Four Stories from the Class of 2019

By Becky Purdy | Photographed by Catherine Johanna Dunlavey ’13

Four Stories from the Class of 2019

These seniors, like a great many of their classmates, understand that “best self” is a journey, not a destination.

Rebecca Mucheru

HOMETOWN: Teaneck, New Jersey

YEARS AT LOOMIS: Four

EXTRACURRICULAR ROLES: Singer, actress, resident assistant, A Cappelicans leader, community service enthusiast, Project Green leader

NEXT YEAR: Kenyon College

Rebecca Mucheru’s family has a recording of her when she was in preschool demanding, “Record me singing,” then launching into the ABCs song. “That’s where it started,” she says. “I was obsessed with being heard from then on.”

Becca’s singing has graced performance spaces around campus for four years, from the Hubbard Performance Hall, where she sang with the Concert Choir and with the student-run Musical Revue, to the Norris Ely Orchard Theater, where she had roles in Shrek: The Musical and The Old Man and The Old Moon, to Founders Chapel, where she led the A Cappelicans.

I’m hopelessly in love with Loomis Chaffee.

Becca has lent her voice to many other endeavors at Loomis Chaffee as well. A leader of Project Green, she helped reinvigorate the student environmental club, whose projects included a T-shirt drive and Boomerang Bags initiative that recycled fabric from the T-shirts into reusable bags, the creation of notepads from stationery left over from the school’s Centennial capital campaign, and the sponsorship of an annual poetry competition with natural spaces as the subject matter. A Girl Scout who is still active with her troop from home in New Jersey, she pursues community service opportunities with zeal. Among other service projects at Loomis, she volunteered with the music and memory program at Seabury Meadows, a memory care center in Bloomfield, Connecticut. She also served as a resident assistant in Ammidon Hall this year and volunteered with the Pelican Support Network, which helps new students adjust to Loomis. An inquisitive student, Becca graduated with a Global & Environmental Studies Certificate, and she capped off her final year at Loomis by collaborating with two classmates to produce a play in the NEO as a Senior Project. She was awarded a Founders Prize her junior year for her leadership and citizenship, and on Class Night in May she received a Sellers Faculty Prize “in recognition of personal achievement and service to the Loomis Chaffee community.”

Coming from a public middle school in Teaneck, New Jersey, Becca heard about Loomis through the Prep for Prep program, which identifies promising students of color from the New York City area and helps them prepare to thrive at independent secondary schools in the Northeast. After gaining admission to the program in the seventh grade, Prep for Prep students spend the summers before and after eighth grade attending full days of classes in New York City five days a week, and during the eighth-grade school year, they attend classes every Saturday. The program also prepares its students for standardized tests required for admission to most independent schools, introduces them to the boarding school lifestyle with two weeks on a school campus during the summer, and helps them to apply to independent high schools. One of Becca’s Prep for Prep advisors was Nana Minder ’14, and Becca looked up to her.

After visits to five schools, Loomis rose to the top of Becca’s list. “I came here, and I was so happy that I did,” she says. The 14 months of hard work in Prep for Prep were worth it, she affirms, “because I got to spend four years here, and I absolutely love this place. I’m hopelessly in love with Loomis Chaffee.” In her college search, she looked for schools that reminded her of Loomis. “I’m going to Kenyon, and they have a whole middle path, so I was like, ‘How can I say no to that?’”

Becca narrates her academic timeline at Loomis with examples of topics that fascinated her, especially those that involved history. In Spanish 4 this year, she loved learning about the history of Spanishspeaking parts of the world while listening and speaking in the language. In Ancient Philosophy and the Philosophy of Nonviolence, she gained insights into the origins of different philosophies and learned how Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Ghandi, and other leaders developed philosophies that challenged the status quo. In College-Level Comparative Government and Politics this year, the discussion-based approach and the demands of a college-level course pushed Becca’s limits. “Even though that class was really hard for me, there was never a moment when I wished I wasn’t taking the class because the content was just so interesting,” she says.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, Becca has a way of telling the unvarnished truth while keeping it in perspective and remaining positive. Despite the stress of senior year and the college process, she didn’t buy it when classmates said they couldn’t wait to graduate.

