meetings, “and that was it,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I would rather do this than that.’”

Sterling’s academic and extracurricular interests authentically and naturally developed together. As his participation in on-campus arts grew, so did his commitment to his artistic coursework. “I think it’s harmonious, because that’s what I’d like to do outside of Amherst,” Sterling said. “I think I’m doing things that I just like to do.”

Performer and Artist

When I asked Sterling about what art means to him, and if he thinks of himself as an artist, he wavered slightly. He doesn’t have a clear definition of art (do any of us?) and he sometimes worries that

his artistic process is not intentional enough. “I think I’ve had moments where I realized that I’m less of an artist than I want to be,” he said. “Where I feel like more of a performer than an artist.” Photography, though, he said, is a medium within which he feels he’s truly creating art.

In November, Sterling photographed me inside the elevator of Morris Pratt Dormitory for his photography class project. For 15 minutes, Sterling directed me to pose in different ways, to stand on the bars of the elevator, and jump up and down. There was no fancy preparation; throughout the process, Sterling was quiet and casual. The results, however, were remarkable. Each of Sterling’s subjects was framed perfectly in the seemingly mundane environment of the elevator. From my perspective, the elevator project is no different than the rest of Sterling’s artistic endeavors: His thoughtfulness shines through even when he thinks he hasn’t meant it to.

Sterling talked to me about how he feels that his creative process has grown and changed across his time here. “I feel like, unfortunately, for a while, my acting wasn’t the most creative,” he reflected. “I was trying to get the right answer … just what I thought was best, not necessarily

what I thought was interesting, or cool.”

“Especially this year, [Sterling] has really connected to his passion for acting,” Bashford (Sterling’s thesis advisor) wrote to me. “He has grown so much as an actor and a person — he is more spontaneous, more willing to take creative risks, and more expressive overall. He made major strides in his singing and ability to act while singing.”

All of this growth manifested in Sterling’s ambitious thesis: a production of “Myths and Hymns” by Adam Guettel. “Myths and Hymns,” is more of a “song-cycle” than a musical, Bashford, Sterling’s advisor, told me. And it is written for “an ensemble of singer-actors … without any dialogue or specific characters.”

Sterling chose the production because he felt that there was a lack of musical theater opportunities on campus, and he liked the adaptability of “Myths and Hymns.” Bashford directed the production, and Sterling served as its leader and one of its stars. Alongside a group of other student performers, Sterling lit up the Holden Theater stage with insightful, poised acting and powerful singing. The production was a wild success, selling out the theater for three nights in a row — an experience that Sterling described as “re-

ally cool … and also a little scary.”

“In his journey as an artist, Sterling learned how to really make his work his own, and connect to his acting in a more personal and dynamic way,” Bashford wrote. “I’m really proud of him.”

The Question-asker

I think that what makes Sterling a great actor — let alone so funny — is the same thing that makes him such a great friend: his genuine interest in people. As evidenced by his depiction as a stereotypical philosopher in the Gads skit, Sterling is known for his hard-hitting questions, offered with care and power.

“Sterling is the question-asker for sure,” Deb said. “Sterling will pick your brain about anything because he’s just generally interested in people and what they have to say and what they think. And it’s really fun to watch somebody say something, and then watch his brain light up.”

Though on-stage Sterling is a vivacious leading man, his interpersonal power is more subtle and reserved. Sterling recounted how much more outgoing he’s become during Amherst versus in high school, when he had “way more defenses.” This growth only heightened after being isolated off-campus due to Covid-19. Reflecting on his return, Sterling said, “as much as I was interested in people before the pandemic, I liked people way more after.”

Sterling reflected that that shift is reflected onstage. “I was even more reserved, interpersonally and even more reserved in performance contexts,” he said, “And now I’m less in both.”

Sterling’s care for people is partly why he has served as a CA. “I love meeting people that I otherwise wouldn’t, because we live together,” Sterling said. “And I like holding events for my floor, to facilitate people meeting other people.”

This is also exactly what he likes about Amherst: “how easy it is to meet people, and know people.” He advised future and current students to take advantage of this — to look for what they have in common with

any person, to “say hi to people you know when you see them,” and to “make the small talk … [and] be curious about people.”

Curtain Call

Sterling has engaged in a variety of other endeavors throughout his time here, accumulating more stories than I have the space to tell — for one, he studied photography in Barcelona in summer of 2022 and living with a host family. He has also spent summers working as an art magazine editor and proofreading scripts for a play. He has worked odd jobs, taken many classes, and spent countless meals in Val conversing with friends, old and new.

After he graduates, Sterling plans to continue pursuing what he enjoys most: acting. He will spend this summer working as an assistant director at a theater summer camp in upstate New York. Then, he plans on moving to New York City to pursue acting professionally. “I’m imagining and maybe naively hoping that, should I keep doing things that I like to do, like be a camp counselor with a bunch of theater kids, more similar opportunities will open themselves up to me,” Sterling said.

While many people will feel Sterling’s absence most acutely when they go to a Gad’s or Route 9 show, or are casting for their next theater production, our campus will more broadly miss his curiosity and caring energy. Sterling is someone who is, in his friends’ words, “thoughtful, hilarious, charismatic, beautiful, exceptional, talented, and insightful.”

“I’m never bored of talking to Sterling,” Deb said, “so I’ll miss that.”

As for what Sterling will miss, he referenced a few specific routines: Sunday morning Tandem bagels in Val. Pre-show rituals with Route 9. Hangouts with his fellow Gad’s after Monday night shows.

But most of all, he said, “I will miss just walking 100 feet in any direction during peak times, and saying hi to, like, one person per foot. That’s very lovely and classic Amherst, and not the real world.”

Photo courtesy of Sterling Kee ’23 Sterling’s thesis performance in “Myths and Hymns” — which sold out for three nights — was the triumph of his effort to become a more expressive and dynamic actor.

A Judicious Journey Into Education

I first met Ryan Kyle ’23, surprisingly enough, not in a class in law, jurisprudence, and social thought (LJST) — our shared major — but in TA hours for our Fall 2021 philosophy class, Logic. I was a young freshman severely regretting my decision to take the class in the first place, and Ryan was a slightly older and much wiser junior, reassuring me that failing Logic would most certainly not be the end of the world. I remember leaving Cooper House that day feeling slightly more reassured about my decision to major in LJST and feeling so incredibly welcomed by Ryan’s words.

Because that’s exactly the kind of person Ryan Kyle is: kind, compassionate, and incredibly open to talking to anyone, no matter who they are. And from my interviews with her friends, her deep love for the people around her only became more apparent. “Ryan really makes you understand that she cares about you,” One of her friends, Hannah Gariepy ’24 told me in a group interview. “She is so incredibly kind and loving and she knows everyone’s names — not just students and professors, but staff as well.” Her friends spent most of our time together extolling Ryan’s various academic, extracurricular, and personal virtues alike — with Tina Zhang ’24 in particular describing Ryan as a secondary academic advisor to her.

Ryan herself laughed when I told her all this, and told me that

her friends were probably exaggerating a little. From learning about how much Ryan has done on this campus and how much she plans to do in the future, I doubt there was any exaggeration at all.

Finding Her Footing

Ryan grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Ryan described her hometown as “lovely, but a very white, wealthy bubble,” adding: “Leaving D.C. is funny, because you realize not everyone has that upbringing of casual conversation about politics that a lot of D.C. parents have, but even with this cultivated public service interest, it was definitely a bubble.”

Ryan knew that she wanted to leave this bubble for college. In many ways, Amherst seemed like a foregone conclusion: her grandfather and mother both attended the college. Despite Ryan not wanting to go somewhere her parents went, she soon realized Amherst would be the perfect place for her.

“I realized how interested I was in going to a liberal arts college.” Ryan said. “If I want the big university experience, I can someday do that for grad school, but this would be the only time in my life I could have that New England small liberal arts college experience.”

Despite her eventual surety about attending Amherst, Ryan’s first year was difficult for her. “I

wouldn’t say that I was really happy here, even though I knew how much my mom loved this place,” she said. “I think I was super overwhelmed by the school and I didn’t know how to balance how intense Amherst [academics were] with a social life.”

“My friends like to say that there’s freshman-year-Ryan and the rest-of-college-Ryan,” Ryan added, laughing.

It was Professor of LJST and Political Science Austin Sarat, Ryan’s first-year seminar professor, who first sat her down to tell her that she couldn’t spend all her time working. It was also he who inspired her to become an LJST major. “My friends like to joke that I was in denial about being an LJST major for nine months,” Ryan said. After [my first-year seminar] “Secret and Lies” , I spent a lot of time trying to figure out — do I like LJST, or do I just like Sarat? Then came the first semester of my sophomore year, when I took “Arendt’s Judgements,” taught by Professor [of LJST Adam] Sitze, and there was no going back. I knew this subject was for me.”

Rooted in Research

Both Sarat and Sitze alike would go on to play pivotal roles in Ryan’s LJST experience at Amherst — Sarat as her research mentor, and Sitze as her thesis advisor.

Over the summer of 2020, Ryan performed research along-

side Sarat on the death penalty during crises. This research would become the backbone of the paper she later co-wrote with Sarat. Ryan describes the paper in question, “The Death Penalty in Dark Times: What Crises Do (or Do Not Do) to Capital Punishment,” as exploring the way in which “crises are barometers of the resilience of certain things.”

“When resources are not invested in a certain thing during a crisis, that’s telling,” Ryan said, “so the fact that the death penalty stopped during Covid is maybe reflective of the larger sort of downward-trend in how committed we are to the death penalty as a country.”

Reflecting on her research experiences, Ryan said they were extremely rewarding. In particular, she recalled someone who reached out to her about their own family’s personal history with the death penalty. “It’s so cool that someone read my words and found this personal connection,” Ryan said. She also especially en-

joyed working with Sarat: “I can’t say enough about Professor Sarat. He’s really become my person.”

The sentiment is mutual, Sarat told me. “Ryan Kyle is simply one of the most impressive students I have ever taught.” He said. “She is brilliant, thoughtful, judicious and generous. She exemplifies all a scholar should be. And, as impressive as she is as a student and collaborator, she is even more impressive as a person.” I can’t help but echo Sarat’s words that Ryan is a “total mensch.”

Ryan’s time doing research with Sarat only increased her certainty that she wanted to eventually pursue a thesis, though the subject of her thesis — dignity jurisprudence — actually originated as a suggestion from Sitze during his “Introduction to Legal Theory” course.

“In a lot of other Constitutions around the world, dignity is this really central concept, but not in the U.S. constitution,” Ryan told me. “While researching, I thought about dignity jurispru-

From research on capital punishment to her upcoming Fulbright to teach English in Uruguay, Kyle’s time at Amherst has been shaped by education, mentorship, and an effort to defend human dignity.

— Tapti Sen ’25

Her professors shaped her time at Amherst. Now, Ryan is paying it forward with a Fulbright in Uruguay.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

dence in connection to disability, because [philosopher Immanuel] Kant, who is considered the father of secular human dignity, really grounded dignity in capacity to reason, and there’s always been this risk that that will exclude individuals who we deem as not having the capacity to reason.”

“I think it was almost fate that I would settle on case law about the death penalty and intellectual disability,” Ryan added, characterizing her thesis as a culmination of everything she has learned at Amherst.

Extending Her Mentorship

Beyond being an LJST powerhouse, Ryan has engaged in plenty of other activities during her time at Amherst. She is the TA for Justice, the In/Out Program class taught by Professor Bumiller that enrolls half Amherst students, and half incarcerated students at Hampshire County Jail. Kyle, who took the class last year, highly recommends it: “It’s so important for students like us to get into prisons and see what the reality is, because it adds another level to

your advocacy and really makes you appreciate just how much the carceral state is one of the biggest injustices of our time.”

Beyond TA-ing, Ryan has also been a leader of Big Brothers Big Sisters (a mentoring program connecting Amherst students to elementary school children) and served the Hampshire County Advisory Board for Big Brothers Big Sisters in her junior year. A lot of her time post-Covid has been spent recruiting for the program, which used to be fairly popular on campus before the pandemic hit.

Ryan described one of the toughest things about graduating as leaving her Little Sister behind.

“It’s been so cool watching her grow up,” she told me. “Especially thinking about how I’ve essentially been there for most of her conscious life.”

Aside from Big Brothers Big Sisters, Ryan has also been co-President of the Glee Club, co-leader of 3D (an organization connecting students with adults with disabilities), and a member of the Educations Professions Fellowship, which offers a va-

riety of funding, learning, and training opportunities for those interested in careers in education. Ryan described the fellowship as “life-changing” and highly encouraged others to participate in it.

“The Office of Fellowships actually gave her an award for bringing in so many people into [the Education Professions Fellowship], unlike most people who don’t want to tell other people about fellowships to avoid competition,” Anna Lyons ’23 told me, as another way to emphasize Ryan’s sheer kindness and commitment to the community around her.

Despite Ryan’s impressive list of resume-worthy activities and accomplishments, she hoped to emphasize to students that it’s never too late to get involved in campus activities — most of the things she does now, she joined in her sophomore year or later.

After graduating, Ryan will be holding a Fulbright English-language teaching position in Uruguay, which she is excited for.

“Fulbright has been on my radar

for a while because my Spanish teacher in high school, who was a huge mentor to me, did it. And I didn’t get the chance to study abroad in college so going abroad for me right after graduation was a goal,” she said.

Uruguay was the right choice for her for a number of reasons: she knew she wanted to a program oriented around teaching, she wanted to improve her Spanish skills, and the program she’s doing in question will allow her to work in high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools, rather than universities like most other Fulbright programs.

After the Fulbright, unsurprisingly, Ryan sees a clear career path in teaching, stemming from her desire to “give back” to others in the ways that her mentors throughout her life have helped her. Olivia Fajardo ’23 told me that she could go “definitely see her becoming a middle school teacher,” while Victoria Gallastegui ’23 added that even as a teacher she’d probably “volunteer everywhere she could.”

“I think if you asked me in

high school, I would have said I want to be a lawyer,” Ryan admitted. “We all know how LJST [majors have] this joke that it’s about convincing you not to go to law school, and well, I think it worked for me, because right now, I see a future in teaching. I’d love to go into a classroom somewhere in the U.S.”

Thriving in Community

With the interview approaching to a close, I asked Ryan if she had any advice for me — and the other students reading this article.

“You’ve got to act like every semester’s your last semester,” She told me. Much of our meeting was spent reflecting on this: the never-ending struggle of balancing friendship, work, and play at Amherst.

“This semester, I have done so much stuff that I never would have done but I’m so glad I did. I think everyone who comes to Amherst to some extent is on a grind and has to kind of work at balance,” Ryan shared. “I’m really grateful because I feel like my friends, from day one, had a much better perspective on what we came here to do — the fact that we’re not just here to go to school — and without them I never would have branched out as much as I did.”

When reflecting on what thoughts and feelings she had as she graduated, Ryan’s biggest emotion was gratitude.

“I can’t list everyone, but Professor Sarat, Professor Sitze, Robert Siudzinski, the Director of Careers in Education Professions, Susan Daniels, the Writing Center, the Office of Fellowships, my parents, and my friends are just a few people [I’d like to thank],” Ryan said. “School is often considered this solitary endeavor, but I’ve realized that it’s taken a village not just to raise me, but to get me through Amherst. I could not have been as happy as I am, or flourished and thrived as much as I did, without the people around me.”

Photo by Jesse Gwilliam courtesy of Amherst College

The throughline of Ryan’s research is human dignity — and its surprising absence from the American legal system.

A Quiet But Powerful Voice

By her own admission, Sika Essegbey ’23 is an introverted person. But her understated demeanor belies an unceasing dedication to helping others feel at home. In her time at Amherst, Essegbey has left an indelible mark — one of genuine care — both inside the classroom and out.

Essegbey, who double-majored in Black studies and Spanish, has been both an advocate — serving as a perennial leader of the Black Student Union (BSU) — and a capable scholar: In recent weeks, she earned an English Language Teaching Fulbright, which will take her to Colombia, where she will be able to pursue her interest in teaching.

Despite her introversion, Essegbey’s contributions have not gone unnoticed.

According to her academic advisor, Professor of Spanish Sara Brenneis, Essegbey is “a really compassionate and empathetic person. Soft-spoken, but somebody who has a lot of passion and a lot of intellectual capability.”

Essegbey’s friend Anu Daramola ’24 put a similar sentiment in somewhat different words. “She underestimates herself, and then she still ends up blowing expectations out of the water,” Daramola said. “And she’s just a bad bitch. That part, too.”

