THE TARTAN A MAGAZINE OF GLEN URQUHART SCHOOL
SUMMER 2017
Message from the Head of School I met an alumna in early May from the class of 1986. She remembers the days when Glen Urquhart School was the fledgling North Shore Middle School in a church basement. Her daughter will be ready for kindergarten in another two years, and she stopped by to find out if GUS was still GUS. “This was the best school I ever attended,” she remarked, “and that was true for my sister, too.” Another alumnus from the class of 1990 wrote me from Tennessee. He was considering a move home to the North Shore and wondered if there might be room for his son in the school. Then, when I met a past parent in Danvers earlier in the year whose two sons graduated from GUS decades ago, he told me, “They still love GUS.” After a year at Glen Urquhart, I can say with confidence that I share the affection all these folks expressed for GUS. This is indeed an extraordinary school. Since arriving at GUS, I have made it a priority to meet alumni, past parents, and former faculty members. Every GUS community member I meet, past and present, expresses a love for GUS and embodies the spirit of this special place. Ours is truly a school with a beating, strong heart. I feel that daily in lower school and around campus, on the nature trail and in the greenhouse, and in the sometimes raucous but always vibrant classrooms of the upper school. I’m reminded often that GUS is a community that allows kids to become themselves. Sometimes that involves smiles and laughter, and sometimes a bit of angst or tears. Kids are growing up here, a messy, joyful, but always meaningful process. That work is our sacred trust. Someone who shared that belief was former Board of Trustees Chair Derek Cavanaugh, who passed away unexpectedly in January. Derek was clearly larger than life and a memorable character, and he was also a determined and fervent supporter of GUS, envisioning in particular the Braemar building, where a moving memorial service was held this winter. Our thoughts went out to his children, Jake ’96, Laura ’97, Jessica ’99, and remain with his late daughter, Nan ’01. Derek would have appreciated that we revived an honored GUS tradition this year, Spring Work Day, when 45 current and past students and parents turned out to rake the campus, stir compost, weed flower beds, and build a Gaga Pit. (Google it if you’ve never seen one—it’s the most popular spot at recess!) The campus is such a central part of the GUS program and your GUS memories. Students traveled to Mystic Seaport, Chewonki, Heifer International, the mountains of New Hampshire, Washington, DC, and the Dominican Republic on trips this year whose focus was a mix of immersive learning and community service. The hands-on curriculum envisioned in the founding days of the school remains at our core. So GUS is still very much GUS, and we’re determined to make it even more so in the coming years. That may be the best way to celebrate our 40th anniversary in the 2017–2018 school year. We hope you will join us— alumni, past parents, former faculty, and the current GUS community—on Friday, June 8 and Saturday, June 9, 2018 for “Forty and Forward,” a reunion and celebration of all that Glen Urquhart School has been and all that it promises to become. See you then! Trust and go forward,
David Liebmann Head of School
2017 – 2018 BOARD OF TRUSTEES Carl Graves P’19, ‘20 President Bob Carroll P ’17, ‘20 Vice President Sallie Pottle P’15, ‘19 Vice President Lisa Sandouk-Romanelli P’13, ‘19 Vice President Steve Todd P’20,’24 Treasurer Emily Collins P’14, ‘17 Clerk David Liebmann, Head of School Ex-Officio Andrew Brown P’21 Lise Carrigg P’19, ‘26 Daryl Colden P ’17, ‘19 Melanie D’Orio P ‘20 Susan Tsao Esty P ‘18 Philip Furse P ’16, ’17, ’18, ‘20 Kenneth Grant P ’13, ‘20 Jodi Llacera Klein P ‘19 Peter Mason David Patch P ’16, ’19, ‘23 Zara-Marie Spooner Jackie Swansburg Paulino ‘98 Patricia Landgren P’17, ‘24 Parents’ Association Representative Lynne Warren, Life Trustee, Founder Glen Urquhart School does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, age, religion, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, disability, mental illness, military status, genetics or sex or any other classification protected under applicable law. Tartan Editor: Judith Klein P ’95, ’00, ’04 Art Director: Lisa Kent P ’23
Contents Message from the Head of School....................................... IFC Graduation 2017......................................................................... 2 2009 Grads Deliver Commencement Addresses.................... 3 Off They Go!............................................................................... 3 Women of Courage: Jesse Soursourian Tells Their Story....... 4 Latin Lives at GUS!.................................................................... 7 Tadler Grants Advance Faculty................................. 9 Farewell, Mrs. Marchesseault!................................................ 10 Louis Somma Keeps GUS in the Family!................................ 12
