Issue 9

THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

VOLUME CXLIV • FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014

Homecoming 2014

Olivia Tarantino ’15 Photography Editor

CONNECT TO US: AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU • @AMHERSTSTUDENT • LIKE THE AMHERST STUDENT ON FACEBOOK

Table of Contents Alumni Profiles

Amy Ziering ’80 H. Irving Grousbeck ’56 Aparna Nancherla ’05E Jennifer Cody Epstein’88 Karti Subramanian ’07 Huston Powell ’91 Emily Stern ’83 William Soleau ’77 Melissa Kantor ’91 Darryl Harper ’90 Abbey Gardner ’89 Tess Taylor ’99

Sports

Men’s and Women’s Soccer, Field Hockey Volleyball, Chris Tamasi Men’s and Women’s Cross Country, Football Baseball

Olivia Tarantino ’15

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 13 14 15 16

Olivia Tarantino ’15 Olivia Tarantino ’15

17 18 19 20

Letters Policy The opinion pages of The Amherst Student are intended as an open forum for the Amherst community.

The Student will print letters under 450 words in length if they are submitted to The Student offices in the Campus Center or to the paper’s e-mail account (astudent@amherst. edu) by 12 p.m. on Sunday, after which they will not be accepted.

The editors reserve the right to edit any letters exceeding the 450-word limit or to withhold any letter because of considerations of space or content.

Letters must bear the names of all contributors and a phone number where the author or authors may be reached. Letters and columns may be edited for clarity and Student style.

The Student will not print personal or group defamation.

Publication Standards Editor-in-Chief Sophie Murguia Homecoming Editors Dan Ahn, Johnathan Appel, Dori Atkins, Gabby Bishop, Sophie Chung, Marquez Cummings, Megan Do, William Harvey, Brendan Hsu, Elaine Jeon, Sunna Juhn, Jeremy Kesselhaut, Andrew Kim, Andrew Knox, Marie Lambert, Liz Mardeusz, Katie Paolano, Jason Stein, Chloe Tausk, Olivia Tarantino, Lauren Tuiskula, Sitina Xu, Nicole Yang Publishers Emily Ratte, Tia Robinson

The Amherst Student is published weekly except during College vacations. The subscription rate is $75 per year or $40 per semester. Subscription requests and address changes should be sent to: Subscriptions, The Amherst Student; Box 1912, Amherst College: Amherst, MA 01002-5000.

The offices of The Student are located on the second floor of the Keefe Campus Center, Amherst College. Phone: (413) 542-2304. All contents copyright © 2014 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. All views published do not reflect the views of The Amherst Student staff.

Saturday Events

11:30 a.m.

Conversation with President Biddy Martin Johnson Chapel

4 p.m.

Football vs. Williams Pratt Field

12:30 p.m.

Homecoming Fest Lunch Alumni Gym, Coolidge Cage

2 p.m.

Glee Club 150th Anniversary Celebration Keefe Campus Center

1 p.m.

Pratt Field Opens Pratt Field

8 p.m.

Choral Society Performance Buckley Recital Hall

Images (left to right) courtesy of Rob Mattson, Rob Mattson, host.madison.com, Rob Mattson, Amherst College, Rob Mattson, Amherst College, Amherst College

1:30 p.m.

NESCAC Men’s Soccer Hitchcock Field

10 p.m.

Jazz Ensemble Performance Buckley Recital Hall

Alumni Profile Amy Ziering ’84

Acclaimed Film Producer for Social Justice

Producer and director of Academy Award-nominated fillm “The Invisible War,” Amy Ziering ’84 speaks out against social injustices.

by Claire Jia ’15 Five seconds into my interview with Amy Ziering ’84, the distinguished producer and director of Academy Award-nominated “The Invisible War” (2012) and Emmy nominee “Outrage” (2009) tells me, “You know, I hate talking about myself. What about you? What do you study?” I knew I was supposed to stay on track and get the story, but her curious demeanor disarmed me as I slipped into a digression about my life.

“I’m not usually the one being interviewed,” Ziering said, who makes documentaries, a genre in which questioning people is her job. She spoke in such a casual, good-humored manner; it was easy to forget that I was on assignment.

“The Invisible War” Ziering’s latest film, “The Invisible War,” investigates the rampant sexual assault in the U.S. military. After reading an article on the issue in Salon back in 2008, Ziering was stunned that this was such a prevalent problem within the culture of the armed forces.

She and her long-term collaborator, Kirby Dick, got right on the story.

“I just started calling people up and soon I was hooked,” Ziering said. “I was infuriated.”

According to Ziering, one of the biggest challenges about making a film about the military was figuring out how to present a story that would be seen not as an attack but as a critique.

“How can you make a powerful critique where all sides are still receptive to? How do you make it bipartisan and something that you can’t turn away from?” she said.

Although this was a sensitive topic, the people who were willing to speak to Ziering were grateful for the opportunity to tell their stories.

“Before the film, most survivors didn’t understand that this was a problem for other people,” she said.

“I would call and people would ask, ‘Why are you calling me?’ This just happened to me, to which I would say, ‘No, actually, this happened to many other people in your battalion as well.’”

By making the film, Ziering brought light to this widespread issue — this invisible war waged within our own military — both to America and to many of the survivors themselves.

Dick calls Ziering’s interviews “the soul of the film,” and “some of the most caring and revelatory I’ve ever seen on film.”

He added, “Again and again, Amy was able to get survivors of military sexual assault to open up about the most private and painful experiences of their lives, yet doing so in a way that the process was profoundly validating and even life-changing for the subject.”

When the film opened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, “the response was phenomenal,” Ziering told me in a tone of disbelief. “People were outraged, people were talking

4

about it, and I’d made other films before, but this time, the difference of the reception was something I’d never experienced and that I’ll probably never experience again.”

The film went on to win the Audience Award at Sundance and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2013. More important, however, was the tangible emotional and political impact of the work on its viewers.

Ziering recounted a story of the time when she showed the film in Dayton, Ohio. As she was walking out to her car after the presentation, a woman drove up to her and told Ziering that she had driven three hours to thank her.

“She had seen ‘The Invisible War’ a few weeks earlier in Cleveland,” Ziering said. “And she said that for nineteen years she had blamed herself until then.”

In the months that followed, Ziering led a nationwide outreach campaign to spread awareness about the issue.

“We knew we had something powerful, so then it became my mission to deploy it,” she said.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ended up seeing the film, and two days later he held a press conference to announce significant policy changes in the military. President Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett invited Ziering to the White House after the film’s release. Jarrett and the President described the documentary as “brilliant” and decided that the administration needed to“exponentially step up their game on this issue,” Ziering said. Today, the film is used as training tool in many branches of the military, with many of the women and men featured in the film travelling to bases in order to talk about their experiences.

An Advocate of Social Justice Ziering has always concerned herself with issues of social justice.

Her interest in the topics presented in “The Invisible War” were only the tip of the iceberg for Ziering; since her time at Amherst, she had always been interested in the injustices occurring on campus and in the world.

“It was very the right place for me to be, given the interests that I had,” recalled Ziering, who studied English at Amherst. “I had extremely good mentors and teachers. I had really great fellow students from which to learn from. Intellectually, it gave me great foundation for everything I’ve done since.”

Studying under Professor Margie Waller of the English Department was a seminal experience for Ziering.

Waller helped shape Ziering’s feminist views through film studies, focusing on the way the male gaze always frames female characters and on how narrative arcs demand closure.

“I was the person who walked out of ‘Star Wars’ so utterly disinterested, but Margie brought me back, and I

thought about films in a very different way after her,” she said.

Ziering went on to extensively study feminist and literary theory. “[Social injustice] is the source of my hunger for philosophy and literary theory and political theory,” Ziering said. “For me, it’s how you breathe.

How could you not be a feminist?

How could you be against equal rights? I don’t understand the other side. I don’t understand how you can occupy this world and not want to do something.”

Ellen Sachs-Alter, Ziering’s firstyear floor mate and long time friend, says that Ziering was “extremely intelligent and funny” and “always had and has an interesting perspective on things.”

“She was in the world in a bigger way than most freshmen I knew,” Sachs-Alter said. “She was outspoken and articulate, but not in a brash sort of way. She wasn’t the ‘on-thesoapbox’ kind of outspoken. She was, instead, a very deliberate activist.”

Kirby Dick characterized Ziering as being “singularly unimpressed by authority and willing to take it on — and cut it down to size when it deserves it — in ways I’ve seen few others do.”

Ziering understands what boundaries to respect and what boundaries to cross. As for her interview subjects, their lives and emotional stabilities were her number one priority.

“We’re not exploitative or sensational,” Ziering said. “I’ve always said: First, do no harm.”

When she made her subjects feel safe and trusted, she said they opened up with “candor and courage.”

Life After Amherst After Amherst, Ziering went on to study literary theory and philosophy at Yale. She studied with famed French philosopher Jacques Derrida, about whom she eventually made her first successful documentary, “Derrida.” The film includes footage of his lectures as well as scenes shot in his home, and investigates the potential impossibility of biography. In the film, Derrida applies his theory of deconstruction to the film itself, challenging the ability of film to accurately portray a subject.

“I was very struck by the quality and intimacy of the footage she was getting and her willingness to undertake such a complex project even though she had never made a film before,” said Dick, who met Ziering while she was filming “Derrida.”

The film was a surprise success.

“When we started, I could not clear a room faster in L.A. when I told people I was making a film about a philosopher,” Ziering said. She received the Golden Gate Award at the 2002 San Francisco Film Festival for the work.

After completing the film, Ziering was a stay-at-home mom for a while.

She also taught writing and film parttime at Bennington College and the University of California, Riverside before going back to the industry to try her hand at narrative film with “The Memory Thief,” a story about a man obsessed with documenting the experiences of Holocaust survivors.

Despite this effort, Ziering prefers documentaries.

“You never know where it’s going,” she said. “With narrative films, you

Photo Courtesy of Amy Ziering

Ziering won the Emmy Award at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with “The Invisible War.” read the script, and then you don’t even want to make the film anymore.

But with documentary films, you never know.”

“Additionally, I’d rather take care of my interview subjects than actors,” Ziering continued. “So that was my only foray into narrative film.”

Ziering sees filmmaking as a vehicle to right social injustices. Documentary filmmaking has reached a golden age, she said, and now takes on the job of original-source investigative work that news sources such as CNN and MSNBC used to do and should be doing. She is critical of mainstream journalism, saying, “There’s this crazy notion nowadays that says there are two sides to everything and I’m like, no! Sometimes there is just one side.”

“There are empirical truths, and I’m happy to report on those,” she added.

Following Her Passion Today, Ziering lives in Los Angeles with three daughters, ages 21, 17 and 13, whom she calls her “three little feminists.”

Ironically enough, you won’t find Ziering watching a movie on a Sunday afternoon.

“I like being with my kids, being with my friends. I like hiking, reading, listening to short stories,” Ziering said. “I’m a workaholic; I really like working. I like being with people. But I don’t like watching TV. I don’t like watching movies.”

“I am completely bored by narrative film. We’ve seen it all. Even the indie films are completely predictable.

They’re trite tropes,” Ziering said with a wave of her hand. “If I never had to watch a piece of fiction again, that would suit me just fine.”

Sachs-Alter told me that she appreciates the opportunity to revisit the old days with Ziering.

“She didn’t understand the social climate of Amherst,” Sachs-Alter recounted. “Other people would love

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

hanging out and shooting the breeze, and she never got that. She was socially stymied, and she laughs about it. She includes herself in her sense of humor. I can’t emphasize enough how funny she was.”

Ziering is always moving, always looking for the next story to report on, the next injustice to address.

When I asked her about past projects, there are so many that she often gets the names and years confused.

“It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Menopause Mind,” Ziering joked.

“She would be the person walking around campus with papers falling out, with pencils in her hair, and thinking about things. She was a person who lived in her mind,” SachsAlter concluded. “And definitely not a nostalgic person.”

“My husband says I’m like a goldfish,” Ziering added. “I live in the present.”

Ziering’s latest project centers around campus sexual assault, making her work doubly relevant to Amherst College, given the recent controversies on campus surrounding this issue. While she was promoting “The Invisible War,” many students sent her messages, telling her that they loved the film and asking if she could make a film about sexual assault on college campuses.

The film will be distributed by RADiUS, a boutique label of the Weinstein Company, and CNN has already acquired the broadcast rights. Ziering said they are hoping that the film will premiere at Sundance in January 2015, and that the campus tour of the film will begin in February.

“I hope and wish that more students would go into this work. I know it’s hard and it’s not lucrative and it’s not the most glamorous thing, but it’s so important, and it’s so undervalued,” she told me. “My advice … is to be curious. Be compassionate. Don’t let anything stop you.”

November 7, 2014

H. Irving Grousbeck ’56 Alumni Profile

An Inspiration in the Boardroom and the Classroom After achieving entrepreneurial success, H. Irving Grousbeck ’56 transitioned to the business of teaching. Now a professor at Stanford, he encourages his students to pursue their passions.

by Lauren Tuiskula ’17 He has served on the boards of more than 40 profit and nonprofit companies. He has co-authored a well-received book regarding entrepreneurial practice. Now, at age 80, things have slowed down a bit, but H. Irving Grousbeck ’56 remains busy working as a professor at the Stanford Business and Medical Schools.

Hitting Close to Home When he first decided to attend Amherst, Grousbeck did not have a long trip ahead of him — he grew up about 30 minutes from the college, in Northampton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Deerfield Academy, an elite private high school in nearby Deerfield, the choice to matriculate to Amherst was easy.

“Why would I go far away for school when I had such a great one nearby?” Grousbeck said.

The decision was made even easier by the fact that the headmaster of Deerfield Academy at the time was an Amherst graduate. Attending Amherst “just seemed like the natural order of things,” Grousbeck said.

The Amherst Years Just like many students today, Grousbeck enrolled at the college with doubts about his major.

He eventually decided on economics, but did not take any courses in the department until the spring of his sophomore year. He had begun the coursework for a major in psychology, and figured that he could finish up that curriculum as well.

At the time, the college’s curriculum included juniors honors courses, six-credit classes that students took for their major, similar to the higher-level seminars the college offers today. Grousbeck went above and beyond, taking honors courses in both economics and psychology before eventually deciding upon economics major.

“I really enjoyed the major. We had some great teachers at that time,” Grousbeck said. “It was really informative.”

Surprisingly, Grousbeck’s favorite professor came from outside both of his majors: the English department.

“He was actually a poetry teacher,” Grousbeck shared with a laugh.

“His name was Ben DeMott.”

“I also had a wonderful economics teacher named Jim Nelson,” he added. “We had a lot of great teachers in the department, and I think that’s something that really attracted me to it.”

Outside of the classroom, Grousbeck remained involved in many aspects of campus life, participating in three varsity sports (baseball, basketball and soccer), working for the OLIO and writing for The Amherst Student. He also held a job

November 7, 2014

collecting tickets at campus events and concerts.

Grousbeck said he enjoyed having such diverse experiences at Amherst.

“It wasn’t in any one thing that really shaped my experience; it was being involved in a number of things, doing so many different things really contributed to it all,” he said.

During his time at Amherst, he was also a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

“The fraternity was a big part of it at that time. It was a very collegial and paternal experience,” he said.

“I enjoyed the social aspect. I don’t mean social as in partying, but the sociable atmosphere surrounding the fraternity. I know there aren’t any now, and that’s fine, but it was really important to me throughout my time at the school.”

He also appreciated the friendly student body.

“The whole fabric of the place was appealing to me; it felt like a very comfortable place,” Grousbeck noted. “It was a place that I really resonated with. The whole atmosphere was always welcoming. It felt like home, I always looked forward to coming back.”

After graduating and spending some years away, Grousbeck did eventually return to his beloved campus, earning an honorary degree from the college at the 2000 commencement exercises.

“I remember the day clearly, because it was pouring rain,” Grousbeck shared with a laugh.

“It’s something very special. The college means a lot to me so for them to turn around and do that was a lovely gesture.” “I’m not sure if it was deserved,” he added goodhumoredly.