Essegbey’s time at Amherst has been one of growth. And now, she’s determined to ensure

that her voice, though it may be quiet at times, is heard — no matter what language she’s speaking.

Encountering Cultures

Essegbey hails from Gainesville, Florida, and both her parents, who are immigrants from Ghana, work at the University of Florida (UF). Specifically, her father is a professor of African studies.

Her parents kept the young Essegbey connected to a “strong community” of Ghanaian and other African people. But her school life was a different story.

“It was kind of a weird dynamic, because it [was] a magnet program inside of a predominantly black school,” she said. “And so it operated in almost like a segregated way, which is something I always noted.”

This realization would inform Essegbey’s later interest in education. “I had always questioned those dynamics,” she added. “It didn’t make sense to me how it was allowed for a school to be set up like that.”

Nevertheless, Essegbey was able to meet lots of different types of people outside of school through her parents’ connection to UF, which she explained “brings in people from everywhere for all the different departments.”

Her family also brought a diversity of different cultural experiences. Her father, in addition

to being a Ghanaian immigrant, had lived in the Netherlands and Norway, and her uncle spoke Russian.

Essegbey’s early life was also deeply influenced by father’s career as a professor. Although her dad can be shy, Essegbey said, “He’s also very welcoming.” She recalled being inspired by the close bonds he formed with his students, who he’d sometimes have over for dinner.

But her father gave her a surprising piece of advice: “‘Don’t teach. Don’t ever teach,’” Essegbey recalled. “‘You’ll make no money.’” She noted with a laugh that all of her internships have been teaching-related.

When it came time to select a college, Essegbey knew she wanted something different. She was primarily interested in small colleges far away from her home in Florida. And when she got accepted to Grinnell College, in Iowa, she was excited, although a little bit nervous about the rural location.

But when the Amherst acceptance came in, the conclusion was immediate: “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to go to Iowa,’” she said, laughing. “Out of all the options,” she added, “[Amherst] was the best one.”

Finding Freedom

After first arriving at Amherst, Essegbey was “really, really nervous,” she admitted. “I was really stressed about meet -

ing people and about making friends.”

These fears came to a head during her orientation trip to “Vermont or New Hampshire,” during which, to Sika’s surprise, temperatures got down to the low 50s, even though it was summer. “I was severely underprepared,” she said.

The upside, though, was that she was able to make many friends while ziplining and canoeing. “It was a lot of freedom for the first time,” she said. “I had so much fun.”

Part of the appeal of being at college was that she was able to build close connections to people who shared her identities. For instance, in the second semester of her first year, Essegbey and other Black students attended a Black Solidarity Conference at Yale University.

“I met a bunch of Black students from other colleges in the Northeast,” she recalled. “They had a bunch of events; they had

a bunch of panels. I got Chickfil-A for the first time in months. It was really nice.”

But the freedom Essegbey soon found herself losing the freedom she had grown to appreciate. The pandemic struck during her first-year spring, and everyone was sent home. “It was really difficult,” Essegbey said.

Even upon returning to campus, the environment — with masking mandates, limited social opportunities, and online classes — was a very different one than she had left.

“We had to get really creative and innovative in the ways that we had fun,” she said. Nevertheless, Essegbey said she was still able to build bonds and enjoy her classes.

Talking the Talk

Even though Essegbey would take, at various times, courses in four different languages — including French, Arabic, and Twi (a Ghanaian language) — it was

Understated by nature, Fulbright winner Sika Essegbey has nevertheless left an important mark in her time at Amherst — as a campus leader, a scholar, and a friend.

— Yasmin Hamilton ’24 and Liam Archacki ’24

Essegbey was recently awarded a English Teaching Assistant Fulbright in Colombia — the perfect pairing of her interests in teaching and the Spanish language.

Photo courtesy of Sika Essegbey ’23

Spanish that stuck with her.

Essegbey had taken Spanish classes since middle school. “I thought it was really fun,” she said. “It never felt like a chore.”

At Amherst, especially, Essegbey enjoyed her classes in the Spanish department, in particular a course she took on Latin American food and culture.

“One thing we talked about a lot was the influence of African food practices,” Essegbey recalled. She thought it was particularly interesting to examine how the processes of African people brought to Latin American in the slave trade contributed to the local food culture.

Essegbey also appreciated the Spanish linguistics class she took. “It was really interesting to understand different language structures,” she said. “I really enjoyed that class.”

Essegbey’s decision to major in the discipline, though, did involve some external pressure. Her former grade-school Spanish teacher, with whom she kept

in touch, told her, “‘You have to major in Spanish. Like, you don’t have a choice,’” Essegbey recalled, laughing. “I was like, ‘You’re so right.’”

The other part of the equation, though, was that she recognized the importance of communication. “You can learn so much from people,” she said, “but if you can’t communicate with them, then you will not get anything.”

Essegbey recently found out that she had been selected as a Fulbright English Language Teaching Assistant in Colombia. She said this was her proudest moment at Amherst.

“I really didn’t expect it,” Essegbey said. “It was such a random decision.”

However, Daramola, her friend, thought that Essegbey was being too modest by doubting herself. “She’s like, ‘I’m not going to get it,’” Daramola recalled. “I’m like, ‘I’m gonna backhand you because you will [get it.]’ … I’m always right.”

“She doesn’t realize how important she is,” Daramola added.

Essegbey is excited about her time in Colombia. “I can go abroad and have the teaching experience,” she said. “I’m supposed to have a supplementary project as well. So I’m going to do some community work with a nonprofit, too. And hopefully learn how to salsa.”

Building Solidarity

Essegbey’s foray into her other major, Black studies, was perhaps more fortuitous. Her firstyear advisor encouraged her to take the introductory Black studies course after she wasn’t able to secure a spot in any law, jurisprudence, and social thought courses.

“I took the class and I really liked it,” she said. “And it was like my first time having experiences learning about Black culture or Black history. … I was just kind of drawn to it.”

By her sophomore year, she

realized she’d taken half the major requirements, and decided to finish it off.

It helped, she said, to have encouraging professors in the subject, particularly Professor of Black Studies Olufemi Vaughan. “He’s a great person,” she said. “I would write essays — I was like, ‘Oh, this is probably so bad.’ And he was like, ‘Sika, you’re brilliant.’”

At Amherst, Essegbey’s engagement with her Black identity extended beyond the classroom. She had been involved with the BSU since her first year, but Covid had disrupted every extracurricular on campus. As things gradually began to approach a semblance of normalcy, she did her best to support the club, serving at various points as its junior chair, secretary, and senior chair.

“I think affinity groups are very important,” Essegbey said. “Just making people feel seen, making sure that people have a community on campus.”

This semester, Essegbey, on behalf of the BSU, worked to bring back the Black Solidarity Conference, which had been discontinued during Covid. It was “a lot of fun,” she said.

Her efforts to support the Black community at Amherst have not gone unnoticed. “She really cares for the Black community,” her friend Ashanti Adams ’24 said, “which is very admirable.”

Full of Brightness

While the immediate future is clear — Essegbey will teach English in Colombia — beyond that, things are more open-ended.

She is interested in attending law school, and plans to take the LSAT sometime next year. In particular, she could see herself studying education law or civil rights law. But none of this is a guarantee.

In Essegbey’s words, “I’m not a five-year-plan person, but I am a two-year-plan person.”

Looking back on her time at Amherst, Essegbey sees a clear lesson. “Moving forward,” she said, “I really want to be intentional about getting to know people, making connections, not just for networking purposes, but just as connections are important. And that will push me to be more extroverted, which is something I’m battling with.”

Essegbey’s brother, who also attends Amherst, Senanu Essegbey ’25, said that he’s been proud to witness her development over time.

“Growing up, she wasn’t always able to express herself as freely as she wanted,” he said. “I see her now truly becoming who she wants to be, focusing less on judgements from others. Whether [it’s] how she acts, dresses, or interacts, she’s doing it more how she wants to. … She’s also prioritizing herself more. She’s sometimes too caring to the point that she puts her own well-being last, so it’s nice to see her focusing on herself.”

Photo courtesy of Sika Essegbey ’23

Essegbey has dedicated herself to the Black Student Union, holding various leadership positions and reviving its traditions post-Covid.

Giving Voice to Their Philosophy

At any given moment, chances are that Sophie Kubik ’23 is contemplating philosophy — even when they’re swimming. “I would run straight from [Assistant Professor of Philosophy Lauren] Leydon-Hardy’s ‘Theory of Knowledge’ class to my practice,” Kubik told me, laughing. “I would be sprinting to the pool, deep in the epistemology, and I [would] dive in, thinking about skepticism.”

Kubik’s intellectual curiosity doesn’t cease when they exit the classroom — it infiltrates every aspect of their life.

But this isn’t the only liberal-arts ideal that the varsity-swimmer-turned-philosopher has fulfilled in her time at Amherst. Kubik has also become a vital campus leader and advocate, heading a charge to make the realms of her two greatest passions — swimming and philosophy — more queer-inclusive and accessible to people, like herself, whose identities transcend the binary.

As we chatted on a slow Thursday morning, I came to understand how Kubik’s time at Amherst has shaped them into the person they are today: It was only through exploration, conviction, and perseverance that Kubik was able to become the confident, passionate leader she now is.

Goats, Nietszche, and a Leap of Faith

Kubik grew up on the foot-

hills of the Rocky Mountains in Berthoud, Colorado, a rural farm town. Growing up in this locale was a bittersweet experience, Kubik admitted to me — in Berthoud, people had very different backgrounds, goals, and dreams than the people they would come to meet at Amherst. Though she appreciated her humble upbringing, Kubik found it incredibly difficult to navigate her identity and beliefs in the town’s conservative atmosphere.

It didn’t help that Berthoud’s public school system, which Kubik attended, was underfunded and didn’t offer much in terms of academic exploration. But with both her parents holding humanities doctorates, the family dinner table served as Kubik’s early intellectual playground — the conversations always had a philosophical undercurrent.

When Kubik would come home and tell their parents what they had learned in her U.S. history class that day, their parents would ask thought-provoking questions, like “Why do you think this event happened?” or “How could that historical figure justify their actions?” In these casual conversations, Kubik gained confidence in developing their own opinions, and defending them with arguments.

Even as a middle schooler, they felt comfortable asserting the pretentiousness of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas after reading a copy of

“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” gifted by her father. These experiences helped them develop an unrelenting impulse to dig for answers to the “whys” of all life’s mysteries — which would eventually prove valuable in and out of Amherst’s classrooms.

Kubik’s time at Amherst, however, originated from her other passion: swimming. Ever since she was a child, Kubik was drawn to the peace of being in the water. “I feel like water is just one big hug,” Kubik said. “I feel at home.”

When it came time to think about college, Kubik decided she no longer wanted to live in a small, rural town. She also sought a balance between academic rigor and athletic opportunity — so she looked to NCAA Division III schools. After talking with various coaches, she landed on the University of Chicago, but the recruitment process did not go as hoped. Despite receiving support from the coach, Kubik’s application to UChicago was waitlisted. That application season turned out to be a disappointing one for Kubik. With the encouragement of Amherst Swimming Coach Nick Nichols, however, she decided to take a leap of faith: She would take a gap year and try again.

This gap year turned out to be an incredibly formative experience. After working on a successful midterm election for Governor Jared Polis of Colora-

do, Kubik used the money they earned to go backpacking, on their own, in France and Spain. In addition to the museums and festivals, Kubik was fascinated by the different sorts of people she encountered in the hostels. “To meet people out of their own contexts,” Kubik said, “it makes you want to put yourself out there that much more.” The gap year experience also taught Kubik to not take their education for granted, and they were ready to make the best of what college has to offer.

At the end of their gap year, after visiting several Division III schools, Kubik found themself somewhere familiar: a small, rural town — this time, in Western Massachusetts.

Finding an Intrepid, Humble Voice

When I asked Assistant Professor of Philosophy Lauren Leydon-Hardy to describe Kubik, in a dim corner of Amherst Coffee, she lit up and said, “Oh, Ku-

bik is an intrepid animal!” As a captain of the college’s women’s swim and dive team, president of the Queer Athlete Alliance, and former president of the French House, Kubik has proved themself a campus leader many times over. Still, it took Kubik time to grow into their voice.

Kubik recalled that the initial transition to Amherst was a bit jarring. Despite having read extensively, Kubik felt that her education at Berthoud’s underfunded public school did not nearly prepare her for the academic challenges of Amherst, compared to her peers.

As time went on, though, Kubik began to see her small-town background as less of an obstacle to her confidence, and more so as a source of her unique perspective. She took the first major step in finding her voice (literally) in Amherst’s Annual College Speaking Competition the spring of her first year, titled “Justice.”

Kubik delivered a forceful yet compelling speech about educa-

“Intrepid” and persistently thoughtful, Kubik not only excels in the philosophy classroom but has translated her moral convictions into practice.

— Stacey Zhang ’26

Kubik is pursuing political theory at Oxford, where they will continue to press philosophy in the service of social change.

Photo courtesy of Sophie Kubik ’23

tional justice and the importance of instituting an inheritance tax, which reflected on the privilege she and her peers held as Amherst students, while friends back home struggled to pay rent. The speech ended up winning Kubik the Kellogg Prize, but more importantly, she found fulfillment in sharing her experiences and exposing Amherst students to a reality that many Americans live in.

It was her teammates and coaches on the swimming team that helped Kubik find the confidence to give voice to another part of her identity — her queerness.

Kubik, who uses she/they pronouns, recalled that when she first joined the swim team, it was a very heteronormative environment. She didn’t come out to her teammates until Abby LeCates ’20, then a senior captain on the swimming team, organized a pride meet. “I realized that, oh my god, Abby’s out and everyone loves Abby,” Kubik said. “If I come out, it’s not going to be super weird.”

Following the pride meet, Kubik grew increasingly comfort-

able with being out, both on the swim team and in other areas of campus life. From then on, Kubik was also determined to change the highly heteronormative space of the swim team, and athletics more broadly, on campus. In their junior year, when swimming resumed from the long pandemic hiatus, Kubik got involved with the Queer Resource Center (QRC) and organized that year’s pride meet for the swim team.

The director of the QRC, J.T. Martin, encouraged Kubik to revive what is now known as the Queer Athlete Alliance (QAA). After getting a lot of interest, Kubik began organizing the club. They meet with administration regularly to organize educational programs, poster campaigns, or bring up problems in Amherst’s athletic program.

“[The QAA] has also just been a lovely community,” Kubik said. “There’s something so comforting about being in a space where being queer and being an athlete is not a dichotomy.” Kubik has taken joy in helping foster queer spaces within the swim team — and the broader athletic

community — in her time at the college. “Our pride meets are glowing and festive, and Coach Nichols is our number one ally,” Kubik said with excitement.

Kubik has many stellar achievements, yet her friends also told me that much of her work on campus is behind the scenes. “A lot of what she does goes unrecognized,” said fellow swimmer Fyn Nandel ’26, “like going to the administration and advocating for [the swimming team].”

One of Kubik’s fellow philosophy majors, Gillan Chalono ’23, agreed. “Kubik genuinely cares about making improvements in the community, [even when they] are going to garner her absolutely no credit or clout,” he said, pointing to this year’s Philosophy Senior Thesis Symposium, which Kubik had pitched as an idea and eventually helped organize. Kubik was inspired by a desire to make philosophy more accessible on campus.

The symposium was a successful and meaningful event. When I arrived, unfortunately 10 minutes later, I was pleasantly surprised to find the Paino Lecture Hall

packed with students supporting their friends. People even took notes, enthralled by the range and depth of the department’s thesis writers, Kubik included. With courage, humility, and self-exploration, Kubik has found an intrepid voice and used it to improve the campus community again and again.

Philosophy and Beyond

To this day, Kubik doesn’t see a firm boundary between her daily life and her intellectual exploration — her experiences inform her philosophy, and vice versa. “[Kubik] feels her work on a really personal level,” Leydon-Hardy said. “That has the effect of her coming to her work with a sense of urgency, and that makes her work better.”

Her philosophical disposition is even reflected in her gender expression. For instance, Kubik said that her pronouns are “a philosophical statement on the complexity and ambiguity of gender as much as a practical tool of reference.”

“I’ve always felt fairly detached from femininity, and feel it only strongly when in solidarity with women facing oppression,” she added. “I am certainly my mother’s daughter and my grandmother’s granddaughter, but I am also unapologetically queer and challenge the gender binary with my existence as well as through my philosophical commitments.”

