St. Andrew’s Magazine, Vol. 41, Issue 2

ST. ANDREW’S MAGAZINE FALL REVIEW 2019

ST. ANDREW’S MAGAZINE | YEAR 2019 V OL UM E 41, ISSUE 2

FEATURE STORIES 38 REIMAGINING SPACE & PLACE

Women's Network Weekend 2019 Explores “The Built World”

54 STEM REGENERATED

The Dedication of Amos Hall

64 GETTING ALONG WITH DIFFERENT BELIEFS

2019 Convocation Talk by Terence Gilheany, Religious Studies Department Chair

TALK OF THE T-DOCK 12 HEAD OF SCHOOL’S MESSAGE 14 IN THE CLASSROOM 26 SUSTAINABLE SAINTS 28 GO SAINTS! 32 CREATIVE CAMPUS

CAN’T HELP BUT CONNECT 72 TEACHER, WRITER, AND PODCASTER STEVEN DEAN ’90 SHARES HIS PASSION... FOR TAX LAW 74 EXPANDING ACCESSIBILITY AT FACEBOOK

An Interview with Facebook’s Director of Accessibility Jeff Wieland ’01

77 CLASS NOTES 84 THE LAST WORD by Bill Amos

{History teacher Grace Gahagan ’10 (not shown) led students in the building of a contemplative labyrinth, constructed out of upcycled slate stones originally from the roof of Founders Hall.}

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This publication is printed with vegetable-based soy inks on paper with waste.

IN 10% THEpost-consumer CLASSROOM / 1 Please complete the process by recycling your copy when finished.

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St. Andrew’s

MAGAZINE

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Liz Torrey

COMMUNICATIONS TEAM

Amy Kendig, Matthew Troutman CONTRIBUTORS

Bates College Athletics, Taylor Cameron ’90 P’18,’20, Annie Egan P’13,’13,’16,’16, Georgetown University Athletics, Ashley Hyde, Susan Jaffe P’16,’19, Ruth Lunsford ’20, Eliza MacLean, Jake Myers, NESCAC.com, Annie Roach ’18, Wesleyan University Athletics

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Scott M. Sipprelle ’81, Chair Henry duP. Ridgely ’67,Vice Chair Andrea Sin, Secretary Richard B.Vaughan ’88, Treasurer

LEAD PHOTOGRAPHER

Matthew Troutman PHOTOGRAPHY

Erin Farrell, Halkin-Mason Photography, Amy Kendig, Joshua Meier, NASA/JPL-Caltech, Emily Troutman, Samuel Stuart Hollenshead/NYU Photo Bureau, Zimmerman Studio MAIL LETTERS TO:

St. Andrew’s Magazine, 350 Noxontown Road, Middletown, DE 19709-1605 GENERAL EMAIL:

magazine@standrews-de.org CLASS NOTES EMAIL:

classnotes@standrews-de.org Printed by Pavsner Press in Baltimore, Md. St. Andrew’s Magazine is published by the Communications Office for alumni, parents, grandparents and friends of St. Andrew’s School. Copyright 2019.

Mission Statement of St. Andrew’s School In 1929, the School’s Founder, A. Felix duPont, wrote: The purpose of St. Andrew’s School is to provide secondary education of a definitely Christian character at a minimum cost consistent with modern equipment and highest standards.

We continue to cultivate in our students a deep and lasting desire for learning; a willingness to ask questions and pursue skeptical, independent inquiry; and an appreciation of the liberal arts as a source of wisdom, perspective and hope. We encourage our students to model their own work on that of practicing scholars, artists and scientists and to develop those expressive and analytical skills necessary for meaningful lives as engaged citizens. We seek to inspire in them a commitment to justice and peace.

Our students and faculty live in a residential community founded on ethical principles and Christian beliefs. We expect our faculty and staff to make our students’ interests primary, to maintain professional roles with students and to act as role models at all times, to set and maintain healthy boundaries with students, to encourage student autonomy and independence, to act transparently with students, and to support each student’s developmental growth and social integration at the School. Our students collaborate with dynamic adults and pursue their passions in a co-curriculum that includes athletics, community service and the arts. We encourage our students to find the balance between living in and contributing to the community and developing themselves as leaders and individuals.

As an Episcopal School, St. Andrew’s is grounded in and upheld by our Episcopal identity, welcoming persons regardless of their religious background.

We are called to help students explore their spirituality and faith as we nurture their understanding and appreciation of all world religions. We urge students to be actively involved in community service with the understanding that all members of the community share responsibility for improving the world in which we live.

St. Andrew’s is committed to the sustainability and preservation of its land, water and other natural resources. We honor this commitment by what we teach and by how we live in community and harmony with the natural world.

On our campus, students, faculty and staff from a variety of backgrounds work together to create a vibrant and diverse community. St. Andrew’s historic and exceptional financial aid program makes this possible, enabling the School to admit students regardless of their financial needs.

Mercedes Abramo Sarah F. Belk The Rt. Rev. Kevin S. Brown Bishop of Delaware Roberta B. Connolly Kellie S. Doucette ’88 Charles P. Durkin ’97 Ari K. Ellis ’89 Michael J. Evans ’98 Robert F. Fogelman II ’91 Sabina B. Forbes W. Hoyt Gahagan Edith “Sis” Johnson F. John Matouk ’89 L. Heather Mitchell ’92 Paul F. Murphy Daniel T. Roach, Jr. Head of School Khalil G. Saliba ’81 Laurisa S. Schutt Staci Williams Seeley Alexander D. Stuart Jennifer B. Thomas Michael D. Warner ’00 TRUSTEES EMERITI

Katharine duP. Gahagan, Chair Emeritus J. Kent Sweezey ’70, Chair Emeritus William H. Brownlee ’44 Monie T. Hardwick Maureen K. Harrington Thomas H. Hooper, III ’71 Timothy W. Peters ’66 Steven B. Pfeiffer Sally E. Pingree Caroline duP. Prickett Henry H. Silliman, Jr. Edward M. IN Strong ’66 THE CLASSROOM / 3

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Saints field hockey defenders rush out for a defensive corner to block a shot from the top of the circle during the team’s Parents Weekend home game against conference rival Tower Hill. The Saints blanked the Hillers, winning 2-0, with goalie Ruth Lunsford ’20 posting her third shutout in as many games. Claudina Buccini ’21 and Alani Davila ’22 scored for the Saints while Nicole Saridakis ’20 and Nonie Bocock ’21 handed out assists.

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In mid-September, the student body used chalk to cover the Strand with the ways in which they would “opt in” to our school ethos this year. They were invited to do so by Dean of Diversity Education Devin Duprey and student Diversity Stewards after a Wednesday night Chapel service. “By choosing to be at SAS, you have decided to opt in to the culture,” said Ms. Duprey during her Chapel Talk that evening. “Develop your own personal commitment to this mission. What will you do to honor the humanity in others during this school year? How will you be sure to first recognize the humanity in all people? What will you do when you encounter someone who chooses not to honor the humanity of others?” You can listen to Ms. Duprey’s talk in full at standrews-de.org/podcasts. (Also: note the new Peter K. McLean Outdoor Classroom in the upper right, which was added to the Amos Hall footprint during its renovation last year!)

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Enthusiastic members of the Class of 2020 show underformers how it’s done at the Square Dance on Opening Day. Seniors’ motto for the year is “We Opt In,” and they spent part of their week-long senior leadership training in August thinking about the ways, big and small, that they show up for each other and for the St. Andrew’s community. Blake Hundley ’20 and Topher Hummell ’20 can add “wearing American flag overalls” to that list!

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In what has become a IV Form tradition, the Class of 2022 spent their sophomore orientation day at Echo Hill Outdoor School in Whorton, Maryland. Here, Sophie Hoopes ’22 tackles a climbing challenge with encouragement and support from her classmates.

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I teach a bit more this year, for I very much want to intensify my connection to our students and experience the very foundation of St. Andrew’s as a school.

Teaching enables me to get to know my students in such meaningful ways. In every class, I want them to see their work together enlighten their minds and illuminate their promising lives.

Of course, the goodness, kindness, and intelligence of my students inspire me.

I teach literature. At its best, the study of poetry, drama, and fiction changes us in elemental ways. Our texts invite and challenge us to explore the thoughts, actions, struggles, dreams, and triumphs of others—characters who stretch, expand, and complicate our preconceived ideas of humanity and the world.

Right now, my teaching reflects upon the voyages two women make in their respective novels—Anna in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Esch in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. Somehow, these two books depicting strong and passionate women speak across centuries, worlds, and cultures and clarify the lives our students will experience in the coming years. These novels and their confrontation with and exploration of life make us more humble, understanding, thoughtful, and perceptive about what the great Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt describes as the “representation of inwardness.”

Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Ward (three of my authors this fall) make a commitment to the comprehensive, and human depiction of their characters. They describe, in detail and with reverence, the mystery, the spirit and the consciousness of all their characters. They awaken us to the mystery and miracle of all who surround us in our own lives.

Each of us has a story, a perspective, an experience, a system of values, beliefs, and first principles, but while we fervently believe in our own special humanity, we are quick to simplify, label, or dismiss others. The lives that surround us are usually not nearly as interesting, intriguing, and urgent as the story of ourselves—that is our “default setting”—the phrase David Foster Wallace used to describe our obsession with ourselves.

Writers reject this ideology of the self by immersing themselves in others—they develop the discipline to look at the world in

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multiple, complex, and often conflicting ways as their stories evolve. Particularly when great writers create a character who is problematic, morally and ethically compromised, they commit even more fiercely towards locating the essence of the character’s soul and spirit.

The essayist and novelist Zadie Smith recently described the miracle of fiction in these beautiful words: “Fiction suspected that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest. Fiction wondered what likeness between selves might even mean, given the profound mystery of consciousness itself—which so many other disciplines... have probed for millenia

without

reaching

definitive

conclusions. Fiction was suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye, that is, parts of ourselves that are material, manifest, and clearly visible in a crowd. Fiction... was full of doubt, self doubt above all. It had grave doubts about the nature of the self.”

Smith moves towards a brilliant definition of the art of fiction, and by extension describes the art of living with, appreciating, and honoring all human beings we meet, particularly those we think we know and understand and those we do not know or understand at all. The point is that the writer ultimately teaches us how to live: the writer gives voice, affirmation, and understanding to all. Might we replicate that habit of mind and spirit?

If my class ultimately teaches my students the art of empathy, compassion, and inclusion; if my class suggests that all human beings have dignity, agency, narratives and struggles that deserve our imagination; if my class alerts my students to the dangers of ideology and simplification, these lessons will resonate in their lives forever. J

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Out & About EXCURSIONS & ADVENTURES

English teacher Anna Hastings took her V Form English students to see Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County at the UD Rep Theatre in Newark, Delaware; they’ve been reading the play in class.

Art Majors made their annual pilgrimage to the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia on November 1.

Dean of Student Life Will Robinson took a group of seniors, many of whom are in his Global Studies class, to a film screening and discussion at Columbia Law School in NYC in early November. The event was hosted by Sarah Cleveland, Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights at Columbia Law. Attendees watched The Long Haul—a documentary film highlighting the transformational work of Sir Nigel Rodley, a UN lawyer who was one of the principal architects of the modern human rights movement—and then discussed current challenges to legal protections for human rights around the globe. Besides SAS and Columbia Law students, the audience included employees of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations.

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On the Free Day following Parents Weekend, a few faculty gathered their advisories for some off-campus fun. Religious studies teacher Jason Kunen took his advisees up to Philly for a Flyers game, while Associate Director of Counseling Lindsay Roznowski brought her advisory to SkyZone Trampoline Park in Newark to bounce away some stress.

Dance students Steph Tanoh ’20 and Derek Ike ’23 traveled to the Wilmington Public Library on October 30, where they performed two pieces as part of a talk given by author Anthony Ray Hinton. Hinton was exonerated from prison in 2015 after spending 30 years on death row in Alabama; their choreography was inspired

by Hinton’s memoir, The Sun Does Shine. Read more about this powerful evening at standrews-de. org/news.

Greek students and faculty traveled to the Hagley Museum in Wilmington on November 1 for a talk by John Camp, professor of classics at Randolph-Macon College, on the ongoing progress of the Athenian Agora excavations, of which he is the director. “Professor Camp is a captivating storyteller, and we marveled at the crossdisciplinary problem solving skills of an archaeologist,” said Classics Department Chair Phil Walsh.

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p EXPLORING OUR ECOSYSTEM

Environmental Science students examine macroinvertebrates in the Noxontown Pond ecosystem.

“We were just fishing them out and seeing what we could find on the dock,” explains Dr. O’Connor.

u CANINE CHAOS

Moss seniors work on dorm decorations before the Opening of School with help from faculty dog Teddy Robinson.

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p GREETINGS & GRATITUDES

III Form students spent a September Saturday morning writing letters of gratitude to former teachers who have made an impact on their lives and who they are today.

p MARSHMALLOW CHALLENGE MASTERS

On the first day of class, Geometry students tackle the Marshmallow Challenge—they had 20 minutes to build a tower out of spaghetti, string, and tape, that would also hold a marshmallow on top.

t BACK TO SCHOOL BLESSINGS

Chaplain Jay Hutchinson offered his annual “Blessing of the Backpacks” in the Dining Hall in early September to students eager to get their academic year off on the right foot.

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Students Explore All Things STEM at Annual Science Lecture Competition On November 9, St. Andrew’s Science Department held its second annual Peter K. McLean Science Lecture Competition. Students were invited to submit presentations on a STEM topic of their choosing in a variety of fields: physics, astronomy, chemistry, engineering, computer science, environmental science, biology, and medicine. Four student finalists were then selected to give their presentations to the school community in Engelhard Hall. This year’s finalists were: II Christine Chen ’21, who presented on alternative cancer treatments II Will Cook ’20, who presented on the possibilities of traveling faster than the speed of light II Robert Shyroian ’21 & Patrick Mauboussin ’21, who presented on identifying and creating malicious Twitter bots II Han Shen ’21, who presented on the use of STEM cells as a cure for aging The finalists’ talks were judged by a panel of the science faculty, with Emily Paton ’20, last year’s winner, representing the student vote. Hans Shen ’21 was ultimately selected as the winner.

“We started this competition in 2018 to give a platform to the young scientists and engineers in our student body who are keen to share their work and passion for these fields beyond the classroom, and to embrace the communication and public speaking skills so crucial to the advancement of science and technology,” explained physics and astronomy teacher Dr. Ashley Hyde, who founded the competition. “One of the most exciting things about this competition is how it shows us that anybody can be a scientist or engineer; the students who participate always have talent in and enthusiasm for many other studies, for the arts, for their athletics.”

“The competition’s name honors legendary science faculty member Dr. Peter McLean, who in his years at St. Andrew’s committed himself to inspiring wonder, scientific curiosity, and environmental stewardship among students and faculty members alike,” Hyde noted.

Christine Chen ’21 led off the morning with a talk titled “Cancer No More?” Christine focused on research she pursued this past summer in China, inspired by Chinese medicine, on the effectiveness of syringic acid, a garlic extract, in combating cancer cell resistance. Next up was Will Cook ’20, with a presentation titled “The Alcubierre Drive: Breaking the Cosmic Speed Limit?”

Will explored the possibility of traveling across the universe at speeds greater than the speed of light by warping spacetime. Following Will, Patrick Mauboussin ’21 and Robert Shyroian ’21 presented “Identifying and Creating Malicious Twitter Bots.” Patrick and Robert both worked at the Santa Fe Institute last summer, where they learned to comb through data to identify malicious

actors on social media. In order to better understand the process, Patrick and Robert then built a bot using a Markov model and a dataset of three million deceptive Russian tweets. Hans Shen ’21 closed out the lectures with a talk titled “Stem Cells: A Cure for Aging.”

Hans used his own research on dental pulp stem cells, which he conducted this past summer at Stony Brook University in New York, as the foundation of a broader presentation on the potential of stem cells to mitigate or reverse the effects of aging.

“After careful deliberation, Hans was selected as the winner of the second annual McLean Science Lecture Competition,” Hyde said. “Hans was gracious in his success and thoroughly displayed his passion for the project and science itself.”

“I have been fascinated by science, especially biological sciences, since I was in middle school,” Hans said after the competition. “This past summer I was really fortunate to receive an amazing opportunity to conduct my own research on stem cells through a summer program. Of course, I was thrilled when I heard about the Science Lecture Competition, through which I can share my own passion for science with other students at SAS.”

HANS SHEN ’20

“I want to give a special thanks to my advisor, Mr. O’Connell, for helping me so much along the way,” Hans continued. “The biggest lesson that I learned during the process of preparation [for the competition] was thinking about who my audience would be. Together Mr. O’Connell and I worked on simplifying all technical terms and making the information as accessible as possible. I would also love to appreciate Dr. Hyde and all the faculty members from the Science Department for granting us this opportunity to share our passion, and Mr. Roach and Mr. Rehrig for their support.” J

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Visiting Author Richard Blanco Shares His Wisdom & Stories

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oet, author, and civil engineer Richard Blanco visited St. Andrew’s on October 25 to meet and work with students and give a talk to the school community on his poetry and his life. Blanco was the inaugural poet at Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2012, and his memoir The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood was one of the all-school reads for St. Andrew’s this past summer. During the day on Friday, Blanco met with Spanish classes; with Creative Writing and English 1 students to discuss poems they had written; and with Engineering students, where he shared this thought: “You are all creators. The world doesn’t call you creative, but you’re building the Golden Gate Bridge.