“First of all, no you don’t,” she begins in passionate response. “You just can’t wait so you don’t have to worry about school anymore. For the most part, you’ve spent four years here. All your classmates are people who you’ve lived with, who you’ve struggled with. These are all people you are extremely close with and you’ll hopefully have in your life forever. You don’t want to get away from your friends. You don’t want to get away from the safe spaces you’ve created on campus. … You’re trying to leave the stress behind. Maybe you’re tying the idea of the stress to the place. Well, there are reasons to come back for reunions, and that’s because you’ve had so many good memories. You don’t hate it.”

There’s a reason Becca has wanted to be heard, even back in preschool: She has something valuable to say, and it’s worth listening.

Mark Valadez

HOMETOWN: Mexico City, Mexico

YEARS AT LOOMIS: Four

EXTRACURRICULAR ROLES: Student Activities leader, environmental proctor, cross country captain, theater technician, prefect, resident assistant

NEXT YEAR: University of Chicago

It was past late check-in on a Saturday night in Carter Hall, and Mark Valadez was missing. A responsible prefect known for his considerate nature, Mark rarely, if ever, neglected to check in on time. Dorm head Naogan Ma was “worried like only a mother would be,” Mark recalls. She picked up her phone and called the dean on duty, Patricia Sasser, who answered right away from her post in the student center.

“We don’t know where Mark is,” Naogan reported.“Oh, he’s here,” Patricia responded. “We’re playing Go Fish.”

Mark, it turns out, was keeping Dean Sasser company while they waited to tidy up the student center after students finished watching a sporting event on TV. Alerted to the late hour, Mark rushed back to Carter to check in with Naogan. “In retrospect it was the funniest moment,” he recalls, “because she was waiting, so gently and sternly with, ‘Where the heck were you?’” He stayed talking with Naogan that night until after 1 a.m. “I’ll miss those moments,” he says.

Except for the tardiness, this incident was typical Mark Valadez: Ubiquitous on campus but rarely in the spotlight, Mark kept the machine of community life well-oiled during his four years on the Island. A student activities assistant, dorm leader, engaged scholar, committed athlete, theater technician, practical-minded environmentalist, and sincere friend to many, Mark couldn’t duck the spotlight at Commencement, when he received the Nathaniel Horton Batchelder Prize for Industry, Loyalty, and Integrity. “Mark is one of those students the Loomis Chaffee faculty will speak of for years to come,” read the conclusion of his laudatory citation for the prize.

Mark, who is from Mexico City, arrived on the Island as a freshman open to the possibilities. “It was a lot of fun, a little bit hectic,” he says of his freshman fall. “A couple of key people introduced me to things.” He quickly discovered the infectious enthusiasm of Michael Donegan, a dean of students and the director of student activities, and Mark signed up to help with “StuActs” events on campus. “I took Mr. Donegan’s advice to heart in terms of getting involved,” says Mark, who soon also joined the cross country team and the theater tech crew.

Cross country was a new experience for Mark. “The first practice was three miles, and I asked [then-captain] Tristan Rhodes, ‘Is this what you do every day?’” Mark recalls. “And he was like, ‘No.’ I was relieved for a second. Then he said, ‘This is the lightest of our days.’ I was like, ‘This is going to be a long one.’”

In the first five-kilometer time trial of the season, Mark struggled but finished, with a time of 35 minutes. But he persevered, and, as the weeks passed, he improved. By the end of his freshman season, he was the top JV runner on the team. The following year, he earned a spot on the varsity as the No. 5 runner for the Pelicans, and as a junior and a senior captain, he ran third or fourth on the team in the meets. He lowered his best time on the home course to 17:02 — less than half the time it took him to complete his freshman time trial. He also gained a supportive community of fellow runners, one he enjoyed so much that he chose to run track in the spring, focusing on distance events and picking up pole vaulting. (He placed third in the pole vault at the Founders League Championship this spring.)