The address given by then-president Tom Gerety, however, showed sincere appreciation from the college. Gerety bestowed the degree upon Grousbeck and said, “a cool, self-contained presence, always impeccable, you are a wonderful listener and a graciously attentive host with a long history of quiet philanthropy … Your description of the attitudes needed to run your own show includes the following: dissatisfaction with the status quo; a healthy self-confidence; a ‘responsible competence;’ a concern for detail and a tolerance for ambiguity.

It is a self-description as well, one that has led you to the heights of both business and education.”

After Amherst The qualities for which Grousbeck was lauded had already been manifesting themselves during the impressive years following his time at the college. From his graduation in 1956 to today, he has worked with numerous different companies

in the capacity of board member or CEO. After receiving his MBA from Harvard, Grousbeck entered the job market, finding early employment with a few different companies.

Entering established companies, however, was not what he had envisioned.

“After doing that, I realized that I didn’t want to work for someone else’s company, I wanted to have my own,” he said.

Grousbeck created his own company with fellow Amherst alum Amos B. Hostetter ’58. The startup was called Continental Cablevision (later known as Media One) and competed with other large cable companies already on the market.

The pair started the company in 1964 and Grousbeck served as its president through 1980.

Continental Cablevision was the spark that ignited Grousbeck’s entrepreneurial career, as he went on to work with many different non-profit and for-profit companies including Asurion Corporation, Response Link and the Boston Celtics.

When asked about his work with the Celtics, he noted the importance of the fan base to the organization and, in turn, the importance of the organization to his own life.

“It’s fun to be associated with a legendary franchise like that,” Grousbeck said. “There are only so many of them that have a history and resonate with a lot of people.

The Celtics have an enduring value and an enduring presence.”

“Fans feel a community of interest with the team, maybe not necessarily that they own them, but they are invested and like to follow them,” he added. “We’re trying to manage the team not only to win … but also to manage them the right way and do the best job we can.”

Was it this community ethic and determination that brought him to where he is today?

“First of all, we have to be sure that we credit Lady Luck,” Grousbeck said. “She was a big supporting hand.”

He also continually praised the people around him who helped him reach the place he is in now.

“They talk about self-made people, but I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as self-made,” he remarked. “A lot of people get a boost from some people that they don’t really recognize.”

Grousbeck also mentioned “integrity and ethical dealing,” and said that honesty is important to him not only in business, but in all aspects of life.

“I think that if people come to trust you, it’s not only a good way to be but it’s also helpful,” he said.

“I see a marriage of both the right thing to do and the practical thing to do. I’m sure I’ve stubbed my toe and failed from time to time but I’ve always tried to do the right thing … and treat people fairly.”

In the Classroom After his great successes in the business world, Grousbeck transitioned to teaching, which he continues to do today.

He began his career at Harvard.

When they originally offered him

Photo Courtesy of Stanford University

Grousbeck majored in economics at Amherst, but also completed a significant amount of psychology courses. a position, he thought, “Now that doesn’t come along every day to everyone,” and knew to jump at the opportunity.

“I knew I always wanted to teach after I was done with business, and I thought I should probably do it now or they might never ask me again,” he said.

After his time at Harvard, Grousbeck made the move to Stanford, where he still works today. It was originally an “adventure” that Grousbeck assumed would end after one year. But now, 29 years later, he’s still there.

“It’s very nice out here; I don’t have to shovel all of the snow,” he said with a laugh.

Currently, he teaches two highly competitive courses at Stanford, one in the medical school and the other in the business school.

It may come as a surprise that Grousbeck teaches at a medical school despite having no experience in medicine. However, his course is focuses on theory of interpersonal relationships, something of which he has a wealth of knowledge. The course is titled “Managing Difficult Conversations” and presents future doctors a number of difficult medical situations.

“We give them cases such as Alzheimer’s diagnosis, cancer diagnosis, teen suicide, baby drowning,” he said. “The students are put in the position of being the doctor and talking to the family and patient in these situations.”

His course in the business school, titled “Managing Growing Enterprises” is another hands-on class. It puts students into the role of CEO and teaches them how to work through sets of challenges in the field of business.

“Maybe one day, your best salesman is about to quit, or two of your key employees are fighting,” he said. “It teaches you how to work through those issues.”

When asked about his own setbacks throughout his business career, he first referenced his family.

“I haven’t had any major personal

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

ones. I’ve been married to the same person for a long time, we have four kids and none of them are in jail, so I’m doing well on the home front,” he said, chuckling.

He quickly got back to business.

“You face professional challenges all of the time,” he said. “Someone disappoints you, and then you disappoint them. There are constantly challenges that you need to handle, and that’s part of the intrigue of being a businessperson. There’s a huge diversity of issues that come up in my world and also in my classes.”

Passionate Professor Because Grousbeck’s courses are hands-on, the atmosphere of the classroom is one of active discussion.

“There’s an old adage that a lecture is where the information goes from the notes of the professor to the notes of the student without passing through the brains of either one,” he said.

“My philosophy is to try to engage the students in lively conversation that leads to insight and learning on their part,” he added.

Grousbeck takes some of the qualities he found in his Amherst professors and applies them to his teaching style today.

“The best teachers inspire — they’re not just prosaic and kind of hum-drum. They are enthusiastic,” he said. “They are inspired about the topic, so they tend to inspire students as well. That’s a lesson I learned at Amherst if not before and something I try to embody in my own teaching.”

Grousbeck urges current Amherst students to find their passion and stay with it. “It’s not work; it’s play, if you love what you’re doing.

I don’t consider coming to the office at Stanford work at all,” he said.

“I feel fortunate that I found teaching and that I’m thriving in it.

I get up in the morning and think ‘Yeah! Today’s a class day! I get to go to class and see the students.’

I love to challenge them and help them continue to grow.”

5

Alumni Profile Aparna Nancherla ’05E

Comedian Alum Ready for Center Stage Aparna Nancherla ’05 didn’t originally plan to pursue a career in comedy, but her sharp wit and observant nature poise her for stand-up stardom.

by Eli Mansbach ’18

“I was walking down the street recently and a black guy with a mohawk coming down the street complimented a white guy with a mohawk going the other way. So I made a wish. Yeah, I know how miracles work.”

Amid loud applause, Amherst alumna and comedian Aparna Nancherla ’05E began her stand-up stint on “Conan” in October 2013.

Although this was her first time receiving national attention for her comedy work, Nancherla has been making people laugh even before she ever picked up a microphone.

A Natural Performer Nancherla said that being a comedian happened “kind of on a whim.”

Nancherla didn’t consider doing stand-up until the summer after her first year of college. While visiting home, she participated in an open mic night at a local cafe.

“It was something that I was trying, and I didn’t really have any expectation going in,” Nancherla said. “The first time I went up, it went pretty well, I think, for a first time, so I got bitten by that bug.”

The first time she performed, all she hoped was that she could get a laugh from the audience.

“I think I was really nervous, definitely a huge amount of anxiety,”

Nancherla said. “But I think it was also like, ‘please, please I hope people laugh at something, anything, and that I don’t freeze up.’ The first time I went up, it was my birthday, so I definitely tried to milk the audience for sympathy on that.”

Despite her success at home, Nancherla did not pursue comedy much at college, only participating in a few open mic events. Instead, she spent the majority of her time at Amherst performing with Amherst Dance, hosting a WAMH radio show, writing for an Amherst magazine called Prism and a satire publication called the Amherst Hamster. Nancherla also ran on the cross country and track teams.

Grace Kay ’04, Nancherla’s South Dormitory floor-mate, WAMH co-host and close friend, said that Nancherla has always been a funny person.

“She might have seemed quiet originally,” Kay said. “But she was very quirky. She would always have very funny observations about people. She has always been interested in theater and performing.”

However, Kay was still surprised the first time she saw Nancherla perform stand-up.

“I remember seeing her first show, and I was just blown away by how polished she was,” Kay said.

Photo Courtesy of Aparna Nancherla

Aparna Nancherla ’05E has enjoyed great success in the comedy world, despite focusing on other interests while at Amherst, where she majored in psychology.

From Open Mics to Conan O’Brien After graduating from Amherst with a degree in psychology, Nancherla moved back to Washington, D.C., where she did some comedy on the side. However, comedy was not initially her main focus. “[Comedy] wasn’t a conscious goal I had — it was more like when I started, I was like, ‘Oh, let’s see where it goes,’” Nancherla said. “It started out as a hobby and something I would do at night, but then it picked up and I got opportunities.”

Her first opportunity was NBC’s “Stand-Up for Diversity,” a program that brought together comedians of different backgrounds to help them start their careers in comedy. In

Photo Courtesy of Aparma Nancherla

Nancherla called her 2013 performance on “Conan” “surreal.”

6

2007, Nancherla was a finalist for this program.

“That was sort of the first indicator that maybe this [was] something I [could] pursue seriously or as a career,” Nancherla said. “But I didn’t really decide that for myself until I got some external validation.”

Nancherla said that she gets inspiration for her jokes from everyday life.

“I think [what also interests me are] little trivial things. I sort of look into the deeper meaning of them,” Nancherla said. “I have a very, sort of dry and slightly [assertive] point of view, so it’s definitely, like, the mundane and day-to-day nature of things.”

Nancherla got her first job in comedy at a local club in Washington, D.C. called DC Improv. She won DC Improv’s stand-up contest and secured a guest spot in their lineup.

She eventually hosted at the club for a few weekends.

After spending four years in D.C., Nancherla decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue comedy as a fulltime career.

“It felt like if I really wanted to pursue [comedy], I sort of had to move to a bigger pool, to places where there was more opportunity,” Nancherla said.

She landed her first job as a writer for the show “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell,” a late night news show on FX that presented political and observational comedy. As a writer for “Totally Biased,” Nancherla also received some on-camera time and was able to work with Chris Rock, the show’s executive producer.

“That was a huge thing for me: to get a job related to comedy where you also got to perform on camera,” Nancherla said. “It was pretty big and definitely a valuable, cool experience.”

But perhaps even bigger than writing for “Totally Biased” was landing a stand-up spot on “Conan” a year ago, which was her first late-night TV spot.

“That was really cool because I grew up watching [Conan O’Brien],” Nancherla said. “It was really fun and everyone was super nice. It was definitely one of those things where it felt surreal to even do it. Until it was over, I couldn’t really process that it had happened.”

Nancherla said that being on “Conan” involved a lot of work. She changed her performance based on the notes the show’s booker gave her and tried to make it more appropriate

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

for the show’s audience. She said that the main hurdle she faced in performing on “Conan” was creating a set that the show would be happy with.

A Rising Star Kay said that she isn’t surprised that her former classmate became a comedian.

“I feel like for Aparna, comedy ... that is who she is and what she wants to do and I felt like that was very apparent early on,” Kay said.

However, another friend of Nancherla’s, Rashi De Stefano, said that Nancherla’s eventual career path surprised her.

“It wasn’t something that we ever talked about — she only got into it later,” De Stefano said. “I’m surprised that she managed to turn it into a viable career and something that she is doing with her life. [Nancherla] was always sort of low key, but it really worked out. Once I started seeing her perform in public venues, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is definitely what she should do with her life.’”

De Stefano also said that she admires Nancherla for being a woman in comedy.

“It is really hard to be a female comedian; [that’s] what I realized just watching her,” De Stefano said.

“Because 90 percent of the time, she is one of two women that are performing in a lineup of all dudes. I think it is a tough world to be in.”

Since leaving “Totally Biased,” Nancherla has been traveling, doing stand-up shows around the country and at festivals. She even performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in Australia. She said that looking forward, her dream job would be to write a comedy show that represents her voice along with some of her comedy friends. She hopes to get some on-air time as well.

De Stefano said that it has been interesting watching Nancherla’s comedy career grow and sense of humor develop.

“I’ve seen her perform since [Amherst], and there has been this evolution of her humor,” De Stefano said. “It started as isolated jokes, and now she has this very witty, observational humor that was always part of her comedy. But now it has developed into these stories that she tells about things that she has seen or people in her life ... It’s gotten more clever, more witty, more specific.”

November 7, 2014

Jennifer Cody Epstein ’88 Alumni Profile

Bestselling Author Explores Cultural Intersections Jennifer Cody Epstein ‘88 is a bestselling author known for “Painter of Shanghai” and “The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.”

by Johnathan Appel ’16 What do you expect when you pick up a piece of historical fiction?

A story about a young Revolutionary War soldier rubbing shoulders with George Washington or an aspiring female actress desperate to appear in one of Shakespeare’s plays? Novels set in well-known historical moments such as these are popular and engaging, but rarely do these works of fiction look beyond our own Eurocentric culture. It’s rare to find novelists who can create protagonists and situations that explore the intersection between the East and the West in a meaningful way.

Jennifer Cody Epstein ’88 is such a writer. She is the author of the 2008 international bestseller “Painter of Shanghai” and 2013’s “The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.” Though she’s always had an interest in writing, Epstein’s liberal arts education was what enabled her to think critically, while writing poetically.

Early Explorations Epstein was born in Connecticut but moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts at the age of three along with her younger and older brothers (both Amherst alumni in the classes of ’83 and ’93). She moved quietly through the Wellesley public school system, where she displayed an appetite for reading.

“I pretty much passed unnoticed,” Epstein said. “I was one of those kids who constantly had their face buried in a book.” Perhaps her most defining feature in those early years was that

she was the self-described “worst player ever in the town soccer league — perpetually benched, even on the remedial-level team.”

But Epstein kept busy with her own pursuits.

“I wrote a lot of little things from the time I could write at all. I was obsessed with making ‘books’ with tape, paper and cardboard,” Epstein recalled.

Her fondest memory during those years involved a 12-page story she wrote about a magic swing set. This early work was chosen for her middle school’s “author’s corner,” earning her the honor of having her story and a “broody black-and-white headshot of me and my Dorothy Hamill haircut” stapled to the principal’s door.

That magic swing set continually inspired her. “Seeing my work out in public like that, and being read by fellow students and faculty pretty much confirmed for me that this was what I wanted to do in life,” Epstein said.

At Amherst, she continued to write. Embodying the spirit of the liberal arts, Epstein used her writing to not only tell stories but also to challenge controversial ideas. As features editor for The Amherst Student, she had the autonomy to engage with the cultural issues on campus she wanted to tackle.

“Amherst was the first place that I started writing seriously in a way that wasn’t just compositional for high school English classes. I could take on controversial stances, like race and gender, that I hadn’t taken on before,”

Photo Courtesy of Jennifer Cody Epstein

Epstein at a 2013 book signing for her second book, “The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.”

November 7, 2014

Epstein said.

An Asian languages and civilizations major with a concentration in Japan, Epstein’s interest in Asian culture began from a simple desire to study abroad. Her father had done business in Kyoto and encouraged her to take Japanese. Despite the complexity of the language, she never looked back, and eventually had the opportunity to engage with her studies first-hand during a semester abroad in Kyoto her junior year.

She described her experience as the beginning of a “life long passion for how cultures are constantly changing, merging in some ways and diverging in other ways.”

Inspired by her struggle to read literary texts in their original Japanese, Epstein’s senior thesis focused on the portrayal of Japanese women in English translations of Japanese works.

This interest in the intersection and sometimes collision of cultures was a precursor for her career writing historical fiction.

“There’s always a dynamic between the two cultures. In the case of my thesis, it was very academic and very cerebral. In the case of my first book, it was really exploring how that interaction really took on very palpable results in terms of people’s arts and in terms of basic culture,” Epstein said.

Cultural Exchange Epstein was awarded the AmherstDoshisha Fellowship during her senior year. This allowed her to travel back to Kyoto after graduation, where she taught two classes at Doshisha University.

“I was able to meet so many fascinating people at Doshisha,” she recalled. The experience continued to fuel her fascination with how cultures came together and actively shaped each other.

“Throughout the whole university network in Kyoto, I felt there was a really fantastic meeting of the minds,” she said.

In September 1999, Epstein pursued her passion for writing by enrolling in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Columbia University. During orientation, she felt an immediate connection with fellow student and now lifelong friend Hillary Jordan, one of only two selfdescribed “middle-aged women” in the program.