A journey into philosophy perhaps makes sense in hindsight, but having a mother that teaches the subject, Kubik entered Amherst resistant to this “nepotism” and planned to major in history.

“[For] my first advising meeting, I walked into [Assistant Professor of Philosophy Rafeeq Hasan’s] office and literally went, ‘I’m not going to be a philosophy major,’” she recalled.

Despite gaining an appreciation for practical philosophy in Professor Hasan’s “Introduction to Political Philosophy” class, Kubik decided to take time off from philosophy the next semester.

However, during that semester, Kubik realized they missed studying it. Another semester and two more philosophy classes later, Kubik declared the major.

In their Instagram bio, Kubik describes themself as “a walking thesis for determinism,” an epithet that Kubik’s friend and fellow philosophy major Ethan Samuels ’24E had jokingly attributed to her for their path to philosophy.

At the core, Kubik finds the value of philosophical work lies in its help for us to understand the world around us and our beliefs. “I have deep-seated moral convictions, like equality, that, upon further reflection, are really hard to justify,” Kubik said.

Their thesis explores this separation between our moral intuitions and what is rationally justifiable — especially along the lines of different conceptions of equality. “I wanted to zero in on ‘social’ equality — what it means for people to relate as equals,” Kubik told me. “Most people really care about humans having equal respect and dignity, but they can’t really explain why.” They concluded that we must commit to the practice of holding each other to be equals before we can develop shared principles of justice. In other words, to realize justice, we must become equals.

Kubik is graduating from Amherst, magna cum laude, in Philosophy and will pursue a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in political theory at Oxford University next year. Since the MPhil program is housed in the Politics Department rather than the Philosophy Department, Kubik hopes to ground her theoretical interests in a more rigorous understanding of historical and contemporary politics. When talking about her plans after the MPhil, Kubik said she is unsure what’s next, but she hopes to work in academia and perhaps teach philosophy in the middle of nowhere. “I would love to just become a Prof. Leydon-Hardy variant,” Kubik told me, laughing.

Photo courtesy of Sophie Kubik ’23 Kubik has worked to make Amherst athletics more accessible to queer athletes, organizing the swim team’s pride meets and reviving the Queer Athlete Alliance.

Grounding Achievement in Joyful Community

When I interviewed Gabriel Echarte ’23 at Amherst Coffee the other day, I was struck for the thousandth time by his inexhaustible hospitality. At my small expression of regret over my coffee order (a hot drink on a hot day is a bold decision) Gabriel didn’t offer any condolences. Instead, he filled a plastic cup with enough ice and oat milk for me to, if I so chose, pour my hot coffee in to create a new cold drink. It was as if the mere potential of my feeling dissatisfied brought him a kind of physical discomfort, like he couldn’t be truly ready to sit down to reflect on his college career without the setting being just right.

Gabriel’s desire for a comfortable place to be, in any other profile, would be a perfect entry point to his decisions and activities at Amherst, providing a means for the reader to understand his character, as someone whose academic achievements are ultimately secondary to his pursuit of personal happiness. But, as soon as one zooms out even a little, it becomes clear that there is no single throughline to who he is. For Gabriel, college has not merely been one thing, nor has his character ever been reducible to a single phrase. Instead, Gabriel’s time at Amherst has been defined perhaps primarily by Covid’s violent rifting of time into a distinct before and after — wherein Gabriel approached Amherst in one way, and then in another.

The First Way

When Gabriel graduated from a magnet high school in Miami, in

2018, he was excited to start a new kind of academic journey at Amherst. He applied after visiting the campus with a close friend who was then a student at the college, falling in love with the idea of close relationships with professors, small class sizes, and a tight community alongside Amherst’s strong academic focus.

His first two years at Amherst matched up perfectly with that ideal. He found community in the crew team and fellowship in other students, whose focus and dedication to academics represented a nice break from high school life. Describing his experience in the community, he said, “I think there were very few other places where I could have grown [as much as I did] because of how small and supportive the community is.” At any other school, he says, a lot of how he’s changed — in terms of his ability to make friends, his comfort in groups, his confidence to seek out and pursue opportunity — simply wouldn’t have happened.

Gabriel’s first two years are also defined primarily in terms of the actual things he did, the type of things you can list on a resume — though it’s worth noting that our interview was characterized by him practically refusing to recount these variously impressive achievements. I didn’t find out about his summer internship on Capitol Hill, for example, until an unrelated conversation two days after our interview. Throughout his freshman and sophomore years, he supported student efforts that spurred the administration to

institute the Climate Action Plan, became a senator in the Association of Amherst Students (AAS), and took an internship in the summer of 2019 with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He found himself developing an interest in environmental policy-making, and to this day closely observes the political scene.

About those first two years, he said that he “wanted to get involved with all of the cool, smart kids … everything felt so important, and I liked it — it felt important.” Gabriel’s first stint at college was defined by this drive to get involved in exciting things on campus, as well a second drive, borne out of four years of grade-chasing amid his high-pressure high school, to perform. These sometimes-conflicting impulses have followed him all the way to the present, but not without an interjection in the spring of his sophomore year.

The Rifting Event

That March, the floor fell out from underneath the college. Gabriel tumbled with his terrified cohort into the fraught early days of the Covid pandemic, when nothing was well understood and normal ways of life collapsed into complete isolation. Expressing how the first months of remote school felt, he explained — vividly — that it was “atrocious. Horrible, horrid, horrible, bad, terrible, very terrible.”

While it was certain that the format was unbearable for Gabriel, who thrives on in-person interaction and a classroom environment, the

worst part of those first few months was that school just “felt so unimportant.” Looking back on that time, he remembers how “every news article was about overwhelmed hospitals, doctors, [or] new infections.” School, for obvious reasons, began to feel secondary to the world outside.

I’ve known Gabriel only since the spring of his junior year, but throughout that time he has always seemed to exist outside of Amherst’s bubble. He feels that world political events are just as important as what he does at college, and that both should be thought about with the same seriousness. As such, he suddenly felt very unhelpful being a college student in the face of the unprecedented and existential fear presented by Covid’s outbreak.

This was an indescribable shock for the student who had previously been motivated by how real and empowering it felt to get involved on campus. “I remember it really hit me at a few points in the spring,” he recalled. “One was seeing these pictures of National Guard deployments at the beginning of [the outbreak]. And then just seeing all the pictures of the [reaction to] George Floyd and Breonna Taylor showed like, how much the country was going through it.”

Since online school seemed to be guaranteed for the foreseeable fu-

ture, Gabriel decided to take a year off. Instead of continuing on the path he had been on since he was a child, he would try to get more directly involved in the country, to do some kind of tangible and helpful work. He moved to a mouse-infested apartment (“I slept under the sheets because I was worried they were gonna crawl on my face”) in Boston that summer, working at Whole Foods until he found a job doing Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) work with Cataldo Ambulance Service. He accompanied experienced crews on emergencies, transported people who needed ambulance services, and assisted more advanced EMTs with their work — all experiences Gabriel variously described as “amazing,” “formative,” and as something that “changed [his] life.”

“The coolest thing,” he explained, “was getting to do [vaccinations]. There was an emergency authorization for EMTs to give vaccinations during the rollout in the spring … I would go [to the Boston Convention Center] and half of it was, like, the Marine Corps giving the shots, and then it was kind of like the tweens, like me … I felt really proud of that.”

With the vaccine’s spread and the associated decrease in existential stress, Gabriel felt like he could go back to school the next year. Af-

Finding a home at Humphries House, and now on his way to Truman and Fulbright scholarships, Gabriel Echarte has worked to reconcile his excitement for impactful work with a need to be in community.

— Dustin Copeland ’25

As many of his housemates know, Echarte is constantly thinking — and talking — politics. His upcoming internship on Capitol Hill will allow him to put that energy into practice.

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Echarte ’23

ter spending the summer of 2021 working at a bar in New York City (and thereby experiencing the world coming a little bit back to life) Gabriel found himself back at Amherst to tackle the second half of his violently bifurcated college experience.

The Second Way

Reflecting on his year with the ambulance service before our interview, Gabriel said that he realized just how much that experience informed his post-pandemic values. He explained, “I became hyper-aware that [the people I helped], from the way they communicated, totally expected more time, and in some cases, expected more from their lives … Something about that proximity with death definitely changed my approach to what I cared about.”

When he came back to Amherst, he said, he realized that even though he did genuinely care about what he was involved in, he wasn’t sure he was satisfied with how he was spending his limited time. In other words, time itself had transformed from a vague backdrop into a tangible, finite thing with greater value than any other earthly resource.

Gabriel became much more “deliberate in balancing what makes [him] really happy with everything else.” Since coming back, he continued, he has continually triedmade life “much more about friends, per-

sonal connections, relationships, things like that.” This change has also made the strange unreality of campus life more apparent. “Sometimes,” Gabriel said, it feels like campus participation is based on “trying to, like, make a mark, stand out,” to declare that “‘I’m a leader.” At the same time, he continued, it’s true that “a lot of it really impacts lives [at the college], and if that’s what you get excited about, then you should totally be involved. It’s just that, after a while, it wasn’t making me happy.”

That is not to say Gabriel has magically separated himself from extracurriculars, much less the pressure to perform that pervades college life. Instead, his return to campus has been defined by effort towards the goal of disentangling self-worth from collegiate performance.

Junior year was therefore a slow and sometimes hard transition away from school being primarily a source of high grades and university-sanctioned achievements towards a place that fostered real community and happiness. The closeness of Gabriel’s staff relationships was essential to navigating college life, and to the two prestigious fellowships he won in his last two years: the Harry S. Truman Scholarship and a Fulbright Teaching fellowship. “I only applied to Truman,” he said, “because [Director of Fellowships] Christine Overstreet found me in Val[entine

Dining Hall] and told me to apply to Truman. That completely changed my life.”

Gabriel’s interest in politics and public service must have been obvious to Overstreet through his actions alone — he was an AAS senator, he was active in work to pass the Climate Action Plan, he took a year off to be an EMT during Covid — but anyone could have realized the Truman is right for him through a single conversation. It’s impossible to watch an episode of “Succession” (for example) with Gabriel without reckoning with the nature of America’s political existence and the fate of electoral politics. I often come down to grab water or a snack from the kitchen of the Zü (or Humphries House), the theme house and food co-op where Gabriel and I both live, only to engage in 20 minutes of conversation about whatever political commentary he has been down there reading.

It is clear to Gabriel that he will spend time working in government, though at the moment he’s not quite sure how. For his Truman, he’ll be placed into a government internship this summer, and participate in community activities designed to bring the cohort from across the country closer together. The scholarship also provides money to go towards a graduate degree, but considering graduate school is one of the things Gabriel is “putting away on the backburner” while he tries out jobs and spends time living outside of school.

Gabriel emphasized that he approached his application with the guidance of the fellowships office in mind — that the application is first and foremost a way to get to know yourself better, to practice writing about yourself in a concise and rigorous way. The difficulty of the application was a huge obstacle while he was applying, and thinking about one’s entire life in the context of an application is always soul-sucking, but doing it with the fellowships office “helped [him] get more confident — I do have some stuff [to be proud of]!”

Where the fellowships office seeked him out to apply for the Tru-

man, Gabriel applied for a Fulbright teaching fellowship much more of his own accord. He called it an “amazing opportunity to teach in a foreign country, meet other people and live in a new culture,” something he had always heard of and thought was “the coolest thing … I’d always planned to apply to a Fulbright. And now, August 27, I’ll be in Mexico.” He hasn’t been assigned to a location in the country yet, but when he is he will provide teacher’s assistant services to students (possibly of college age, like the Foreign Language Teaching Assistants at Amherst, but possibly younger students as well).

Without coming to Amherst and finding supportive relationships with staff and faculty, he emphasized again, he feels like he would never have done half of what he now has done. It is thanks to Amherst, he says, that he is going to spend next year in Mexico, and that he’ll spend this summer learning with another talented group of scholars.

“A Meeting of Souls”

Looking back on Amherst, it is certain that not all was perfect. Gabriel’s college experience was shattered by Covid, broken into two halves that are seemingly irreconcilable in terms of the worldviews they entailed. But without that discontinuity, it is certain that he wouldn’t be the person he is today — perhaps because of the difficulty he’s faced. “I definitely feel that a lot of my relationships here were kind of cut short, or not able to grow as deep as I would have liked, largely because of Covid,” Gabriel said. After all, he came into college with the class of 2022, so many of his longest relationships were broken off by last year’s graduation.

College has also been a stressful place — Gabriel said that there were times when receiving a paper deadline felt like a literal death sentence — and it often seemed that the campus had a “lacking sense of community.” However, as he leaves, he says that he is “feeling good about [Amherst] and where I’m leaving this place at.” The reason for that satisfaction is in no small part the Zü.

This past semester, Gabriel

moved into the Zü in search of a more tightly-knit community and in the absence of his closest friends. The move has been a positive one, he says — “I was feeling kind of negative at Amherst [in my senior year], and the Zü has completely changed that … I loved living there this year. I met some really cool characters, I loved cooking vegan broth [with April Dottin-Carter ’23] for four months, everyone coming together on Wednesday nights, Helen [Feibes ’23] making scones at one in the morning and hanging out.”

He and I have spent a long time talking about the Zü and how it functions as a theme house, and at this point I think both of us are certain that, for all its idiosyncrasies, the house has the most real living community we have experienced at Amherst. There have been multiple times, whether at a dinner we held outside on the porch a few weeks ago or while we were singing happy birthday to a member of the house over a cake baked that day, when Gabriel has turned to me to say that the house is beautiful, that this community is good, that he is happy.

Overall, I think that’s the most clear takeaway from Gabriel’s time at Amherst. The whole thing is too large, too multi-faceted, to sum up in a sentence, and no individual event can stand in for all the happy and sad he has experienced between enrolling here and graduating. But, at the end of it, it is certain that he is leaving happier than he came and excited for the future. That future, though it is sure to be filled with the same kind of humility and high achievement that Gabriel has exhibited throughout school, will be decided by his commitment to spending time in the service of making himself and those around him happy.

“That’s been my experience from high school — a lot of my best friends I knew in high school, but we are just now starting to get really close,” Gabriel said. Similarly, he’s “hoping that [college] is just the start of our relationships, and that they really take off after we leave this place … This is a meeting of the souls in my rolodex, but it really picks up afterwards.”

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Echarte ’23

With relationships nourished by shared, home-cooked meals, the Humphries House provided Echarte with a real sense of community after many of his friends graduated in 2022.

Bridging the Gap Between Lab and World

Aditi Nayak ’23 does the seemingly impossible.

A self-admitted “workaholic” at times, she has spent hours in the lab each week researching the impact of zinc on the brain, founded Amherst’s premier science publication, worked research internships at the University of Pennsylvania and NASA, and initiated a project to more efficiently harvest rainwater in her mother’s hometown of Mambattu, India. All this while double-majoring in math and neuroscience, notoriously among Amherst’s toughest (and almost “accidentally” picking up a third major in political science).

When I spoke with Nayak about her time at Amherst, it was via Zoom — she was spending her third-to-last week of college in Canada, visiting a research lab. Before the interview, having scrolled through Nayak’s jaw-dropping LinkedIn profile, I anticipated an intense personality: the type of person who has little patience for anything other than the academic grind. I was, however, completely mistaken. Nayak pairs her astounding work ethic with an easy-going, empathetic demeanor.

It is this quality, I suspect, that makes Nayak not only an adept researcher but also a lucid communicator of complex scientific concepts. She has written countless articles for the Amherst STEM Network, presented research at conferences, and, just two weeks ago, participated in Amherst’s annual Three Minute Thesis Competition.

“Scientists, in general, aren’t the best at communicating or explaining

their science to all types of audiences,” said Nayak’s lab supervisor and mentor, Assistant Professor of Biology Sally Kim. “And she has that ability.”

Just looking at Nayak’s resume — her skills and accomplishments — does not tell you the full story, however. But when you talk to her, it becomes apparent: She has a genuine excitement about understanding the world — and also about making it a better place.

“It’s kind of frustrating when science is done in a vacuum,” she told me. “The whole point of science, I think, is that it’s inspired by questions that happen every day. The only way that makes sense is if you feed back into everyday life. Like, ‘OK, this is what we’ve learned. This is how it translates to the real world.’”

Finding these solutions, Nayak said, “That’s 100 percent my mission.”

From Jock to “Bookworm”

Nayak is from West Windsor, a suburban town in the heart of New Jersey. Interestingly, the community in which Nayak grew up was predominantly South Asian, so she didn’t think much about her own Indian American identity as a child.