Mark’s learning curve as a theater and events technician followed a similar upward trend, and it further widened his social circle. Nearly every weekend he helped set up for and break down campus events. “That just became part of my routine, Friday and Saturday nights helping out with events and hanging out and talking with people,” he says. Mark also did lighting and sound tech in the Norris Ely Theater for every major production, and many additional shows, throughout his four years at Loomis.

The value Mark placed on community and the skill with which he built community lent themselves to leadership positions. A mentor to many students, he served as an international student ambassador as a sophomore, helping other international students acclimate to the school and American culture; as a prefect in Carter his junior year; and as a resident assistant in Taylor Hall this year. He remained close to many of the underclassmen, his “prefectees,” from Carter and took pride in their growth to become prefects and student leaders themselves.

Mark also served as an environmental proctor, a student position devoted to raising awareness of environmental issues on campus, reducing waste, and shrinking the school’s carbon footprint. He took on the role as a sophomore after a school-sponsored trip to Joshua Tree National Park, where student travelers worked with scientists and park rangers to study and better understand environmental issues. His experiences motivated him to work to stem climate change and promote sustainability. Mark was a head e-proctor this year.

In the classroom, Mark took a big-picture approach to learning. He was fascinated by connections he discovered among different subjects and by ways in which what he learned helped him to understand and navigate the world. “Many times we forget that what you learn in the classroom is not just for the classroom, and people get too bogged down with turning in the paper,” he says. “For me, I don’t focus on grades. I mean, I make sure that they’re up where I want them to be, but when I go into a classroom, it’s not about the test.”

Math and sciences, including computer science, particularly intrigue Mark. Last summer he attended a five-week program at Yale University, where he took statistics and Yale’s introductory computer science course. He says the program was fun — “type 2 fun” — as he strove to conquer several problem sets and tests every week, sometimes working from noon to midnight on the challenges. “I say it’s fun because at 12 at night when you’re freaking out because the problem set is due and you’ve been working for three days on it, when it actually works, it’s the best feeling in the world,” he says.

Mark, who will attend University of Chicago in the fall, hopes to focus his studies on financial engineering and sociology and later to pursue an advanced degree in computer science. He describes financial engineering, a branch of economics, as “structured problem-solving in terms of finances.” His academic and career intentions all come back to his fascination with explaining the world, understanding people, and solving problems.

Problem-solving was the focus of the Innovation Trimester (I-Tri), a program offered for the first time at Loomis this spring, and Mark was one of 10 seniors engaged in the inaugural course. The students, under the guidance of two teachers, devoted the full term to helping local companies and organizations solve challenges, from helping a social service agency to better serve homeless people in Windsor, to advising a hydroponic farm as it expanded production and sought to reach more customers. Mark says he loved the opportunity to put his learning into context and practical use and to help people in the surrounding community.

Among the many people at Loomis that Mark will miss next year is his sister, Alexa, a rising senior. The two siblings grew closer in their three years together on campus, and they gravitated toward the same groups of people. “It became a normal thing for me to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my sister and all my friends,” Mark says. “I’ve enjoyed that, and that’s one of the things that I’ll definitely miss.”

Stacy Park

HOMETOWN: Hwaseong-si, South Korea

YEARS AT LOOMIS: Four

EXTRACURRICULAR ROLES: Resident assistant, managing editor of The Log, entrepreneur, violinist and concertmaster for Orchestra, science tutor, prefect, member of JV ice hockey, III soccer, and water polo teams

NEXT YEAR: UPenn’s Wharton School of Business

Stacy Park was the top scholar in the Class of 2019, but to stop there in summing up her contributions to Loomis Chaffee would vastly oversimplify her impact in a multitude of realms on the Island.

