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Class Notes
EMILY PRUD’HOMME ’87
A Career in Nature
A Brooksian combines her love of the outdoors and her academic interests into a career as a park and forest ranger.
Emily Prud’homme ’87 in Clarno, Oregon, where a unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and Hancock Field Station are located.
Emily Prud’homme ’87 came to Brooks from Los Angeles. What she found in North Andover inspired the path of her education, and her career as a park ranger and forest ranger for America’s natural spaces.
Brooks nurtured Prud’homme’s love of the outdoors, science and nature. She was challenged and inspired by Advanced Placement Biology with venerated science teacher Nick Evangelos as a sixth-former, but she still speaks most fondly of an introductory earth science course she took as a fourth-former. Specifically, Prud’homme recalls a field trip the class took. “Somewhere near Brooks, we found an esker,” she says. “An esker is a glacial deposit. It’s basically a long sinuous mound of river deposits that is from the melting underneath a glacier. It blew my mind to imagine the ice sheet that covered Brooks, and the melting of that ice sheet that created this long, skinny hill. And that, thousands of years later, we went and visited that hill. That was my first academic connection of going into the field and seeing a cool physical geography concept.”
Prud’homme graduated from Brooks without firm college plans. She spent time working and traveling, eventually visiting classmate Ali Boileau in Durham, England. Boileau was studying
geography. Prud’homme recalls being intrigued by Boileau’s field of study. When she subsequently matriculated to the University of California Davis, she enrolled in an introductory course in physical geography. “That class set my course, and I never looked back,” she says. Prud’homme completed a degree in geography and a minor in geology, and then received a master’s degree in geography from Arizona State University.
“I liked the rigor of becoming a scientist,” Prud’homme says, “but during the time that I was getting that degree, I worked with a service learning group on campus. I taught physical geography to sixth-graders at a school on a nearby American Indian reservation. And doing that made me realize that I loved teaching. I wanted to work with kids if possible, and help to inspire them to appreciate the world around them, the way my teachers had done for me.”
This realization, Prud’homme explains, led her toward a career in outdoor education experiences. She became the manager of Hancock Field Station, an outdoor science camp located inside the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in rural Oregon. There, she trained staff and led students among fossil-rich rock formations that preserve a record of plant and animal evolution, changing climate and past ecosystems stretching back 40 million years. She was inspired a couple of years later to apply to work as a seasonal park ranger at Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, a position she began in 2010. “I was able to tie a whole lot of personal passions together,” Prud’homme says, “and then do that professionally, teach people about it; become an expert in this landscape and help explain it.”
Prud’homme spent six seasons working at Crater Lake, honing her skills in interpretation each summer and working with school groups in the spring and fall. She then spent a season at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, gaining perspective on landscape size and a new geography. Denali contains six million acres of taiga forest, alpine tundra and mountains, the highlight of which is North America’s tallest mountain, Denali. “It’s pretty amazing how huge the landscape is,” Prud’homme says. “It’s amazing to live in a place where you can’t go for a run because there could be grizzly bears, but to go hiking anyway and get used to that. And then on, well, one out of every three days, be absolutely wowed by a picture of an enormous mountain that was otherwise in the clouds. That was a big step out of anything that I was familiar with.”
Prud’homme went on to spend three years at Acadia National Park in Maine. She calls that position a homecoming of sorts, since her family summered in Maine since she was young. “Seeing a familiar place with a new perspective was pretty cool,” she says. “I got to learn a lot. You realize the questions you don’t ask about a place when you think you know it. You start to learn where to look. And the cultural stories as well as the geologic stories just give the whole place a whole lot more depth than I had before.”
Recently, Prud’homme felt drawn back to Oregon. She moved from the National Park Service to the National Forest Service, and was named the lead ranger for the caldera of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, which is part of Deschutes National Forest. The monument covers just a small portion of the Cascades’ largest volcano, two caldera lakes, cinder cones and several obsidian lava flows. “I work in a landscape that fascinates and inspires me,” Prud’homme says. “When I finish a day of work — some of it outside, some of it at a desk — and head out to a trail or launch my kayak, I realize how lucky I am to have found this career. It would be hard to have any other kind of job.”
“It feeds me. It feels right to me to be in these places,” Prud’homme reflects. “To have the opportunity to talk to a dozen people on a guided walk and answer their questions and share stories about the full picture of the place, or at least as much of the picture I know; not just the geology, not just the volcanic flow, but who were the people who lived here before, who were the people who thought that making a monument was important. I try to connect with people and ask, ‘what are places that are inspiring to you where you live, and how do you engage with those places when you’re at home?’ Because you are the important voice for that place.”