Nevertheless, she had a strong connection with her family, who she said supported her in every endeavor. “Their attitude was always, ‘What do you want to do? How can we help make that happen?’” Nayak told me. “In that way, my family made me feel that anything was possible.”

Her brother, Akash, is her “best friend and greatest inspiration,” she added.

Though her parents encouraged her to try out many different activities — everything from painting to ballet — Nayak’s grade-school days found her most often on athletic fields and courts (and certainly not in a lab). Nayak was a three-season varsity athlete in high school, playing lacrosse, basketball, and marching band (“which I count as a sport, but maybe you don’t,” she said, laughing).

Her time as a serious athlete provided her something even more valuable than speed and strength: “Doing three sports takes a lot of discipline,” she explained. “And I learned how to be very disciplined through that.”

In the last lacrosse game of her senior season, however, Nayak suffered a crushing blow: She tore her ACL, and was left effectively bed-ridden the entire summer.

Having lost the freedom afforded by mobility, Nayak sought to regain control of her situation in another way. “I tried to treat myself, in terms of my ACL injury,” she told me. “I was like, ‘Oh, I want to get better faster. How do I make this get better?’”

As a result, Nayak began reading copious amounts of science journalism in order to better understand her injury. Though she had always been somewhat interested in science, having aspired since childhood to become a pediatrician, she says that she went down “a spiral” that

summer. “I became more of a bookworm that summer than I had been previously,” she said.

When it came to selecting a college, Nayak knew she wanted a somewhat different experience than she had in high school. Her school was notoriously competitive, she said. So Amherst’s small, welcoming environment — with one-on-one access to professors — held a particular appeal. “I really liked how tight-knit everything felt,” she told me. “I think I came for the community, as cheesy as that sounds.”

All It’s Worth

When Nayak visited Amherst to see if she wanted to attend, her host-student shared a piece of advice about the Amherst experience: “‘You’ve got to milk it for all it’s worth.’”

In her time at the college, Nayak has taken this sentiment to heart.

The first deployment of this philosophy came just weeks after Nayak arrived. Inspired by her injury-induced reading spree, she had been eager to join a student science-journalism publication at Amherst, but she soon came to a startling realization: The college didn’t have one.

So she did the only natural thing: She started her own.

The Amherst STEM Network (ASN) is an online publication featuring science-specific content with

an Amherst focus, including coverage of professors’ research, student theses, and campus events. Since founding it as a first-year, Nayak has served as ASN’s editor-in-chief.

Taking ASN from an idea-kernel to fully fledged magazine required Nayak to understand the intellectual and extracurricular climate of Amherst. “I really liked taking people’s ideas and trying to coalesce them into a united vision,” she said.

Over Nayak’s four years at Amherst, ASN has grown tremendously. Beginning with just articles, it added a summer reporting series after Nayak’s first year, and a podcast during the pandemic. Nayak even had the opportunity to interview — via Zoom in June 2022 — an Amherst Presidential Scholar: the science writer and ethicist Harriett Washington.

“What I learned from ASN is, if you want to do something, and you put the energy into doing it, that’s really all that matters,” Nayak told me.

Nayak’s reporting for ASN also helped her land her Amherst research gig. Kim recalled that Nayak had asked to interview her about her research, in August 2020, before she had ever taught a class at the college.

“We had a really interesting, engaging conversation,” Kim told me.

After the interview, Nayak asked if she could join Kim’s lab. The only problem was that Kim’s lab hadn’t

Aditi Nayak combines a remarkable work ethic, an empathetic demeanor, and a mind for problem-solving in her efforts to bring scientific knowledge into the world at large.

— Liam Archacki ’24

Despite her impressive track record in the lab, Nayak aspires to be a communicator of complex scientific topics rather than solely a researcher.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

even really been established yet, so they agreed it would be best to wait a little while. But the following January, Kim invited Nayak to join the lab, where she has worked ever since.

The Sky’s the Limit

Nayak’s request to join Kim’s lab, which primarily studies the role that zinc plays in the brain, reflected a narrowing of her academic interests in her early days at Amherst.

“I’ve just always been very curious about why people behave the way they do,” she told me. “And something that’s always fascinated me is the idea that some things completely out of your control can determine who you are.”

Nayak found this curiosity especially fulfilled during a research internship at the University of Pennsylvania the summer after her first year, several months before she joined Kim’s lab.

The project, using rats as its test-subjects, examined the impact of lead consumption by mothers on unborn fetuses. Nayak explained that lead is a neurotoxin that can build up in a mother’s bones and, when eventually released, harm the fetuses’ developing brains.

“This whole idea that something that happens outside of your lifetime can impact you and who you become … was really interesting to me,” Nayak said. “In that research experience, seeing how [this idea] manifests, and how you can find the mechanisms behind that and take some agency to figure out what’s going on — that was really cool.”

Nayak took her first neuroscience course the next semester and

joined Kim’s lab soon after that. All of Nayak’s remaining research experiences while at Amherst were born out of her work in Kim’s lab.

Zinc, which the lab studies, is abundant in the brain, yet tightly regulated, Nayak told me. Nevertheless, its role in the brain hasn’t been studied by many researchers.

Nayak brings her particular interest — the impact of environment on the brain — to the Kim Lab’s work on zinc. These two pieces of the puzzle came together in a discussion between Kim and Nayak about a research paper Nayak had read. The paper pointed out similarities between how neurons align in the brain and the formation of galaxies.

(“It kind of makes us feel like we’re living in a simulation,” Nayak said.)

The moment was the impetus for Nayak’s interest in the overlap between neuroscience and outer space, which would eventually lead into her thesis work.

But first came an internship at NASA. Kim’s husband, a researcher at the space agency, was able to help Nayak secure a summer research position with a group studying how biological systems act differently in space.

Drawing on her work in Kim’s lab, Nayak specifically examined how zinc-regulating proteins function differently in space, and how this can disrupt the functioning of mitochondria, which are especially rich in zinc.

When the internship ended, Nayak’s research in the subject did not. It became a new subject area studied by Kim’s lab.

“[Nayak’s] also really unusual,”

Kim said, “in that a whole branch of my research has grown out of our work together.” (“Professor Kim and I are both brand-new to the space,” Nayak said, “pun kind of intended.”)

The work became the basis of Nayak’s thesis, which she presented at this year’s Three Minute Thesis Festival in a brief talk titled “Spaceflight and Aging: Is Zinc the Link?”

In the talk, Nayak emphasized the real-world significance of her work. “My thesis not only establishes zinc as a target that we can [use] to treat and protect astronaut health,” she said during the competition, “moreover, it shows us that the [relationship] between spaceflight and aging is not just phenotypic. Maybe there’s a mechanism that’s shared, with zinc as the link.”

This is not the end of this particular project for Nayak. In fact, she has worked over the past months to obtain rodent brain-tissue samples from NASA that have flown aboard the International Space Station. She expects them to be ready for processing this summer, which, in her words and mine, is “really cool.”

A Side Order of Coconuts

Despite her impressive research experiences, Nayak’s time at Amherst hasn’t been solely dedicated to her lab-work. Her vision is far too broad for that. She has also directed her indomitable efforts toward solving problems that other people experience.

One such project originated out of a phone call with her grandma, who lives in India. Nayak’s grandma told her that there hadn’t been enough water for use at the farm her family owns.

Nayak’s immediate response: “What can we do? How can we help?”

Her grandma, however, told her not to worry about it. They had contacted a “coconut dowser” who would solve the problem. As Nayak soon learned, a coconut dowser is someone you pay to walk around your land holding a coconut who’s supposed to locate underground water pools. Where the coconut rolls off their hands, there’s water.

Unfortunately, the spot that the

dowser identified, when dug into, didn’t contain any water.

But the next day, Nayak happened to attend a seminar from an organization called the Global Water Alliance (GWA), about predictively mapping underground water wells based on differences in elevation.

Nayak reached out, asking if the speaker could teach her the method so that she could help her grandma’s family. The spot predicted by the mapping technique was, it turns out, the same identified by the coconut dowser. The problem was that there was a deficit of groundwater in the entire village, not just the farm.

Not one to give up, Nayak initiated a project alongside the GWA to improve the village’s water systems. Employing a technique previously used by the GWA, they devised a plan to transition the village from relying solely on underground wells to using a cistern that collects rainwater.

Nayak made contacts with a nearby Indian university, whose senior students would actually implement the solution. “I really like the experience because I was able to build these connections,” Nayak said. “But also it helps people I care about have access to water.”

Upon hearing this story, and about Nayak’s research, I couldn’t help blurting out, “How do you possibly do all this stuff?” However, I quickly amended this to the much more answerable question, “What do you do for fun?”

Nayak assured me that, although she does spend a lot of time in the lab, she still makes room for her social life — with a little help from her friends. “If I find something exciting, I would spend hours and hours on it,” Nayak conceded. “But my friends are very good about being like, ‘OK, let’s go for dinner, let’s go have a dance party, let’s go play ‘Just Dance,’ let’s catch up.’”

It’s clear, too, that Nayak’s friends deeply value her in return. For one, Graciela Navas ’23 said that what sets Nayak apart is not only “how hard she works,” but also “how caring and sweet” she is, as well.

The Horizon

Certainly, Nayak has fulfilled her promise to “milk” the experience of being at Amherst. But in her senior year she had a realization. Between all of her work — from her research, to her side projects, to her academic course load, to her extracurriculars (which now included leading the Neuroscience Steering Committee) — Nayak knew that, at some point, she would have to take a step back.

“I want to have time with my friends, and if I prioritize [these things], I’m not going to be able to,” she said she realized. Although it has been a challenge, since then, Nayak has slowed down a little bit, and made time for herself in her final days at the college.

Now, looking beyond graduation, much awaits Nayak at the horizon.

Her immediate plan is to continue her thesis research over the next couple of years. Further down the line, although many people expect her to go to graduate school, Nayak says she’s more interested in being a communicator — perhaps a science-journalist — than solely a researcher.

She still wants to keep her side projects going, however.

One project she has in the works draws upon a particular course at Amherst, taught by Professor of Political Science Amrita Basu, whose research focuses on populism in India.

Talking with Basu helped, Nayak said, with “seeing my identity as a South Asian woman not as just something that I’ll figure out on my own, but something that you learn about in class. It was something I craved from that spring onward.” Nayak would go on to do research under Basu.

Now, upon graduation, she’s interested in returning to her home community, which is primarily South Asian, so she can emphasize that “being South Asian is something that is worth discussing in a classroom.”

Setting her future plans aside for a moment and reflecting on the past four years, Nayak had a crucial, yet simple, piece of advice: “Just go for it.”

Photo courtesy of Aditi Nayak ’23 In her work on the Amherst STEM Network, Nayak had the opportunity to interview science writer and ethicist Harriet Washington.

Improving Institutions Through Care

“She makes it seem easy to care about people,” said Georgina Omaboe ’24. “She makes it feel easy.” Omaboe was describing Maya Foster ’23, and her words are ones that I, and many others, wholeheartedly agree with.

Even before I began working on this profile, I’ve seen how much Foster cares about the Amherst community. I had interviewed her on several occasions as a reporter for The Student about the college’s anti-racism plan or her role on the Campus Safety Advisory Committee — endeavors to which she brings her characteristic passion and enthusiasm.

This time, I felt lucky to learn more about the genuine love and care that Omaboe talks about, love and care that have driven all of the significant work Foster has done over her four years at Amherst.

It is clear that Foster’s dedication to her community has not gone unnoticed. Her efforts to bring people together — particularly evident in her diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work on- and off-campus — have made her a cherished member of the Amherst community, and one who will be sorely missed.

Engagement Before Amherst

Foster’s childhood in Oakland, California was shaped by her close-knit family. She attend -

ed the same high school as her brother, Mercer, who was “wellloved” there. “Everyone knew him — I was always Mercer’s younger sister,” she said. “I think being compared to him so often would be really hard for a lot of kids, but for me was actually just really lovely because he’s just such a great person. I think it really inspired me to want to fill the shoes that he left for me.” For Foster, those shoes are “his dedication to making other people’s lives better,” a role she ever since strived to fulfill.

In the city of Oakland, which Foster described as a “very economically diverse place,” she believed “it was really really important to engage meaningfully with [it] as a community and as a city.”

In high school, one of the activities Foster was involved in was the school’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE). In this role, Foster brainstormed ways the school could best engage with the surrounding community, planned language trips, and connected seniors to gap-year programs. She ended up partaking in one of these gap year programs herself, living with a host family and working at a preschool in rural Ecuador for a year. Looking back now, she sees this work with the CCE as helpful for shaping her perspective and “frame of reference as a person.”

Thinking back on her ex -

perience at this predominantly white, private high school more broadly, Foster said, “I think I came to Amherst looking for something that I had been missing there, which was a sense of community. Not only Black community, but also just feeling like I was around people that knew me and understood me.”

Now, looking back at her four years and accomplishments at Amherst, Foster said, “I think everything that I’ve done here has been in search of that feeling, or to try and help other students cultivate that feeling, even after I’m gone.”

Getting Involved

Foster is deeply involved in the Amherst community, and has played an important role in many of the institutional changes the college has seen in her time here. But this wasn’t something she had entirely planned out from the beginning.

When she first arrived at Amherst, she did know that she wanted to be a psychology major, and that she wanted to continue dancing, as she has for most of her life. “Other than that, I was kind of just open to whatever fell in my lap,” she said. “Which happened serendipitously, many, many times.”

Talking with Foster and those who have known her at Amherst, however, reveals some of what’s behind that “serendipity” — her intention to build community,

and the knowledge that strong relationships are necessary to thrive.

“I’m super relationship-focused,” she said. “I love finding the connections between the things I’m interested in and the things that other people are interested in. And I think that has helped a lot.”

She recalled learning about how to be involved in campus life from the people she met early in her time at Amherst. One significant role model was her first-year community advisor, Jeremy Thomas ’21.

“He was always just very good about including me in stuff and making sure that I felt like I had space to do the things that I thought were interesting,” Foster said. “I would just be like, ‘I have an interest in this thing.’ And then Jeremy would tell me that this opportunity existed, or I would read it in the Daily Mammoth, or [something like that].”

A critical moment of involvement for Foster came, she said,

in Spring 2020, after three white members of the men’s lacrosse team verbally accosted a Black team member using a racial slur. In the wake of this hate incident, Foster, Thomas, and Joelle Crichlow ’22 worked to change a number of institutional policies regarding hate speech. Foster wrote the free speech clause of the institution-wide non-discrimination policy, and presented it for ratification at a faculty meeting.

Foster’s academic advisor, Professor of Psychology Matthew Schulkind, recalled the efforts of Foster and her collaborators at this faculty meeting.

“It’s a difficult topic to discuss and faculty meetings are a difficult environment for students,” he said. “But … she and her co-presenters crushed it. I’ve never seen a group of students communicate that effectively in a faculty meeting.”

This moment was perhaps the beginning of Foster’s now lengthy track record of

Serving as the student representative to many of the college’s DEI efforts, Maya Foster’s personal “brightness” has perhaps improved as many lives as her work to institute protections against identity-based harm.

— Caelen McQuilkin ’23E

Foster spoke on her dedication to improving other students’ lives at the college.

Photo courtesy of Maya Foster ’23

involvement in institutional change-making.

She has served as the student director of the college’s Office of Student Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (OSDEI), which she said is designed to “organize and standardize and monetize the [DEI] work that students were already doing” in different departments across the college.

She has also worked as a student representative on the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, improving identity-based harm processes and developing new equity frameworks for the college.

This past year, Foster has expanded her work in campus DEI to helping launch the new Office of Civil Rights, which will include Title IX as well as DEI.

She has served on a number of other student committees and task forces, including the Campus Safety Advisory Committee. In addition, she’s worked within the psychology department to overhaul and redesign its “Introduction to Psychology” course to include consideration of race and identity in all parts of the class.

“I would say [Foster] was part of a succession of … intergenerational students who’ve been working to make Amherst a better place since the Uprising,” said Professor of Psychology Allen Hart, who has worked with Foster on a number of DEI initiatives. “She really is carrying on the mantle of folks who have come before her.” He added that she has both “been great about

continuing the momentum that she inherited” and “passing it on … to those who come next.”

Reflecting back on what this institutional change-making work has meant to her, Foster described her ambivalence: “I have loved a lot of the work that I’ve done,” she said. “I have also felt at many times, the college has profited in some way … off of the work that students do. And I think I have been one of those students.”