Jordan remembers how crucial they were to each other’s development and sanity during that time. “In grad school, you’re getting comments from about 11 different people who are all over the map. Jen was great for putting things into perspective, and that’s something that we continually do for each other,” Jordan said.

Today, Jordan continues to admire the life Epstein breathes, not only into her protagonists, but into other cultures in other times.

“Her writing is driven by character, by humanity and her desire to illuminate our common humanity through characters,” Jordan said.

Epstein’s 2008 debut novel, “The Painter from Shanghai,” featured a protagonist based in reality. In the novel, Epstein paints her own fictionalized portrait of the life of Chinese painter Pan Yulian in the early 20th century. Yulian began her life as a prostitute and ended up as

Photo Courtesy of Jennifer Cody Epstein

Asian languages and civilizations major Epstein always had a special interest in exploring different cultures. a well-regarded post-impressionist painter in Paris.

“She was somebody who was really at the crux of these two contradictory cultures and found a way to meld them in her art,” Epstein said.

Her second book, 2013’s “The Gods of Heavenly Punishment,” shifted her focus from art to war.

Setting her novel during the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo at the hands of U.S. forces, Epstein uses her characters to explore the ways in which we dehumanize those who belong to different cultures. She asks the reader how we can rationalize devastating acts of cruelty on both sides.

“What I was exploring in ‘Gods’ was this myth or this fable that the Japanese were simply these monsters who committed inhumane atrocities while we were simply heroic,” Epstein said. “The firebombing of Tokyo killed several thousand civilians in the space of a few hours with one of the first uses of napalm, pretty much untested at the time.”

Asian Languages and Civilizations Professor Samuel Morse, who taught Epstein during her time at Amherst, has nothing but praise for Epstein’s cultural critiques in “Gods.”

“Her descriptions of the destruction are eloquent, but also very graphic, and I have a hard time reading them out loud to my classes — which I often do when I teach 20th-century Japanese art — without choking up,” Morse said.

Moving west, Epstein’s next book takes place in Germany during the lead-up to World War II. At the intersection of German and Jewish culture, she will explore how antiSemitism took root at the beginning of the Nazi regime and led to the eradication of a society.

“At the beginning, it was a very small thing, something people didn’t take seriously. [That] it started in a small way and then went on to have dire horrific implications is both fascinating and horrific because even this dramatic example can happen again. There are a lot of lessons to be learned in that,” Epstein said.

Aside from her writing, Epstein applies her perceptive lens to editing.

She and Jordan constantly provide feedback for each other’s works and

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

offer fresh perspectives.

“Her strength is really in looking at the tapestry of a novel and saying where it looks rich and where it looks thinner,” Jordan said.

Perhaps the most impressive part of Epstein’s writing process is the very beginning. To truly explore other cultures and their intersection with our own, Epstein channels her inner historian. With a degree in Asian studies and international relations, she feels an obligation to provide a relevant and clear window into a different time.

“I could keep reading about them forever and discover these fascinating points in time but at some point you have to stop and just write the damn book,” Epstein said.

A self-proclaimed “avid reader,” Epstein admits that she can’t point to a particular influence.

“That’s like asking someone to say which ancestor they’re most genetically indebted to. I feel that we’re all a product of different pairings,” Epstein said.

Her Own Homecoming Now working on her third book, Epstein lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Michael Epstein, her two daughters and a lovable, if needy, springer spaniel.

“It’s hard to imagine another place a writer would want to live than Brooklyn,” Epstein said. She compared the literary environment of Brooklyn to that of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s.

“In other parts of the city, saying that you’re writing a book can be a conversation stopper,” she said.

“There’s just a ton of creativity and a tremendous place to be to meet other people trying to do the same thing you’re trying to do and frankly not feel like a freak.”

Ultimately, Epstein sees Amherst as her home and influence. Though her husband pokes fun at its size and elitism (both points she concedes), Epstein argues that the school’s small size makes it far easier to keep a connection to a place that welcomes her back openly, warmly and eagerly.

“Whenever I come back, there’s this sense of homecoming for me,” she said.

7

Alumni Profile Karti Subramanian ’07

Bringing Efficiency to Clients With High-Quality Data Vera Solutions co-founder Karti Subramanian ’07 has revolutionized data collection to improve social groups operate.

by Jessie Kaliski ’15 Although Karti Subramanian ’07 initially started out with investment banking after graduating from Amherst, it became clear that that wasn’t all that he wanted to do for the rest of his life. His interests in international development and nonprofit organizations eventually led him and his two colleagues to found Vera Solutions, a company that aims to improve the quality of information and data in order to increase the efficiency of social impact groups. And now, as a young social entrepreneur, Subramanian attends John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Childhood: Travel and Change Subramanian and his family had lived in two continents before finally settling down in the United States, making North America the third continent that Subramanian called home. Although it was difficult for Subramanian and his sister to leave their friends every few years, the experience of seeing so many different places and cultures would set the stage for Subramanian’s future career. Vera Solutions, the technology consulting and development firm he co-founded, operates in nearly 40 countries and helps non-government organizations, social enterprises, research institutions and government agencies collect and analyze data.

“I think it’s fair to say that those experiences were formative for me,” Subramanian said. “That my interest in international development now comes from explicitly or implicitly having been interested in the question of ‘Why does this place look like this, but this other place look like this?’ as we moved between places.”

An Intellectually Curious Student Before coming to Amherst, Subramanian barely knew what he wanted to do after graduation, let alone as a future career.

Nonetheless, Subramanian found himself following his older sister, Tia Subramanian ’05, to Amherst College. “My older sister thought that [going to Amherst] would be a good decision,” Subramanian said.

And, as a wise younger brother, Subramanian said, “I usually do what she tells me to.”

Once at the college, Subramanian truly enjoyed his four-year experience. “I found some amazing friends who shaped me in so many ways, and who continue to be some of the most important people in my life,” Subramanian said.

In fact, at the time of this interview, two of his college friends were on their way to Boston to stay with him and his girlfriend, who also attended Amherst College.

Among many extracurriculars at the college, Subramanian regards his involvement in two specific

8

activities as most memorable in his collegiate experience: being a member of the tennis team and being a co-owner of MAStorage.

“Karti was one of the fittest and quickest guys on the team,” said Assistant Tennis Coach Matt Leitl.

“He was extremely energetic, intellectually curious and very bright.

He took his fitness and dynamic stretches very seriously.”

Leitl recalled one of Subramanian’s memorable victories over a notable Middlebury player, when he had his opponent “muttering the unforgettable under his breath”; as well as Subramanian’s infamous tight gold and red dragon suit that he would wear to cheer on his teammates during his freshman and sophomore years.

Aside from his athletic career, Subramanian and four of his friends acquired MAStorage, a student-owned and operated storage service, in 2005. A relatively small company, MAStorage had been run by just a single person before.

“We were fortunate enough to do something that I’ve since done a second time: run a company with good friends, whose work you really enjoy and that allows you to meet all kinds of people that you wouldn’t otherwise,” Subramanian said.

Photo Courtesy of Karti Subramanian

Subramanian left a comfortable career in finance to help social impact groups develop more effective and organized data. tion organization in South Africa: Grassroot Soccer.

And it was here that Subramanian would meet his soon-to-be co-founders, Taylor Downs ’08 and Zak Kaufman (Dartmouth ’08), of Vera Solutions.

The Typical Amherst Path: An Investment Banker

A New Career Path: Vera Solutions

“I was a happy-go-lucky kid growing up, more oblivious to the world than I’d like to admit,” Subramanian said. “It only occurred to me towards the end of college that I cared about a lot of things — that I was really ignorant about a lot of things, that there were so many things I’d love to have the chance to study and learn about.”

After graduating from Amherst, Subramanian followed the career of many Amherst graduates: he entered the investment banking world. This decision was influenced by a few of his friends, whom he saw applying for jobs at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. Subramanian said he thought to himself, “Huh, should I be doing that, too?”

Without even knowing what a cover letter was, Subramanian borrowed a suit from a friend, quickly studied up on investment banking and went off to the interview.

For two years after graduation, Subramanian worked as an investment banking analyst for Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital. “It was in so many ways an amazing experience from which I learned a ton,” Subramanian said. “And being at ground zero of the financial crisis in September 2008 was pretty surreal.”

As Subramanian dived into this profession, he soon discovered that this career was not for him. His next career move would bring him to yet another continent, this time volunteering for an HIV-preven-

The organization Grassroot Soccer uses the game of soccer to help educate communities in preventing the spread of HIV. Like many other non-government organizations, Grassroot Soccer was compiling its data on the program’s results and impacts through paper registers and poorly recorded Excel spreadsheets.

“What was initially some software that we developed for our own organization’s use — to take attendance at sessions in township schools, to keep track of how many kids had been tested and referred to subsequent services, etc.,” Subramanian said, “turned into a technology consulting service.” Namely, Vera Solutions.

“Building Vera together was amazing,” said Taylor Downs, one of Vera’s co-founders. “Zak [Kaufman] and I had been talking about doing something like this for a few months, and Karti was the one who actually sat us down and announced that we were going to start a business. Next thing I knew, we were signing an operating agreement.”

Vera Solutions has provided technology-consulting services to more than 100 social services organizations. By using low-cost technology, Vera Solutions helps companies access their data and analyze it so that clients can understand whether their services are effectively impacting and improving people’s lives.

“At its core, the idea for Vera Solutions is that we think NGOs and social enterprises should track their beneficiaries with the same vigor that they track donors,” Subramanian said.

But starting the company was not an easy task. “[Technologists and potential clients would] ask about some new tool or framework or technology that we’d never heard of and in 90 seconds of research, we’d have to figure out exactly how it related to our work, how we might use it, why it might succeed or fail and so on,” Downs said. “Karti was amazing at this, [and] a hundred times over the last four years, we’ve had a really good laugh about the ridiculousness of us running a company.”

Vera Solutions has given Subramanian an opportunity to not only work on issues he is interested in and passionate about, but also to surround himself with a variety of new and old friends and organizations.

“We get to work with some of the most dynamic, creative and passionate organizations working on some really big, entrenched social issues all over the world,” Subramanian said.

One of those individuals that Subramanian had the opportunity to reconnect with was his first-year year roommate, Eric Glustrom ’07.

Glustrom’s organization, Educate!, became one of Vera Solutions’ first clients.

“As a result [of working with Vera and Subramanian] we had the chance to spend beautiful times together in Uganda,” Glustrom said. “I remember traveling to Sipi Falls together in eastern Uganda with a group of fellow Amherst friends, getting a soccer ball stuck in a tree, having a great guacamole eating contest and gleefully singing

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

Pete and Jay’s version of Beyonce’s ‘Halo.’”

Glustrom said what truly distinguishes Subramanian from other entrepreneurs is his ability to connect with people. “He naturally understands people and brings out the best in them,” Glustrom said.

“Whether he knows it or not, the quality of conversation and authenticity of relationship are higher when Karti is around.”

“30 Under 30” Despite Subramanian’s uncertainty as to how his life would unfold after college, he has made a name for himself and his company.

Subramanian, along with his co-founders, Downs and Kaufman, were all awarded Forbes’ “30 Under 30: Social Entrepreneurs” in spring 2013. Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list highlights the “brightest stars” from 15 different fields, all of whom are under 30 years of age.

Last year, Subramanian shared his experience and knowledge at Amherst College’s first annual TEDx event.

“Our theme for the event was ‘Disruptive Innovation,’” said Megan Lyster, the director of innovation programs at the college’s Center for Community Engagement.

“Karti was chosen because his work with Vera Solutions is reshaping the ways in which social enterprises collect and utilize data.”

During his TEDx talk, Subramanian spoke about the importance of improving data collection and analysis so that organizations can better understand their social impact, with a particular focus on the human-centered nature of data systems. He emphasized that data can only be as good as the questions it is used to answer: “Asking better questions is the real innovation,” he said.

November 7, 2014

Huston Powell ’91 Alumni Profile

The Mastermind Behind Lollapalooza Music Festival Huston Powell ‘91 studies global music trends in order to showcase musicians that listeners want at festivals such as Lollapalooza.

by Gabby Edzie ‘17 Huston Powell ’91 has mastered the art of tracing musical tastes around the world. Working with Austin-based concert and festival promoter C3 Presents, Powell has the task of booking bands for the world’s most prominent festivals.

Most notably, Powell holds the reins to the annual Lollapalooza music festival.

After his time at Amherst, Powell took an unconventional path to join C3 Presents, the incredible force behind much of the eclectic music, good vibes and flower headbands that the world has come to love.

The Path to C3 Presents For Powell, coming to Amherst meant a drastic change of scenery. Powell grew up in Kentucky and had spent little time in the Northeast before his acceptance to the college. Fortunately, Powell came to love Amherst. A member of both the basketball and lacrosse

prep. He also had a chance to apply skills learned from his Amherst athletic career, coaching basketball and freshman lacrosse.

Following his three years of teaching, Powell decided to attend business school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After business school, he worked on Wall Street for the next four years, a drastic change perhaps similar to his initial transition from Kentucky to Massachusetts. He spent four years working on Wall Street after business school, and once there, he experienced a change perhaps as drastic as his initial transition from Kentucky to Massachusetts.

“I worked at Morgan Stanley, which was an interesting experience, but I didn’t really enjoy the Wall Street life,” he said. “The hours were super long, and ultimately it just didn’t appeal to me all that much.”

It was during that time that Powell found a friend in Charles

Photo Courtesy of Huston Powell ‘91

After four years on Wall Street, Powell drastically changed his life by joining the music industry. teams, he kept himself busy with sports and extracurricular activities throughout his four years. After graduating as an economics major, he worked for T. Rowe Price, a global investment management firm in Baltimore, Maryland.

After three years with T. Rowe Price, Powell took a teaching opportunity at the Woodberry Forest School, an all-boys’ boarding school in Virginia. There, Powell taught algebra, geometry and SAT

November 7, 2014

Attal, a startup music promoter in Texas. “He said, ‘Come down here and you can work with me and learn the business,’ and so I did,” Powell said.

And just like that, in the spring of 2003, Powell joined Attal in the music industry. Since then, the impact of his work has been felt all around the music world.

A New Chapter C3 Presents is a company that

works independently in concert promotion, event coordination and artist management. Its home market is Austin, Texas, but the venues it books extend far beyond the area. Annually, C3 Presents books around 1500 concerts from all over Texas extending into the Midwest, and in places like Park City, Utah and Washington, D.C. Although C3 Presents is in charge of a huge number of concerts, Powell explained that the company is most famous for its festivals.

“C3 has about 130 employees.

We book Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits music festival, a lot of smaller festivals, like CounterPoint Festival down in Georgia ... we do almost 30 different festivals around the world,” Powell said.“I specifically book all the Lollapaloozas worldwide. There’s a Lollapalooza in Sao Paulo, Brazil; there’s one in Santiago, Chile; there’s one in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is what I’m working on right now, and for the first year, next year in September 2015, we’re going to launch a Lollapalooza Berlin in Germany.“

Lollapalooza Festival: A Yearly Challenge When it comes to Lollapalooza, Powell has to know what an audience of thousands wants, sometimes before their musical tastes have become immediately apparent, a task Powell describes as a “tricky process.” Preparations begin very early. Lollapalooza Chicago begins July 31 of next year, and Powell said he is already 80 percent done with the booking. In order to create just the right mood for Lollapalooza, Powell does extensive musical research.

“I’m talking to all the bands’ agents all over the country,” he said.

“I’m talking to them about who they think is right to play that year, who has new releases and what the right vibe is.”

The effort that goes into each festival is repeated each year to adjust to changes in the music world.

“Lollapalooza specifically is a multi-genre festival: one part rock, one part hip-hop, one part electronic music,” he said. “We also don’t like to repeat bands too often, and we’re looking at the different changing trends in music.”

Powell also looks to demographics for guidance. The primary audience demographic for Lollapalooza Chicago is 16- to 35-year-olds, and it skews toward the younger, creating a core demographic of around 18 to 25. After Powell carefully considers the elusive “vibe” of each year’s festival, artists are chosen for booking. A quick glance at past Lollapalooza lineups shows the extent of the work that Powell does each year.