EMILY PRUD’HOMME ’87
NALIA MEDINA ’18
The Opportunity to Imagine
Nalia Medina ’18 graduated from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., this spring, and she’s well on her way to a strong career on Capitol Hill. Medina currently works in education policy. Previously, Medina, who hails from Lawrence, Massachusetts, interned in the office of United States Congresswoman Lori Trahan. Medina says that she was inspired to her current career path by her time at Brooks — particularly by her AP United States Government class and her time in a Winter Term class that traveled to Washington, D.C.
“Undoubtedly, being at Brooks for four years subconsciously prepared me for a career in politics and advocacy,” Nalia Medina ’18 says. “A lot of the things that I went through, especially as a daughter of immigrants and as a first-generation American, really just helped cultivate this desire in me to want to learn more about our history and our government.” Medina shouts out her time in her AP United States Government class, taught by Willie Waters ’02. “That class was one of my first exposures to this material,” Medina says. “I really appreciate Mr. Waters giving me the space to ask questions and challenge things. I think that was really what put me into this environment.”
Medina also took the Winter Term course “The Complexity of War,” taught by Head of School John Packard, in the winter of her sixth-form year. The group traveled to Washington, D.C., where it had the opportunity to meet with United States Senator Ed Markey, who represents Massachusetts. [Ed. Note: The trip to Washington, D.C. was covered in the spring 2018 issue of the Bulletin, in the feature beginning on page 36. Medina is featured in that piece.] “The Winter Term trip was, I think, my second time visiting D.C., and I just fell in love with everything,” Medina says, pointing at the group’s trip to meet with Senator Markey.
“I was fascinated by Capitol Hill, the inner workings of our government, the staff and the legislation. I never would have imagined someone like me walking the halls of Congress. So, being able, at 18
years old, to sit in Senator Markey’s office and speak with him; I couldn’t believe that I was in that space,” Medina says. “When I was able to intern with Congresswoman Trahan, I kept thinking back to that Winter Term, which was the first time I even thought about the possibility that I could be in that environment. Now, I’ve been able to go back every day. It’s still crazy to me, and it still doesn’t feel real every time I go back to Capitol Hill.”
Medina interned in Congress from September 2019 through March 2020, while she was a student at The George Washington University. She recalls her favorite project was helping to create an informational pamphlet to distribute throughout Trahan’s Massachusetts district informing Trahan’s constituents of her accomplishments. Medina also attended the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Gala with Trahan and saw Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speak, an event she calls “really, really awesome.” Another highlight of Medina’s time in Trahan’s office took place in January 2020, when she was able to chat briefly with the same Winter Term class she had been a part of at Brooks during that group’s trip to Washington and visit to Capitol Hill. In what Medina calls “a fullcircle moment,” she got to meet with the visiting Brooks class, and with its faculty: Mr. Packard, Willie Waters, and Medina’s Brooks advisor, Associate Head for Academic Affairs Susanna Waters. “Having them see me there, on Capitol Hill, when just two years before I had been at Brooks, was an awesome moment,” Medina says.
Now that her college days are behind her, Medina holds a full-time job working as a government relations and policy associate for a membership association that represents financial aid administrators at American colleges and universities. She works to advance government relations efforts on both the federal and state levels; she analyzes policies related to higher education; and she works on advocacy efforts. Medina’s work takes her back to Capitol Hill regularly for meetings and hearings.
Although Medina admits she didn’t expect to work in education policy, she’s enjoying her current position. “A lot of it is the personal connection I have to it,” Medina says. “I’ve always been a financial aid recipient. I received financial aid at Brooks. I received financial aid at GW. I was on a Pell grant throughout my college career. I recognize that education can literally change someone’s life. So, I’m working to dismantle the barriers that exist, and to make education more accessible and more affordable so that other people can have the same opportunity that I did.”
Medina emphasizes how influential her time at Brooks was to her. “My experiences at Brooks really shaped me,” she says. “That AP government class and that Winter Term were really foundational to where I am today, because they gave me the opportunity to begin to imagine being in an environment like this. I think about that every time I’m on Capitol Hill: I’m not supposed to be here. People like me are not supposed to take up space in rooms like this. So, the fact that I can do it is mind-blowing. It will never feel old to me when I walk through the halls of Congress.”
NALIA MEDINA ’18
Left to right: Nalia Medina ’18 outside the United
States Capitol building. ■ Nalia Medina ’18 (second
from left) with Winter Term faculty (from left to right) Willie Waters ’02, Susanna Waters and Head of School John Packard.
Brooksians at work in science faculty Michael Dixon’s class in October.
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