Thinking back on the sum of all the work she has done at Amherst, though, “I can see that a lot of the stuff I’ve done has made an impact on the community at large,” she said. “And that, to me, makes it all worth it. Because if I had to lose a bunch of hours of my life so that oth -

er people could be protected in the classroom from hate speech, then I don’t care. I’m glad that I did that anyway.”

Connections and Relationships

Many of the people I talked with while getting to know Foster expressed admiration for her dedication to making the college a better, safer place for students.

“Maya Foster is an unparalleled student leader,” said Angie Tissi-Gassoway, chief student affairs officer and dean of students. “Her dedication and contributions to the work of DEI at the College has a tremendous impact on our community and will leave a lasting legacy as she embarks upon her next adventure.”

Given this level of involvement, it makes sense that Foster would “struggle with not having enough hours in the day.” But, she jokes, “somehow I still find time to be on TikTok for two hours every day.”

Many people I talked with noted Foster’s sense of humor and friendliness. These aspects of her personality demonstrate how her care and dedication run deep — they extend into her individual relationships, grounding the institutional-level work she has accomplished.

As Omaboe put it, “I couldn’t possibly tell her about something that I’m doing, or that I care about, or that I’m thinking about that she will at least check back in with me on, or take genuine interest, or even just Google [it].”

Laurie Frankl, director for civil rights and Title IX coordinator, reflected on Foster’s DEI work at the college. “One of the joys of working with Maya is that one minute you are engaged in the hard work before us, the next you are discussing the Superbowl halftime show — which I watched just so that I could keep up with the conversation — and from there, Maya will excitedly offer her researched-based

insight about pre-teens — I have two,” she said. “Maya is a bright light.”

Omaboe reflected on this brightness, too, recounting the time she got a concussion and Foster helped out by emailing all of her professors, letting them know that Omaboe would be unavailable while she healed. “All my professors, when I met with them after I recovered, were like, ‘You have an amazing friend in Maya Foster,’” she said. “I’ve never had more fun being concussed in my life, than hanging out with Maya in a dark room.”

Even knowing all the impactful work she did, Schulkind said “What I value[d] the most was the opportunity to get to know Maya as a person. Office hours were challenging. She had a lot of questions and they always made me think … I believe that there were semesters when we discussed every course in the catalog.”

Omaboe agreed that this sense of care is what sets Foster apart. “[Whether] things go well, or things go badly, she genuinely is feeling it with me,” Omaboe said.

But, in Foster’s opinion, she has gained as much as she has given in her time at Amherst. “I’ve found so much community in spaces like [the Black Student Union] and [Charles] Drew [House], which are obviously very Black spaces,” she said.

“I’m really proud that I’ve been in DASAC and on BSU e-board all four years. Those are two things that mean a lot to me.”

“Being in that community makes me really proud,” she added.

Some of what she has done, she said, “were also selfish endeavors where I wanted to feel like I had a sense of community. But I think everything that I’ve done with OSDEI and diversity at the Mead, and campus safety stuff — all of that stuff has been because I wanted community, and because I wanted other people to feel that too.”

Photo courtesy of Maya Foster ’23 Foster’s psychology thesis explored “how parents engage with their children’s strong positive emotions and how that impacts developmental outcomes.”

A Squash Star With an Eye for Architecture

At Amherst, where students often start their academic paths incredibly far from where they land, the likelihood of Daksha Pathak ’23, as a high-schooler, correctly predicting her eventual field of study seems especially low. It is a testament to her self-knowledge, determination, and the fortuitous timing of the introduction of studio classes in architecture (matching exactly with Pathak’s arrival!) that she is now graduating with a double major in math and architecture, with plans to enroll in the masters program in architecture at Parsons School of Design next year. Pathak is an accomplished student athlete, a thesis writer, and an ardent supporter of her friends. Most of all, however, she has a deep understanding of her own interests (“I feel like you can’t really say you’re in school if you’re not taking math,” she said) and a desire to bring her holistic approach to bear on architectural problems.

A lifetime athlete, Pathak credits squash as being essential to her development as a student as well as a person. As she started competing — and succeeding — in squash from such a young age, Pathak “just became a hard worker. It structured my life really nicely.” Also, it gave her a kind of “edge — because not everyone else was doing squash. So it was just nice to have something of my own,” she said. The tools of hard work and determination that it

gave her enabled her to pursue her academic interests with full assurance. As she said about her choice of major, “I have always loved math, art, and physics. And I was like, what combines all three things that I love the best?”

The answer, she assumed in high school, must be architecture — even though she never got to take architecture-related classes.

From Mumbai to Amherst

When Pathak moved to Mumbai from northern India as a child with prodigious arm strength, it was decided that she should play squash. By 2011, she was the national champion — but the road from the beginning to there was not a smooth one. “I felt like Jaden Smith in The Karate Kid, the way that I would train,” Pathak recalled. “I would literally wear ankle weights to school. My coach was crazy, but I loved him — honestly, he was the only man in India who ever was encouraging of me. He was tough, but you know it was all love.” Nevertheless, the culture of misogyny and competition that was prevalent in the sport in India made it difficult for Pathak to continue to enjoy playing squash, and when she moved to the U.S. and began thinking about rankings in preparation for college recruitment, the stress and competitiveness only increased. Throughout high school, balancing squash with a rigorous curriculum and the stress of college admissions

was “just a little tough, but I was able to power through … relatively well.”

Coming to Amherst’s squash team, then, has been a capstone to Pathak’s squash career. From winning national tournaments in India and the U.S. to competing in the U.S. Squash organization throughout high school, Pathak has had an accomplished, if grueling, career. At Amherst, however, “no one has been able to define … my relationship with the sport other than just me. For the past four years, I can say that I’ve only played this sport because I love it, and not because of any external pressures. And that has been the most freeing experience.” Coming back to squash now for what she calls the “right intentions and the right reasons,” playing with the same kind of love for the sport that enabled her to train so hard as a child in Mumbai, has made squash at Amherst fulfilling and enriching in ways that the sport wasn’t before coming here.

That fulfillment extends beyond the courts — Pathak is a captain of the team, and has relied on their camaraderie for all four years, from upperclassmen showing first-year squash players around campus to just spending time together with such like-minded people. The community, Pathak emphasized, is not something students are forced to participate in. Instead, “whenever you wanted to, you

could always fall back on me, fall back on these people.” Squash was finally a truly welcoming space, where people who bonded by working so hard together could support each other in various ways throughout their college experiences.

An Empowering Thesis

Pathak wishes for her future in architecture to center communities just as much as her life at Amherst has. As she said, “the type of projects I wish to take on would be ones that aren’t just for a user, but for the public and … the greater community.” While it’s true that architecture is perhaps most widely appreciated in the form of really cool houses, Pathak realized that she wanted to do more than “just residential stuff.” Her thesis, in that vein, “was a design proposal for a women’s shelter in India, in the city where I come from and my mom comes from.” The thesis was born out of a desire to take

on a really useful social project, one that requires participation from a community and that “takes into consideration the needs of wherever the site is.” It is in projects like this that Pathak finds her love for architecture, for it is in being “really engaged with the clients, [getting] to know what they need and offering my services in helping them in whatever way possible” that she feels “you can, like, make such a difference.” Architecture’s direct effect on people’s lives, Pathak posited, is the primary reason she loves it — it comes from her appreciation for making and doing, and her wonder at that process being “translated into a very real-life thing that affects people and like, benefits them, hopefully.”

Visiting Professor of Art and the History of Art Gretchen Rabinkin has no doubt that Daksha is capable of effecting real change. “Daksha just has this incredible energy that she brings to everything that she does. She

Daksha Pathak brings an acute sense of intentionality to everything she does — from her play on the squash courts to her architecture thesis.

— Cassidy Duncan ’25 and Dustin Copeland ’25

Architecture brings together Pathak’s drive to create things with artistic and social value and her love for math and physics.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

is one of the most energetic students that I’ve ever … had the joy and delight to work with,” said Rabinkin. “I can see her really like getting a movement around social issues. She brings such passion to it. She brings such thoughtfulness and grace. And she communicates her ideas really well, both in words and drawings, in ways that are, like beautiful and exciting, and I think will help to engage others within that.”

Pathak’s thesis originally came out of the news cycle during the pandemic. “I saw in the news that the number of domestic violence cases was rising during the pandemic … [which raised] this whole idea of like, you have these four walls that literally trap a person. So how can you manipulate that? Or, how can you change [the four walls] to instead empower and liberate?”

Looking into the future, which is sure to face crises both wider in scope and similar to the Covid pandemic, Pathak finds it essential to keep those questions an “ongoing investigation” for which her thesis work was a

starting point. Her thesis’ design proposal was therefore something that she says she would “wish to offer so that [domestic violence cases] don’t go up again.” As such, it needed to be in tune with the community that it was targeted for, which is that of Kumaoni women in Nainital, a city in the state of Uttarakhand — the city where Pathak and her mother both come from. Pathak chose the community of Kumaoni women not only because she belongs to that community, “but also because [the highest numbers of domestic abuse cases] came from that city, and because I had learned about this type of construction called Koti Banal, which is the vernacular architecture from this area.”

Koti Banal architecture alternates stone and wood layers to create structures without the use of rigid construction materials like nails or adhesives. As such, buildings built using the techniques of Koti Banal are inherently resistant by their flexibility to the kinds of disasters common in Uttarakhand, like earthquakes and, more recently, landslides. As

Pathak recalls, “finding that out was very exciting, that there are these structures that have been standing for thousands of years, and now people are trying to integrate [the architecture of those structures] into modern practices.” She added that seeing this new precedent forming in climate-conscious architecture that has its origins in where she comes from came with a sense of pride: “My people were able to figure this out, like thousands of years ago! And now it is finally becoming popular.”

Pathak’s thesis synthesized three main components — “the culture, the environment, and the health.” As she researched the vernacular architecture, she realized also that she could not “just look at the vernacular and, like, copy and paste, because while there are some empowering features to it, there are some cruel or tough memories associated with it for the women.” So a guiding question for her work was, “How do you use the vernacular? And how do you manipulate the vernacular to create more empowering spaces?” For the project,

Pathak answered those questions by picking features out from examples of buildings built in the vernacular of Koti Banal to integrate in the structure, as well as keeping the massing of a stone foundation and first floor with a more wooden structure on top.

For Pathak, the thesis was not simply an answer to an architectural problem. To complete it, she drew from her classes in art, design, and architecture as well as from learning about shelters in sexuality, women’s, and gender studies classes. It was a work that could only have been created holistically, with the intersecting considerations that Pathak has continually explored across her studies at Amherst.

Designing the Future

Indeed, going into the next phase of Pathak’s academic career — a masters degree in architecture from Parsons School of Design in New York City — she wants to make sure that she doesn’t “lose that side of me that tends to look at things holistically.” In order to maintain that at an institution that, compared to Amherst, is almost single-minded in its focus on design and architecture, Pathak said that “one way that I would be able to maintain [that mindset] would be to maintain the conversations that I have with my peers here. I feel like, because [a bunch of my friends will be moving to New York] and they are into so many different things, I’ll be able to maintain that. But also [I will be] looking for community like that at Amherst in New York, and wherever I go.”

That community isn’t invested in just one thing, but, as Pathak said, is “an amalgamation of different interests in different disciplines.” It would allow her to keep an open mind, to consider fields not necessarily directly related to her own, even as she pursues furthering her education in architecture. Amherst, Pathak says, “has already set a high bar on high quality people.” If she

can hope to find anyone after leaving this place, she hopes to find people like those who go here, who she can engage with and have fun both inside the classroom and outside. People here continually make Pathak’s life richer — it is her hope that she can find a community to do that throughout her life past Amherst.

As for advice to underclassmen, Pathak’s is simple and reflective. “It could have been very easy for me to not indulge in all these different things, had I not tried to take part in, like, my friends’ interests and things like that … I would tell underclassmen to try and use Amherst’s opportunities as much as possible — just do random things.” She continued, “Because I was taking part in so many different things, it was very easy to feel like, if you’re not working, then you’re not being productive. I felt it was very tough for me to accept the fact that I need to take time for myself.” But taking time for herself was essential to her experience at Amherst, and it often consisted of doing random things not inspired by schoolwork. For example, it could be “celebrating with my friends, or [seeing their] orchestra concerts.” It could also be seeing a Gad’s show, going to the Mead, or doing anything that makes you happy.

Perhaps more important still to Pathak would be taking a studio art course. Through drawing classes at Amherst, Pathak discovered figure drawing, which has become a big part of her work. The human form is “a mass, and it’s almost, like, perfect and solid. So my portfolio is just figure drawings, and then buildings.”

Above all else, it is certain that the opportunity offered at Amherst is vast, and that taking the fullest possible advantage of it has made Pathak’s four years here deeply unique. As she said about the place, “I’ll let you know if I can find any community like this outside.”

Photo courtesy of Daksha Pathak ’23

Besides her academic pursuits, Pathak is an accomplished squash player who has found new joy in the sport at Amherst.

A Colorful Practitioner of the Liberal Arts

Helen Feibes ’23 is the quintessential liberal-arts student. Her passions and interests spread across campus, weaving between different disciplines and student organizations.

She is a neuroscience major who has also written award-winning poetry. She has performed in theater and dance performances and also served as a Statistics and Data Science Fellow. She is active in many student organizations, just as likely to be heard on the airwaves of WAMH, Amherst’s radio station, as spotted in the halls of the Zü (Humphries House). It is this flexibility that makes Feibes unique: When you think you’ve figured out what she’s about, she expands her horizons and tries something new again.

At Amherst, she tried to foster joy not only in her academics, but in all aspects of her life, creating a wide-ranging campus presence. “I think I’ve finally figured out the ways in which I want to exist at this school, with the things I really care about and want to be a part of,” she said. Her impressive involvement in both academics and extracurriculars will certainly inform her time after Amherst.

Arriving at Amherst

Feibes grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, where she attended Lafayette High School. Here, she first became interested in neuroscience. In high school,

she was primarily interested in biology and psychology as independent subjects, but was only when someone pointed out that she could join those interests by studying neuroscience that she found her academic niche.

“I was 16, and I was like, ‘This is crazy. This is a game changer,’” she said. Amherst’s neuroscience program, the first undergraduate program in the country, was a major factor in Feibes’s college decision. She also knew she wanted to go to school in New England, and the open curriculum solidified her decision.

When she thinks of her first year, what stands out is the LEAP trip she took during orientation, “Daring Edge: Taking the LEAP.”

“It was bonding with, like, 11 other people in a way that could have been really, really artificial,” she said. “But just by virtue of the people I got stuck with … [It was] actually a really nice way to be introduced to a lot of people at the school.”

During her first semester, she took chemistry and math classes, but she also took “Logic” in the philosophy department, which she didn’t intend to take but greatly enjoyed. This set a precedent for her, as she would continue taking advantage of the open curriculum by exploring the humanities while still concentrating on STEM courses.

Feibes can’t recall much of

the following semester except getting sent home because of Covid. In an intro statistics course, “I remember the professor, for two weeks before we got sent home, was just like, ‘It’s gonna happen. We’re gonna get sent home.’ And he would just say it every time,” she recalled.

“It was so surreal when that happened.” Feibes finished the semester at home and completed a virtual Research Experience for Undergraduates at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. There, she began working on what would become an area of particular interest to her: computational neuroscience.

When she came back to campus in Fall 2020, all of her classes were online, except for one: “Lighting Design” in the Department of Theater and Dance. That was also a class that she didn’t intend to take but ended up being wonderful. There she met Christianna Mariano ’21, whose immersive performance-art thesis she would participate in the following semester. “I really wanted to be in that, and that required me to be back on campus. And so that’s probably at least half the reason I chose to come back during the spring,” she said.

This return to campus allowed Feibes to take a more active role in student life, at a time when many students were off-campus or less engaged in Amherst’s extracurriculars.

Cultivating a Community

After not joining clubs her first year, Feibes began finding communities where she felt comfortable and which let her have fun outside of her coursework. She joined WAMH in Fall 2020 when she started her show, “And She Was” (named after the Talking Heads hit), and joined the organization’s e-board that semester.

“I thought it was really nice to start during the semester when there was kind of no one doing it,” she said. “I was really nervous to do it.” Yet, Feibes continued with WAMH throughout the rest of her Amherst career, and during our conversation, she told me that she was preparing for her last ever WAMH show, curating a playlist throughout the semester to end her show on the best possible note.

During her sophomore spring, she danced in Mariano’s senior thesis, “Endogenous,”

which Feibes credited as one of the main reasons she returned to campus in spring. That was one of the few times she could connect face-to-face with people while in online classes, as she would eat breakfast with friends over FaceTime in their respective dorm rooms.