You’re building a hand that can allow someone to touch their child. You are in creative service to humanity, just in the way poets and artists are.”

“My visit to St. Andrew’s was one of the most—if not THE most—memorable experiences I’ve ever had at a school,” Blanco wrote in an email after his visit. “Why? Well, for numerous reasons, but most importantly and in a word, love: a love for learning and exploring, a love for all kinds of knowledge, a mutual love among students, faculty members, and staff, a love that teaches beyond what is teachable, and transforms us into our brightest, truest, and most selfless selves.”

“Richard Blanco spoke with us about many topics, including how writing leads us to engage thoughtfully with the world,” said Dean of Studies Gretchen Hurtt after his visit. “As he said in his talk, he feels that ‘one of the roles of a poet is to be an emotional historian,’ and he sees his work as a way to give back to his family and his country. He spoke about the importance of celebrating and honoring diversity, of connecting as human beings, and also the importance of having ‘cognitive diversity’—or in other words, a wide spectrum of knowledge. As an engineer and poet, he certainly embodies this.”

“As Richard Blanco moved seamlessly from Casa Latina to poetry to engineering to Spanish classes to a meeting with our LGBTQ students, he was a living embodiment of how we want our students to learn, think, engage, and live in the world around us,” said Dean of Teaching and Learning Elizabeth Roach. “In each iteration, Blanco embraced the moment with our students, honoring their questions, imparting bits of wisdom, and telling stories.

Our students—sitting in rapt attention—didn’t want these conversations to end. Throughout the day, Blanco celebrated the life of the mind, active engagement, and the ways in which we can achieve agency in our lives by writing, reflecting, and learning something new every day.”

Karen Paredes ’20 was instrumental in bringing Blanco to campus, and introduced his talk in Engelhard Hall with the following remarks: Until I picked up Richard Blanco’s The Prince of Los Cocuyos, I did not know that a book could make you feel completely at home. The memoir appeared in my life at a time when I felt lost and unsure of myself. I was just beginning my sophomore year and was struggling with the fact that almost no one at boarding school seemed to share my experience as a Hispanic. I had come from New York, a city bustling with cultures that never ran short of a corner bodega and cars driving past with loud Spanish songs blasting from their speakers. To make the transition to Delaware, a very American and rural area, was difficult to say the least. My culture was nowhere to be found. So, I relied on my close friend Aliay [Chavez ’20], the only other Hispanic in my grade that understood what I was going through. Eventually, I learned to code-switch, a term meant to describe changing between two different cultures in order to assimilate. Still, in trying to integrate into a primarily white community, my desire to embrace my identity only increased. So, when Profe [Spanish teacher Dave Miller] decided to recommend a book that focused on a Cuban-American immigrant, I simply could not say no.

Page after page was like reading something out of my own life.

I saw myself in Richard Blanco’s desire for his family to be more American in hopes to be more “normal.” At the same time, I also saw myself in his aspiration to embrace his Hispanic roots so that he could feel truly connected to his family. For once, my existential crisis at the ripe age of 15 felt normal because his struggle of being stuck between two cultures was exactly like my own. Even the little details like the mention of the Winn Dixie, a supermarket in Miami, in his book, brought me back to my own time living in that very area.

How was it that I related to a stranger so much? The way in which Mr. Blanco articulated his life experiences made me feel comforted right when I needed it. As much as his experiences were similar to mine, he also opened my eyes to things I had never considered. He gave me insight into what it was like to be an LGBT member of my community, something I was always somewhat aware of but never took the time to truly understand since it did not pertain to me. His memoir also provided me with an answer to what he would call an “identity crisis.” The question of “Where are you from?”—the focal point of my chapel talk last year—was answered. I did not need to acknowledge just one country, but instead both Colombia and the United States, as my answer because he made me realize that it was the cumulation of both that make me who I am today.

His impact on my own life led me to want to share his work with all of you. His way with words and ability to draw you into his work will undoubtedly give you something to relate to. Still, while his experiences are so close to my own, I recognize that they are experiences you may not be entirely familiar with. That exact unfamiliarity is where people are able to learn from one another and provide perspective, just like I was able to get from his work. I hope this is able to do just a little bit of that for all of you.

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NASA/JPL-CALTECH

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What exactly do you cover in this course?

Making Black Holes Fun A chat with Dr. Hyde on her AS Astronomy elective by Annie Roach ’18

Dr. Ashley Hyde joined St. Andrew’s faculty three years ago, moving to Middletown, Delaware from London, England, where she had previously taught physics at the Harrow School.

Dr. Hyde is an astrophysicist, and received her Ph.D. in the subject in 2014; her research has focused on the relationship between star formation and supermassive black holes in galaxies. She has conducted research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. With the introduction of our new academic schedule in the fall of 2018, Dr. Hyde found herself with the opportunity to design and launch a new elective course on astronomy. We sat down with her over the summer to learn more about this new course and the ways in which she is bringing the universe within the walls and windows of Amos Hall.

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Essentially, I’ve tried to boil down what would be a first-year college-level course in astronomy into a semester-long course here. The common stereotype is that astronomy is just looking at pictures of things through telescopes, but we also explore a lot of astrophysics, which is so much more than just looking at pictures. Ultimately what I’m hoping students will get from the course is a good appreciation of how modern astrophysics is done.

We start by covering a little bit of physics—the electromagnetic spectrum and photons, and atomic physics. We talk about the transitions of electrons in atoms and how they can move up or move down, through the absorption or emission of a photon. Those two ideas are going to be new to them, because they’ve only really done mechanics [in Physics classes] before. We record information about these transmissions through a telescope: a big focus in the course is giving students the basic idea of what a spectrum is, and how we can measure spectra from space, and then looking at all of the different things that we can study via spectra. We see what elements or molecules are present in a star or atmosphere or planet. You can also work out things like temperatures as well as how fast things are moving towards or away from us.

We start small, with the solar system, and we consider how planets are formed and studied. Then we start looking at how we detect exoplanets—planets around other stars—and we discuss what would make a good candidate for a habitable exoplanet, the requirements for life, and the chances that there might be extraterrestrial life in the universe. It almost becomes a sort of psychological exploration of what we would do if we found it. Would it be a good idea to try and communicate? Should we be putting ourselves out there? Then we move on to thinking about stars—all the different types of stars, how they evolve, how they grow, how they die. We look at galaxies—how a galaxy is formed, how they can change their shape and structure through collisions. We look

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at how the supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy can influence its evolution and change how stars are formed in the galaxy.

And we finish with this ultimate bigger picture, which is cosmology— how the universe was born, so to speak; the evidence we have for the Big Bang; how the universe is evolving and what current data tells us might happen in the future.

Students do a couple of independent projects throughout the course, and they research different topics which they then present to the class. For example, without having studied the work of Edwin Hubble, students find evidence for the expansion of the universe (the result for which Hubble is famous).

I give them some data—real galaxy spectra—and ask what they notice about all the spectra, and what kind of measurements they might take to learn about those galaxies. They work their way through that, and discover these various interesting relationships, and after applying all their knowledge and skills from throughout the course they ultimately realize—“Oh hey. I just proved the universe is expanding.

Cool!” They end up having these tools which I think are key to what a future astrophysicist should have, and they get an appreciation of the fundamental ways in which we understand the universe.

As an astrophysicist, what’s your favorite topic that you cover? Or, what’s your favorite part of teaching this class?

My favorite topic is probably talking about super massive black holes and galaxies and how that influences a galaxy’s growth and evolution, because that used to be my area of research.

It’s quite exciting to share that with my students. But I think actually the part of this class that I enjoy the most is when I have students go off and do their own independent research and come back and share that. The students who choose to take this course— which is an additional, elective science course—have this passion and curiosity.

They do incredible research and come

back and give these really captivating presentations to the class, and you can just see that enthusiasm coming through. That’s the whole reason I went into teaching—to pass my enthusiasm and my passion along to others. To see that coming full circle is really special.

How do you structure a typical class period—do you use lecture, discussion, or a combination?