Design: Graphic Details, Inc. Printing: Cummings Printing Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in The Tartan is accurate. Please direct any errors to the editor at jklein@gus.org. The Tartan is published for alumni, parents, and friends of Glen Urquhart School. Please send address changes and other communications to Martha Delay, Director of Advancement, at: Alumni Relations Office of Advancement 74 Hart Street Beverly Farms, MA 01915 978-927-1064 ext. 117 mdelay@gus.org
On the Cover: Eighth graders completed the traditional GUS White Shirt Projects this spring, creating works in the styles of a variety of different contemporary artists. They explored themes ranging from Civil Rights to their journey at GUS, where they have been and where they hope to go in the future. Family and friends viewed the work, along with originally choreographed dances by the students, at the annual Arts Block Evening. See more on the school website.
HELP! If we have sent more than one copy of The Tartan to your address or an alumnus has a new address where we should send the next Tartan, please let us know so that we can update our records. Write to Director of Advancement Martha Delay at mdelay@gus.org or call her at 978-927-1064 ext. 117. Follow @gustartan on Instagram and Twitter and like us on Facebook!
GRADUATION 2017 Thirty-two eighth graders received their diplomas on June 15 at a commencement ceremony replete with GUS traditions of bagpipe playing, Tussy Mussies, choral music, alumni speeches, and personal tributes from the head of school. The night before, the soon-to-be grads shared their remarkable “This I Believe� reflective narratives with an audience of parents and faculty at the annual Evening With the Graduates. Photos by Tom Underwood
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Photos by Tom Underwood
Off they 2009 Grads Deliver Commencement Addresses Nan MacMillan and Will Harpin, 2009 GUS grads, offered the commencement addresses this year, following a tradition begun in 1999. They both offered humorous and heartfelt anecdotes about their time at GUS, high school, and college, as well as some advice for how to navigate the roads ahead. To read their speeches, go to the school website.
go! Congratulations to our 2017 graduates who are off to a variety of secondary schools where they will bring their intellect, curiosity, imagination, doggedness, joyfulness, silliness and seriousness to make their new school communities better places! The lucky destinations are:
After graduating from Glen Urquhart, Nan attended The Thacher School in Ojai, CA, spending a semester studying abroad in Vietnam. She then went to the University of Virginia where she graduated in May, Phi Beta Kappa, with a double major in Music and Poetry Writing. At UVA, she was a member and Music Director of an all-female a cappella group, Hoos in Treble. She was an active member of the Charlottesville music scene, volunteering at a local radio station, interning with a recording studio and music management firm, and performing around the city. As a local poet, her work has been published by Heartwood Literary Magazine and the Virginia Literary Review. This August, she will head to Valencia, Spain, to complete a Master’s in Contemporary Performance and Production through Berklee College of Music.
The Cambridge School of Weston
Will attended Glen Urquhart from Kindergarten through eighth grade. After GUS, he attended Phillips Academy Andover, where he supplemented his four years of German study with two summer study programs in Germany. While in high school, he also worked with local middle school boys through a Phillips Andover after-school mentor program. Will has just completed his fourth year of a dual-degree five-year program in Mechanical Engineering and Management for Engineers at Bucknell University. In engineering, he has focused on energy production, holding two internships in the energy sector. In management, he has focused on accounting and finance. Next fall, he will participate in a class that manages a $900,000 stock portfolio. Outside of classes, he is the treasurer of Bucknell’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) chapter and an active member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. In his free time, Will works on his custom-built desktop computer, enjoys doing puzzles, and spends time with his dogs.
Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School
Central Catholic High School Essex Agricultural and Technical High School The Governor’s Academy Lawrence Academy Manchester Essex Regional High School New Hampton School
Phillips Academy Andover Phillips Exeter Academy Pingree School Beverly High School St. John’s Preparatory School Waring School
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Alumni Profile
Women of Courage: Jesse Soursourian ’95 Tells Their Story
Jesse Soursourian ’95 recently returned from Nagorno-Karabakh, an area between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where he interviewed and filmed women who are deactivating landmines that threaten the livelihood and wellbeing of their families and neighbors. This area, called Artsakh by the ethnic Armenians who live there, has been the site of contention and war for more than a century. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the conflict became even more heated with thousands of deaths of civilians. The war years have not only left the residents impoverished but also surrounded by land mines that make them afraid to tend their farms or let their children play outside. An NGO called HALO Trust, which operates around the world training people to deactivate land mines, has established a program in Nagorno-Karabakh. While men are usually HALO’s workers, teams of women have begun doing the job in NK. With such high unemployment in Artsakh, HALO offers these women a very welcome opportunity to make a decent salary. Jesse found out about the women after seeing photographs taken by renowned photojournalist Scout Tufankjian when she went to Karabakh in 2016. He contacted the NGO and they put him in touch with people on the ground. Before he went to Nagorno-Karabakh, Jesse thought he and his collaborators would be telling a story about how women in this society were ostracized for doing “a man’s job.” What they found was something more complicated and, ultimately, disturbing.
A view of the Artsakh landscape
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Jesse with Varditer, one of the deminers, directing partner Emily Mkrtichian, and director of photography Alex Igidbashian.
Contact Jesse at forgottenfieldsnkr@gmail.com and learn more at Facebook.com/forgottenfieldsnkr
Above: A group of newly trained deminers ‘opening’ a new field. Below: Nara, a deminer, at her home in Lachin, being interviewed by Emily.
“The team we followed, Nara, Varditer, Inge, Naz, Vardouhi, and Lilit, is a diverse group of independent Armenian women who took this potentially dangerous job both for the excitement and in order to provide for themselves and their family. We followed their meticulous—even at times monotonous—process of looking for unexploded landmines left over from the war with Azerbaijan. The interesting thing about the job, they explained, was not just that it was risky, but that it required superhuman patience, since most of the time nothing at all is found. Nevertheless, these women had to remain completely vigilant throughout the entire process.” “The key thing that links them all together is that, more than any other reason, desperation led them to work for HALO—so they could take care of their kids or, in Vardouhi’s case, her 13 brothers and sisters as well as her invalid parents. While some may frown on them for working in a man’s field, they would face even worse criticism if they failed to provide for their families. And nearly all of them have been let down or abandoned by men in their lives who were supposed to help them and be their partners.”
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“Hopefully, this film can raise awareness and help change things for these women.” Jesse partnered with filmmaker Emily Mkrtichian as co-director and Alex Igidbashian as director of photography for the project, the working name of which is Forgotten Fields: A Documentary Film. All three are Armenian Americans, but Mkrtichian lived for five years in Armenia and speaks the language. Their plan is to have the footage for a short 10- to 20-minute film and then to secure further funding for a feature or series for a network like Amazon, Hulu or Netflix. Photos courtesy of Forgotten Fields: A Documentary Film
Deminers Naz, Inga and Lilit, on a mountainside in Lachin, on a much deserved break.
His Road to Now Anyone who was a classmate of Jesse Soursourian at Glen Urquhart will remember that he always told stories. In fact, his first grade teacher Carole Stewart would scold Jesse because he distracted others from their work with his tales. In time, he acted out stories on the stage, performing professionally in Boston and on the North Shore from the time he was a preteen. After majoring in Theater at Wesleyan, Jesse took his talents to New York, continuing to act for a few years before deciding he wanted to return to his first love—writing stories of his own. That was when he returned to school—Columbia
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University this time—to earn an MFA in Film with a concentration in Screenwriting. Now he writes both fiction and nonfiction stories he hopes will capture the interests of wide audiences. His teleplay won Honors in the Columbia University Film Festival in 2016. A short he co-wrote, Hugh the Hunter, was screened at Sundance in 2015; and They Were Afraid of Us, his short documentary about an Egyptian emigre to New York, was screened at the Adirondack Film Festival, the Lighthouse Film Festival, and the Social Machinery Film Festival in Italy.