In her junior spring, she also moved into the Zü and became the house coordinator, the person responsible for the house’s food safety and budgeting — which required managing the 21 other people who also lived there. And despite not being a statistics or mathematics major, she also became a Statistics and Data Science Fellow, simply because she enjoyed it. Even with these added responsibilities, she made time for her creative endeavors.

At Amherst, many students find that their personal pursuits fall by the wayside for the sake of academics. Feibes enjoyed pho -

Her radio show is called “And She Was,” but Helen Feibes is anything but a has-been. Finding joy in everything from neuroscience to creative writing, Feibes is the personification of the liberal-arts ideal.

— Madeline Lawson ’25

Feibes recently completed her neuroscience thesis about color perception and won the Five College Poetry Prize.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

Senior Profile | Helen Feibes

tography and poetry throughout high school and managed to continue them during college, even with a heavy course load and multiple extracurricular responsibilities. She said that taking advantage of the creative opportunities at Amherst, such as taking poetry classes, was the main way she was able to keep up with her interests.

Although she does less photography these days, she has taken photos for the college’s

student fashion magazine, Bolt. Sometimes, still, she captures moments from everyday life. As her friend Henry Bassett ’23 recalled, “[We] have a lot of really great photos from all those times, even the dark Covid ages, to still find us laughing and frolicking around the [Book and Plow] farm, so that’s very special. That’s very special.”

Feibes and Bassett became friends during their first year, when they both lived in Ap -

pleton Hall. He emphasized Feibes’s passion and care for her activities, saying that she loves to share her “very specific and very distinctive” music tastes with her friends.

Bassett also noted her commitment to friendship, even during Covid, and after she moved farther from the central part of campus to the Zü. “She is very intentional about her relationships,” Bassett said, “and she just likes to talk to people and

because she always has someone that she was like, I really want to get to know them better, and that’s a priority for her.”

Feibes also continued writing poetry at Amherst. She took “Poetry II” in her freshman spring, which she was nervous about, seeing as she hadn’t taken “Poetry I.” “Getting to write poetry was so nice,” she said. “That class was huge for me.”

Last fall, she and a friend took the “Creative Thesis Workshop” with Assistant Professor of English Thirii Myint, despite not writing creative theses. Instead, it served as a place for Feibes to pursue her interest in creative writing while working on her thesis.

Her efforts in the “Creative Thesis Workshop” paid off — she won the Five College Prose and Poetry Prize last April, one of two winners chosen from Amherst. She showcased her journey writing during college by reading her work alongside 11 other writers chosen from the Five Colleges and celebrating the work she had put into her craft.

Thesis and After Amherst

The summer after her junior year, Feibes began working on her thesis in neuroscience with Assistant Professor of Psychology Michael A. Cohen, which would eventually be titled “The Outer Limits of Color Awareness and What People Think They Are.”

Her thesis concerned the domain of color and peripheral vision. “[It’s about] how much color we [are] seeing in the world, and also the aspect of what people actually believe about their visual awareness and perception.” She worked closely with both her advisor and another neuroscience thesis student, Skyler Sung ’23, who referred to the pair as “accountabili-buddies.”

She described the thesis experience as a great opportunity to expand her skills and credits it for inspiring her

next steps after Amherst. She will be working at the National Institutes of Health’s Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) program for the next two years, continuing her research with visual and color perception. Once she finishes her IRTA program, she will go to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in neuroscience.

Before all this — immediately after graduation — Feibes wants to travel, although she isn’t sure where. “I don’t know yet, but somewhere fun, that’s for sure.” She looks forward to exploring the world outside of the Amherst bubble and will certainly continue to find avenues to express herself creatively outside of her career.

She advised current Amherst students not to take their academics too seriously, and to enjoy all of the extracurricular and community-building opportunities on campus. “It’s really important, I think, to have communities you’re a part of and do things that you really love to do that are outside of, like, your academics,” she said. “Because I think it’s really easy to get into the mindset of, ‘I have to be perfect at everything, and I should be working really late all the time.’”

Finding your community, Feibes said, is a vital part of the Amherst experience, adding that the WAMH studio proved a fantastic place to spend time.

She also added that, despite Amherst’s abundant resources and activities, getting off campus is incredibly valuable. “That could include going to local music shows, going swimming, going to museums, etc,” she said. “Getting out of the Amherst bubble has always helped me clear my head and balance work and fun!”

Her time at Amherst is defined not only by her dedication to neuroscience but also by her curiosity for learning and the ways she has found joy within the campus community.

Photo courtesy of Helen Feibes ’23 Feibes began her radio show, “And She Was,” her sophomore fall and joined the WAMH e-board that same semester.

A Devoted Teammate and Community-builder

I spoke to Kelechi Eziri ’23 on one of the spring’s first truly hot days. We sat on the patio of the Science Center, occupying one of the only tables on a day when campus felt drowsy, trudging to the end of finals through the bright, noontime sun.

Everything was edging up on summer, and, waving at friends passing by every few minutes, Eziri had an air of composure. As told me about his past four, “unpredictable,” years at the college, I got the sense that Eziri had made peace with his upcoming graduation.

Of course, that is not to say he won’t miss Amherst: With a track record of community-building, athletic achievement, and leadership as long and impactful as Eziri’s, it would be nigh-impossible.

Between his mentorship of younger teammates on track and field, his effort to create institutional power for athletes of color, and his thesis research into Black solidarity at Amherst, Eziri has truly given all of himself to the campus — and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Jared Loggins, Eziri’s four-time instructor and a professor of Black studies, praised the resonances between Eziri’s politics and his community-oriented ethic in a note to me: “[Kelechi’s] political commitments are clear, reasoned, and ethical … He clearly loves people and ideas, and beautifully draws people into his orbit.”

At Amherst, Eziri has interrogated what intra-racial solidarity means. As he prepares for a masters’ program in public administration

(and then a psychology doctorate), this experience will continually inform him in his effort to strengthen Black communities.

Forging a Path

Eziri attended Providence Day School in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was “predominantly white, and predominantly conservative, even though they tried to brand differently,” he said, chuckling. “I definitely felt somewhat distant from a lot of my other classmates, mostly just due to my circumstances.”

While his peers were within walking distance of the school, Eziri told me about the 30-mile trek he would complete each morning: “My dad would drive us 45 minutes to a bus stop behind this Denny’s … and then we’d do, like, another hour to school.” Later, Eziri started catching rides with a PE teacher, before his older sister got her license.

Eziri grew up in a first-generation Nigerian immigrant family. This, combined with the strong Nigerian community in Charlotte, provided him with a sense of place that he would later seek to recreate by joining (and leading) Amherst’s African and Caribbean Students Union.

At school, Eziri told me his teachers occupied a nurturing role.

Three years before Eziri got recruited by Amherst track and field, it was Carol Lawrence, his computer science teacher and Providence track and field coach, that got him to commit to running. “She kind of took me under her wing … [and] honed in that track was the thing for me,” Eziri

reflected.

Originally only dabbling in 100- and 200-meter runs (and the occasional long jump), Lawrence pushed Eziri to try the triple jump. “She was like, ‘With legs as long as yours, you’ve gotta do triple!’” Eziri laughed.

Just as Lawrence predicted, Eziri excelled, and by senior year, recruitment calls started coming in.

A liberal arts school, much less a niche college in rural Massachusetts, wasn’t initially on Eziri’s radar. But, serendipitously, Lawrence had a connection with one of the coaches that was expressing interest in Eziri — Amherst’s own Head Track and Field Coach Steve Rubin. “[Lawrence] said, ‘I think he would be good for you, he specializes in triple jump … he’s gonna take care of you over there,’” Eziri recalled.

So Eziri visited, committed, and arrived, planning to pursue the pre-med track — which he did for almost three years. Coming from a long line of doctors, Eziri told me it was “the implicit assumption that I would go into medicine … My dad kind of wanted me to take over his private practice.”

Hearing how he moved through three full years of STEM classes — and remembering when I consulted his Linkedin before the interview how it was stacked full of hospital and medical research internships — I was stunned when Eziri told me he had switched away from medicine only last year. “I dropped pre-med … actually with two credits left,” he said.

I would soon learn that the com-

posure I sensed when we first sat down wasn’t just skin-deep. Eziri’s late departure from his pre-med plans exemplifies the introspective work — and risk-taking — he’s done at Amherst, work that has prepared him to go into the real world with self-assured authenticity.

An “Explosive” Energy

He may have been guided to Amherst by a CS teacher and a recruitment call, but Eziri’s four years here were decisively self-determined. Paradoxically, however, you get the best sense of this when Eziri explains the more “unpredictable” developments, like his switch away from pre-med — or the fact that, right at the start of his final track season, he broke his foot.

“At the beginning of this year, I broke my foot, like, three meets into the indoor season,” Eziri stated simply. Before the injury, Eziri’s performances were shaping up to be a triumphant end to his athletic career, including All-Region marks in

both the triple and long jumps. The injury, remarkably, didn’t stop his momentum, just changed its course.

“I did a lot of really cool things [on track],” Eziri said, “but … the things that stick out in my mind are the things that other people did, or that I helped other people do.”

When some staff rearrangements left gaps in the coaching lineup for jumpers, Eziri stepped up. “There’s a certain amount of energy you need to be an effective coach … I think because of the fact that I was so invested in this program at this school, I was able to bring that energy.”

Eziri specifically mentioned jumper Adrian Friedman ’24, “who I love to highlight whenever I can, because he’s had this absolutely tremendous year,” he said proudly, adding that Friedman had improved his long jump PR by a foot and a half.

Teammate Jack Trent ’23 told me that Eziri’s adaptation to his injury exemplified the energy and strength he brought to the lineup.

Anchored in the “familial” nature of the track and field team, Kelechi Eziri built power among student-athletes of color, linking his Black studies and psychology coursework with his leadership ethic.

— Sam Spratford ’24

Eziri served as president of the Coalition of Amherst College Student-Athletes of Color during his senior year, while doing ethnographic research on the different perceptions of “Blackness” on campus.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

“Kelechi essentially broke his foot, yet still showed up to basically every meet, team meeting, or event we had with the team,” Trent said, “It’s been incredibly impressive to watch him lead from the sidelines as well, because it is so obvious that a lot of the people on the team gravitate towards him whether he is competing or not because of his level-headedness.”

Trent also jumped at the opportunity to laud Eziri’s “explosiveness” as an athlete.

“He is just so powerful that it’s fun to watch him practice because it almost doesn’t make sense how he is doing what he does,” Trent said, adding, “his work ethic is tremendous. It feels like he basically can’t get through the day if he doesn’t get a workout in — he really loves it that much.”

Equal parts spirited and steadfast, Eziri has also been an indispensable leader off-track. His participation in a 2021 walkout protesting the “pay-to-play” model of Amherst athletics springboarded him into an impactful organizing stint with Coalition of Amherest College Athletes of Color (CACSAC).

Eziri said this was a “really big moment” for CACSAC — it was a material victory, insofar as the athletics departments now funds all personal equipment (from spikes, to jackets), but it was also a turning point in CACSAC’s power vis-a-vis the administration.

“It showed [everyone] that not only are we an affinity group, somewhere where student athletes of color can relate … we also have a certain power,” Eziri reflected. “I think there’s a certain apprehension [now] about saying ‘no’ to CACSAC on things, and I think a lot of that can be attributed to the walkout.”

In the past year, Eziri served as president of CACSAC, and simultaneously channeled more of his academic attention into Black studies. Building on the foundation that the walkout laid, Eziri now had the chance to clarify the purpose, and the limits, of his activism.

Challenging Institutions, Building Solidarity

Eziri is graduating as a Black studies and psychology double major. He attributes much of his switch away from pre-med — and

to a course of study that roots his love for medicine in sociology — to Professor of Black Studies Olufemi Vaughan’s “Introduction to Black Studies.”

“He asked me to come to office hours … just because we’re both Nigerian so he wanted to learn about me,” Eziri said, adding that a professor had never wanted to get to know him in that way before. “He’s a very passionate speaker, and he was like ‘I’m not going to tell you you have to become a Black Studies major… but you simply must become a Black studies major.’”

This, combined with Professor of Black Studies Jared Loggins’ “Critical Debates in Black Studies,” sold Eziri on the major. He also took note of the resonances between the course material and his life on campus.

Between Eziri’s sophomore and junior years, he played a major role in helping the athletic department create a DEI structure. As a member of the CACSAC’s e-board, Eziri drafted and created a DEI representative position to be instituted on every athletic team; then, CACSAC wrote an application, conducted interviews, and “ran all of the athletic department programming for the entire year until the athletic department, like, hired a paid position,” Eziri explained, with a hint of derision.

If Eziri was already skeptical toward institutional DEI work, his Black studies courses lent perspective to his critical instinct. “Throughout most of history, Black struggles have just been sabotaged by various institutions,” Eziri said. “It’s interesting going to class … hearing about it, and then going into a meeting with the AD [athletic director] or the associate AD … and talking to them, and actually getting nowhere.”

But, as I had learned by now, Eziri is nothing if not level-headed. Despite the administration’s constant bureaucratic stalling (“They’ll find a lot of ways to beat around the bush,” Eziri remarked) and the athletic department’s too-frequent apathy toward the new requirements, Eziri knows he did an “objective good.”

Sporting this healthy cynicism, and “for [his] own sanity,” Eziri redi-

rected energy to community building within CACSAC when he was president during his senior year. “I realized that … where I would best serve our community would just be by utilizing the resources of the institution by doing things for the group,” Eziri said.

By holding events and expanding networking resources “on the dime of the athletic department,” Eziri bypassed institutional resistance to racial-economic equity to strengthen his community from the ground up.

That Eziri wrote his thesis on Black solidarity at Amherst exemplifies his attention to the crossovers between his scholarship and lived experiences. He used ethnographic methods to interrogate “how Black community is influenced by ethnicity [and nationality differences] within Black students,” hoping to unpack the disproportionate “scrutiny” that Black communities face for intra-group divisions.

Eziri focused on interviewing members of different affinity groups to grasp differences in intersectional understandings of “Blackness,” and to destabilize the assumption of “Black essentialism.”

“I get kind of nervous explaining my thesis at times … some people are like, ‘Oh, you’re trying to say there’s nothing within the Black identity that’s worth collectivizing over…’ I don’t think that’s the case at all,” Eziri told me.

Rather, he hopes to emphasize that the shared experience of oppression at a PWI is a significant point of community, while disrupting people’s instinct to label intra-racial stratification — along class, gender, or national lines — as a “lack.”

Chiakh Thiam, Eziri’s thesis advisor and professor of Black studies, praised Eziri not only for his strong analytical skills, but noted his “passion for social justice and engagement with Black experience.”

Through his CACSAC work and thesis research, Eziri has furnished an actionable link between his scholarship and everyday practice. The maturity of his worldview and personal ethic is perhaps best expressed by Thiam’s turn of phrase: “Kelechi is the type of student that many teach-

ers dream of having.”

Pushing Ahead

When I asked Eziri to sum up his time at Amherst, he paused, and then told me the first word that came to mind: “difficult.”

This honesty (and the grace with which he answered my admittedly impossible question) affirms Eziri’s integrity and my initial intuition — that Eziri has not shied away from processing, to use his words, all of the “ups and downs.”

Eziri is still choosing between Villanova and Howard University for his masters in public administration (though he’s leaning toward the former: “My baby sister runs track at UPenn, so there is extra incentive to go to Philly,” he told me).

And, for all the “unpredictability” of his time here, there may have been some serendipity after all: Eziri will be running track in grad school thanks to leftover eligibility, a consequence of the Covid shutdowns.

After, Eziri plans to pursue a doctorate in psychology, because of a gap he’s noticed in Black-oriented mental healthcare. “It’s really hard going to therapy with somebody who isn’t Black,” he said, “mainly because there’s a lot of baseline things you have to explain.”

“When you have a Black therapist that can really conceptualize your experience … I think that goes a long way to distributing adequate counseling to individuals,” Eziri explained.

His interest in working within Black populations derives from some of the same beliefs that guided his leadership of CACSAC — that community-building is an actionable, indispensable step in the struggle for equity.

Loggins wrote to me that his favorite “non-scholarly KC moment” involved “witnessing him very, very patiently teach one of his friends how to drive”: “To his great credit, no one was harmed in the process,” he added.

If I needed any more convincing that Eziri possessed the care, dedication, and prudence needed to better lives and strengthen communities, this would have done the trick.