“Of course, we have a certain budget,” he said. “And then, you know, it comes down to if we want to spend it on Eminem or Kendrick Lamar. What do we think of Of Monsters and Men with the new record coming versus the Alabama Shakes with their new record approaching? We just have to listen to music and try to figure out, anywhere from nine to 10 months out, what we think is going to be

Photo Courtesy of Huston Powell ‘91

Powell seeks out lesser-known bands and gives them the opportunity to attract new listeners. hot that summer.”

Powell’s booking experiences with bands vary constantly. Lollapalooza’s notable reputation in the music industry grants Powell immense power in booking artists, but larger bands can still challenge C3’s authority. Powell explained some of the difficulties that he faces when booking big names.

“At the headliner level, it’s very difficult because those bands have a lot of opportunities. Maybe they won’t be in the United States when we want them; maybe they want to do their own tour, and they’re going to be playing arenas; or maybe, like in the case of Eminem, they’re only going to do a couple of dates,” Powell said.

“That’s one of the changing things in the music business — there seems to be fewer and fewer really big bands. When you think about the biggest bands in the world, they’re bands like Coldplay, Radiohead, Eminem and Jay-Z and, you know, those are hard bands to replace.”

If a band plays Lollapalooza, Powell’s policy is to wait a few years before he can book them again, so the pool of headliners is constantly dwindling. This requires Powell to continuously make new discoveries, because he’s always looking for the next big thing.

The Evolution of Music Powell has the unique opportunity to give smaller, newer bands a chance to gain thousands of listeners. Powell has booked onceunknown bands like MGMT, Foster the People, the Lumineers and Mumford and Sons — all of which are now household names.

He said he has his eye on quite a few up-and-coming groups that

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

might become the next Radiohead or Eminem.

“You know, there’s Sylvan Esso, and 21 Pilots has started to do really big numbers,” he said. “Is MSMR going to be a bigger band? There’s a lot of this new wave electronic, like SBTRKT and Flying Lotus. The first time I booked Deadmau5 was for almost no money in 2008 before all these DJs exploded. Now, Calvin Harris, Deadmau5 and Skrillex — they’re all major touring artists. I think Kygo is going to be really big, and I’m also curious to see how bands like Tame Impala do. Oh! I also think Alt-J is really exploding.”

Powell noted that new festivals are popping up everywhere. Five or six years ago, the number of festivals was nowhere near as high as it is today. Crowds of thousands are drawn to festivals like Boston’s Boston Calling, New York’s Governor’s Ball and Delaware’s Firefly.

“The market is getting a little bit saturated with festivals,” Powell said.

Despite the intense workload involved in organizing Lollapalooza, Powell said that his career continues to be “very culturally stimulating.” His final meetings don’t take place around an office table, and he frequently has the opportunity to work outside the office.

As part of preparations for Lollapalooza, he’ll be in South America for two and a half weeks to see all the incredible bands that also make the trip. Last year it was artists like Vampire Weekend and Lorde.

Powell noted that he’s a 46-yearold trying to stay on top of what a 22-year-old wants to listen to, but as he confidently rattled off today’s most popular bands, he showed that he still had the ears and musical taste of a 22-year-old.

9

Alumni Profile Emily Stern ’83

Advancing the Field of Neuroimaging Director of functioning neuroimaging laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Emily Stern ’83 is a leader in her field.

by Elaine Jeon ’17 Once a biology major at the college, Emily Stern ’83 has now integrated her science education at Amherst and medical training at Cornell into revolutionizing functional neuroimaging for studying functions of the brain. The director of Functional and Molecular Neuroimaging and of the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, one of the primary teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School, Stern is a leading expert in imaging of neuropsychiatric diseases.

A Determined Researcher Stern credits growing up in New York City with providing her the opportunities to explore and develop her interest in science. Her high school’s science program shaped her into a curious-minded scientist even before coming to Amherst, and an internship at a biomedical research lab at Rockefeller University during her last year in high school solidified her interest in the field.

“I had a strong feeling that I wanted to be a scientist, but didn’t know what path I wanted to take. One of the reasons I went to Amherst was to explore different options,” Stern said.

Unlike her peers, Stern did not decide that she was going to be on the pre-med track until her junior year.

Instead, she did everything she could to avoid the typical pre-med classes, taking the required courses out of order. Eventually, she reconciled with the idea that she wanted to pursue higher education at a medical school.

“I really had a sense that I wanted to work on problems that were relevant to human conditions,” she said. “I

departments and supportive professors. She wrote her senior thesis in developmental biology with Professor Dominic Poccia and reaffirmed that research was her passion.

Stern was convinced that even if she ultimately worked as a researcher, clinical training was still going to be important for whatever specific career path she chose.

“When one goes into medicine, there are many options,” she said.

“One can become primarily a clinician or one can pursue academic medicine with a combination of research, teaching and administrative work. The latter is what I chose to do.”

Revolutionizing Research in Neuroimaging During her fourth year at Cornell University Medical College, Stern became intrigued by radiology.

“What really attracted me was the idea that you could use imaging technology to not just look at structure, but to examine function,” she said.

“At that time, functional neuroimaging was in its infancy so it was a very exciting time. Investigators were using positron emission tomography scanning, and functional MRI didn’t even exist yet. There was a lot of possibility, and I saw this as an area that could develop and provide a powerful tool to examine functions in living humans that we couldn’t look at before.”

Before this imaging technology was developed, conclusions about brain function were largely based on postmortem examination, detailed testing of spinal fluid and blood or the careful clinical evaluation of patients with stroke or other lesions. Stern wanted

more advanced training in functional neuroimaging at the Hammersmith Hospital in London. In 1994, she returned to the U.S. to found the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory at Cornell with David Silbersweig, her co-director and husband. In 2008, the lab relocated to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

In the laboratory, Stern and her colleagues study neuropsychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia, anxiety and personality and affective disorders, among others. They also develop new image acquisition and analysis techniques in order to study these disorders with increased sensitivity and at a higher resolution.

Stern also finds beauty in the detailed investigation required to observe small structural changes within the brain. With careful measurements in research studies, one can identify abnormalities that are not as obvious as a stroke or a tumor. She continues to stay in this field because “it’s revolutionary for psychiatric disorders. It’s a new way to identify the underlying pathophysiology of the diseases, which we weren’t able to do before.

This is a prerequisite for identifying potential new treatment approaches.”

A Dynamic Work Environment Stern’s Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory attracts esteemed professionals from many different fields, including radiology, psychiatry, neurology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, mathematics, statistics and engineering. She finds her interdisciplinary area of research to be an exciting environment to work in.

“One of the things that characterizes the lab is that we have people from all these different backgrounds,” she said. “It’s tremendously stimulating, but also tremendously fun because we are all constantly learning something new from each other.”

While the lab focuses on further

Photo Courtesy of Emily Stern

Stern enjoys researching in a laboratory, an environment that allows her to collaborate with experts in different fields, including psychology, mathematics and engineering. wanted to be able to help people and make a difference in the real world. I decided that medical school was the right path for me and that background has turned out to be invaluable.”

Stern said that her mentor at the Rockefeller internship made a great impression on her and inspired her to pursue research. She continued to pursue her interests at Amherst, where she encountered strong science

10

to continue chasing the idea of looking at brain function because she was intrigued by psychiatric disorders. She wanted to understand them better using these novel, advanced imaging techniques.

After graduating from Cornell and completing her internship in internal medicine and residency in diagnostic radiology at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Sterm sought

developing functional neuroimaging, she still has opportunities to interact with patients.

“Because we do clinical research, we interact with patients that have the disorders that we are specifically studying in a given protocol,” Stern explained.

Other than being involved in research, Stern finds her work schedule busy with the administrative aspects

Photo Courtesy of Emily Stern

Stern firmly believes in continuing to learn after college. of running a laboratory, such as applying for research grants and attending to teaching opportunities.

“I always enjoyed teaching and I believe that it is an important part of what I do,” she said. “One reason I am in an academic medical center is that I think it’s incredibly important to train the next generation of investigators to move the field forward.”

Stern had her first teaching experience at Amherst, where she worked as a teaching assistant for both the chemistry and biology departments.

She believes that had she not been at a small liberal arts college, she would not have had this valuable opportunity to teach during her undergraduate years.

Most of the teaching happens in the laboratory on a daily basis, where she mentors trainees who range from high school to medical and postdoctoral students. She also teaches medical students, residents and fellows outside of the laboratory. Moreover, for nine years, she worked through a federally funded grant on developing educational programs that intricately outline mechanisms for teaching in this fairly new field.

Stern believes that working in a laboratory is one of the most dynamic jobs because it offers different scenarios all the time. For instance, she initiated a project that involved constructing a new MRI research imaging center at Brigham.

“There was no robust infrastructure for this before I came,” she recalled. “When doing fMRI, it’s important to have a ‘clean’ environment with no electromagnetic interference from outside sources and no vibration. For this project, I had to learn about things like power lines, pouring concrete and green construction procedures … and what did I know about such things?”

Stern also described co-directing a laboratory and working with her husband as very exciting and intellectually stimulating. Her husband’s background is in neurology and psychiatry, so she has learned a lot from his fields of expertise and has enjoyed collaborating on projects with him.

“Before we had kids, it was almost

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

dangerous because we were both really into what we were doing, brought our work home with us, and basically talked shop most of the time,” Stern joked. “But we have a great time working together and discussing our work. We have complimentary backgrounds, so it’s helpful for both of us to have these conversations.”

Her husband, David Silbersweig, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, describes his wife as an extraordinary human being, flawlessly executing the responsibilities of a physician-scientist, administrative leader and mom.

“I feel so fortunate that we are able to share our professional and intellectual lives, as well as our personal lives,” he said. “During the long years of medical school and residency training, we were one year apart, so we would each help support the other through the particularly tough times.

I remember bringing her sandwiches when she was on call in the emergency room in the middle of the night, and she did the same for me when I was on call in the neurology ICU.” He lauded Stern’s “tireless, steady and wise leadership and teaching of functional and molecular neuroimaging” and for bringing incredible expertise and resources to Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Appreciating An Amherst Education Having taken advantage of the professors and resources a top-tier liberal arts college can offer, Stern felt prepared for the future after college.

Nevertheless, she said still misses her undergraduate years and being in “an environment where the sky is the limit for learning.”

However, she strongly believes that her time after college has been an ongoing experience of self-education.

“Amherst prepared me incredibly well,” she said. “It’s where I learned to think deeply and realize that learning is a lifelong process. I discovered that it’s a privilege to spend time educating oneself. I went into the world after Amherst knowing that I wanted to continue to learn, and that was tremendous.”

November 7, 2014

ALUMNI, INTERESTED IN SCHOOL HAPPENINGS?

WANT TO READ UP ON THE LATEST HOME TEAM WINS? price

subscription duration

(trust us, we’re worth it)

$40 $75 $140 $250

One semester One year Two years Four years

Subscribe! go ahead and

TO SUBSCRIBE, EMAIL US

astudent @amherst.edu

(Maybe a better investment than Amherst College itself. Maybe.)

SERIOUSLY, THAT’S

0.431%

What’s purple and gold and red all over?

Williams’ football team after Homecoming

OF TUITION HERE

What’s black and white and read all over?

The Amherst Student

If you subscribe, we promise not all our jokes will be this bad.

Studies* show that subscribers are more attractive, smarter, wealthier, 73092 taller, more important, less likely to succumb to brain freezes and possess greater school spirit than non-subscribers. *Studies may or may not be fictionalized

WE TAKE THE

THRILL OUT OF INVESTING.

At TIAA-CREF, we believe the less excitement you find in your portfolio the better. When we invest, we do it for the long term, steadily.1 Our approach works so well it earned us the Best Overall Large Fund Company award two years in a row by the independent research firm Lipper.2

Learn more in one click at TIAA.org or call 855 200-7243.

Consider investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing.

Go to tiaa-cref.org for product and fund prospectuses that contain this and other information. Read carefully before investing. 1 TIAA-CREF funds are subject to market and other risk factors. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

The Lipper Award is given to the group with the lowest average decile ranking of three years’ Consistent Return for eligible funds over the three-year period ended 11/30/12 and 11/30/13, respectively. TIAA-CREF was ranked against 36 fund companies in 2012 and 48 fund companies in 2013 with at least five equity, five bond, or three mixed-asset portfolios. TIAA-CREF Individual & Institutional Services, LLC, and Teachers Personal Investors Services Inc. C18456B ©2014 Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America – College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), 730 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017.

2

BEST OVERALL LARGE FUND COMPANY The Lipper Awards are based on a review of 36 companies’ 2012 and 48 companies’ 2013 risk-adjusted performance.

2

November 7, 2014

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

5021A0002 C18456B THRILL 10x10 NWS Various_1.indd Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

11

Alumni Profile William Soleau ’77

A Dancer, Choreographer and Storyteller An accomplished choreographer and dancer, William Soleau ’77 says he is enthralled by the narrative possibilities of dance.

by Darya Bor ’18 When you think of dance, you imagine graceful and powerful dancers, elegant lines of motion, fabulous costumes and the energy of humankind. But rarely is the question asked — who actually decides how this artistry is made?

Who controls the movements of the dancers?

William (Bill) Soleau ’77 is the answer to these questions. As a choreographer of contemporary ballet, he decides how a dance looks, feels and responds to the music, the audience and the story. Although his dance style is classified as contemporary ballet, Soleau describes his approach as the opposite of “dance for dance’s sake.”

His choreography is particularly focused on storytelling and the human condition in order to affect his audience in a realistic way.

“I like the human, emotional side of things. I want to tell stories that people can relate to,” he said.

Soleau has created more than 80 ballets over his 35-year career and has worked with dance companies, including the Shanghai Ballet of China, Ballet Met and The American Ballroom Dance Theater. Soleau currently works as the resident choreographer for State Street Ballet in Santa Barbara, California. He has choreographed 20 ballets there, including his most recent, “Tango Rain,” which returned to the stage on Oct. 25.

Dance and New Discoveries Soleau became involved in dance through the influence of his older sister. His parents nurtured his dancing skills at age 11 in the form of mandatory “junior socials,” a series of classes for youth in various forms of social dances. In high school, he tried out for (and got) all

the dancing roles in musical theater productions. This early experience with theater would later influence Soleau’s highly narrative works.

Upon enrolling at Amherst College, Soleau decided to follow the pre-law track. He said that his parents, who both worked in creative professions, supported his decision though they did not understand it. In the late 1970s, the college was still all male with a small theater department and no dance programs. Soleau was one of the first to take advantage of the 5 Colleges by taking dance classes at UMass and Smith.

“In UMass I was around women all the time!” he said with a laugh.

He cites his education at the College as one of the most influential experiences of his life.

“Really good teachers — and Amherst had a lot of them — really influenced me, and those influences stayed with me for the rest of my life,” Soleau said.

He recalled a particular class — Gothic Architecture with Professor Joel Upton.

“Because of his enthusiasm for his subject, by the end of the course, I couldn’t get enough of gothic architecture,” Upton said. “I just fell in love with gothic architecture!”

He also notes another aspect of his identity that changed during his college years — that of an athletic, 6-foot-1, self-described “jock.”

“I realized hitting a tennis ball or a squash ball isn’t as important as seeing the end of Romeo and Juliet where the woman falls across the altar reaching for Romeo and” — his voice rose in excitement — “all of a sudden, I saw art and human beings and what really mattered.

I wanted to move people and be moved.”

Soleau also discovered an interest in art history, specifically the work of Vincent Van Gogh, which later developed into his first ballet: “Starry Night.” This work illustrated the tale of Van Gogh’s life through the media of dance, paintings and poetic narration. The piece brought Soleau fame in the dance world when it premiered in 1989.

The Beginnings of a Career After graduation, Soleau did what all aspiring dancers hope to do: move to New York City. His girlfriend at the time was studying at the Boston Conservatory and invited him to be in one of her dance pieces. This was his first introduction to the professional dance world, and it reaffirmed his aspirations to be a performing member of it.

Soleau described his first day in New York City as a fairytale: he spent the day taking a class with Joyce Trisler, a successful dancer and leader of her own company.