It’s a mix, really. There’s a lot of new material that we need to cover, and it’s material that’s very difficult to approach in the same way that we might in a standard physics class. In a standard physics class we tend to approach a topic or a concept through a lab, and let students discover the concept for themselves. But this is very difficult to do when it comes to learning about space! When I introduce a new topic, it’s a mixture of lecture and discussion— students are encouraged to ask lots of questions, which we’ll take time to talk about—and there’ll be problems and activities for students to pause and review what we’ve discussed. I’ll post a question and ask them to discuss it with their neighbor, or I’ll give them a problem to start working on, some kind of puzzle or challenge that allows them to whiteboard some ideas or do some mini-research in class. I might give them some real data from Hubble, or the Kepler telescope, or from a NASA mission, and we’ll start applying what we’ve just talked about to that real data and try to figure out the masses of some newly discovered exoplanets, for example. All that just keeps things fun and interesting and engaging. That’s always my aim.

periods, really, because you would get sucked into something and then—“Oh, we’re done, darn it.” Double periods or extended periods [are] always great in physics and in astronomy. We can get into the flow of the class, and we can fit a bunch of different topics and activities into a single class. Both the students and I can really delve into what we’re doing without watching the clock. The longer periods allow us to use the time more efficiently.

As for the semester-long classes we now offer—I think it’s so amazing that we’re able to design our own courses. I cannot express that sentiment enough as someone who came from the British system, where we’re very restricted and keep to a specific national curriculum.

There’s very little room to do anything creative. It’s amazing that St. Andrew’s allows its faculty to bring their passions into the classroom. Physics is a big passion of mine, but astronomy and astrophysics are also, and to have a specific outlet where I have the freedom to design and teach my own courses is really special. The exciting thing is that so many of the faculty here have had these other, “second” lives.

[Physics and engineering teacher] Will Rehrig was a nuclear engineer before he became a teacher. How cool is that, that he now gets to teach an engineering class and students can learn from his experience? J

With the new daily schedule that allows for longer class periods and semesterlong courses, how has that affected your teaching, if at all?

I think that the new schedule has definitely been really helpful— particularly in science because we obviously do a lot of labs, so it was never ideal to have [the old 45-minute] single

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s r s e r g e o g R o R e i e g i g g a g a ““MM n a n a s a s hha ” ! ” t ! n t e n e m e m c e n c u n o u AAnnnno … words that Maggie has not heard since her salad days as a St. Andrew’s student, perhaps, but that was how she was introduced by student body co-president Billy Ewles ’20 at the end of Friday lunch on October 4. Today, Maggie is a chart-topping singer-songwriter who just wrapped up her first international tour. On her way to a show in Philadelphia that evening, she stopped by campus to perform four songs with her guitarist Elle Puckett in a surprise acoustic concert for students and faculty in the Dining Hall. (You can watch a brief clip of her beautiful performance on Instagram @sasdelaware.) “This community has been so important for me being the person that I am and thinking the way that I do,” Maggie said to students before playing her final song. “I have an immense amount of respect and gratitude to everybody here and the work that happens here. This place is super, super special, so take advantage of it while you have the time.” After the fact, Maggie and Elle noted to Head of School Tad Roach how unusual, even incredible it was to play live music before an audience in which no one was holding up or otherwise using a smartphone. If that’s not a powerful compliment to the SAS “phone rule,” we don’t know what is.

Tad closed out the mini-concert by saying this to Maggie and the student body: “We want you to know that everywhere you travel, St. Andrew’s is with you. The love of this student body, this faculty, this staff, this alumni body—you carry us in your heart. Whenever you feel tired, whenever you feel fatigued, whenever you wonder, and you must wonder, whether it’s all worth it, you need to know that you lift us, you inspire us, you make us even more audacious in the way that we live.” Thank you for taking the time to make this magical visit, Maggie! J

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SUSTAINABLE SAINTS

DR. JESSE LYTLE VISITS CAMPUS Dr. Jesse Lytle, Vice President and Chief of Staff at Haverford College, delivered our 2019 Environmental Lecture in early October. As Haverford’s first chief sustainability officer, he oversees the College’s environmental impact strategy and planning. You can watch Dr. Lytle’s talk (and hear the many questions students put to him afterward!) on our Livestream channel.

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CELEBRATING POND DAY 2019 St. Andreans spent a Saturday morning celebrating the School’s commitment to sustainability with our annual “Pond Day.” Pond Day is a day dedicated to exploring and reveling in St. Andrew’s 2200 acres and Noxontown Pond, and to connecting students with sustainability initiatives both within the school and in the wider world. (above) Facilities Team member and campus beehive master Toby Kirk held a beekeeping demonstration and honey-tasting. Featured below are two of this year’s many activities:

Shania Adams ’23 created a sculpture using driftwood collected by faculty member Avi Gold from along the shores of Noxontown Pond.

Retired faculty member Marijke Van Buchem, who founded St. Andrew’s ceramics program more than three decades ago, led a hand-building teapot workshop outdoors.

CLIMATE WALK-OUT On September 20, students organized a presentation on climate issues followed by a walkout down the Main Drive, all in support of climate action and that day’s worldwide climate strike.

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S A I N T S A T H L E T I C S

CROSS-COUNTRY The 2019 boys and girls cross-country teams found success yet again in 2019 as they both placed 8th overall in the Division II DIAA State Championships held at Killens Pond State Park. Blake Hundley ’20 led the way for the boys all season long, finishing his career as one of the greatest runners in school history with three key performances down the stretch. Hundley finished second overall in the Conference Championships and followed that up with a fourth place finish in the New Castle County Championships.

The girls cross-country team had an excellent year as well, winning the Conference Championship meet with a narrow, three point victory over Tatnall School. Josie Pitt ’23 and Emma Hopkins ’23 placed fourth and fifth overall while Emily Boyer ’21 and Emily Murphy ’22 finished seventh and eighth, respectively. For their efforts, Pitt, Hopkins, Boyer and Murphy all received All-Conference honors.

FIELD HOCKEY The varsity field hockey team finished their 2019 campaign with a record of 3-11-1, recording victories over Middletown High School, MOT Charter High School and Tower Hill School. Alani Davila ’22 was recognized for her stellar offensive play as she was named Second Team All-Conference while Soulati received

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an Honorable-Mention nod. The defense, led by goalkeeper Ruth Lunsford ’20, center back Nonie Bocock ’21 and left back Parker Friedli ’22, posted three consecutive shutouts during the month of October against Delaware Military Academy, MOT Charter High School and Tower Hill School. Bocock, who contributed one assist on the offensive end, was named First Team All-Conference for her outstanding work at the back end, while Friedli received Second Team honors. Lunsford, who allowed two goals or less in nine contests, was awarded Honorable Mention for her strong play in goal. For their outstanding leadership and service to the team, captains Josie Friedli ’20 and Lily Howard ’20 received the 2019 coaches award.

FOOTBALL The 2019 Saints finished their season with a 6-4 record, recording their first winning season since 2012. Eight members of the Saints were recognized by the Delaware Independent School Conference for their play during the 2019 season. Headlining the AllConference team on offense were Adrian Watts ’20 (QB), Lamar Duncan ’20 (WR) and Nick Oxnam ’22 (OT) who were all named to the First Team.

Alex Maruszewski ’20 (WR), Brandon Graves ’22 (WR) and Phineas Hunt ’22 (OG) were Honorable Mention selections.

Watts completed 105 of 181 passes (58%) for 1,632 yards and 20 touchdown passes while running for an additional 633 yards and ten scores on the ground. He even added six receptions for 105 yards and three touchdown receptions on the season, giving him a total of 33 touchdowns.

Watts broke numerous school records with his prolific passing and playmaking ability. Duncan also had a record-breaking year and gave defensive secondaries nightmares.

Duncan finished his senior campaign with 56 receptions for 860 yards and seven touchdowns.

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S A I N T S

SOCCER The varsity soccer team went 9-51 during the 2019 regular season, reaching the DIAA state tournament for the ninth consecutive season where they fell to St. Mark’s High School. Zach Tull ’20 went out in style, leading the offensive attack by scoring a team-high 15 goals in his senior campaign. Tull scored multiple goals in five of the Saints 15 regular season contests. For his efforts, he was awarded First Team All-Conference and All-State honors. Steven Ding ’20 joined Tull on the All-Conference First Team, netting five goals while handing out an additional three assists. Matt

Lilley ’21, second on the team with eight goals, received Second Team All-Conference honors for efforts in the attacking third. The Saints were equally impressive protecting their own net, limiting their opponents to one goal or less in ten contests. Logan Cameron ’20 anchored these strong defensive efforts throughout the year, earning First Team All-Conference and Second Team All-State honors.