Photo courtesy of Kelechi Eziri ’23 Eziri achieved all-regional recognition for triple jump. When he broke his foot during his senior season, he redirected his energy to a coaching role.

Tenacious & Poised To Confront Healthcare Policy

Jack of all trades — master of every single one. That’s the conclusion I’ve reached about Maira Owais ’23 after having known her for two years, interviewing her for this profile, and speaking with those close to her. From her time serving as an Association of Amherst Students senator, to her thesis on women’s autonomy in healthcare, to her work as a leader of the Muslim and South Asian affinity groups on campus, I’ve yet to witness Maira accept anything less than excellence from herself.

I’m not the only one who has this impression. “She lives completely,” said her friend Ankit Sayed ’24. “The things she does, they’re all done well: everything from the way she dresses to her academics. That completeness is something that I see as the ideal of how one should live.”

But you wouldn’t find out about her many achievements and accolades from talking to her. Maira is one of the most humble people I’ve met at Amherst — it’s this combination of talent, indefatigable grit, and humility that has made her a true role model.

“Sometimes I wonder how someone can be so put-together,” admitted Sayed. After spending several hours these past weeks learning about Owais, I have the same question.

From Karachi to Central Jersey Owais’ family moved to New

Jersey from Karachi, Pakistan, just after her 11th birthday. Karachi was “the best place to grow up for a kid,” she told me.

When her parents and adult sister, who was in dental school at the time, realized that they wouldn’t find the job opportunities they wanted in Pakistan, they had to make the choice to leave the relative comfort of their settled life for what would be a demanding and laborious immigrant experience. But Owais’ parents were older and more established in their paths, so the responsibility of truly settling down in America would lie with Owais and her siblings. “They were like, ‘We’re doing it for you guys. It’s not our turn to do anything,’” explained Owais.

Of course, Owais was still very much in “kid mode” when her family arrived in America.

“Everyone in Pakistan would ask me, ‘What are you most excited to do in the U.S.?’ I was like, ‘I’m going to go to Times Square.’”

That’s exactly what she did: One of her first photographs in America is of her 11-year-old self posed with a Smurf in one of New York City’s most iconic areas. Then, soon after her family arrived in New Jersey, they went to visit Owais’ khala (maternal aunt) in Florida — and so her second tourist stop in America was Disneyland.

The reality of American life set in soon enough, though. Being much younger than her sis-

ter and brother, Owais found it easier to integrate into her new school. But even for her, life in this unfamiliar, predominantly-white, ultra-conservative town wasn’t all smooth sailing.

She remembers introducing herself to her class on her first day of school: “I was like, ‘Hi, I’m Maira. I’m from Pakistan.’ They were like, ‘Hi, terrorist.’”

She also recalls a school administrator insisting that she would need to be moved back several grade levels, assuming her proficiency in English would be insufficient to maintain her current grade level. (Her mother did not allow this. As I came to realize during our conversation, Owais’ mother has never backed down from a challenge when it comes to her daughter’s education.)

Owais doesn’t recall all of this with any apparent resentment. These early experiences were not traumatic, she says, because she was able to make her own way and “make friends with very random groups of people.”

An Inner-White-Girl-American-Suburbia Dream

Amherst was not seriously on Owais’ radar until very late in the college application process. As a precursor to the Questbridge program, Owais was assigned a tele-mentor during her junior year in high school. Her tele-mentor happened to be a student at Amherst, but Owais actually wrote the college off at

the time. About two weeks before she had to rank her college choices, Owais came to Massachusetts with her mother and sister to tour colleges, making a stop at Amherst.

“It was this rainy day — it was awful,” she recalled. “But then at some point, I was walking around, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this place is so cute.’ And someone was having a little picnic behind J-Chap. And it was like all my inner-white-girl, American, suburbia dreams.”

“I fell in love,” admitted Owais. “So I canceled my Williams tour.”

When it came to ranking schools for Questbridge, Owais’ mother insisted that she put all of the Ivy League colleges before Amherst. (“I still have a brown mom,” Owais laughed.) But at the last minute, Owais switched around her rankings so that Amherst was first without telling her mother. “I still don’t think she knows this,” said Owais.

When Owais first came to

Amherst, she distanced herself from her South Asian, Muslim, and low-income identities. While these parts of her were difficult to escape at home, Owais explained that at Amherst, it was easy for her to “pretend that the Questbridge, low-income-student thing had never happened.” She describes her first year at college as a period of assimilation, suppressing these identities in order to fit the mold of what she believed an ideal Amherst student ought to be.

Being forced to go home when campus shut down in March 2020 was a turning point for Owais in this regard. Reminded of her pre-Amherst experiences, she returned to campus with a renewed sense of self and a resolve to reconnect with her identities.

“I think that was a good growth experience freshman year,” reflected Owais. She added, “Now all my time is spent with people from [the Muslim Students Association] and [the South Asian Students Associa-

Known by peers for her excellence and composure, Owais is leaving Amherst having integrated a solid sense of identity — from her long-time love of the health sciences and a newfound interest in economics, to her roots as a Pakistani immigrant.

— Noor Rahman ’25

Owais solidified her passion for health economics after spending a summer at Harvard’s Health Systems Innovation Lab.

Photo courtesy of Claire Beougher ’26

tion.]” Owais has served on the e-boards of both organizations.

The Muslim Students Association, in particular, has helped her connect with her faith differently than she had as a child. “I went to the typical Sunday school at the masjid for eight years, and there were some pretty awful people,” said Owais. Meeting “the eclectic group of Muslims on campus” allowed Owais to separate her religion from the people and connect with parts of Islam she would not have seen otherwise.

“Are You Sure You’re Not Going to Med School?”

Owais knew from a young age that she was interested in the health sciences. Her taya abu (paternal uncle) is an ear, nose, and throat doctor and had told her when she was five years old that she would make a good cardiothoracic surgeon. Of course,

at such a young age, Owais did not really understand what this meant, but she “just kind of stuck to it.”

“I’m a very stubborn person,” she said. “If I say I’m going to do something, then I’m going to do it.”

While Owais never felt parental pressure to go into medicine per se, once her parents realized that she was interested in the field, they pushed her toward it to help her achieve her goals. Owais attended a magnet school in New Jersey that specializes in health science. “Going into college, I thought I was pre-med for sure,” she said.

Her interests began to shift when she was introduced to the field of economics, around the time Amherst first shut down due to the pandemic. Research with Professor of Economics Jessica Reyes on the effects of lead expo-

sure piqued her interest. She continued to work with Reyes during the summer after her first year, researching the effects of Covid on American healthcare systems.

Entering her sophomore year, Owais continued with her biology major with the new addition of an economics major instead of the pre-med track. She admitted that it was difficult to tell her mother that she no longer planned on becoming a doctor; even now, said Owais, her mother still asks her on occasion if she is sure that she doesn’t want to go to medical school.

In addition to her research with Reyes, Owais’ biology research with Jill Miller and Ethan Clotfelter has broadened her horizons beyond the health sciences. Owais developed a close personal relationship with Professor Miller over the past four years. “I took my first bio class

with her, and now I’m taking my last bio class with her as well — kind of a full-circle moment,” Owais said, describing Miller as “the most supportive person.”

Her research with Clotfelter was on the effect of climate change on bird migration patterns. Owais and her father share a deep affection for birds, and so field research that required her to take birds’ measurements was a welcome opportunity to play with the birds as well.

At this point in the interview, Owais began to tell me about some of her favorite species of birds that she had seen around campus. She showed me a video of her family’s 42-year-old African Grey parrot, named Mitu. Laughing, she recalled childhood Qur’an lessons in Pakistan. Her tutor would come to her house, and, while she would struggle and cry while reading the Arabic, Mitu would memorize entire pages at a time and recite them. “I would get so mad,” said Owais. She affectionately joked, “I hated that bird.”

Owais also spent the summer of 2021 working for Harvard’s Health Systems Innovation Lab, an experience which solidified her interest in health policy. One of the projects she worked on focused on diabetes incidence and care across different countries. The other, which was “the coolest thing” in Owais’ view, required her to help interview the ministers of health of different countries to put together a publication about global healthcare infrastructure. “Sometimes I’d wake up to an email that would say ‘Here’s a meeting with the health minister of Sudan,’ or something.”

“There was one person on the team who was a health economist. I was like, ‘Yep. That’s what I want to do,” said Owais.

She was able to pursue her interest in health economics with her thesis, which evaluated the impact of a Pakistani health insurance program on women’s autonomy in healthcare.

Saying Goodbye, Looking Forward

“I think it’s a good time to leave [Amherst],” said Owais. “I feel like when you’re in a place for too long, you start to hate it. I don’t think I’ve reached that point yet.” Nevertheless, she admitted that there are a lot of people who she is going to miss.

“I’m going to miss having a built-in community,” she reflected. “Living in such close proximity to everyone you’re friends with is just so easy. Everyone is always there with you. I’m going to miss that.”

After graduating, Owais will be a consultant at Clarion, a healthcare consulting firm. Clarion functions as the business management team for any pharmaceutical and biomedical companies that focus primarily on research and development. Her work will be a mix of data analysis and interviews with physicians and patients.

“It’s a good bio and econ mix,” said Owais, “but I’ve also never done it. A lot of people who do consulting have done internships in consulting, but I’m kind of going into it without experience. I honestly don’t know what it’ll be like. But I’ve talked to a lot of people [at Clarion], and I’m excited.”

After working at Clarion for two years, Owais hopes to go to graduate school. “I really, really liked doing my thesis,” she said. Over the next two years, she will decide whether she wants to pursue a degree in health economics or a joint law degree and masters in public health. Either way, her long-term goal is to work in health-care policy.

Whatever this choice might end up being, Owais’ loved ones have confidence that it will change the world. One of Owais’ friends, Phillip Zhou ’24, wrote in a statement to The Student, “I have zero doubt she will make the world a better place and help a lot of people live better, happier lives.”

Photo courtesy of Maira Owais ’23 Owais conducted research in both the economics and biology departments, before doing a health economics thesis on women’s autonomy within a Pakistani healthcare program.

A Reporter’s Eye, a Teacher’s Heart

When I sat down with Yee-Lynn Lee ’23 — my mentor and friend, as well as the former editor-in-chief of The Amherst Student — for this profile, she spoke about her experience interviewing her predecessors at the paper, Ryan Yu ’22 and Becca Picciotto ’22, for their Commencement profiles last year. In total, she spoke to the two of them for almost 15 hours on the record, and she mentioned that Ryan even assigned her extra reading materials. I assumed this to indicate that our interview would surely last a more typical length, and I would most certainly not be receiving any extra materials to review — but I was wrong. In addition to the nearly 12 hours we spoke on the record over the course of three days (not to mention the hours of conversation that were off the record), she sent me links to her college application essays, a research project she completed for a sociology class, and even to a song that captured a feeling that she had tried to describe but couldn’t quite articulate.

Despite the sheer length of the interview, it felt like anything but a chore. As her friend Ian Husler ’23 said, “[Lynn] can be very quiet at times, but when you actually get her to start talking, she has a lot of very interesting things to say.” The length of the interview was simply amusing to me, perhaps because Lynn is the last person one might expect to find talking about themself for 12 hours in such a condensed period of time. When I spoke to her professors, friends, and my fellow editors, the

words that most often came up to describe her were: quiet, thoughtful, introspective, and humble.

For a long time after I joined the editorial board in my first semester, Fall 2021, I, too, found myself wondering what was going on in Lynn’s head. Although I have now had many conversations with Lynn, my first true interactions with her didn’t take place until months after we had been sharing our every Tuesday night in the newsroom, steeped in the chaos of outputting the college’s news. Amid the scrambling of editors finalizing last-minute articles, shouts of yet another egregious layout error, and then-Editor-in-Chief Ryan’s sudden bursts of harmonica-playing, Lynn sat quietly at the same Mac desktop each week, piecing together the pages for the news section. I rarely heard her speak, except for the occasional comment during our weekly editorial meeting.

But when she stepped into the role of editor-in-chief the following spring, there was an almost instantaneous change in her demeanor. Though there was still the sense that there was more going on in her head than she let on, she was more vocal and open, willing to share her hopes and visions for the newsroom at large.

As she grew into the role, our friendship also began to blossom. I spent many a night with Lynn in the newsroom, having sleepovers on its collapsing couches when I didn’t want to make the drive back to my off-campus abode at 4 a.m. Once everyone had trickled out, we’d have

unhindered conversations, and I’d learn in snippets more about her and all the things she contemplates.

From Abstraction to the Real World

Lynn grew up in Eldersburg, Maryland, a small and predominantly white town, with her twin brother. She dabbled in a number of ventures in her early years, from dancing, to baking, to chess, to piano and violin, to constructing elaborate modular origami pieces using small folded triangles. She even attended a sports camp one year.

From kindergarten to her sophomore year of high school, Lynn also went to Hope Chinese School on Saturdays. Her mother was adamant that she and her brother learn Chinese: “She was like, ‘You can quit all the other activities, but not Chinese,’” Lynn said. Though Lynn can’t remember how she felt about Chinese school when she was younger, after Hope Chinese School’s curriculum ended in 10th grade, she kept learning the language on her own.

In high school, Lynn also stumbled into the world of competition math, and was immediately smitten. She came across brilliant.org, a website with a community forum where members would post challenging math problems, and learned about the American Mathematics Competitions series. “I liked solving problems, and I liked learning about proofs, and [doing competition math] showed me how math can be beautiful,” she said. In fact,

one of the college application essays she sent me described the beauty of problem-solving.

When it came time to apply for colleges, Lynn was unsure what she was looking for in a place. At the end of her junior year, one of her teachers mentioned how she had found her liberal arts education to be extremely rewarding. Later that day, Lynn looked into liberal arts colleges, and “it just seemed like a good fit … the small classroom environments, the close interactions with professors, the ability to explore a lot of different things.” Lynn ended up applying to many liberal arts colleges.

She was initially waitlisted at Amherst, and committed to Grinnell College, in Iowa. When she was later offered a spot off the waitlist, she was hesitant to switch her plans. However, at this point, Lynn was planning on studying math, and Amherst’s proximity to UMass Amherst’s graduate-level course offerings was therefore an undeniable advantage.

“When I came to Amherst, I think part of me really still wanted to be that sort of hard-core math person that does all the advanced classes and then goes on to do research or grad school,” Lynn said.

Lynn’s high school hadn’t offered multivariable calculus, but she

self-studied it before arriving at Amherst and ultimately took a 300-level math course, “Functions of a Complex Variable,” her first semester. It was also during this semester that she took “Introduction to Economics” with Associate Professor of Economics Jun Ishii, which she enjoyed so much it made her question her initial decision to pursue math. She would take courses with Ishii the next three semesters straight until his sabbatical.

Around the registration period for spring classes, Lynn recalled a particular “Introduction to Economics” class where they were talking about the pharmaceutical industry and why it’s difficult to get drug companies to develop vaccinations or medications for diseases in developing countries. “I remember just being struck by the way that economics could be used to understand pressing problems and things like that,” Lynn said.

She ended up dropping a math class to take “Advanced Macroeconomics” in addition to “Industrial Organization,” which she had already been planning to take. This marked a shift for Lynn toward “trying to do something more engaged with the real world.” While her pre-college mindset had been very achievement and goal oriented, she realized that she “didn’t want to be

Characteristically thoughtful and precise, Yee-Lynn Lee has made invaluable contributions to the Amherst community — by curating the college’s news, but also as a caring teacher and mentor to so many of her peers.

— Kei Lim ’25

Lynn joined The Student out of a determination to get more engaged with people, and ended up mentoring a generation of Amherst journalists.

Photo courtesy of Slate Taylor ’25

someone who just got good grades.”

Searching for a Place

At the start of her second semester, mirroring the shift towards more social engagement in her coursework, Lynn also began volunteering with Amherst Community Connections, which supports those experiencing houselessness in the Pioneer Valley. Her work with the organization, however, was soon cut short by the announcement that students would need to leave campus due to the pandemic. The email came immediately after Lynn had finished the Math Department’s Walker Prize Exam (which Lynn ended up winning) and while she was not initially very emotionally impacted by the announcement, as she didn’t feel a strong attachment to Amherst as a place, her emotions caught up to her once she was back in Maryland and the news of massive loss began to sink in.

Despite her robust intellectual life, Lynn had found it difficult to connect to people throughout her childhood and adolescence. Though she was fairly well known in her relatively small high school’s graduating class of less than 300 people, there was always a certain distance that she felt between her and her peers, exacerbated by the feeling of being one of the only people of color in a very white town. While during her first semester and a half at Amherst she had been making strides towards finding meaning and connection in her life, the pandemic put a pause to this. Lynn felt more isolated than ever.