Later that evening, he received a call from Alvin Ailey Dance Company, which he had auditioned for while in school. The company offered him a full scholarship to attend its school.

“I went home happy that day,” he laughed. “But that night I got a phone call from Joyce Trisler, who was my teacher that first day. She said, ‘Bill, listen. My company’s about to leave for a three-month tour of Europe and I want you to come with us,’ I was in New York one day, and I got into a company that was about to leave for Europe – and that’s how it started. And it took off from there.”

From there, Soleau said he was never out of work, and always working on one project or another.

Eventually, his wife-to-be, the ballet master at the New York City Ballet, needed a choreographer for a new performance. Soleau asked to be involved, beginning his career. Since then, he went from being a dancer to a resident choreographer, ballet master and principal dancer.

For his first 15 years in the professional dance world, Soleau spent six months of the year in the U.S. and toured the world for the rest of the year. Soleau says he was very fortunate to meet his wife, Christine Redpath, while choreographing a ballet for the two of them called “ISLE.” “That’s how we fell in love,” he said.

Soleau said he considers himself lucky in many ways.

“We were all artists, we were all dancers and we were touring the world,” he said. “I consider myself blessed, and I think Amherst had a lot to do with it. If you’re interested in something, allowing yourself to have the tools to go after it. Even without a dance department.”

Unexpected Inspiration

Photo Courtesy of William Soleau

William Soleau seeks to impart his passion for dance to a new generation of dancers.

12

But there are other sides of this artistic personage. The same insatiable curiosity and appetite for learning that has served Soleau so well in the dance world also led him to the field of software programming. He taught himself various codes while on tour and

Photo Courtesy of William Soleau

“I like the human, emotional side of things. I want to tell stories that people can relate to,” Soleau said. created a software company called Soleau Software. The company specializes in non-violent strategy games and has even received orders from doctors to create games that would measure the aptitude of a brain patient who has suffered a severe cerebral hemorrhage.

“They needed a program, so I’d sit down, write the code and make the program,” he said.

Software engineering took up Soleau’s life for about nine years until he returned to choreography.

“To me, programming was like choreography,” he said.

“Choreography is a problem-solving thing, figuring out, ‘OK, he’s coming from stage right to stage left, but it’s more powerful if he’s going from left to right because that’s how people in the Western hemisphere read,’ and programming’s like that too. You’re given a problem and you need to figure out the most creative and simplistic way with the least amount of code to solve the problem. People ask how I can be a choreographer and a programmer at the same time, and I reply that it’s really the same thing! They’re using different sides of the brain, but the creativity process is the same.”

For Soleau, the creative process represents the most important element of choreography. He often takes dance in an improvisational direction. His style is “personally nerve-racking,” he said. He never creates a single step until he meets the dancers he is working with for the first time. The music is memorized, but the steps are

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

created right in the studio during the first meeting.

“I view the dancers as people — as paint — on a fresh canvas,” Soleau said. “Seeing the development is so fun. I can’t believe they pay me to do this!”

However, despite the improvisational nature of these first meetings, Soleau’s finished pieces always have each movement meticulously planned.

Leila Drake, a leading dancer in many ballets directed by Soleau, described the creative process after initial choreography in the refining stage during production for the ballet “Carmen.”

“There is a moment where I pick the ‘death’ Tarot card off the ground and then look into the distance, and we worked on that one moment for at least 20 minutes, experimenting with different ways to pick it up, how to hold it, which direction to look, how quickly to lower my hand, what angle to face, how to bend down, etc.,” she said. “It was so cool to work these tiny movements that are so pivotal to the story, but then we just laughed at the amount of time we spent on one thing!”

During and beyond his time at Amherst, Soleau said artistic nature had the freedom to prosper and grow to be “motivated and inspired.”

When asked to give a piece of advice to current students, he said: “I promise you, you’ll find your way. Take the ride, but look out the window, because you’ll never get that ride again.”

November 7, 2014

Melissa Kantor ’91 Alumni Profile

Finding Joy Through Writing and Teaching Melissa Kantor ’91 is a young adult fiction writer, English teacher and dean of faculty at St. Ann’s School.

by Sophie Chung ’17 For college students across the nation who have too many interests and don’t know exactly which direction to take in the future, Melissa Kantor ’91 is a prime role model. Exploring a variety of interests that led her down many different paths, Kantor has pursued what she honestly finds the most happiness in doing. Today, this include being a young adult novelist of eight books, an English teacher and, most recently, dean of faculty at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

Life at Amherst “When I was in seventh grade, I told people I was going to be a writer,” Kantor said. She said she was especially interested in creative writing. In high school, Kantor pursued that passion, writing stories and by extension, acting out stories in theater performances. It was something that came naturally to her, writing out of her imagination.

However, after entering Amherst College, Kantor found herself exposed to many opportunities to try other fields and slowly began to fall in love with the study of political science.

“I took Poli Sci 11 with Professor Tom Dumm, which was just amazing. If there were any courses at Amherst that blew my mind, it was Tom Dumm’s

Poli Sci 11 and a course that he used to teach about punishment,” Kantor said. “Both were just unbelievable to me. They changed the way I thought, the way I wrote, the way I articulated my ideas and thought about the value of my ideas.”

Her newfound passion for political science showed Kantor what she really wanted to study intensively at Amherst. In her four years in college, she didn’t do much creative writing at all and instead focused on writing academic papers and studying critical theory. But while Kantor did end up majoring in political science, she also couldn’t deny her other passion for creative writing, which led to a double major in English.

Her interests in both of these fields sharpened her writing skills even further. Kantor attributes much of her clear and distinct writing style to her political science thesis advisor, Professor Austin Sarat.

“I feel like Tom taught me how to think and Austin taught me how to write,” Kantor said. “He really encouraged us to write in a very direct, straightforward way in a time when loquacious writing that really called attention to itself was fashionable.

He was critical of work that was not clear or was not direct and was not purposefully so. And so

that was a very important thing for me when I carried on writing books on my own, when I was writing novels and also in my teaching of writing.

Sarat remembers Kantor quite distinctly, even years after she graduated from Amherst: “Melissa Kantor was, from the first moment I met her, an intellectual sparkplug,” he said. “She took nothing for granted and questioned every bit of conventional wisdom. She brought an uncommon liveliness to her work and was, as a result, a real pleasure to work with. Moreover, I remember her as a warm, funny, engaging person. I loved talking with her.”

Aside from her academic interests at Amherst, Kantor recalled spending a lot of time winding down from the intensity of her studies by having fun and doing what she wanted to.

“I did Women’s Speak. which was a month long celebration of women,” she said. “I did a group that worked doing some education and counseling around sexual harassment. I drank a lot of beer. I kind of did what I did.

I spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends. I also feel like I literally spent my years there reading at a café in town called Bonducci’s.”

Photo Courtesy of Melissa Kantor

November 7, 2014

Kantor credits her Amherst education with helping her become an innovative thinker. that definitely gives me satisfaction.”

New Places

Rekindling First Love

After graduating from Amherst, Kantor left for Israel and lived there for a full year, teaching at an American school. When her year in Israel came to an end, Kantor returned to New York for a few months before embarking on yet another journey, this time to Zimbabwe.

“In Zimbabwe, I was doing development work. I was working with women’s organizations for a while and doing some work with small businesses as well as some literacy work, “ Kantor said.

But Zimbabwe was not a permanent home for her. She said she found her time there interesting, but “not really for me.” After spending two years abroad, Kantor found herself back in New York, searching for work that would both inspire and challenge her.

Yet despite all these other interests, Kantor has continued to relentlessly pursue her passion for writing young adult fiction.

After coming back to the U.S. and pursuing graduate studies in English, she couldn’t help but start to do some of her own writing again. “I returned to that first love,” she said.

When Kantor started writing fiction again, she found herself interested in catering to a very specific category of people: teenagers.

This wasn’t the audience she initially had in mind; it was only after a good friend of hers, Helen Bernstein, an editor at a publishing house, suggested that she focus on a young adult audience that Kantor started to find what she wanted to write and for whom.

Bernstein sees Kantor as “a focused and earnest writer who gets into the heart and soul of a character. Much of Melissa’s success as a Y.A. author has been connecting to her audience through her characters. Her books are character driven and delve into real issues and emotions.”

Kantor describes writing for young adults enjoyable because a person’s high school years can be particularly exciting.

“You’re making decisions about your future and navigating complicated friendships,” she said. “I think in the adult life, if you’re lucky and you have some good resources, you can kind of weather storms. But I mean if you have a breakup as a teenager, you really believe — I certainly believe — that you’re never ever

Finding Her Niche

Kantor’s young adult novels present lively and relatable characters, and have achieved considerable success in recent years.

Photo Courtesy of Melissa Kantor

After coming back to the States, Kantor found a position teaching English at St. Ann’s School, where she is now the dean of faculty. While teaching at St. Ann’s, she went back to school and obtained her master’s in English.

She has been teaching at the school since then and describes these years as her most rewarding.

“I’ve been working at this school for a long time. It’s really a school that’s committed to a life of the mind and celebration of the arts. And I feel like I’ve contributed to that in significant ways,” Kantor said. “And thinking about students that I’ve taught successfully or classes that I’ve done well is something

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

going to be happy again. A teenager can just feel that way about anything, and I can feel sympathetic to it. I think that’s why.”

Kantor’s recently published books include “Maybe One Day,” published just this year, as well as “The Darlings In Love” and “The Darlings Are Forever,” also published this year.

Just Her But even as an author of eight young adult fiction books, teacher and dean at a prestigious school, at the end of the day, Kantor is a mother, wife, and precious friend.

Nancy Updike ’91, a fellow Amherst alumna, recalled meeting her at Amherst one Tuesday Night Tap party.

“She was funnier than everyone else in the room, which is always true, and we’ve been friends since then. As far as I’m concerned, Melissa is a mutant, like Wolverine, and her mutation is being overall more excellent: more disciplined, harder working, more savvy,” Updike said.

“I am one of many people who would be lost without her.”

Kantor attributes a lot of her growth as a thinker and as a person to her time at Amherst.

She remembers that she arrived at the college as a very good and obedient student who was extremely hard-working. However, she admits that she didn’t know how to be an interesting thinker.

“The degree to which I think about things in complicated ways is something I learned at Amherst,” she said. “I am enormously grateful to the school for that. I hope that people who are students there right now are really part of this celebration of the life of the mind of just thinking about things.”

13

Alumni Profile Darryl Harper ’90

A Jazz Musician With the Passion to Teach Darryl Harper ’90, music department chair at Virginia Commonwealth University, gives others a chance to succeed in music.

by Sitina Xu ’16 Darryl Harper ’90 is a jazz clarinetist who has split his career into equal parts jazz performance and teaching. Harper recently released his seventh studio jazz album, a double CD of collaborations with other jazz musicians, and is currently the music department chair at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Introduction to Jazz Harper began playing the clarinet in his school’s band at the age of six.

“The clarinet, it was fun,” Harper recalled. “It was very social and it just seemed like, ‘yeah, do this!

This is great!’ I was a very energetic, mischievous child.”

Harper’s mother had always wanted to study music, but wasn’t afforded the chance, so she made sure that she gave her son the opportunity. Harper’s father, while not musically trained, “would improvise blues lyrics at the dinner table,” Harper said. He said that his father used one of several harmonicas strewn about the house “to flirt with my mother.” It was his father who gave Harper his first saxophone.

Harper’s most vivid memory of music was the first time he saw live jazz at a neighborhood club. Anthony “Tony” Hurdle, Harper’s jazz teacher at Settlement Music School, invited Harper to a local jazz club in the middle of the day when classes were over.

Within the club, Harper said he understood the power of music — specifically the power of jazz — for the first time. Harper credited jazz powerhouses from his Philadelphia neighborhood, such as saxophonist Tony Williams and bassist Tyrone Brown, for showing him what “playing your heart out” meant.

In explaining the experience of watching Williams on stage, Harper said, “He was so earnest about what he was trying to get across to the

audience, and the audience was enjoying it so much. They were responding to what he was doing and they were calling out and encouraging him, and that would make his playing get to another level and they would call out more. There was this vitality and joy in the room I had never experienced before, not in the same way.”

Harper said that this experience transformed his relationship with music, jazz and his clarinet.

“I did whatever I could to have [jazz] in my ear or be practicing at all times,” he said. “It was the beginning of me trying to practice with every spare moment that I had. I always had a clarinet with me, and if I had ten minutes, [I’d] pull it out and play something.”

Harper’s real inspiration didn’t stem just from witnessing how jazz could be performed for the first time, but also from being under Hurdle’s guidance.

“Hurdle was a really dedicated player [with a] work ethic that was really incredible,” Harper said. “I’ve never been close to anyone who played at his level.”

Hurdle practiced constantly and directed Harper on the path to becoming a professional jazz clarinetist. Harper recalls Hurdle telling him, “If you want to be good at this, you have to devote yourself to it.

That’s the way it works.”

Jazz at Amherst When Harper decided to attend Amherst College, he wasn’t sure if he was making the right choice as an aspiring jazz clarinetist.

“I was a little afraid because there were a lot of things I wanted to do,” he said. Because Amherst is isolated from major cities, he was unsure of whether pursuing a professional music career would be feasible at the college.

He worried about having venues at which to play and whether there would be other musicians around.

Luckily, “there seemed to be enough happening within the Five Colleges,” Harper said. “I feel very fortunate in retrospect.”

The Amherst music department “was much smaller than it is now,” Harper said. He was one of about ten music majors of his graduating class. However, with the program’s small size came benefits.

“What was great about it was that you had a tremendous amount of individual attention, and the faculty was fantastic,” he said. He praised Professor Jenny Kalick, the music department chair and his senior thesis advisor, and Professor David Reck, an ethnomusicologist of classical Indian music.

That Harper’s music career began at a liberal arts college as opposed to a specialized, pre-professional music school proved to be “pretty unusual,” he said, yet fundamental to how he operates today.

“I feel like the discipline of questioning your assumptions, understanding context and really bringing a critical perspective to the work that you do, that was really critical to me,” Harper said.

In describing Harper’s approach to music using a perspective of context and critical understanding, jazz violinist and tour mate Regina Carter said, “Darryl takes his time [to really get] inside the music, listening to the conversation and gathering his thoughts before playing a note.”

Harper described his Amherst education as being empowering for him as a musician. The liberal arts “discipline of questioning your assumptions, understanding context and really bringing a critical perspective to the work [became a] constant thread through [my career],” Harper said.

His early years as a professional musician, however, weren’t free from challenges. Harper’s first obstacle upon graduating from Amherst was that he was behind his colleagues in terms of technique.

“I had a lot of catching up to do,

thefabempire.com

Despite the college’s small music department, Harper found a welcoming community of musicians at Amherst. but the thing that was different was that I knew that. I could see it as clear as day,” Harper said.

Honing His Technique Between Amherst and graduates studies in jazz at Rutgers University, Harper spent three years developing his skills. Harper reached out to a jazz guitarist at UMass and came back with a specific list of techniques he needed to learn to qualify for graduate school.

“He gave me this whole program and said, ‘If you come to your audition and you can do these things, I’d be pretty confident that you’ll have a successful audition,’” Harper remembered.

He eventually enrolled at Rutgers University for his master’s in music, but not before making sure he could play at a competitive level.

Giving Others the Chance

northcountrypublicradio.org

Three years after graduating from Amherst, Harper pursued a master’s in music at Rutgers.

14

While Harper was practicing for graduate school, he moved back to his native Philadelphia and began admission recruitment work at George School, a private Quaker school, first as assistant director of admissions and later as director of financial aid.

Harper said he saw his time at George School as a chance to “take the education I had received and reciprocate.”

During this seven-year tenure at George School, Harper recruited about one thousand students from inner-city backgrounds similar to the Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up. He also managed two million dollars in scholarships for financial aid.

“A lot of the students I recruited, they’re old now — almost as old as I am,” Harper said with a chuckle. “It’s really gratifying to imagine that you helped bring something to a person that they value and that they’re still

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

using.”

Later, Harper taught and directed St. Paul’s School Ward Center for the Arts. He is now the music department chair at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“I just think that schools are a wonderful place where a very intimate human interface happens,” he said.