LATIN LIVES AT GUS!
Photos by Ellen Harasimowicz
Spend ten minutes in GUS teacher Cori Russo’s classroom and you will be convinced that Latin is anything but a dead language. You will also realize the importance of Latin in the toolbox of skills GUS middle school students carry with them to high school and college. Class begins with the magister (teacher) greeting his students with “Salve” (hello) as they make a semi-circle around the whiteboard. For the next 40 minutes, as much Latin as English is spoken and there are no dry textbooks with stories about ancient Roman boys carrying water. Instead, the students enthusiastically participate in creating an oral story about a hippopotamus who goes camping with a tent in a tree! All the while, vocabulary is reviewed and expanded, and students master when to use “ego” (I) and “mihi” (me), and what English words might derive from the Latin words they are learning. For example, “rusticatum ire” means “to go camping”; thus, the students are invited to consider the root “rustic” and what it means in English. After a heated discussion—in Latin—about where it is best to go camping, it is time for a break, so Magister Russo leads a spirited game of Simon Says. In Latin, of course. After break, the class finishes the story, adding the words for hearing—“audit”—and sleeping—“dormit”—and seeing—“vidit”—to their vocabularies. Of course, the relationship to English words is explored. Before the students are dismissed, Magister Russo asks the students to close their eyes. He then recites some of the words and phrases discussed during class and asks the boys and girls to give a thumbs up if they understand, an “eh” if they need more review, and a thumbs down if they feel like they’ve never heard what he is saying before. So who is this Latin Magister and what has he done with your grandfather’s Latin class? Cori Russo arrived at GUS last fall after teaching for four years at Lynn Classical where he built up the Latin program from a single part time position to a four-year curriculum offering ten classes. In 2016, his success earned him the Teacher of the Year Award from the Classical Association of Massachusetts. Pretty impressive considering Lynn Classical was his first teaching job! After earning a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Emerson College, Cori worked for a few years as a reporter and in an office job, but
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knew he wanted to return to school. Though he had a solid background in reading and writing, he felt he “needed to read things in depth.” After taking a summer class at Tufts University about the ancient poet Aristophanes, he became fascinated with the ancient world. For the next two years, he audited post-Baccalaureate classes in Greek and Latin before enrolling in a two-year Master’s program at Tufts in Classics. Talking with Cori, his fascination with the ancient world is almost contagious. “What interested me the most, as I developed as a student of Greek and Latin, was not just the literature, but the influence it had on the Renaissance,” he explains. “For instance, I had no idea until grad school that Isaac Newton and Galileo wrote in Latin. As a teacher, Cori wants his students “to start to draw connections between Latin language and English language and eventually make connections between other academic fields they are studying and Latin.” For example, in science class, “understanding the difference between centrifugal and centripetal forces is simple if you know Latin because ‘petere’ means to seek or move towards and ‘fugere’ means to run away or move away from.” Likewise, he points out, the language of calculus is the same that Isaac Newton used in the Enlightenment. While he personally loves to read Latin literature and poetry, that is hardly his goal in teaching middle school students. “The pedagogical justification centers around the indisputable fact that Latin vocabulary makes up the core of English vocabulary, and the more Latin a student knows, the more English they know and the deeper their understanding is of how their own language works.” In fact, more than 60 percent of English words have Latin roots, he points out. The percentage is even higher for French and Spanish words, so knowing Latin helps to learn other languages too. “If you know a Latin root, you are able to engage in a thoughtful analytical process that allows you to make a highly educated guess at the definition of a word you don’t know. It also gives you expanded understanding of words you know.” Cori is quick to point out that learning Latin further benefits brain plasticity. As with mastering any new skill, learning Latin has cognitive benefits by making students understand the world with other than their native tongues, he explains, referencing research that acknowledges the benefits of this brain cross training. In summarizing his goals for GUS students, Cori likes to quote the ancient Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, who wrote, “Ars longa; vita brevis” (Art is long; life is short). Cori believes the Greek physician “meant that it takes a long time to reach the heights of a skillful endeavor though life is short.” He agrees. Thus, “the demands on students’ time in order for them to become readers of what essentially amounts to highly ornate literary works are probably too great. On the other hand, you can literally learn one or two roots and be able to figure out the meaning of dozens and dozens of English words. The return on investment is amazing.”