Yes, she received all A’s and A-plusses in the most demanding college-level and advanced courses that the school offers. Yes, she earned the Donald M. Joffray Senior Mathematics Prize and junior academic awards in science, math, foreign languages, and music. And yes, she taught herself Calculus A during the summer after her freshman year so that she could advance to Calculus B/C as a sophomore, followed by both Multivariable Calculus and Statistics as a junior and Linear Algebra this year.

But Stacy, genuine and joyful, also served as a prefect in Cutler Hall her junior year and a resident assistant in Ammidon Hall as a senior; played lead violin in the Orchestra; was a features editor and then managing editor of The Log; tutored her peers in the Science Resource Center; earned a Founders Prize as a junior for her leadership and citizenship at the school; and played water polo, III soccer, and JV ice hockey— or “JV puck,” as she and her teammates called it. She and classmate Abby Huang also found time to start a business, Snatch, an online platform for students to sell and buy used items on their school campuses. As a Senior Project, Stacy and Abby created and launched the website and began marketing the service at schools in Connecticut. The citation for the Loomis Family Prize for scholarship, awarded to Stacy at Commencement, quotes her advisor as saying that Stacy “packs more into a day than most people fit into a week.”

When Stacy thought ahead to college and beyond, she thought she wanted to focus on a STEM field such as computer science, chemistry, or engineering, but she worried that she would miss the humanities and people-centered pursuits. Then last summer she attended the four-week Leadership in the Business World program at the University of Pennsylvania, and she fell in love with the field of business, which she says combines her interests. The summer program involved working on a team of peers to develop a business plan for a new idea. The group interactions and the technical side of building a business startup plan appealed to her, and as she and her teammates resolved problems and surmounted challenges, she discovered a particular aptitude for managing. The experience convinced her to apply to college at UPenn’s Wharton School of Business, where she will begin studying this fall.

Stacy and her older sister, Rosie ’18, arrived at Loomis together four years ago, Stacy as a freshman and Rosie as a sophomore. (Their brother, Andrew, is a rising sophomore at Loomis.) The family lives in South Korea but decided to experience life in America for a few years when the children were in elementary school. They moved to Seattle, Washington, where they intended to live for two years before returning to Korea. Those two years stretched into four as the siblings thrived at school in Seattle. When the girls neared high school-age, the family began to look at American boarding schools, and both girls chose Loomis. Stacy says she liked having Rosie at school with her, especially in their first year. Both new students away from their parents for the first time, they grew closer and learned to rely on each other. It was especially comforting that first year, she says, to go to airports together and share the long trip home to Korea and back.

“Also, Rosie set the standards high academically,” Stacy says. “She was very academically driven, and I looked up to that. Before, in Seattle, I thought, ‘If I just do it, this is enough.’” Rosie’s hard-working mindset rubbed off on Stacy, and she began to see the value of striving to do her best, not just completing her work. “You don’t have to be all hard-core with everything, but it’s always good to have that mindset … because you can always do more,” Stacy says. “I also think if you work more on something, you develop more passion.” She adds that she is naturally easy-going, so while she developed a strong work ethic, she did not let the work overwhelm her with stress.

Stacy’s academic interests evolved at Loomis. At the beginning of her freshman year, she says, she expected to concentrate on the violin and the study of history, her two main interests at the time. Although those two pursuits still interest her, she made new discoveries on the Island that excited her even more. She took Chemistry Advanced with Robert DeConinck as a freshman, and she found the material surprisingly intriguing. “It was just so abstract that it was weird and cool,” she recalls. And math had until then meant plugging in equations to solve problems. But her Algebra 2 Advanced teacher freshman year, Stephen Sacchetti, derived all of the equations they used. “You actually start from the beginning and build it up,” she says. “That’s probably why I didn’t really like math and science before, because you were just given a formula and you did it.”