She admits that part of this isolation was brought on by her own habits of spending much of her time studying alone and doing classwork. In an office hours meeting with Ishii during that semester, however, he told her “how there’s, like, a cost to spending all my time just alone and doing stuff for classes — emphasis on like the alone part.” Ishii would later repeat this sentiment in emails, emphasizing “that you often learn more with other people … and there’s a limit to how much you can do by yourself.”

Serendipitously enough, at the

end of her freshman year, she happened upon that year’s Commencement issue. She doesn’t know what prompted her to do so, but she read it front to back, noting the ways that year’s seniors had found purpose during their time at Amherst. As Lynn described in her exit letter in The Student, when she read profiles of previous editors-in-chief Shawna Chen ’20 and Emma Swislow ’20, which detailed their meaningful experiences on the newspaper, Lynn knew she wanted to get involved. She described it as an “immediate resolve,” and told me she even has a note on her phone that she wrote then that says, “I’m going to join The Student.”

Lynn was initially intimidated by joining the paper. “I thought it was really cool how people would write something and then it would just get published,” she recalled.”Because, in my mind, that was a really high bar of, like, it’s good enough to be published.”

However, soon after joining, Lynn fell into a rhythm. “I found that I really liked that it was so different from academic learning, and that it was hands-on and learning-by-doing,” Lynn said. “You improved by just going out and actually talking to people and writing stories.”

“I also really liked the aspect of it being students [just a year above me] sort of teaching and mentoring students,” she added.

Lynn smiled as she recalled seeing her first published article on the front page of the website. “I was like, ‘Wow. That’s me. I wrote that and people can read that,’” she said. “It felt like I was doing something real.”

Lonely at the Top

Around this time, Lynn was convinced that she wanted to triple major in math, economics, and political science. “There was still this part of me that was still holding onto the idea that I would excel academically,” she said. Part of her, too, was still holding onto the certainty of just picking a pathway and following it. It soon did become apparent, though, that how she was currently operating was mentally and emotionally unsustainable.

“I spent time just thinking, reflecting more on what kind of work I found meaningful, and what kind of person I actually wanted to be,” Lynn said. During her sophomore spring, Lynn started working for Amherst Community Connections again, joined DASAC, and got more involved with The Student (becoming a news editor). “Even though I didn’t feel a natural belonging, it was some aspect of, ‘I should still try to, like, make this community my own,’” she said. “I was determined to be more engaged and connect with more people.”

During this semester, Lynn spoke to Asian American students in the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings and wrote an article documenting their conversations and emotions. “I was able to do something with my grief and take action,’” she said. “[Writing the article] contributed to what I came to see as the value of The Student or journalism more broadly — the idea of building community through documenting the stories and experiences and perspectives of individual community members.”

When Lynn was first offered the editor-in-chief position for The Student by Becca and Ryan, she was hesitant to accept, even though she knew she wanted to. She feared she lacked formal training and was unsure she would be able to adequately perform the role. Now, though, it’s hard to imagine anyone else having been in that role during those two semesters, especially after she became the sole editor-in-chief.

As a lone editor-in-chief (the position typically comes in pairs), she had twice the responsibilities — unfortunately paired with a cohort of lots of new editors and a deficit in institutional memory after the pandemic’s virtual newsroom. I would often wake up from our newsroom sleepovers at 8 a.m. to see Lynn, freshly awoken from a power nap, exporting InDesign pages or finalizing the newsletter. Even more than her absurd sleep cycle, however, what struck me most about the way she functioned was the amount of care and dedication she brought to the paper. Throughout her ten-

ure as editor-in-chief, and even beyond in this past semester, one of her undertakings for The Student that I have personally found most meaningful is her work to both improve diversity of our staff and of our coverage, making the reporting we do more connected to and representative of our community. This included implementing a DEI section, doing a sociology research project on The Student’s makeup, and incorporating conversations about diversity into our staff meetings.

One of Lynn’s original motivations for joining The Student was “the image of a tight-knit group of students all investing themselves in a single project and supporting each other in the process,” as portrayed in Chen and Swislow’s profiles. Lynn’s impact on those of us who have spent our weeks with her in the newsroom is testament that we have certainly found community in her.

“When I first met Lynn, we used to stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights in the newsroom, talking until 3 a.m. sometimes. As a first-year, this meant a lot to me because I didn’t feel like I had a solid place in the Amherst community yet. Talking with Lynn on those nights made me feel a part of not only The Student but the Amherst community at large,” said Brianne LaBare ’25, managing design editor. “I feel like when everyone talks about Lynn, they love to mention how accomplished she is, and believe me, she is. But at the same time, she is a brilliant person who is an amazing friend and takes time to invest in people and the things she cares about.”

A Teacher at Heart

While Lynn is leaving Amherst as an economics major, she spent much of her time in her later semesters exploring a broad range of coursework in the psychology, Spanish, anthropology, English, and American studies departments. She even decided to take a Chinese class during her last semester — her first since her graduation from Hope Chinese School in 10th grade. This intellectual eclecticism has ex-

tended to her jobs over her college years, which have included teaching positions with the Art of Problem Solving, an organization that offers online courses in competition math and beyond, and as a TA for economics classes her sophomore, junior, and senior years. However, just two months ago, when I asked Lynn if she knew what her postgrad plans were, she had no idea. Between then and now, however, she has settled on a teaching position very far from home.

Apart from trips to visit family in Taiwan, where her parents immigrated from, Lynn has never really been anywhere but Eldersburg, Maryland, and Amherst, Massachusetts. But, at the end of July, Lynn will be leaving for Bangladesh, where she will be a teacher and fellow at the Asian University for Women. When I asked her how she landed on this opportunity, she said, “Well, I’ve enjoyed my experiences teaching and working with students … and I think it was a combination of wanting to do something I found meaningful and to see more of the world,” she said. “My Amherst experience has shown me how important it is to seek out different experiences and, in that way, inhabit different perspectives … to gain a better understanding of the world but also myself.”

“The thing I’m really excited about about her teaching is, I think she’s getting to a point where she’s decided that she wants to share what she knows with others,” Ishii said. “And I think she has a lot of things that she can share, not just because she’s very good at academic material … But I think the reason why I think she’ll be a great teacher is that she takes things seriously, she’s very deliberate about things. She doesn’t do things carelessly or thoughtlessly. And I think she’s incredibly thoughtful that way.”

Lynn departs Amherst with a newfound sense of exploration to pair with her characteristic thoughtfulness. She has been a teacher already, every night she has spent in the newsroom, and to students across campus. She’ll be a teacher to many more.

The Year in Sports

Field Hockey

Second-team All-Americans Beth Williamson ’23 and Muffie Mazambani ’24 led the Mammoths to a strong 12-4 record in the regular season. Signature wins included a 3-1 victory away at Williams and a victory over Bowdoin at home on Senior Day. Williamson and Mazambani made the conference first-team, while Kat Mason ’24 and Sara Nidus ’24 secured spots on the second team. The Mammoths finished the season ranked No. 5 in the nation, but ultimately fell to a last-second goal from Williams in the conference Semifinals. With a number of decorated players returning next year, the Mammoths are poised for another strong year.

Women’s Basketball

The women’s Basketball team finished the season with a 17-8 record, behind guards Kori Barach ’25 and Reeya Patel ’24. Barach averaged 14.3 points per game, including a career-high 32 against New Jersey City on December 4. Despite closing the season on a strong three wins against NESCAC opponents, the Mammoths fell in a conference-quarterfinal nailbiter.

With no seniors graduating, the squad is set to go again next winter.

Men’s Basketball

The Mammoths finished the season with a 10-14 record, 4-6 in the NESCAC. The season was highlighted by strong home wins against Wesleyan and Bowdoin, while the Mammoths lost by just a point away at Williams on January 18. Ryker Vance ’25 led the team in scoring, putting up 8.5 a game on top of 5.8 boards. The season was highlighted by the induction of David Hixon ’75, who coached the mammoths for 42 years and retired in 2020, into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. The first Division III coach to be inducted, he shares the honor with greats like Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Phil Jackson.

Women’s Cross Country

The women’s Cross Country team finished its season with a trip to the NCAA Championships, where six runners combined to finish twelfth overall in the nation. It was the team’s best showing since 2014. Senior Mary Kate McGranahan ’23 led the pack with a time of 22.21 in the

6k. For the season overall, McGranahan was named the conference’s most-outstanding runner, and a member of the NESCAC first team, while Allison Lounsbury ’26, Julia Schor ’25, Sophia Wolmer ’23 earned spots on the second team.

Men’s Cross Country

Theo Dassin ’24 led the Mammoths in 2022. He finished 18th at the regional championships, as the squad ran to a sixth-overall finish. He then came 100th at the NCAA Championships in East Lansing, Michigan. Other season highlights included a second-place finish at the Little Three Championships, behind the Williams Ephs. A strong showing, at Wesleyan’s Cardinal Invitational, in which four first-years placed in the top seven, ought to give the team hope for the future.

Volleyball

After a 13-6 regular season, the Mammoths fell just short of the NESCAC final. The team advanced to the tournament behind a strong 7-3 conference record and the play of senior hitter Caroline Tilton ’23 (All-NESCAC First Team) and junior setter Carly Cooper ’24 (second

team). The squad easily dispatched Bowdoin 3-0 in the NESCAC quarterfinal, before advancing to a meeting with the Wesleyan Cardinals in the semifinals. The Mammoths forced a fifth set, but ultimately fell short 12-15. The squad will graduate six seniors.

Football

The football team ended the season 2-7, with wins coming against Bowdoin on Senior Day (17-14) and away at Tufts (20-17). Five Mammoths earned All-NESCAC honors: linebacker Andy Skirzinski ’24 was selected to the first team, while Charles McKissick ’23, Tim Swope ’23, Nick Diprinzio ’23, and Finn McGilvray ’23 made the second team. Alexis Chavez-Salinas ’23 was additionally named to the all-sportsmanship team.

Women’s Golf

It was another strong year for Amherst women’s golf. The team repeated as NESCAC champions, and finished eighth at nationals. The team earned a chest-worth of accolades along the way.

Elizabeth Davis was named conference coach of the year.

Jessica Huang ’25 was named

NESCAC Player of the year, and she and Priya Bakshi ’24 earned first-team all-conference honors. Kaia Wu ’26 made the second team. With all four of the squad’s nationals competitors returning next year, another conference championship looks likely.

Men’s Golf

The men’s golf team took second place at the NESCAC championship, coming in behind Middlebury. Steven Chen ’25 led the way, finishing in a four-way tie for individual champion. Chen was also selected to the All-NESCAC first team, a year after he was the conference rookie of the year. The team has no departing seniors and is positioned to make another run at the conference title in 2024.

Women’s Ice Hockey

It was — literally — a banner year for the women’s hockey team. The team finished the season with a commanding 26-4-0 record and claimed the conference title without conceding a single goal in three games. This dominant streak continued through until the NCAA Division III national championship game, when Gustavaus Adolphus eked out a heart-

breaking 2-1 victory in triple overtime. The engine of the run was first-year goalkeeper Natalie Stott ’26, who was named a First-Team East All-American, NESCAC Rookie of the year, national rookie of the year, and All-NESCAC First Team. Junior forward Rylee Glennon ’25, was also named to the conference first team.

Men’s Ice Hockey

It was a strong year for the men’s hockey team. The Mammoths finished 16-6-4 on the season, ending the regular season with a convincing 5-0 win over the Middlebury Panthers. The team carried this momentum into a 3-2 overtime win against the Tufts Jumbos, but ultimately fell in overtime to the Williams Ephs in the semifinals. The year was highlighted by a First-Team All-NESCAC selection for sophomore forward Matt Toporowski ’25.

Women’s Lacrosse

The women’s lacrosse team ended their season in the NESCAC finals, suffering a narrow 11-9 defeat at Tufts. The team fought to a 9-5 regular season record behind Colleen Mooney ’23, who earned All-NESCAC First Team honors, and Clara Sosa, who was named a member of the second team. The highlight of the season was an 11-10 win over Williams at home on Senior Day.

Men’s Lacrosse

The men’s lacrosse team finished the season with a NCAA tournament berth, beating SUNY Geneseo in the second round before falling to Salisbury University in the third. Two Mammoths, attackers Tanyr Krummenacher ’23 and Ben Gross ’26, were named to the conference first team. The team has a bright future in Gross, who was selected as NESCAC Rookie of the Year.

Women’s Soccer

2022 was another dominant season for Amherst women’s soccer. The Mammoths lost just three games, and won the NESCAC championship without conceding a goal. The only blemish on the team’s record was a 1-2 loss to William Smith College in the NCAA Division III round of 16. Leading the way was forward Patience Kum ’25, who was named to the conference first team and the All-America second team.

Defenders Abby Schwartz ’26 and Charles Huang ’25 were also named to the conference second team.

Men’s Soccer

A year after reaching the NCAA Division III national championship game, the Mammoths captured a conference championship on back-to-back overtime wins over Middlebury and Connecticut College (who the Mammoths lost to in the

2021 national championship game). Leading the way was forward Ada Okorogheye ’24, who was named a first-team All-American.

Women’s Squash

The Mammoths finished out the season 14-6, and finished fifth in the CSA Kurtz Cup, an end-of-season tournament. The season was highlighted by a 8-1 win over Brown on Senior Day, and four athletes were named CSA Scholar Athletes.

Men’s Squash

The men’s squash team ended the season strong, capturing the CSA Summers Cup with wins over Colby, Hobart College, and St. Lawrence University. Four athletes were named CSA Scholar Athletes. The team will graduate six seniors.

Baseball

The baseball team ended the season 21-14-1, falling to Tufts in a first-round series of the NESCAC Tournament. The season’s high point was certainly a threegame sweep of Williams in April, the latest installment of college baseball’s oldest rivalry. Three Mammoths were named to the All-NESCAC First Team: Luke Padian ’24, Ryan McIntyre ’25, and Jack Sampedro ’25.

Women’s Swimming and Diving

The women’s swim and

dive team was 6-2 in dual meets on the season. The team’s biggest success came on the diving board, where Sydney Bluestein ’25 captured the national championship on the one-meter board. Her teammates Ali Lacroix ’25 and Megan Lee ’25 earned All-American honors in the 200-yard breaststroke and the 1650 free, respectively. The team finished third at the NESCAC championships.

Men’s Swimming and Diving

The women’s swim team swam to third place at the NESCAC championships, behind a second-place finish by Gabriele Lunardi ’25 in the 1650 free and a third-place in the 200 breaststroke from Tor Metelmann ’25, both earning All-NESCAC honors. At the end of the season, head coach Nick Nichols, who was three times named the NCAA Division III Women’s Coach of the Year, announced his retirement.

Women’s Tennis

The women’s tennis team finished the season with a 14-5 record, falling in the NESCAC semifinals and the NCAA Division III quarterfinals. The team earned 5-4 wins over Williams and Tufts, finishing the season ranked No. 8 in the nation. Senior Calista Sha ’23 was named to the NESCAC All-Sportsmanship team.

Men’s Tennis

The men’s tennis team went 10-7 on the season, and fell in the first round of the NESCAC championship to Williams. The Mammoths were 5-5 in conference play. Senior Zach Ostrow ’23 was named to the NESCAC All-Sportsmanship team.

Women’s Track and Field

The women’s track and field team sent three athletes to the NCAA Division III National Championship. Eliza Cardwell ’25 qualified in the the 100- and 400-meter hurdles, McGranahan qualified in the steeplechase, and Carolina Andrade ’24 earned her way in the Javelin. The team took fourth overall at the NESCAC Championships, while seven athletes earned All-NESCAC honors (given for finishing in the top three places).

Men’s Track and Field

Hurdler Ellis Phillips-Gallucci ’23 and decathlete Jack Trent ’23 represented the men’s track and field team at the Division III National Championships. The team combined to finish third at the NESCAC Championships, where the Mammoths posted 13 All-NESCAC finishes. There, first-year sprinter Jordan Harrison ’26 finished first and set a school record in the 100-meters. If his pace continues, that record is certainly set to fall again.

To Our Seniors,

Alex Noga ’23 Managing Sports Editor

Skye Wu ’23 Managing Opinion Editor

Sophie Wolmer ’23 Managing News Editor

Emi Eliason ’23 Social Media Manager

Yee-Lynn Lee ’23 Editor-in-Chief

Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 Managing A&L Editor

Theo Hamilton ’23 Senior Managing Editor