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As for his style of teaching, Cori sees benefits in drawing on his creative writing background to incorporate storytelling into classroom learning. “People are wired to understand the world through stories,” he believes. “We are good at remembering things in the context of stories. When we come up with a story as a class, it gives students a chance to express themselves and it re-enforces all we are learning. It’s fun and provides lots of meaningful repetition.” Since all students, Cori believes, “meet with the most success when they are inspired by the environment, encouraged to seek answers and to make connections,” he tries to provide those conditions every day in his classroom. To Cori, the kind of rigor that involves analytical, investigative work to understand a concept “is what defines a model GUS student” and is far preferable to the kind of rigor defined merely by memorization or rote learning. Cori enthusiastically presided over his first GUS Chariot Races this spring. He also hopes to create some new traditions including a Convivium or literary party modeled after the symposia in the ancient world—complete with good food, poetry recitations, and togas. In the meantime, he has a celebration of his own to plan. In December, he will marry Holly Engvall, a Latin teacher at East Boston High School. They met at a Latin immersion camp, Conventiculum Bostoniense, run by UMass Boston. And, yes, their first conversations were in Latin, the language of love. Latin has been part of the core curriculum at Glen Urquhart for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders since the school began. It has always been considered an important component of the integrated, spiral curriculum that defines the GUS experience.
TADLER GRANTS ADVANCE FACULTY Thanks to the initiative, foresight, and generosity of former GUS trustee Richard Tadler and his wife, Donna, one or two GUS teachers are selected each year to participate in extraordinary professional development opportunities. We asked Richard about his vision and motivation for establishing the Tadler Grants. Why did you create the Tadler Grants? As a Board member at GUS, I was looking for a different way to support the faculty. Faculty are, of course, the key to success at GUS. What are your goals for the grants? Our goal is to see excellent teachers get a chance to do something different from their everyday lives. Each recipient chooses an activity they are passionate about and they return to GUS to add their experience to the overall school experience. Our goal was to simply try this for a few years and see how it developed. Clearly, the faculty have liked the program and we have seen the value in continuing to support the faculty’s professional development. Our hope is others will see projects or ideas that they would like to fund. What are some examples of how the Tadler Grants have benefited GUS faculty, and thus, students, so far? Recipients have attended educational conferences, travelled to foreign lands, and built relationships with other schools. Math teacher Maureen Twombly, for example, attended a conference entitled Mathematical Mindsets led by Jo Boaler, a professor at Standford University. Co-kindergarten teachers Sandy Thoms and Amy Billings traveled to Nevis in the West Indies where they ran a summer arts camp and attended a cultural festival, Culturama. The following year, Sandy returned with retired art teacher, Catherine Cobb, and they created the Nevis Arts Initiative, holding art classes for students and teachers in the public schools. The Tadlers are parents of GUS grads Devon and Conor. Devon ’05 graduated from Pingree School and Elon University and now works for the Wayfair Corporation in Boston. Conor ’09 graduated from Pingree School and the University of Denver and just began working for Baccarat Hotel in New York City.