Nick Lilley ’21, known for his speed and tenacity on the back end, earned First Team All-Conference and Third Team All-State honors.

libero position, recording 100 digs in the 13 contests she participated in. For her efforts, Lunsford earned Third Team honors alongside Paton.

Caroline Sahs ’22 handed out a teamhigh 146 assists while Louise Stilwell ’20 capped off her career with 87 kills in 14 contests, good enough for second on the team. J

VOLLEYBALL The varsity volleyball team finished 7-9 on the year, earning a bid to the DISC tournament as the number four seed for the first time in school history. Sophie Xu ’23 had an incredible rookie campaign, earning Second Team All-Conference honors for her outstanding play. Xu was an all-around contributor in her debut season, averaging a team-high 3.3 blocks per match while adding 3.2 digs and 2.4 kills per contest as well. Emily Paton ’20 earned Third Team AllConference honors in her final season as a Saint, recording a team-high 102 kills and adding 23 aces. This marks the third time that Paton has received All-Conference recognition, earning Second Team honors in her sophomore and junior seasons. Pati Lunsford ’22 proved to be a steady force at her

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A T H L E T I C S

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ALUMNI ATHLETES IN ACTION

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PHOTO BY ALEX SERBETZIAN

n his senior year at Wesleyan, Jordan Bonner ’15 racked up the achievements

on the Wesleyan men’s basketball team. For his play at guard, he was named 2019 Defensive Player of the Year by the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC). On his Senior Day in February, he scored his 1000th point, making him only the 24th Cardinal in the team’s history to reach that milestone. In May, he was named to the 2019 National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) Give Back Team, which recognizes men’s college basketball student-athletes for outstanding community service. Bonner co-founded the Cardinal Community Classic, a 3v3 basketball fundraiser for the Middlesex Health Comprehensive Breast Center in Middletown, CT. The tournament also offered a threepoint contest, a dunk contest, hot spot shooting, and a half-court shot.

Middletown-based businesses provided raffle prizes and Weselyan provided free food and refreshments. “Our goal is to support individuals affected by breast cancer in our local community, but in the process, we also provide an exciting space where Middletown residents and Wesleyan students can come together and have a great time,” said Bonner.

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D

irector of Athletics Al Wood paid a visit to Robert Butler ’94 in St. Louis this summer. Rob serves as the Director of Performance for the 2019 National League Central Division champs the St. Louis Cardinals. In this position, Butler oversees aspects of the athlete’s physical health and rehabilitation in coordination with the Cardinals Head Athletic Trainer, as well as strength and conditioning, sports science, injury prevention, and athlete recovery and nutrition plans for the players across the various levels of the Cardinals organization. During their visit, “we talked about the system of performance that Rob has implemented with the Cardinals,” Wood recalls, “some of the science that drives that system, and how many of his approaches can be scaled to benefit St. Andrew’s athletes.”

his spring, Morgan Hallow ’15 wrapped up an outstanding career in track & field at Trinity College, where she had originally enrolled to play on the women’s basketball team. After tearing her ACL during her freshman year, Morgan made the switch to track as a sophomore, and over the next three years, became Trinity’s top sprinter in the 100, 200 and 400 meters. She holds the college’s record in the 400 meters with a time of 57.43. In February, she won the New England Division III Indoor Championship in the 200 meters (25.86) and finished third in the 400 (58.57). In early May, she won the New England Division III Outdoor Championship in the 400 (56.17) and placed second in the 200 (25.14). Finally, in late May, she qualified for the NCAA Division III Outdoor National Championship, and placed 8th in the nation in the 400 meters with a time of 57.26, earning her NCAA All-American honors. Run, Morgan, run!

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PHOTO COURTESY OF TRINITY COLLEGE

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ROWING ROUNDUP B Emma Porrazzo ’15, Emma Lea Wheeler ’15, and Hannah Beams ’17 all competed at the NCAA Rowing Championship in Indianapolis, Indiana during the first weekend in June. Wheeler and Beams both row in Bates’ varsity eight, which crossed the finish line in first place, making the Bates women’s rowing the Division III national champions for the third year in a row. Porrazzo rowed in Wesleyan’s varsity eight, which finished in fifth place, 13 seconds behind Bates.

In her senior year at Bates, Wheeler was named First Team All-NESCAC and a College Rowing Coaches Association National Scholar Athlete, and also received National Invitational Rowing Championship All-Academic and NESCAC Spring All-Academic honors.

C That same weekend, Claire Miller ’18 competed at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) National Championship in Gold River, California. Rowing in a lightweight double for Georgetown, Miller (on left) and her teammate finished second and won silver in that race.

D Three SAS alums raced at US Rowing’s Senior National Team Trials in Sarasota, Florida in April, competing for spots on the senior national team that would go on to represent the U.S. at the 2019 World Rowing Championships in Austria in late August. Sydney (Tooze) Taylor ’08 and Mary Wilson ’12 rowed in the Women’s Lightweight Single event, placing 17th and 18th, respectively. Mary (left) and Sydney wore their SAS unis for their final day of practice before the qualifying race!

Sydney also shared the following reflction on her Facebook page last fall, “I followed my brother and sister into the sport, after watching Steve [Tooze ’04]’s team compete at the Henley Royal Regatta when he was a sophomore [at St. Andrew’s] (and I was 12). I remember looking up to my first female athlete role models on the St. Andrew’s rowing team, learning about commitment and adages such as ‘on time is late’ (thanks, Coach Brown), and learning to love hard work and team boats. I’m grateful to my teammates, coaches, SAS community and my family for supporting our SAS boats for all those years! Over the past three years, I’ve returned to Noxontown Pond on several occasions to practice or race in the Diamond State Regatta, and am happy to report that it still feels like home!”

E Kelsey Barolak ’13, who has been rowing for Cambridge University while she pursues an MPhil in Psychology and Education there, also competed for a spot on the U.S. national team and finished 22nd in the Women’s Single event. “I started rowing at my high school, St. Andrew’s, a small boarding school in Delaware,” Kelsey said in an interview with The American magazine in 2018. “The more I rowed the more I fell in love with the sport, and even after rowing for four years at Harvard I didn’t want to stop. Cambridge is one of the only places I could keep rowing at a high level and continue my studies, so for me it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” (Photo courtesy of WEROW) GO SAINTS! / 31

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SCENE AROUND CAMPUS

Owen Pinto ’20 and Michael Kwashie ’21 play their electric guitars in the Jazz Ensemble performance during Parents Weekend.

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CREATIVE CAMPUS The arts abound at St. Andrew's Parents Weekend celebration.

On Friday evening, the School's Orchestra performed four works and were led at the podium by instrumental music teacher Fred Geiersbach. Following the Orchestra concert, the St. Andrew's Theatre Program put on their production of The Curious Savage by John Patrick, featuring Mia Nguyen ’20 in the lead role—and in some dramatic aging makeup.

On Saturday evening, the School's Jazz Ensemble, also directed

by Fred Geiersbach, took over the Engelhard stage for an evening performance.The weekend concluded with an equally full day on Sunday, which began with a Chapel service and a homily delivered

by Charlene Li P’20 on parenting her son Eddie from 2,000 miles away. After Chapel, the community packed Engelhard Hall for a morning of choral and dance performances by students. All performances can be watched on our Livestream channel.

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ST. ANDREW’S MAGAZINE “It’s pretty neat to be 14 and thrown into that level of economic and national and international diversity.”

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G I N A I M N I G E R SPACE & PLACE

ENGINEERING ARCHITECTURE REAL ENGINEERING ARCHITECTURE REAL ESTATE CITY ESTATE CITY PLANNING PLANNING D

DESIGN CONSTRUCTION TRANSPORTATION

ESIGN CONSTRUCTION TRANSPORTATION

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WOMEN’S NETWORK WEEKEND 2019 EXPLORES “THE BUILT WORLD”

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ver the weekend of November 15-16, St. Andrew’s welcomed alumni and families to campus for our 2019 Women’s Network Weekend.

The theme of this year’s conference was The Built World: Reimagining Space & Place, and events celebrated alumni who are working in fields such as engineering, architecture, design, construction, and the many other

professions involved in creating and improving our communities and habitats.

The weekend began with a keynote talk by Jean Li ’06, which she delivered the duPont Memorial Chapel on Friday afternoon. Li is an architect with MBB Architects in New York City, and currently oversees projects for schools and religious institutions. She spoke about the ways in which our spaces affect the spirit and health of our communities, outlined some of the collaborative challenges of working in architecture, and shared three project examples from her work. You can read more about Li and her work on page 45, and watch her talk at standrews-de.org/livestream.