Her interest in STEM subjects took off from there, but Stacy says she also continued to grow as a student of the humanities. At first she struggled to understand some of the native expressions in readings for English class, and her writing was careful and dry. But as the years passed and teachers encouraged her to stretch — and as she learned a different, journalistic writing style for her Log articles — she gained the confidence to experiment with her writing. Her idea of creative writing assignments expanded from creative stories written in traditional fashion to essays written in a creative style. In history classes, Stacy preferred in-class discussions to writing papers, but she found an intriguing topic for her junior research paper: the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, in which white miners attacked their Chinese-immigrant co-workers, killing 28 of them and driving many others from the town. Stacy pored over newspaper accounts from the time as primary sources for her paper, and she discovered that racism not only helped to fuel the attacks but also seeped into some of the news reporting. “It’s interesting how no one really has a full picture of history,” she reflects.

Multivariable Calculus, or “Multi,” a difficult course that requires abstract thinking about three-dimensional shapes, was probably Stacy’s biggest academic challenge at Loomis, and this winter, months after she had completed the course, she discovered a startling reason why: “mind blindness,” or aphantasia. She cannot visualize things. “When people said, ‘Visualize yourself at the beach,’ I thought it was metaphorical. I can’t see anything in my mind,” she says. “I was mind-blown that you could actually see stuff.” She made the discovery when she was helping her friend Jean Shin, a junior, with a physics project. Jean said she wondered if people picture graphs in the air when they watch a ball flying upward. Stacy laughed, and that triggered a conversation. Stacy was incredulous that, for instance, a person could look at his or her hand and imagine an apple in it. For her part, Jean was amazed that Stacy could not conjure an image in her mind’s eye. “She said, ‘What do you do when you’re in a bus going to a game? Don’t you daydream, look out the window and see little things?’” Stacy recalls, laughing at the memory. “And I was like, ‘No, I just look out and see the roads.’”

After making this discovery, Stacy continued to ask people about this phenomenon, and she marveled that they could “see” things that they imagined. Her classmates wondered how she had survived Multi. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess I just think differently.”

Liam Scott

HOMETOWN: South Glastonbury, Connecticut

YEARS AT LOOMIS: Four

EXTRACURRICULAR ROLES: Editor-in-chief of The Log, Model United Nations delegate, tour guide, member of equestrian and varsity tennis teams

NEXT YEAR: Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service

Before traveling to Cambodia and Vietnam last summer on a Loomis Chaffee-sponsored trip, Liam Scott had heard of the Khmer Rouge and its brutal rule of Cambodia in the 1970s, but he knew little more about the mass killings committed by the regime, wiping out an estimated 1.6 million Cambodians.

As the student group and accompanying faculty visited the Killing Fields extermination camp and other sites recounting the genocide and interviewed a survivor of the regime’s oppression, the realities of this tragic chapter in Cambodia’s history came into sharp focus.

“I was just struck by how little I knew about the Cambodian genocide and genocide generally,” Liam recalls. He wanted to learn more and do more, he told history teacher Harrison Shure one evening as the group was returning to their hotel. “I wasn’t sure what that would look like, but I said, ‘Can we do something more with that when we get back to Loomis?’”

“Yes, we should,” Harrison replied. And so began a journey for Liam that included a year-long independent study on genocide and, with Harrison’s guidance, the creation of a new history course that will be taught next year, Genocide: Media, Remembrance, and the International Community. The journey ignited a passion in Liam for the study of genocide, for the examination of history through different lenses, and for the art of teaching.

During the fall term, Liam worked to develop an overview of the course, create a course description, and present the proposal to the History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Social Science Department, which approved the course. In the winter term, Liam researched case studies of genocides, developed the content of the course, and learned about pedagogy and good teaching practices. He also visited history teacher Kevin Henderson’s Global Human Rights class and taught two class periods on the Rwandan genocide. Liam built on these experiences in the spring term, when he constructed the course, developing a narrative that brought together the teaching techniques and the material students would explore.