At Virginia Commonwealth, Harper has the opportunity to play a mentorship role similar to the role Hurdle played for him.

Harper compares his relationship with Hurdle to that of the acclaimed Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein.

“Sondheim said, ‘If Hammerstein had been a great dentist, he would have been a dentist,’ because he wanted to be just like his mentor.

I wanted to be just like Hurdle. He was this great jazz musician and teacher and so that’s what I wanted to become or try to become,” Harper said.

Now at Virginia Commonwealth University, Harper has the opportunity be the one giving inspiration and guidance.

“It just feels like a real privilege to be with students, period,” Harper said. “It felt like a privilege to be a student, and it’s an equal privilege at least to teach.”

Upon reflection, Harper describes his life as one filled with such “privileges.”

“I’m just surrounded by people who have been very generous and filled with such talent and skill,” he said. “I think of where I started just learning the rudiments of the instruments, or even encountering my first poem or whatever it is.

To be able to keep developing your skills to whatever extent you can, it’s really a privilege. I’m realizing how lucky I’ve been.”

November 7, 2014

Abbey Gardner ’89 Alumni Profile

Lending a Hand in Developing Countries Abbey Gardner ’89 has had an exciting and varied career working to improve aid to developing countries.

by Ryan Cenek ’18 Most students study world events from a safe distance. Abbey Gardner ’89, however, has the habit of being exactly where history is being made.

From a visit to the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era, to the halls of the Latvian parliament during the nation’s struggle for independence, to earthquake-shattered Haiti, Gardner has both witnessed and taken part in the changing world of international affairs. Today, she works with Paul Farmer, the special adviser to the United Nations Secretary General to improve aid to developing countries.

A Transformative Four Years Gardner’s experience at Amherst began with a link to an important historical moment. Her application essay, about her experience visiting the Soviet Union in the summer of 1984, landed on the desk of Amherst Russian professor Stanley Rabinowitz.

“Stanley wrote me back this long, personal note about the Russian department, [how] I should consider majoring in Russian,” Gardner said.

“I was just blown away by the time he took and the personal attention, and that just made my decision that I absolutely wanted to come to Amherst and major in Russian.”

Indeed, Gardner did end up majoring in Russian. Over her four years at Amherst, Gardner developed close friendships with the professors in the department.

“They all ended up staying mentors to me after college, helping me figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” Gardner said.

Rabinowitz remembered Gardner as being “very outgoing and bubbly and vivacious.”

“She is the best kind of student you can find: open to new experience, receptive to whatever you give, curious, intelligent,” he said. “She was really interested in the subject matter, and got excited about it.”

She was equally enthusiastic about engagements outside the classroom.

“Whether it was club rugby, a political protest or a study group for Russian comps — Abbey was the first to join, worked the hardest and always assumed the best positive outcome,” said Sarah Sanford ‘89, one of Gardner’s good friends.

The ’80s were a particularly exciting time to be studying Russian, Rabinowitz said. By 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had begun the programs of political restructuring known as glasnost and perestroika, marking a major turning point in Russian history.

“My time studying Russian at Amherst were the years of complete upheaval in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” Gardner said. “When I look back and think that was the time I was able to study with Stanley Rabinowitz and [political science professor] William Taubman and [Russian professors] Jane Taubman and Stephanie Sandler, in this tiny little intimate Russian department … it was an extraordinary time to be there.”

Although Gardner’s area of study was relevant to world news at the time, she did not see the Russian major as preparation for a career

Photo courtesy of Abbey Gardner

Russian major Gardner did not predict that her future would be in international affairs.

November 7, 2014

in international affairs. For her, Russian was a pursuit of passion.

“It was a purely liberal arts endeavor. There was nothing careeroriented about it at all, because in those days, there weren’t too many jobs for people who were Russian area experts or spoke Russian, so I did it, you know, with no thought that it would ever lead to any career in the future,” Gardner said. “But those classes … I just soaked them in, and they were just incredible.”

Both socially and academically, Gardner fit in well at Amherst. Her best friends at the college were from James Dormitory, her first-year residence hall. According to Gardner, after nearly 25 years, they are still her closest friends.

Another of Gardner’s friends from her first year, Margaret Stohl ‘89, said, “I can’t remember a single person who didn’t like her. She was a people person, and she’s still that way.”

A Time of “Awakening” After graduating in 1989, Gardner lived for one year in Riga, the capital of Latvia, which was then a part of the Soviet Union. While there, she taught English to a group of Latvian factory workers and wrote for the Russian-language antiSoviet newspaper Atmoda (Latvian for “awakening”). As a reporter for Atmoda in 1990, Gardner witnessed Latvia declare its independence from the Soviet Union.

“I had a press pass for writing for this newspaper, so I was able to be in the room inside the Latvian Parliament when they voted to secede from the Soviet Union,” Gardner said. “I was in the building when the Soviet troops marched in. It was one of these historic, unbelievable moments that I was fortunate enough to be a part of and witness after I had been studying Soviet politics at Amherst.”

After returning to the United States, Gardner earned a master’s degree in Russian Area Studies from Georgetown University, studying ethnic politics in the Baltic republics as they regained independence.

By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen. Gardner now found that her knowledge of Russian language, politics and culture was suddenly far more in demand than it had been in 1989, as nonprofits and private companies alike raced to establish a presence in a more open Russia. While completing her master’s, Gardner worked for the Open Society Institute, a nonprofit run by liberal philanthropist George Soros that ran a program reforming the social sciences in the newly independent Baltic republics. It was at this job that she met her eventual husband Patrick Dolan, who also worked for the nonprofit. The two married in 1999.

Some of Gardner’s most influential work was with the International Science Foundation program, which gave away around $100 million to scientists working in non-weapons fields who had lost their Soviet funding in 1991.

This work was important, Gardner said, because “not only were they doing world-class scientific

Photo courtesy of Abbey Gardner

Gardner’s current focus is on the outbreak of Ebola. research, but those were really the intellectual liberal thinkers in the former Soviet Union, and they were in desperate shape at that point because nobody cared about them anymore. Everyone was supporting weapons scientists, and basic scientists were getting left out in the cold. So we supported them for several years.”

By 1995, she became Soros’ Regional Director for Russia, overseeing a $100 million-per-year operation in the former Soviet Union.

“We supported a network of foundations in Eastern Europe. I was the person in New York who supported them strategically as they developed their program plans and budget, and I linked them up with resources,” Gardner said. “We ran programs that spanned from early childhood education to higher education to rule of law programs, economic development, job training for returning soldiers.”

International Impact The next step in Gardner’s career happened almost by chance. While working for an Open Society Institute program responding to a tuberculosis outbreak in Russia, Gardner met a young Harvard professor named Paul Farmer, whom she describes as “a hero, inspiration and close friend.” When Soros adopted Farmer’s proposal for focusing on the multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, the outbreak was quickly contained, and Farmer was propelled to international prestige.

Gardner stayed in touch with Farmer as she made her next career move, working for the University of Miami medical school to set up a global health training program.

In 2009, Farmer, now the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti, was recruited by Bill Clinton for a mission focused on improving political and economic conditions in Haiti.

Farmer asked Gardner to join him on that mission.

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

In January 2010, a powerful and deadly earthquake struck Haiti.

“Our entire mission changed overnight. What we ended up doing was tracking the aid to Haiti,” Gardner said. “We tracked how much the donors pledged, which was in the billions, and how much they actually dispersed. We found that in the emergency phase of the response to the earthquake, less than one percent of over two billion dollars went through the government of Haiti.”

Gardner, working with Farmer, decided to draw attention to this problem. They worked to persuade donors that the Haitian government needed help in order to rebuild.

After the Haitian mission was shut down, Gardner helped found a small U.N.-affiliated partnership called the Aid Delivery Support Initiative, which researches aid effectiveness and strategies to handle donors who refuse to work with governments of developing countries.

This issue is important, she said, “because everyone’s agreed that the best, most effective thing to do is to support public sectors, but they don’t do it.”

Jehane Sedky, who worked with Gardner at the Aid Delivery Support Initiative, recalled Gardner’s importance to Farmer’s project.

“I remember meeting Paul Farmer for the first time — he walked into the U.N. office with Abbey by his side and introduced her by saying ‘this is my right hand and my left hand,’” Sedky said.

Today, Gardner’s work focuses on the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

“The reason this outbreak got out of hand is because Liberia and Sierra Leone had no health systems of their own. Liberia has had three percent of its development assistance go through the government,” she said. “Contractors and N.G.O.s, as great as they might be, do not make a national health system.”

15

Alumni Profile Tess Taylor ’99

Poetic Conversations with the Environment Tess Taylor ’99, a poet who recently published “The Forage House,” writes meaningful poetry about places she loves.

by Julia Pretsfelder ’18 Culling images and fragments from the world around her, Tess Taylor ’99 exemplifies how a poet can also be a historian, archaeologist, naturalist, teacher, student and witness. Whether she is describing her first post-college apartment in Brooklyn, her drives from northern to southern California or the bird sanctuary at Amherst, her thoughtful observations give a complex and distinct shape to a place’s unspoken stories.

The Root of a Poem “Poetry is essentially a long conversation,” Taylor said.

For Taylor, a poem can begin in a variety of ways and develop over time.

She said she often “close reads” her environment and writes her thoughts down in a notebook, perhaps adding research to the notebook as well.

Later on, she might find connections between a hurried thought from a five-year-old notebook and a response to one of her current pieces of writing.

“Ideas emerge as you make them,” Taylor said. “You have to let yourself admit that you pursue poetry, and poetry pursues you.”

Taylor’s style of writing carries a distinct musicality and pulse of language, perhaps stemming from her training as a singer. The arts were a key part of Taylor’s upbringing in Berkeley, California.

Rachel Richardson, her friend and fellow poet from Berkeley, explained, “Growing up in Berkeley was a great help to both me and Tess, kids who had artistic leanings and really cared about storytelling and justice … We were both able to believe — as so many kids aren’t — that the world wants truth and justice, and that these, even if hard, are worth seeking out.”

Though Berkeley undoubtedly

fostered a commitment to truth and justice in Taylor’s writing, she was unsure of how or what she wanted to write before coming to Amherst.

Learning Poetry, Learning to be a Poet “Amherst was where poetry came alive for me,” Taylor said.

After participating in a play by Amherst’s poet in residence at the time, Glyn Maxwell, Taylor decided to take his class, where she discovered that the lyrical space of a poem — its shape in meter, white space or rhythm — provided “a resonant zone.” She had always known she was interested in writing, but poetry allowed her to concretize and preserve the ephemeral observations that had always fascinated her. Professors like Maxwell and William Pritchard showed her how to make better choices in writing and “cultivate skill” to turn experiences and ideas into interesting encounters.

Across her classes at Amherst, she was able to learn the craft of poetry, as well as the art of reading and thinking carefully.

Although Taylor began to learn poetry in college, she did not learn how to identify and live as a poet until after graduating. She dedicated herself to her conviction that “writers read and writers write” by spending days reading in the New York Public Library or memorizing Elizabeth Bishop poems, but she began running into challenges. She initially supported herself by waitressing at an Italian funeral parlor-turned-restaurant in Brooklyn. However, she said she was embarrassed that poetry was what she wanted to pursue, given that many of her fellow graduates either had a trust fund to support their artistic endeavors or were following “bourgeoisie and

Photo Courtesy of Tess Taylor

To pursue her dream of becoming a professional poet, Taylor memorized poems while financially supporting herself by waitressing after college. respectable” paths.

“What claim did I have on this profession?” she wrote in an essay for Amherst Magazine called “Notebook Days.” “I had the most excellent (and among the more expensive) educations the country could offer, yet here I was calculating the cost of lentils and calming myself by reciting ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ on subway platforms.”

Yet, in bouncing around New York, smoking cigarettes on balconies and owning two pairs of shoes, “We created a little world, learning how to make and produce art,” Taylor said.

Her world began to settle down a bit when she found short stints of employment, including doing accounting for a publishing firm and writing freelance journalism. Even during her time at New York University’s Arthur. L. Carter Journalism School, she continued working on the poetry she began during her senior thesis at Amherst and simply thinking about poetry whenever she had the chance.

She maintains that poetry is a slow, patient process, and that it emerges in a way that is not systematic.

“You have to be ready to detach yourself from this object when it feels done, and you have to be in the secretary mood for sending out your writing,” Taylor said.

Similarly, she said that becoming a poet takes patience. Taylor compared the process of becoming a poet to the process of “interning” in other professions, in that it can take a few years to build confidence and skills.

In 2003, she won the Chapbook Fellowship Competition, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, for her first complete collection of poems, “The Misremembered World.”

However, Taylor said her journey to being a professional poet still “felt serious” because she still needed to pay bills even graduating from journalism school, receiving an M.F.A. and winning a poetry competition.

Writing the Environment

Photo Courtesy of Tess Taylor

Taylor, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, traveled to Monticello to capture the buried past in her work.

16

One piece of advice that Taylor often gives to her poetry students is, “You have to trust that images convey meaning. Attending to the thingness of the world can be good enough.”

Having lived in a variety of Ameri-

can landscapes, Taylor has an inquisitive eye for how context shapes these images and what they reveal.

“Writing is about specificity,” Taylor said. “You can’t write about a place until you know the names of the plants. Different places expect and demand distinct things from us. They have different languages and different attitudes towards their own history.”

She cannot write the same kind of work in California, where she said she believes history has been largely erased, as she can in Monticello, where she conducted much of the research for her first complete collection, “The Forage House,” which was published last summer.

A descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Taylor initially went to Monticello after graduating from journalism school to find material for what she expected to be a nonfiction book or memoir. Five years earlier, when DNA evidence had confirmed that Jefferson had fathered his slave Sally Hemings’ children, Taylor realized that she had neglected the fact that she was descended from slave-owners.

“What struck me as a writer — a keeper of records — was encountering the historic violence implied by not writing people down — a legacy of absence that sends its tendrils into life today,” Taylor said in an interview for The Poetry Foundation.

At Monticello, the wilted tendrils of Jefferson’s unspoken histories and Hemings’ unwritten histories were literally unearthed in buttons or pipes where the slaves had lived. Poetry, rather than the prose Taylor had expected, became the most resonant medium for giving voice and language to the excavated fragments.

Her exploration of the inheritance across her family, time and space of the United States exemplifies her ability to capture the overlooked, fleeting sketches of her surroundings and ask questions a less courageous writer would shy away from. “Tess can conjure a time, place, mood, memory with such ease; as a reader, you quickly step into her inquisitive shoes,” Sarah Bacon ’98, Taylor’s friend, said.

Loving and Questioning Amherst The first woman in her family to

The Amherst Student: Homecoming Edition

come to Amherst after a line of men on her mother’s side, Taylor was conscious of the fact that she was able to attend the college when her mother could not. This sense of triumph went on to characterize much of her experience at Amherst.

“Amherst is a beloved place for me. I always associate it with intimate thinking, reading carefully and breathing that good air closely,” Taylor said.

Her attentive affection for this atmosphere also made her aware of the problems and inequalities under Amherst’s surface.

“There were times when it felt not quite equal,” Taylor said, referring to the college’s historical and current controversies regarding race and gender.

During her time at the college, she said that there was not a normalized way for women to have camaraderie or create their own space in a way comparable to fraternities. Most insidious was that issues of inequality were often ignored.

“Nobody wanted to make a fuss,” Taylor said.

Through Taylor’s digging of her family history or revisiting expunged internment camps in her neighborhood in California, she makes the most thoughtful version of a fuss.

Her distinct perspective and desire to participate in dialogues about issues that can be taboo provide a model for identifying ourselves within our settings.

“Nobody made me have to say anything about race. I could assume my privilege and go on, but I wanted to explore it. In an environment full of privileged people, terrifying discussions of inequality can get shut down because they are not going to help anybody get their paper written,” Taylor explained.

She engages with beloved places in an honest way, admitting confusion, curiosity, embarrassment or disappointment rather than clear-cut condemnation or celebration.

In her writing, Taylor creates a dialogue between what is present and what is absent in order to shape a complex view of her environment. By questioning the places she loves, she demonstrates how much she cares for them.