On Friday evening, Annie Imbrie-Moore ’12 and Margaux Lopez ’11 gathered on stage in Engelhard Hall to deliver the weekend’s second keynote address—a fun, thoughtful, wide-ranging conversation on engineering, stem careers, gender, and life at St. Andrew’s. You can also watch their conversation at standrews-de.org/livestream. Imbrie-Moore is a mechanical engineering student at Stanford, where she researches heart valve repair techniques. Lopez is a mechanical engineer at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where she works on an enormous digital camera destined for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, an observatory currently under construction in Chile.

Imbrie-Moore and Lopez were introduced by Trustee Michael Evans ’98, who helped organize the weekend. Evans is the President of Moynihan Station Development Corporation, where he oversees the redevelopment of the James A. Farley Post Office Building into a new intercity passenger rail station for New York City. Learn more about the life and careers of Lopez, Imbrie-Moore, and Evans on the following pages. u

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On Saturday morning, students, faculty and guests gathered in Engelhard Hall for a panel discussion with the following alumnae: II Kim G. Cortes ’01, Associate Art Director, Guardian News & Media II Clair Colburn ’87, Senior Associate, Finegold Alexander Architects II Elisa Espiritu ’98, Organizational Development Specialist, The Innocence Project II Faith Loehr ’13, Engineering Intern, Turner Construction Company II Elizabeth A. Martin ’09, Systems Engineer, Northrop Grumman Corporation II Heather Williams Mitchell ’92, Former President & COO, Head of Asset Management, Capri Capital Partners After the panel (which you can also watch at standrewsde.org/livestream), students, faculty, and alumni dispersed throughout campus to attend more than 50 workshops hosted by both male and female alumni. Workshop topics were wide-ranging; a few samples are listed below: II Community-Based Planning in NYC’s Chinatown

II

II II II II II

II II

and the Lower East Side: A Case Study (Elisa Espiritu ’98) Electric Autonomous Vehicles (Probably) Won’t Save the Planet: The Past, Present, and Possible Futures of American Transportation (Jamie Carrington ’98) Engineering a Solution to Save the Bay (Beth Martin ’09) Exploring a Career in Real Estate Private Equity (Rob Toomey ’92) Historic Preservation: Planning the Future of the Past (Alice Duffee ’88) Inclusivity in Design (Clair Colburn ’87) The Psychology of Urban Spaces: Creating a Vibrant and Welcoming Public Realm (Michael Evans ’98) Talking Shop: Inside the Business of Interior Design (Lucy Long ’00) The Very Stubborn Phenomena of Redlining (Bret Peters ’81)

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The Built World was our ninth on-campus Women’s Network event since the Network’s founding in 2009

by Roach—and that number does not include the many off-campus Women’s Network gatherings that have been held over the past ten years as well. The Women’s Network came into being as the school was celebrating its 35th anniversary of co-education. Our earliest female alums are now in the midst of their adult careers and doing fascinating work out in the world, and thus the motivating idea behind the Women’s Network was to celebrate the accomplishments of these alumnae while also allowing them to reconnect with the school and with each other, and to create a means by which they could share their professional insights and expertise with our current students. Since the spring of 2010, Women’s Network events have brought a wide variety of St. Andreans back to campus for just this purpose, often around a professional theme—business, the arts, medicine, journalism, education, and so on. The size and scope of these events has expanded over the years, and since 2013 both men and women have come back to campus to present and participate in our Women’s Network Weekends. Today, the central goal of the Women’s Network is to provide community, inspiration, and mentorship for all members of our community.

“The Network celebrates the full maturation and development both of coeducation at St. Andrew’s and the steady evolution and progress women have made in the 20th and 21st centuries toward leadership in every field, every endeavor, every responsibility in global and American life,” explains Roach. “We want to celebrate the incredible collaboration among men and women, boys and girls in the creation of our abiding spirit and ethos, connecting and inspiring us all.”

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WOMEN’S NETWORK WEEKEND REMARKS BY MICHAEL EVANS ’98

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hen I was a student, even though I was aware that the campus was spectacular and its buildings were special, I didn’t have a full appreciation of them, and I blame this less on the fact that I took St. Andrew’s and its campus for granted, but because I really took all places and all spaces for granted in general. While I appreciated the attractive buildings and well-maintained lawns and playing fields, I did not really think with much depth about them.

How did they come about? Why did they look the way they did? What effort went into their creation? What was their significance?

I had not thought about and did not really know how to think about what we call the “built world.” Put simply, the built world is the human-created environment, as opposed to the natural environment. The built world is the objects, structures, buildings, landscapes, and communities that people create and then organize their lives, families, institutions, and societies around. This weekend will be an immersion for all of us into ways to think about the built world, and as a result, how to have a deeper appreciation for the world in which we live—a world that has been dramatically shaped by human intervention, shaped in ways that are awe-inspiring, and also in ways that are appalling. How do we think about the space—any space— like this room for instance, or a building, an entire campus, or a city?

How do different spaces make us feel? What do they encourage us to do or discourage us from trying? How do they impact our lives, our communities? One could argue that the very idea of the built world is intrinsically part of the human experience: the desire, the drive, and the ability to orchestrate the lasting change on our natural surroundings to hopefully improve our shared human experience....

Human history itself then, one could argue, springs from the development, brick by brick by brick from the built world. Incredibly, while cities first emerged nearly 10,000 years ago, it took until just 12 years ago for 50% of the world’s population to live in an urban environment.

But it is a trend that’s accelerating. The United Nations

projects that 68% of the world will live in an urban setting by 2050. This trajectory already has had and will continue to have enormous implications for how we live, interact, socialize, and thrive—or not— as a human community. Human activity, having exploded exponentially past 10 millennia, is now judged by many to be the dominant influence on the Earth’s climate and environment. So much so that some could describe this new era as a new geological era: the Anthropocene. Or, you could call it the era of the built world. The activity and impact of our species on the natural environment has multiplied to such an extent that now instead of figuring out how to protect ourselves from the natural world, as our neolithic ancestors did, we as a species are beginning to finally think seriously about how to protect the natural world from ourselves.

The built world, then, is a stage whereupon many of our greatest human achievements and most urgent human challenges will continue to play out. How will we build sustainably in the future? How will we engineer and finance the affordable production of renewable energy?

How will we retrofit our suburbs and exurbs to be less car aligned? How will we design our neighborhoods to encourage walking and cycling and healthier living? How will we design streets to prevent rather than risk cyclists to pedestrian deaths? How will we provide affordable housing in our most vibrant but expensive cities? How do we repair infrastructure that was built a century ago and needs to last for another century? These are just a few of the questions that speakers, panelists, and workshop leaders will touch upon this weekend....

I hope and expect that during this Women’s Network Weekend, surprised by the range of roles and activities that go into the creation of the world around you, you will be stimulated to think about opportunities that could present themselves to you. •

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THE STORY OF ST. ANDREW’S

Our Bright & Brilliant Alumni REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN’S NETWORK WEEKEND 2019 BY ELIZABETH ROACH

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hrough the journeys of their lives, our alumni also tell the story of St. Andrew’s.

They tell the story of how a community of care and kindness, of collaboration and creativity, of intellectual rigor and joy, of diversity and co-education, of adults and teenagers, can challenge us all to keep striving to make the world a better place. This story is made visible and audible during the Women’s Network Weekends when our alumni return to campus and engage with our students and faculty for two days.

This year, as Michael Evans so beautifully outlined in his talk, the theme of The Built World: Reimagining Space & Place allowed alumni from a variety of professions to come together and share their insights about engineering, architecture, city planning, real estate, design, construction, transportation, affordable housing, and sustainability.

Their knowledge was deep and profound, but even more impressive, was their wisdom about navigating the complexities of their careers and how their experiences at St. Andrew’s inform the ways in which they live and Students understand, in a profound work. way, the authenticity of their work Linking what they learned at St Andrew’s directly to their careers, they reinforced how a range of courses here (in math and here and, even more powerfully, science as well as in the arts and humanities) provided them with invaluable foundational skills: the ability to be comfortable in the begin to imagine a future version of uncomfortable, to be open to feedback, to be intellectually flexible, themselves beyond St. Andrew’s. to be able to adjust their perspective in the moment, to be good writers and problem solvers, to be able to see failure as part of any process, to be confident, courageous, persistent and resilient, to be able to distinguish intensity from stress, and to be able to invest in what is real.

The magic works in two ways. As alumni reflect on their experiences as students at St. Andrew’s and tell their stories, students understand even more clearly why they are engaging in challenging problem sets, exhibitions, experiments, research papers, and long-term projects, why we are asking them to collaborate with their peers in seminar discussions and labs and problem-solving, why they need to listen to, respect, and carefully consider others’ voices and perspectives, why and how a fully residential, diverse, and co-educational school mirrors the world beyond this campus. Students understand, in a profound way, the authenticity of their work here and, even more powerfully, begin to imagine a future version of themselves beyond St. Andrew’s.