To supplement this work, Liam interviewed seven genocide survivors and descendants of survivors as a Senior Project during the last two weeks of classes at Loomis. He uploaded the interviews, along with conversations recorded earlier with two other people, to a website that can be used for the Genocide course. The interviews were emotionally intense, he says, and he appreciated not only the generosity of the people who shared their stories, but also the opportunity to debrief with Harrison after the interviews.

“I’m so grateful to Mr. Shure for embarking on this experience with me. He taught me what it means to … feel endlessly passionate about something and like I can make a difference,” Liam says. “I’m just so grateful to have had the opportunity to work so closely with a teacher, and [the fact] that he taught me how to do all of that is something that I can never thank him enough for.”

Near the end of the spring term, Harrison organized a course defense, similar to a thesis defense, in which Liam presented his plans for the course, the pedagogy and intention behind it, and the structure he had chosen. A committee of 15 faculty members, including members of the department, the director and associate director of the Alvord Center for Global & Environmental Studies, the director of the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching, Director of Studies Timothy Lawrence, and Associate Head of School Webster Trenchard, attended the presentation and asked Liam questions. They were blown away. “It was very impressive,” Tim says. “We were ready to offer him a future teaching position on the spot.” Tim had worked with Liam every year on his academic planning, so Tim was impressed but not surprised by the detail and depth of Liam’s work in developing the course and the eloquence of his presentation. “What made Liam’s presentation more remarkable,” Tim reflects, “was his poise and the maturity of his thinking in responding to a [room] full of teachers and administrators asking him rather deep and pointed questions about his concepts, his explorations, his choice-making, and his decisions. He handled this with aplomb, impressive content knowledge, clear and well-considered reasoning, and with an emotional presence that bespoke intellectual and personal ownership of the process.”

Passion for learning is hardly a new experience for Liam. From his dual pursuit of French and Chinese language studies — both reaching the sixth-year level — to his love of close textual analysis in literature and from his role as an editor-in-chief of The Log to his avid involvement in Model United Nations conferences and the equestrian and varsity tennis teams, Liam embraces learning opportunities at every turn. In fact, when he reflects on his various Loomis experiences, he talks first about what he learned from each activity and from the faculty members who guided him.

Working on The Log with his peers and with faculty advisor Jessica Hsieh ’08 improved Liam’s writing and editing and taught him about collaboration, leadership, and the nuances of journalistic ethics, he says. Liam started with The Log as a contributor his freshman year, then a staff writer, and then a section editor before becoming an editor-in-chief as a senior. “I’ve learned what it means to lead well,” he says of his editing role, quickly adding, “I definitely haven’t gotten there. I’m not an expert on leading. But I’ve learned more about leading through practicing leading.” He says his experience with The Log also opened his eyes to the pitfalls of complaining. “I think it’s easy to want to criticize everything when you’re doing journalism, and I might have fallen into that trap initially,” he says. “You can criticize, but there should be a point behind that criticism.”

Participating in Model United Nations conferences, under the able guidance of history teacher Rachel Engelke, helped him discover a passion for international affairs, a field on which he will focus his studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Liam was part of the Loomis delegation to the Yale Model UN and Boston Model UN conferences for the last three years, and he and a contingent of Loomis students participated in the Yale Model Government Europe in Budapest, Hungary, in 2017. He says these experiences improved his public speaking skills, his understanding of diplomacy, and his ability to develop creative solutions to problems and crises.

Although sad to say goodbye to friends and faculty, Liam says his overriding emotion at Commencement was gratitude for his four years at Loomis and the community that watched out for and mentored him. “I really cannot overemphasize how grateful I am toward Mr. Shure, Ms. Hsieh, Ms. Engelke, and Mr. Helfrich [Liam’s faculty advisor Timothy Helfrich ’96],” Liam wrote in an email after the interview for this article. “They’ve made me who I am today, and I love for them to know that in every way possible.”