November 7, 2014

The Amherst Student • November 7, 2014

Sports 17

Men’s Soccer Returns to NESCAC Semi-Finals, Will Host Tourney Jason Stein ’16 Sports Section Editor After a disappointing stretch for the men’s soccer team, the Jeffs responded in convincing fashion by closing out the regular season with a victory and by advancing to the NESCAC Semifinals for the fifth straight season. The Jeffs now stand at 12-1-3 overall and 7-1-2 in the NESCAC. In their victory over Trinity, the Jeffs received a variety of scoring contributions from different members of the squad. In the process, the Jeffs also matched their season best of four goals in a game.

Amherst struck first in the 16th minute as junior striker Nico Pascual-Leone collected the rebound, following a shot by senior defenseman Gab Wirz, sending it into the back of the net for his seventh goal of the year.

Shortly after Amherst got on the board, the Bantams responded with a goal of their own. Trinity forward Tim Shea carefully placed a shot to the right corner of the net to tie the score at 1-1.

In the 34th minute, Amherst scored another goal stemming from a rebound following a Wirz shot attempt. This time, forward Chris Martin ’17 scored by kicking it just under the cross bar to give the Jeffs a 2-1 lead.

The Jeffs added another goal before halftime, as a cross from the left side by Martin set up sophomore midfielder Andrew Orozco, who then headed it into the net to give the Jeffs a 3-1 lead heading into the break.

About five minutes into the second half, the Jeffs would continue to ride their momentum from the first half of play. For the second consecutive time on the afternoon, the player who scored the previous Amherst goal would provide the assist on the next score. This time, Orozco hit forward Greg Singer ’16 with a pass at the top of the 18-yard box.

Singer then struck a shot above the goalie’s reach to give the Jeffs a 4-1 lead.

Trailing by three goals, the resilient Bantams

would not go away easily. About twenty minutes into the second period, the Bantams drew closer, as a header from sophomore midfielder Tobias Gimand on a pass from forward/midfielder found the left side of the net.

Towards the end of the game, the Bantams cut their deficit in half with another goal from Gimand, this shot going to the back right corner of the net. However, Gimand’s second goal of the afternoon and Trinity’s third goal of the day proved too little too late, as the Jeffs were able to hold the resilient Bantams for the 4-3 victory.

While Amherst’s four-goal effort tied for the most goals the team has scored in a match this season, the three goals allowed by the Amherst defense proved to be the most that the Jeffs have let up in a game this season as well. In fact, the last time the Jeffs allowed three goals in a match was in late October 2011 in a regular season game against Connecticut College.

With their regular season closed, the No. 2 seeded Jeffs Amherst hosted seventh seeded Colby this past Saturday in a NESCAC quarterfinal matchup.

After scoring the final goal of Amherst’s regular season, Singer continued his ways. Less than three minutes into the match against Colby, Singer received a pass from first-year forward Aziz Khan in the box and fired it into the net to give the Jeffs a 1-0 edge on Singer’s fifth score of the year.

In the first half, Amherst preserved the 1-0 lead and outshot Colby by an 18-2 margin.

Over the following 45 minutes after the halftime break, the Jeffs and Mules had a far more equal number of shot attempts, as the Jeffs outshot the Mules by a slim 4-3 mark in the second period. In the second half, both teams were held off the boards. During the game, the Jeffs managed to hold their 1-0 lead for more than 87 minutes to take the victory. With Amherst’s second victory over the Mules so far this season, the Jeffs advanced to the NESCAC Semifinals and eliminated Colby from

contention in the NESCAC Tournament.

The strong efforts of goalkeeper Thomas Bull ’16 and the entire Amherst defensive unit enabled Amherst to come away with the team’s seventh shutout of 2014.

Following a fairly disappointing week for Amherst, Coach Justin Serpone was pleased with how his team responded. “In the past week, we won a game 4-3 [and] we won a game 1-0,” Coach Serpone said. “I think what this shows is that we have a team able to do both [and win both types of games]. We have been pretty resilient. I was happy with the last week and we are looking forward to the coming weekend for sure. We have a lot of guys who can make plays, which bodes well for the next couple of weeks.”

Up next, the Jeffs will face the Connecticut College Camels on Saturday, Nov. 8 at 1:30 p.m.

While most expected that as the No. 2 seed, Amherst would be travelling to Tufts (the No. 1 seed in the tournament), the Jeffs will host the remainder of the tournament after Conn. College defeated Tufts. Playing in front of the home crowd has been a welcome occurrence for the 2014 squad, as the

team currently sports a 6-0-0 record at home this season.

During the regular season, the Camels proved to be a tough opponent for the Jeffs. Amherst won the contest by a close 1-0 margin.

“Connecticut College is probably the best eighth seed in the history of NESCAC sports,” Coach Serpone said. “They are dangerous, they just beat a top 10 team in the country. They have played us well in the past. We are in for a very difficult game on Saturday.”

In the other NESCAC Semifinal matchup slated for Saturday, Middlebury (the No. 4 seed in the tournament) will take on Bowdoin (the No. 6 seed in the NESCAC) on Hitchcock Field.

“As far as the rest of the field, the final weekend is emblematic of how tight the league is and how competitive this league is 1-11,” Coach Serpone said. “The teams that are left are the two seed, the four seed, the six seed, and the eight seed, which is not surprising, because every team is good and every team is capable of beating every other team on any given day. It will be a fun weekend of soccer coming up.”

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

Senior Milton Rico has six points, two goals and two assists this year.

Field Hockey Falls in NESCAC Quarterfinals

Women’s Soccer Drops Quarterfinal Contest to Midd.

Lauren Tuiskula ’17 Sports Section Editor

Virginia Hassell ’16 Staff Writer

In a battle of the fourth and fifth-ranked teams in the nation, the Amherst field hockey team fell by a 1-0 score to lower seeded Tufts.

The battle proved to be mainly defensive, with the first shot not coming until late in the 10th minute of play.

Mary Margaret Stoll ’17 had a strong chance for the Jeffs in the 25th minute, coralling the rebound and putting the ball back on goal. However, the Tufts’ keeper was there to make the stop and keep Amherst off the board.

The teams entered the intermission still scoreles, Tufts holding a 5-3 advantage in shots in the half and Amherst having the edge in penalty corners, 4-2.

Tufts used the break to their advantage, netting the eventual game winner just over 10 minutes after play resumed.

The goal came off a penalty corner opportunity as Alexandra Jamison fed the inlet pass to

Dakota Sikes-Keilp. Sikes-Keilp fired a shot on goal that rattled off the back of the cage, giving Tufts the one-goal lead.

With one lone shot in the period, Amherst was unable to mount an offensive comeback.

Tufts held the final advantage in both shots and corners on the day, 10-4 and 7-5 respectively.

Amherst keeper Emily Horwitz ’17 put in a strong performace in net making eight saves for the Purple and White.

Tufts will compete in the NESCAC semifinals against Bowdoin on Saturday, Nov. 8.

Amherst awaits the decision of the NCAA selection committee, hoping to receive an at-large bid into the field of 24.

Senior Ellie Anderson reflected on the exceptional season the Jeffs enjoyed. “This has been an exciting and constructive season. We have made a lot of progress as a team and have great faith in our ability. We are hoping for an NCAA bid and are more than ready to play!”

Photo courtesy of Mark Box

First-year midfielder Elizabeth Turnbull has scored five goals and also added five assists for the Jeffs this year.

In a game that saw Amherst (11-5-0) outshoot Middlebury (10-6-0) 16-5, the Jeffs found themselves unable to capitalize, falling 1-0 in a heartbreaking loss in the NESCAC Quarterfinals. The fifth-seeded Panthers found the back of the net in the first half on a Katherine Hobbs goal that would be just enough to lift them over the fourth seeded Jeffs.

Amherst now awaits news of a possible NCAA at-large bid in hopes of having a chance to pursue the national title. With the win, Middlebury advances to the semifinals where they will face off against top-ranked Williams.

Amherst controlled play for most of the game.

In the first 45 minutes of play, the Jeffs delivered seven shots on goal to Middlebury’s three. The Panthers scored in the 39th minute of action, when Claire Nishioka found Hobbs off of their first and only corner kick of the match. Hobbs tallied her first collegiate goal to give Middlebury a 1-0 lead, a margin that would prove enough to hold off the Jeffs.

In the second half, Amherst continued to apply pressure and dominate the field. Though Amherst recorded nine shots while Middlebury only registered two in the second half, the Jeffs were unable to connect with eight of the nine shots being off target.

Middlebury goalkeeper, Emily Eslinger contributed one save.

Amherst’s Megan Kim ‘16 and Hannah Guzzi ’18 delivered three shots apiece, while Meredith Manley ’18 chipped in one shot. Seniors Mel Stier and Emma Rothkopf were tremendous for the Jeffs, showcasing their impressive abilities in what may be their last collegiate contest. Amherst goalkeeper Holly Burwick ’16 tallied two saves, one in each period.

Players and fans alike hold their breath in hopes that they will have the opportunity to see Amherst women’s soccer play at least one more time this sea-

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

Emma Rothkopf has amassed three points in her senior season. son.

Regardless, it’s safe to say that seniors Alex Hart, Mel Stier, Caroline Broder, Meghan Mills, Ariana Twomey, Emma Rothkopf and Maya Jackson-Gibson have left their mark on Amherst women’s soccer, compiling a cumulative record of 54-12-5 over the course of their four years.

“While our game this past weekend didn’t go our way, our team definitely played a game to be proud of,” Emily Hester ’17 said. “We fought hard and had a few opportunities to put the ball in the back of the net. Unfortunately Middlebury scored first, and we were unable to come back, but sometimes that’s soccer. Though we don’t yet know whether or not we will be getting a bid into the NCAA tournament, I know that if we do our team will treat it as if we’re playing a whole new season.

I’m really excited to see the product that we could potentially put on the field.”

18

Sports

The Amherst Student • November 7, 2014

Schedule FRIDAY Volleyball vs. Conn. College, 8 p.m.

Homecoming Saturday Men’s Soccer vs. Conn. College, 1:30 p.m.

Football vs. Williams, 4 p.m.

Men’s Cross Country at ECAC Championship Women’s Cross Country at ECAC Championship

CAPTAIN SPOTLIGHT Start of Winter Sports Saturday 11/18 Men’s Swimming and Diving vs. Union, 1 p.m.

Women’s Swimming and Diving vs. Union, 1 p.m.

Women’s Hockey vs. Hamilton, 3 p.m Men’s Hockey at Hamilton, 7 p.m.

Volleyball Finishes Regular Season on a High Note Drew Kiley ’18 Staff Writer The Amherst College volleyball team finished regular season action this week with victories against NESCAC foes Bowdoin and Colby. Amherst improved to 20-6 overall and 7-2 in conference play, securing the third seed in this weekend’s NESCAC postseason tournament.

On Friday night, Asha Walker ’18 notched eight service aces and 11 digs to lead the Firedogs past Bowdoin College, 3-1 (25-22, 15-25, 26-24, 25-15). In the victory, Nicole Gould ’17 led Amherst with 13 kills, followed by Maggie Danner ’17 with eight and Lizzie Ahern ’16 with seven. Nicole Carter ’16 led all players with 24 assists, while Kate Bres ’17 added 11 helpers. Liberos Katie Warshaw ’16 and Kelci Keeno ’17 claimed 24 digs and 13 digs, respectively.

For Bowdoin, Christy Jewett enjoyed a phenomenal match, flooring 18 kills to lead all players along with 17 digs. Quincy Leech and Clare McInerney combined to dish out 39 assists, while Katie Doherty recorded a matchhigh 33 digs.

Amherst led 2-1 after claiming close victories in the first and third set on either side of a poor second stanza. With the score tied at 10-10 in the fourth set, the Firedogs went on a 10-0 run on six service aces by Walker and four Bowdoin miscues.

A kill by Jewett halted the run, but that was the closest the Polar Bears would get, as a kill

by Jennifer Mackinnon Krems ’18 claimed the set and the match for the Firedogs.

On Saturday afternoon, Amherst defeated Colby in straight sets (25-13, 15-15, 2520). Carter led the Firedogs to the win with a match-high 16 assists. Warshaw claimed 14 digs, and Bres notched 11 assists. Gould floored nine kills while Samantha Newby ’16, Marialexa Natsis ’18 and Ahern each claimed five. Ahern also added eight digs in a terrific all-around effort.

Karolina Serhan led all hitters with 10 kills to headline the match for the Mules. Natalie Roy claimed a match-high 16 digs and Emily Moslener added 15 assists in Colby’s losing effort.

Amherst started the match with their usual flourish, claiming an 11-4 lead following a service ace by Bres in the first set. The Firedogs then claimed the set easily, extending their advantage throughout and securing the win, 2513, on a Colby miscue. In the second stanza, Amherst again led by double digits (23-13) en route to a 25-15 set win and a 2-0 lead in the match.

Jake Turrin ’15

Madeline Tank ’15

Favorite Team Memory: Playing in the Frozen Four Favorite Pro Athlete: Dan Girardi Dream Job: Not having one Pet Peeve: Watching Bruins/Pats/Sox with Cash and Dave Favorite Vacation Spot: Any beach Something on Your Bucket List: Win the lottery Favorite Food: Chicken cutlets Guilty Pleasure: Girly drinks Favorite Thing About Amherst: Friends Thing you are most excited for this season: Interterm

Favorite Team Memory: Flare Jean Day Favorite Pro Athlete: Priscilla Tyler Dream Job: National Geographic explorer Pet Peeve: Bad knee bend Favorite Vacation Spot: Hayley Opperman’s basement Something on Your Bucket List: Learn all the state capitals Guilty Pleasure: Hilary Duff jams Favorite Thing About Amherst: Caroline Bomstein Thing you are most excited for this season: Competing for a NESCAC championship

Football’s Chris Tamasi Honored For Service Katie Paolano ’16 Sports Section Editor

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

First-year Asha Walker has 68 kills on the season for the Jeffs.

With Amherst winning 23-16 in the third set, the visitors claimed four straight points to pull themselves within three and threaten the Firedogs, but back-to-back Gould kills secured the sweep for the Purple and White.

Outside hitter Maggie Danner said, “I think we have started playing more consistently as a whole, and the team is in a really good place right now. If we continue playing aggressively like we did this past weekend, I think we will be very successful.”

For the Firedogs, that consistency has not been a question this season. Amherst has taken care of business against weaker opposition throughout the season, defeating every team below them in the NESCAC standings on its way to amassing 20 wins.

This weekend, the Firedogs will travel to Tufts to compete in the eight-team NESCAC postseason tournament, hoping to win their fourth NESCAC championship in program history and first since 2006. Amherst kicks off its weekend with a quarterfinal match-up on Friday night at 8 p.m. against sixth-seeded Conn. College.

The Firedogs had a tough time with Conn. in the regular season, going to five sets with the Camels. The meeting ultimately resulted in an Amherst victory.

Danner said she was optimistic about the upcoming contests slated for Amherst. “Beating Bowdoin was such a huge win after losing to them last year in the NESCAC tournament,” she said. “The whole team feels really good going into this weekend at our peak.”

Div. II, and III. This prestigious recognition represents collegiate football players who have gone above and beyond to dedicate their time, effort, and leadership to their school and their community.

“Chris is the epitome of a well rouned person, he is always in good spirits and constantly seeking ways to serve others, this school and the local community. This award is well deserved,” said sophomore running back Myles Gaines.

Chris is the only player from the NESCAC to be selected to the Good Works Team in 2014 and joins former Amherst athletes Mike Proman ’03, Justin Roemer ’06 and Paul Whiting ’04 as the fourth player from the college to receive the award.

In regards to this upcoming homecoming game against Williams, Tamasi said he is “looking forward to taking the field one last time with a special group of guys and finishing his team’s season on a high note in front of their family, friends, and alumni. This is a season that I will never forget — I love these guys.”

In September, Chris Tamasi ’15 was nominated for the 2014 Allstate American Football Coaches Association Good Works Team for his outstanding community service. But the accolades didn’t stop there. Last Monday, during his weekly visit to the Amherst Survival Center, Tamasi was surprised by his parents, friends, coaches and Amherst College representatives with a trophy reception ceremony.