In addition to the teaching and learning that emerged from the stories of our keynote speakers and alumnae panelists, our workshop leaders gave our students a more detailed look at the specific work they do, the challenges they face, and the complexities of their projects. Nick Lilley ’21 emerged from his workshop with Brian Court ’92 with the following epiphany: “I was amazed at the beauty, simplistic design, and the ability for his projects to connect with the natural world around us. His architectural firm and the work he does to advocate for our natural world is what will save this planet from the rabbit hole of inefficiency and destruction which humans have grown accustomed to. I want to make an everlasting change for the benefit of the environment and the health of people as a whole. [This workshop] raised the sense of hope that solutions are all around us, once we have the political will and incentive for people to change their perspective on the environment, then change for the better will become a reality...it already has.

Through this bright and brilliant group of alumni, I got a glimpse of the powerful way in which the St. Andrew’s community strives to represent this school and all the wisdom it has given them in the outside world!”

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Once again, the magic was reciprocal. As alumni visited classes, shared dinner with seniors, engaged with students and faculty and each other, and roamed through new buildings and spaces, they felt reinvigorated, reconnected to their past friends and places on campus, rejuvenated by the promise and optimism of our current students, and reenergized to commit more deeply to alumni stewardship. Here are just a few testimonials from alumni participants: “Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to interact with the SAS students and faculty in such a fun and rewarding way! It's always great to be back and you have done an incredible job of growing the school while keeping its integrity. In a tough world, it is truly a safe place and that is no small feat.”

— CARTER WILCOX ’90

“It’s so important and restorative to be reminded that smart engaged young people do exist, and the structure you envisioned and realized made that possible for all of us who were there.”

— ARI ELLIS ’89

“It is always a pleasure to be back at SAS. I could never express how much SAS has provided for me, but coming back to share just a small bit about myself to the student body is nowhere near enough to reciprocate the impact the SAS community has had on me. I will be forever grateful for my time at SAS and wanting to return the kind energy SAS radiates.”

— FAITH LOEHR ’13

Many of my conversations with alumni throughout the weekend centered on the renovation of Amos and the Sipprelle Field House and how these new buildings have created amazing learning and communal spaces. In addition, we imagined the next iteration—perhaps—of other important spaces on campus: faculty housing, the dorms, the Dining Hall, a student center. Their imaginations were alive, invested in a vision— in both practical and whimsical ways—of the future of the school. Certainly, their willingness to participate in the weekend signaled to me that they care deeply about the school, but talking to them about their dreams for the school and their interactions with students fueled me with hope and gratitude and optimism about the capable and brilliant hands in which we’re leaving the future of the school.

The weekend affirmed our mission to educate boys and girls so that they flourish both as individuals and in collaboration with one another. It affirmed that the conversation between the school of yesterday and today is essential to the school of tomorrow. It affirmed that our culture of kindness, support, allyship, trust, hope, optimism, and respect is a culture that can be and is being replicated by our alumni. It affirmed the power of enduring friendships and how quickly those friendships can be rekindled. It affirmed that the story of St. Andrew’s is full of promise and potential, a story that is inspirational and aspirational, a story that we’re all writing together on campus and in the spaces and places beyond St. Andrew’s. •

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FALL REVIEW 2019

“We Were Always Encouraged to Ask Questions” AN INTERVIEW WITH JEAN LI ’06

Did you always want to be an architect?

I became interested in [architecture] during my time at St Andrew’s. I had taken art classes with [retired visual arts teacher] John McGiff my entire time there, and I did Art Major my senior year. The visual arts really appealed to me, but as I started looking at colleges and thinking about what my major might be, art seemed a little bit too open-ended for me. Candy Schuller, who was my advisor and was also my college counselor, suggested architecture to me and it stuck. I really enjoyed majoring in architecture in college, and I just kept with it.

What does your day-to-day work look like? What would you say is the most rewarding aspect of your job?

One of the most fun things about being an architect is that my day to day varies a lot depending on what stage a project is in. About half my time is spent interacting with people outside the office—this could be meeting with clients to tour their facilities and discuss potential projects, or sitting down with engineers to develop our design together, or going out to a construction site to review issues with contractors.

And then I would say the other half of my time is spent working internally with the design team at my office. We draw, build threedimensional models, and basically use all the means we have at our disposal to develop our design.

As for what is most rewarding, there are moments when I’ve worked with engineers and contractors on a design or construction problem and together we’ve developed a really elegant solution that you couldn’t have imagined on your own. When you get that result collaboratively, it can be very satisfying. But teamwork is never easy— each person brings their own set of goals. So the very collaborative process of architecture can also be one of the most frustrating aspects as well. But when it does come together, it’s very rewarding.

How would you describe your experience at St. Andrew’s?

I grew up in the Bronx, and St. Andrew’s was a very different place at first. There was definitely a transition period, but I had a wonderful time. I think one of the most amazing things I got out of St. Andrew’s was a lot of great friendships. Something that I really appreciate about St. Andrew’s classes is that we were always encouraged to ask questions—not just straightforward questions, but really probing questions that try to tackle the heart of an issue. I’ve found that that kind of question-asking has been very important for problem solving and working on the complex issues that come up a lot in architecture.

I think that’s definitely something that I took away from St. Andrew’s that still impacts what I do today.

What are you anticipating in terms of coming back to St. Andrew’s this fall?

I’ve only been back to St. Andrew’s once during the school year—I’ve come back for reunion, but that’s a very different experience. So I’m really excited to see what St. Andrew’s is up to now and what students are thinking about and doing, and how St. Andrew’s culture has evolved. The principles and ideas that were around when I was there, it seems like they’ve really evolved since then. So I’m really excited to see what the school is like today.

Jean Li ’06 is an architect with MBB Architects in New York City. After graduating from St. Andrew’s, she studied architecture at M.I.T. and interned at design firms in Beijing and Barcelona. In New York, she worked for CookFox Architects on a variety of projects including affordable housing in Brooklyn and the redevelopment of an industrial site in Salem, Massachusetts.

In 2017, she joined MBB Architects and is overseeing projects for schools and religious institutions. Jean was one of our keynote speakers at our 2019 Women’s Network Weekend: The Built World; you can watch her talk at standrews-de.org/livestream.

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Engineering “Astronomy’s Biggest Digital Camera” WITH MARGAUX LOPEZ ’11

Margaux Lopez ’11 is a mechanical engineer at SLAC National Lab in Menlo Park, California, where she works on astronomy’s biggest digital camera— the camera that will be housed inside the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, an observatory under construction just outside of La Serena, Chile, that will produce an unprecedented amount of astronomical data. (She is seen above in a selfie taken with the telescope in the background at the upper left.) Margaux works on the assembly of delicate camera components as well as preparing the facility in Chile for the arrival of the camera in 2021. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology as well as a master’s degree from San Jose State University, both in mechanical engineering. She returned to campus this fall to give one of the keynote talks at our 2019 Women’s Network Weekend: The Built World; you can watch her talk at standrews-de.org/livestream.

by Annie Roach ’18 46 / REIMAGINING SPACE & PLACE

Could you tell me a little bit about your job and this particular project that you’re working on and what it entails?

I work for the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California [SLAC stands for Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which was the original name of the lab]. It’s a lab that’s run by Stanford, and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to do a lot of different types of research and development projects. The project I work on is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. In a giant clean room at SLAC, we are physically assembling a car-sized camera that will eventually be mounted on a telescope that is currently under construction in the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Chile.

I started my career at SLAC in October 2015, working on the integration and test team for the LSST camera. As you can imagine, this camera is very complicated and there are many different subassemblies, large and small parts that need to be precisely integrated together. There are teams at SLAC building the shutter as well as a metal cylinder called the cryostat that holds all the sensors; there’s a team on Long Island in New York building all the sensor assemblies; there’s a team in France building our filter changer mechanism for a set of fancy colored filters. All of that hardware eventually gets delivered to SLAC to be assembled into the camera and then verified by the integration and test team. Turns out these things don’t always work the first time around, especially when combining multiple pieces of hardware from different teams into one large assembly, so the “test” part of integration and test is key.

I did that for three years, and then I transitioned to the LSST commissioning team, which is like integration and test for the entire telescope. On a broad scale, the LSST project has four main subsystems: the camera team, the telescope team, the data management team, and the education and public outreach team. The commissioning team is responsible for bringing those teams together in a harmonious way.