Top to bottom: Nevis summer art camp; the Tadler Family - Richard, Donna, Devon’s husband, Zach Guarino, Devon, and Conor; Nevis art show
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FAREWELL, MRS. MARCHESSEAULT! Photos by Kristina Young
For hundreds of GUS parents and children, Leslie Marchesseault has been the first welcoming face to the school. For 21 years, she has been our director of admission, introducing families to Glen Urquhart with her warm smile and deep understanding of child development and educational pedagogy. But even before that, Leslie was a second grade GUS teacher and a GUS parent. Her long tenure and multiple roles mean she has a unique perspective and lens to view our school over a long period of time. Indeed, when Leslie leaves her official role this summer, she is one of the handful of people who are holders and caretakers of Glen Urquhart’s institutional wisdom and traditions. What first drew you to GUS? “I first visited GUS when I was director of The Village School, a preschool in Boxford. I came with Maria Freedberg who was looking for a school for her daughter, Lexie. I also had a dear friend, Babette Loring, who was enrolling her son at GUS. I didn’t expect to find a school for my children, too. What I immediately liked—and it may sound trite now—is that the school cared about the social/emotional life of children. And, academically, it met children where they were and moved them along. I loved the theme learning, too, though I must say that I’ve grown to love the theme learning even more than I did in the beginning. The new research about how children learn across different disciplines and benefit from a unified approach confirms what GUS has been doing for nearly forty years. As adults, we all go to work with a unified goal. For children, the shared theme gives them a purpose to their days at school.” 10 The Tartan Summer 2017
How has GUS changed over the years? “I think we are better at documenting what we are doing. At the beginning, it was very much an oral history of the curriculum, traditions, and pedagogy. We’ve kept up with current technology, how we evaluate kids, and new approaches to math and language arts. We have continued to update, but never abandoned our core curriculum, just looked at in a new way, which any good school needs to do. Our parents are still a wonderful group who are appreciative of what happens here at school every day. What do you think your biggest accomplishment has been? “Probably two. First, I believe that I have been able to create an atmosphere around admission where people feel taken care of with honesty and with none of the elitism often associated with independent schools. People are listened to at GUS, taken care of, and decisions, positive or negative, are delivered with sensitivity. Secondly, I am proud of the establishment of GAIN@GUS. We are the only elementary school in the area that has reached out to the local community to provide a program for academically able students so that they can maintain and extend their learning in the summer and have enriching experiences they would not otherwise have—such as visit museums or go on lobster boats. GAIN@GUS can change their summers, but also their view of education, and their sense of possibilities for their lives. We use GUS graduates as interns which gives them a chance to develop their leadership skills in the summer and to learn about being mentors.” What do you hope for GUS’s future? “I hope that GUS continues to offer what is distinctive about us—a comprehensive foundation, deeper learning from firsthand experiences, and social and emotional learning that every adult needs to be a part of a healthy community. It might surprise many to know that we promote traditional learning a good deal of the time, but we couple that with considerable outside and hands on learning. We have been doing this more and better and longer than any other school. Just think of the trips to the quarry in Rockport, the walks on the Nature Trail, the extensive community service program at all grade levels! And that there remains a strong arts, dance, and drama program. We are still the only school that has a dance program throughout the school. This is all that is uniquely GUS!” How would you like applicant families to think of you? “I think people would say I treated them very personally. I really do remember who they are. I think there is a heart of a school, and I have tried to represent it. There are all the statistics on the number of books in the library, but then there is the heart of the school, what happens when you are here. Parents are giving their kids to us for the day, and the faculty and I have always
taken that opportunity seriously—that element of valuing kids and the relationship you build with parents. You have to take the time for people, to listen to them, to hear their point of view. It’s all about how you treat each other. I have enjoyed coming to work at GUS every day. I think families have felt that.” What would you like students to say about you? “That I am the person who opens the door for people. When seventh graders were studying the human body a few years ago and how cell membranes allow things to enter and exit the body, one of the students said, ‘It’s like Mrs. Marchesseault. She’s the cell membrane of the school.’ I got a kick out of that.” What are your plans? “I’d like to work part-time. I plan to spend more time with my four grandchildren and my mother who recently moved to MA. I hope to have more time to travel with my husband and for us to spend more time together. I’d also like to volunteer.” Leslie Marchesseault and her husband, Guy, are parents of GUS grads Kyle ’91 and Andrew ’97. Kyle, is a graduate of Brooks School and Dartmouth College, and holds an MBA from Babson College. He is the Senior Director of Marketing for Blueport Commerce in Boston’s South End, an ecommerce platform for furniture retailer websites. Kyle is married to Marisa and they are the parents of a daughter, Ellie, and a son, Tyler. Andrew is a video archivist for the Voice of America in Washington, D.C., the largest U.S. international broadcaster. A graduate of Phillips Andover and the University of Chicago, he has an MA from Pratt University. Andrew and his wife, Analiese, are the parents of two sons, Johann and Lawrence.