“I was ambushed with emotion — dealing with the surprise, trying to make sense of what was going on and gathering my emotions so I could thank everyone,” Tamasi said.

Every Monday morning, Tamasi delivers food to the Survival Center as part of “Cac Giving Back.” As president of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, Tamasi helped launch a milk fund campaign to raise money to put fresh milk on the shelves of the Amherst Survival Center.

With the help of other Student-Athlete Advisory Committee members, Tamasi started a NESCAC-wide sportsmanship initiative known as the “We Are NESCAC” campaign, designing T-shirts to promote sportsmanship not only at Amherst but also throughout the league. The committee created marketing collateral through a photo company that utlilised milk mustaches in conjunction with sporting the T-shirts. The group ultimately raised $2,300 thanks to their efforts.

Tamasi is also a member of Big Brothers Big Sisters program and has been matched for three years with his little brother, Kyle. As a sophomore, he worked with the Center for Community Engagement as an Athletic Team Engagement Leader for the football team, and was later hired by the CCE the following fall as an Athletics Liaison for his charitable involvement and community service contributions.

“I received this award because it is offered to those that play collegiate football. There are so many people that helped make these initiatives a reality and I am so grateful for their support.

I hope they know that they are being celebrated with me as well,” Tamasi said.

The Allstate AFCA Good Works Team is Photo courtesy of Stella Honey Yoon ‘15E comprised of 11 players from the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision and 11 players from the Tamasi poses with a representative NCAA Football Championship Subdivision, from the AFCA Good Works Team.

The Amherst Student • November 7, 2014

Sports

19

Women’s and Men’s XC Compete at NESCAC Championships Holly Burwick ’16 Senior Staff Writer

Photo courtesy of Bob Blanchard

Savanna Gornisiewicz ‘17 finished fifth overall this past weekend.

Photo courtesy of Bob Blanchard

Sophomore Cara Lembo continues to perform well for the Jeffs.

Women This past Saturday at Middlebury, the Amherst women’s cross country team took third place at the 2014 NESCAC Championships. The team averaged a 6K finishing time of 23:27.8, just behind Middlebury’s winning 22:46.4 and Williams’ second place (22:54.3). The Jeffs have finished in the top three at 11 of the past 12 NESCAC Championships.

Amherst finished ahead of the remaining eight NESCAC teams, including Colby and Tufts who finished fourth and fifth respectively at the event. One of the team’s goals in the race was to beat Tufts, a team ranked much higher nationally than them, and they did just that.

Jessie Kaliski ‘15 said she was proud of her team for meeting this goal. “I think what is so special about our team is how deep our team is.

When one girl doesn’t have a good race, another girl steps up to the plate and fills in that void,” she said.

Savanna Gornisiewicz placed first for the Jeffs and fifth overall in the 122-person field with a time of 22:40.1. Just behind her was Lexi Sinclair ‘16 whose 22:58.0 finish placed her 11th overall. Lizzy Briskin ‘15 crossed the tape exactly 20 seconds later to take 17th.

Rounding out the top five finishers for the Jeffs were Kaliski and Betsy Black ‘16 whose respective finishing times of 23:59.5 and 24:23.3 placed them 32nd and 43rd.

Other top finishers for the Jeffs included Tess Frenzel ’17 (24:28.8, 46th overall) and Cat Lowdon ’17(24:30.9, 48th).

This was a huge confidence booster for the Jeffs, which will come in handy when they return to action next Saturday, Nov. 8 for the ECAC Championships at Westfield State University.

Men The Amherst men’s cross country team took fourth place at the 2014 NESCAC Championships this past weekend at Middlebury.

Williams won the event with 39 points. Colby (76) and Middlebury (80) also finished before the Jeffs (93). However, Amherst edged ahead of the seven other NESCAC competitors in the race. This is a great improvement from last year’s seventh place finish in the 11-team race.

Because Williams, Colby and Middlebury are all top ten teams nationally, such a close performance by the Jeffs is highly encouraging as they continue to move into championship season.

Dan Crowley ‘16 paved the way for the Jeffs with a finishing time of 25:29, seven seconds faster than his time at this event last year.

This slated Crowley eighth in the 121-person field. The top overall finisher at the event was Colin Cotton from Williams, with a time of 24:56. Next for the Jeffs across the line was Mohamed Hussein ’18, whose 25:31 placed him twelfth in the field. Rounding out the top three finishers for the Jeffs was Greg Turissini ‘15. The senior co-captain crossed the tape at 25:40, 28 seconds faster than his finishing mark from last season. He placed 13th overall.

Other Jeffs with successful races included Romey Sklar ‘15 (26:13, 28th place), Raymond Meijer ‘17 (26:14, 32nd place), Craig Nelson ‘18 (26:17, 33rd place) and Ben Fielder ‘17 (26:29, 47th place).

“We are looking forward to showcasing our depth at the ECAC Championships next weekend,” Turissini said.

The ECAC Championships will take place next Saturday, Nov. 8 at Westfield State University. Coach Nedeau is hopeful that the team can come out on top at this event.

Photo courtesy of Janna Joassainte ‘17

Senior Romey Sklar finished 28th overall and sophomore Jesse Fajnzylber was close behind.

Photo courtesy of Janna Joassainte ‘17

The team gathers around Coach Nedeau following the race.

Football Edges Trinity, Remains Undefeated on Season Nell Patterson ’16 Staff Writer Small mistakes can often cost games, seasons and championships in sports. For the Trinity Bantams, missed field goals and extra points were the difference between victory and defeat against the Amherst College football team this past Saturday on Trinity’s home field. After snapping a 53-game home winning streak last weekend against Middlebury, the Bantams hoped to start a new streak against the Jeffs. As they have all season, the stalwart Amherst defense remained strong and helped secure a 7-6 victory to remain undefeated in the 2014 season.

“The defense as a whole really earned the victory and bailed the offense out drive after drive,” said senior captain Scott Mergner. He also gave credit to the special teams players for the Jeffs.

“One group of guys who don’t get enough credit are the long-snappers (Jake Hines ’18 and Jake Shuman ’15), the holder (Will Brewster ’15), and the kicker (Phil Nwosu ’15). The game was decided by an extra-point. That’s all it takes sometimes to win a game. Just do the little things: snap, hold, kick,” Mergner said.

The defense kept Trinity to a mere 10 passing yards and an overall yard total of 233 yards. The Jeffs’ offense found lots of success through the air, with 102 passing yards and 156 yards total.

Senior Max Lippe led the offense at quarterback once again and threw for a touchdown.

“Where our offense as a whole has really improved is capitalizing on scoring chances when we absolutely need them,” Jackson McGonagle ’16 said. “Every game we have found ways to score when it was essential that we do so. I think this shows the heart and dedication that all the guys on the team have. “ The Amherst defense picked off the Bantams twice and forced two fumbles. “The defense played very well against Trinity,” senior Max Lehrman said. “Most importantly, everyone did their job very well. We made it difficult for them

to move the ball and also forced a few big turnovers. “ The weather definitely played into the very low score of the contest this week. Wind, rain and chilly temperatures made passes difficult and made kicking extra points and field goals increasingly hard. Adjusting to the weather challenged the Jeffs early, as they were unable to convert any first downs on their first possession. However, the real trouble came when Trinity’s Nathaniel Hitchcock forced Jaymie Spears ’16 to fumble a punt return deep in Amherst territory. The Bantams recovered the ball on the Amherst 11-yard line and were able to run the ball into the end zone for a touchdown. Ben Rosenblatt missed the extra point, leaving the Bantams with a 6-0 lead.

The missed extra point seemed secondary in the first quarter, but would later be the real difference in the game.

Neither Amherst nor Trinity could get drives going for the rest of the first quarter. McGonagle punted a total of 10 times during the game, and the Trinity punter kicked the ball away nine times. Four of McGonagle’s punts came in the first quarter. The second quarter opened up with exciting prospects for the Jeffs as Spears intercepted Trinity’s Hayden Jardine on the Amherst 46-yard line. The Jeffs were unable to move the ball as the Trinity defense was relentless on the run game. The rest of the half was a similar story; big defensive plays and little offensive movement on both sides. The Jeffs went into the locker room losing 6-0. “We really struggled in the first half,” McGonagle said. “We couldn’t sustain any drives and Trinity’s defense was laying some big hits.”

The Jeffs offense finally found its rhythm in the second half. Starting at their 30-yard line, Lippe and the offense worked patiently up the field, converting more first downs than they had in the entire first half. Lippe found Gene Garay ’15 and Adam Wallace ’16 on back-to-back third downs to move the Jeffs into Trinity territory for the first time all game.

“Gene Garay ‘15 had a big game receiving for us,” McGonagle said. “He took some brutal hits

throughout the game, but it never seemed to faze him. He made some big catches when we really needed them in the second half to continue driving down the field.

“Lippe also rushed for nine yards on a third down play to move the Jeffs into the red zone.

Unable to convert again, head coach E.J. Mills decided to go to his kicker, senior Phillip Nwosu.

Although normally consistent, Nwosu wavered, missing he field goal from 36 yards out, preventing the Jeffs from getting on the board.

The offense would return quickly to the field after the missed field goal. Jimmy Fairfield-Sonn ’16 recovered a fumble by Trinity’s Chudi Iregbulem. The Jeffs offense once again could not find any success against the Trinity defense. In the last minutes of the third quarter, the Jeffs’ defense forced another turnover as Chris Gow ’16 intercepted Jardine’s pass and returned the ball 35 yards to the Trinity 40-yard line. The interception ended the third quarter and put the ball back in Lippe’s hands. Working up the field, the Jeffs’ benefitted from a Trinity holding penalty, which gave them a fresh set of downs at the seven-yard line. Unfortunately, Lippe threw an interception to Tom Szymanski and the Jeffs once again failed to put points on the board.

The Jeffs were not ready to give up yet. Although the Bantams finally found success on the ground against the Amherst defense, junior Jaymie Spears would not let the Bantams get too far. Spears came up huge, forcing Trinity’s Spencer Aukamp to fumble and senior captain Chris Tamasi recovered the ball for the Jeffs. Lehrman noted this as the biggest play of the game.

“Jaymie made a great individual play to force the ball out,” Lehrman said. “Usually fumbles are forced when a second or third defender comes and strips the ball once a first defender secures the tackle. But, not only did Jaymie secure the tackle, he also forced the ball out. This took away Trinity’s momentum after the big interception they had made.”

Wasting no time, Lippe completed a pass to Garay for 17 yards before finding Jackson McG-

onagle for a 20-yard touchdown pass. The Jeffs’ bench erupted in cheers as they finally were able to convert on offense. Nwosu’s point after was good and the Jeffs took the lead 7-6. With lots of time left, the Trinity offense had a chance to put the game away. At the Amherst seven-yard line, the Jeffs held the Bantams to fourth down. Trinity sent out Rosenblatt again for the game-winning field goal attempt. Once again, Rosenblatt failed to convert the 24-yard kick and the Jeffs felt triumphant. Winning by only one point, the missed kicks and strong defense proved to be the difference in the game for the Jeffs.

Victorious against Trinity, the Jeffs remain undefeated on the season at 7-0 and face arch rival Williams for homecoming weekend this Saturday. “The biggest little game of the year” will kick off at 4 p.m. McGonagle said that pressure will be high as “Williams would love nothing more than to come to our house and spoil our homecoming.

We have to keep that in mind throughout the week and realize that they will not go down without a fight. We will have to play a great game and execute as a team for the entire game,” he said.

A win would guarantee a perfect season and a NESCAC championship, a rare event that would make Amherst football history. The senior class experienced a perfect season their first year and hope to end their careers as Jeffs the way they started.

“It’s pretty simple: we don’t want to share the title with anyone; we want to earn it for ourselves,” said Mergner.

When asked what winning on Saturday would mean to him, Lehrman said “It would mean everything. That of course has been the goal since day one. It is something I have thought about since last season and really for my whole life. To say we have worked hard to put ourselves in this position would be an understatement.

What could be better than finishing your last season playing the best game in the world with your best friends and going out on top?” Witness the homecoming magic Saturday starting at 4 p.m.

Sports

“Following a fairly disappointing week for Amherst, Coach Justin Serpone was pleased with how his team responded...”

Men’s Soccer Returns to NESCAC Semifinals... Page 17

Photo courtesy of Rob Mattson

Members of the Amherst College baseball team, coaches, faculty and other members of the community gather in the Red Room for their Family Weekend briefing.

Bringing It Back Home: Amherst Baseball Presents Doshisa Exchange Recollections and Perspectives Event Pike Goldschmidt ’16 Contributing Writer On Oct. 25, the Amherst College baseball team presented a personal and informative recap of the 2014 Amherst College-Doshisha University Cultural Exchange, entitled “Recollections and Perspectives: Amherst-Doshisha (Japan) Baseball Cultural Exchange.” The event took place in Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall.

In addition to a general overview and slideshow presented by head baseball coach Brian Hamm, the event also featured remarks by Director of Athletics, Don Faulstick, professors Trent Maxey and Samuel Morse, former Dean of Faculty Gregory Call, and Mark DeWaele ’79. The idea for the trip was kickstarted

by Hamm, DeWaele, and Morse after a fundraising event for the Sendai region following Japan’s devastating triple disaster — an earthquake followed by a tsunami and meltdown at the Fukashima Nuclear Plant — on March 11, 2011.

“From the beginning, when Mark, Morse and I shared in this vision through the many

events and ultimately the tour, we wanted learning to be the primary objective,” Hamm said. “This culminated with the Recollections and Perspectives event, and it really was inspiring to see students, faculty, athletics and community engagement mesh together into something extraordinary.”

The exchange, which took place from August 3 to 15, consisted of a three-game series against Doshisha and tours of many religious, cultural and historic landmarks in cities such as Osaka, Kyoto, Sendai and Tokyo. The Tour looked not only to build upon Amherst’s relationship with Doshisha, this time in an athletic setting, but also to introduce the student-athletes to cultural and societal aspects that the players likely would not have seen otherwise.

This included attending a Japan Professional Baseball game in Tokyo and experiencing different types of traditional lodging and dining accommodations.

“Probably the coolest thing from the game, and really all of our games with Doshisha, was seeing how differently baseball is played in Japan,” said senior Jack Falvey. “It’s almost unrecognizable. They don’t go for the long ball,

but they play defense and utilize deception. It’s small ball at its finest.”

Additionally, the team was invited by the Consul General of Japan to run a baseball clinic at Tagajo Middle School. Tagajo was one of the areas affected by the triple disaster.

“It was an unreal experience to take part in this trip,” said junior Travis Strickler, “But to give back to an area that’s been going through a tough time was probably the highlight. It’s an area that needs any and all kinds of support and for us to break the language with something like baseball touched me a lot.”

Student-athletes from the trip also participated in a panel, fielding questions from the audience, as well as sharing experiences from the trip. Players on this panel included Falvey and Strickler, senior Louis Hunt and junior Pike Goldschmidt.

Members of the baseball team who could not make the trip to Japan said they benefited greatly from the panel. “I am convinced that the impact of the Japan trip stretches beyond the 29 community members who participated in the exchange,” sophomore George Long said. “Following the panel, I realized how

the cross cultural experience with Doshisha aided in the growth of the Amherst Baseball Program. The guys learned so much from the trip and were fortunately able to bring back what they learned for the rest of us. The values presented are something I, along with the rest of the baseball team,will hold onto for a long time.”

The Recollections and Perspectives event served as a venue to share the team’s experiences with the public, as well as serve as starting point for future athletic and cultural relations with Doshisha. DeWaele ended his remarks with a recount of his presentation of the Amherst-Doshisha Trophy, signifying the start of a recurring cultural exchange. The plan is for Doshisha to travel to Amherst at some point in the coming years.

“The tour is an example of the coming together of alumni, faculty and athletics, for an experience that speaks to the true mission of Amherst College,” Hamm said. “And that is to mesh the academic, athletic and extracurricular experiences within an undergraduate education for a truly special and unique experience.”

Photo courtesy of Brian Hamm