To Strive, to Seek, to Find...

I have now been working at Prep—to say nothing of my student years—about as longas I had been alive the frigid morning in December 1998 when I visited as a Freshman for a Day. That’s a lot of daily announcements to glance over, a lot of Fr. Azzarto’s handwriting to decipher, a lot of Emmaus banners to peruse, a lot of highs and lows and friendships and hard work and slices of pizza from Las Americas (formerly Lisbon). It’s a lot of memories of a lot of days spent in a place that means the world to me.

Lately, as I reflect on each day during my sometimes lengthy drive home, I find I don’t always remember everything that happened just a few hours prior. And yet somehow I still remember that one day so vividly. It was the first full day I spent here, and the day I knew this would be my second home. I remember waiting for my freshman ambassador in the small office off the Mulry lobby with Michael Mazur, the “director of public information,” whatever that meant (I know now, because I have his job, though Freshman for a Day is now the purview of the admissions director), elbowing through the crowded Burke Hall cafeteria to get lunch, trying to draw a mental map of the labyrinthine hallways. I remember Jack Raslowsky announcing bottled water was available in the principal’s office due to a water main break on Tonnelle Avenue. I remember World Civ with Michael Guzik, S.J.; Music with Roland Jones; Religion with Jon Dwyer, later one of my favorite teachers and a fellow member of Emmaus 187. I can’t recall all my college professors’ names, but I can tell you the Prep teachers I met that day, even those who never officially taught me. Why is that?

I have two guesses. First of all, it speaks to the experience I had that day, and the incredible people who have taught at Prep through the decades to make those indelible impressions on our students (or even prospective students). I am honored to have called some of them my teachers, some of them my colleagues, and best of all, some of them both. Second, and of greater interest in this context, was the first-period English class I visited that day.

As we squeezed between the parked cars on Warren Street (which was still a street!) toward the English Building, my ambassador turned and said, “Now we have English with Mr. Gomez. He’s awesome. He will curse.” Curiously, I don’t remember whether the cursing came to fruition. But I do remember standing up on the chairs with a roomful of Prep freshmen and their teacher (whose face clearly stated he lived for this), reading from Tennyson: “I am a part of all that I have met,” and “Come, my friends/‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” and “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

I never spent another period in class with Mr. Gomez. At the end of my junior year, not unlike Ulysses, he headed west (to Omaha, perhaps less dramatic than striking out on the Ionian waves, but still). You’ve probably guessed that our paths crossed last spring, as the now-Dr. Gomez visited ahead of his announcement as Prep’s new president, and yes, full disclosure, he’s now my boss. But in the interim, I came to regard those lines we read in his class as a kind of shorthand for the Prep experience: the brotherly bonds of a shared endeavor that can turn strangers into a family, the hunger for adventure and new challenges, the certainty that not trying would always be worse than failing.

Much has changed at Prep and in the world in 147 years, and for the first time the president of this particular Jesuit school is not himself a Jesuit. But as many of us have seen already, and many more will see in the years to come, there is every reason to believe our proud tradition will continue to grow as we continue to work together, ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Mike Jiran, ’03 |Director of Communications