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Alumni Profile
Louis Somma ’88
Keeps GUS in the Family! When Louis Somma ’88 attended Glen Urquhart for grades 4–8, the school was still in its infancy. There was a ninth grade, primarily for those who would go on to boarding school; there was no upper school building or Braemar; but there were still trips to Mystic Seaport, talent shows, and lots of time to get to know your teachers. Louis learned to play guitar in sixth or seventh grade from classmate Joshua Taylor’s father, which meant Josh and Louis could perform at the school talent shows. Their repertoire was mostly rock and roll with some Courtesy photo folk thrown in. The experience was so rewarding that after Louis graduated from Northfield Mount Hermon he completed the summer program at Berklee College of Music, worked construction during the fall term, and then enrolled as a full time student at Berklee for a year and a half to study jazz and rock and roll. He then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College where he majored in history and foreign policy but continued to play in bands. After Sarah Lawrence, music took a total back seat, though Louis still picks up a guitar now and again and hopes to teach his son, Leo, who just completed second grade at GUS, to play. Louis attended Cornell Law School after working as a paralegal for two years, and then worked for big corporate law firms—White and Case and Ropes and Gray—in New York City for the next dozen years. He is now Director and Senior Counsel with Affiliated Managers Group, a global asset management S&P 500 company that operates through a diverse group of investment firms in Prides Crossing. “It’s almost a coincidence that they had their office in Prides,” Louis says. He is happy to find himself back on the North Shore and able to send his young son to GUS. He thinks this area is a great place to live and he is glad it is where some of his best friends still reside. And then there’s Glen Urquhart. “New York has great schools,” Louis says, “but they’re a little intense. GUS lets you be a kid, be goofy, but also get solid academics. GUS is underrated for giving you an education for anything you want
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to do. There are plenty of alumni who are not artists, writers, or musicians. GUS gives you the basic skills of self confidence, knowing yourself, being very good at moving through different groups of people. I wasn’t interested in finance until after law school. I could go to music school or do hedge funds and feel comfortable in both. I also think that the faculty/student situation/relationship means that you are very comfortable with adults. Not the ratio, but the relationship. Not that you don’t think they are authoritative, but the dialogue is different. It extends to college and the mentoring relationships you develop.” Louis, his wife Ann, and son Leo live in Hamilton where Ann maintains a home office for her product development job with a perfume company in New York. Ann lived in New York for more than 15 years so the North Shore is “a new scene for her,” Louis explains. In his spare time, Louis likes to sail or motor boat, often in Maine, teach his son to ski in winter, get together with friends, and work on fixing up their “big old colonial house.” Louis sees his GUS friends often, especially Joshua Taylor, Jake Bartlett, Hunter Jay, and Martha Almy. “It’s not unusual at a summer barbecue to have 10 people from GUS there,” he says.
Glen Urquhart School 17th Annual Wild Boar Classic Golf Tournament Wednesday, October 11, 2017 12 p.m. Shotgun Start Essex County Club Manchester, MA For more information or to register, go to gus.org or contact Annie Barton at abarton@gus.org. The Wild Boar Classic Golf Tournament supports financial aid, faculty professional development, and other important program initiatives at Glen Urquhart School.
Annual Fund
Nurturing Academic Growth and Supporting Achievement
THANK YOU to our alumni, parents, and friends for a great year!
Glen Urquhart School 74 Hart Street Beverly Farms, MA 01915 978-927-1064 | gus.org
Save the Dates: Forty and Forward! Celebrate Glen Urquhart’s 40th anniversary year! FRIDAY, JUNE 8, 2018
Gather under the tent for 21+ Alumni Evening Reunion.
Savor locally made food and libations with old friends and teachers.
SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2018 Remember May Day? Huzza? Chariot Races?
We are rolling them into one for our 40th anniversary GUS Community Picnic/Barbecue. Join GUS alumni, past and current families, faculty, and trustees for an afternoon of fun.
From the Archives: Huzza, GUS’s 20th anniversary celebration