So, my current job is to make sure that the camera we’re building at SLAC will function properly in the observatory with the telescope; that all of the utilities and mechanical connections and software controls are going to work as designed—or, more accurately, as revised once we realized that the original design was flawed; that we have all of the tools necessary to work on the camera and the telescope available on a remote mountaintop in Chile; that we have proper installation and maintenance procedures in place; and those sorts of things.

Do you have a typical day-to-day schedule, or is every day different? What does the average day look like for you?

It depends a lot on the phase of the project. I spent a lot of time my first two years in the SLAC clean room turning wrenches and building test fixtures in anticipation of the arrival of sensors from the team on Long Island, so that was pretty fun. Nowadays, there is no such thing as a “typical” schedule for me. Sometimes I am in Chile at the observatory site turning wrenches, sometimes I am at SLAC ordering and inventory-ing thousands of dollars of tools and materials to send to Chile, sometimes I design assembly or support fixtures in a CAD

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[computer-aided design] program and then make fabrication drawings, sometimes I am in meetings trying to make sure all of the interfaces are going to work, and sometimes I play soccer or volleyball during lunch. I’m currently responsible for the shipping plan to get this giant camera, plus other delicate pieces of hardware, from SLAC to Chile safely, so that’s mildly terrifying. I’m also working on a test refrigeration system because ours is super-complicated and we want to make sure we can tune it properly at altitude.

So, it’s pretty varied, but the answer is my days contain lots of various engineering-related things… as you might have been able to guess from my job title.

In related news, I’m actually going to relocate my whole life from California to Chile in January. I’ve been there several times in the last year for two to four weeks at a time to work on various aspects of the summit facility and also check out the local climbing scene. The camera won’t get to the summit for another year-ish, at the beginning of 2021, but there is a ton of prep work that needs to be done ahead of time and it’ll be easier to do that if I’m based in Chile for the next year or two. So learning Spanish is also on my daily to-do list.

How did you become interested in engineering?

What a great question. I grew up with an older brother (Pierce Lopez ’06), six years older than me and pretty much my idol when we weren’t busy fighting over computer time.

He’s my only sibling, and he was always really interested in science and technology and building things, so that definitely rubbed off on me. I played with all the same toys that he did, like K’NEX and LEGOs, and watched him build a desktop computer from scratch his junior year at St. Andrew’s. Also, my dad was an engineer before I was born and then became a stay-at-home dad for most of my childhood, so I always had a bunch of encouragement from him to dive into science and engineering and logic puzzles and strategy games.

I also really wanted to be an astronaut when I was little; I’ve always been completely fascinated by space. And then in eighth grade, I did this research project where we had to choose three careers and research them, and my three choices were an astronaut, math teacher, and soccer coach.

That’s pretty much me in a nutshell. Through that exercise, I found out that most astronauts don’t actually get to go to space, and when they do, it’s a totally annoying process. So I was like, “Maybe I’ll just help them get there.” That’s when I started to seriously think about engineering.

At St. Andrew’s, I took a really fun computer programming class with Mr. [David] Myers. We got to play with LEGO robots, which was supremely exciting after reading a million pages of Shakespeare for homework. In the class, there was a lot of engineering involved because we had to build the robots but also program them to be efficient. That was probably my first view into what engineers actually do. I also loved all the computer modeling in VPython that I did in Mr. Hammond’s AS Physics class my senior year.

Although, thanks to St. Andrew’s, I think I’ve taken more

humanities classes and written more papers than all of my engineering colleagues combined.

And what’s your favorite part about what you do, or the most rewarding part?

LSST is a very global project, and it’s been rewarding to work with people of vastly different backgrounds. There are local Chileans that I work closely with when I’m at the observatory. Part of the telescope structure itself was built in northern Spain, and I got to travel there and meet all the people involved in that particular part. Also, SLAC itself is a very multinational lab, so I live and work with people from various cultures and countries, like my Canadian boss and my Dutch volleyball teammate. Of course, the main draw of the project for me is that space and telescopes and astronomy in general are all really cool and exciting. But on top of that, getting to work with crazy brilliant people from all over the world has been a lot of fun.

You graduated from St. Andrew’s in 2011. What was your St. Andrew’s experience like?

In a word: Awesome. Living with friends and faculty for four years, you develop certain bonds that persist even if you haven’t seen each other in a while. I also really valued the independence that we learned at St. Andrew’s—as students we were entrusted to do all the things we needed to do and then we had the freedom to enjoy the independence that we were given. As long as you get all your stuff done, you can kind of do what you want. And I did.

When I wasn’t busy writing English papers, which somehow always sucked up way more hours than planned, I spent a lot of time swimming in the pond, running around the cornfields, hanging out on the Front Lawn, and generally taking advantage of the outdoors. Through that culture, St. Andrew’s helped to instill in me a love of nature that persists to this day—I spend most of my weekends in the mountains, skiing or hiking or climbing or some combination thereof.

What are you most looking forward to about coming back to campus this fall and taking part in this year’s Women’s Network weekend?

I mean, selfishly, I get to see all my friends, so that’s going to be awesome. I also love the St. Andrew’s community and the general vibe of the place, and I am excited to come back and experience that again, even if it’s just for a weekend. •

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From Revising Papers to Fixing Hearts A CONVERSATION WITH ANNIE IMBRIE-MOORE ’12

Annie Imbrie-Moore ’12 is a Ph.D. student in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University, where she works in the Advanced Therapeutics for Heart Failure Research Laboratory.

She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Stanford Graduate Fellow, and an Accel Innovation Scholar. Prior to Stanford, she received her Bachelor of Science in biomedical engineering from Harvard University. She discovered her engineering acumen while living on Pell Dorm during her freshman year at St. Andrew’s, when Annie and her roommate developed a mechanism to turn on and off the lights while still in their beds. Annie was one of our keynote speakers at our 2019 Women’s Network Weekend: The Built World; you can watch her talk at standrews-de.org/livestream.

by Annie Roach ’18 48 / REIMAGINING SPACE & PLACE

First, let’s talk about what kind of research you’re doing at Stanford.

I’m in the Mechanical Engineering Department, and my work in Dr. Joe Woo’s lab is centered around using mechanical engineering and biomechanics to optimize cardiac surgery operations. Every heart surgeon has to decide exactly how they’re going to fix a particular failing heart—how they will repair a leaking valve, for example, where to put their sutures, whether to resect tissue, and a million other decisions. We’re using engineering to [help surgeons] make those choices by figuring out what is the most biomechanically optimal method in every case.

In the lab, most of my experiments use pig valves mounted in a heart simulator chamber that we’ve designed, which allows us to analyze all the various repairs. A blood analog solution or saline flows through the valve with tuned pressure waveforms so the valve beats as if it were in a heart. We then can simulate a disease state and repair it with any one of a thousand different means to see which option restores the valve to optimal functionality. Part of the work is also dedicated to improving the simulator, and trying to find new ways to more accurately simulate disease. We also take the research one step further to perform and analyze these operations in live sheep and pigs.

That’s a little bit of a simplification, but the big idea is: our research is optimizing cardiac surgery operation using engineering. And I’ll add that the most rewarding aspect of my work is the fact that I can have a direct impact in the clinic—our results can influence surgeons to immediately adjust their techniques. Most research takes years to have that kind of impact, so this significance really drives my work.

What’s a typical day like for you?

That’s a hard question. I set my own schedule, and what I do in a day really just depends on how experiments are going on that day.

I’ve had days where I get in at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. and don’t leave until well past 3 a.m. because the experiment is not working. You stay for as long as you can until you have to just call it. But that’s kind of the reality of a lot of Ph.D. work, whether in engineering or biology or something else. Research is really, really messy and it takes a long time to get to clean, trustworthy data. But I enjoy it, and those long days are by no means the norm! We always say in lab: it all depends on whether the Pump Gods are shining on us that day (the pump being our short-hand for the heart simulator).

What’s your favorite aspect of what you do?

I do love the messiness that I described. It can be very exciting even when things are going wrong. Every day I’m making big decisions, I’m trying to problem-solve through a million unexpected issues and interesting data, while simultaneously trying to come up with new long-term projects and new designs for all of our current work. So it’s never boring. But when you have a thousand projects going on

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and you’re trying to make progress on every single one of them, it can be exhausting. You know that feeling you’d get in college, where, near the end of the term, you feel like you always have something you’re supposed to be doing in every moment? You should be working on a paper, you should be studying for a test, and so on, and it doesn’t go away until finals are over and you have a little break. That’s what Ph.D. work is like, but we never have finals—it’s never over. It’s just like that for five or six years. These projects aren’t going to be done even when I’m finished with my Ph.D. They’re years and years and years of research, and other students will take them over. Anyway, that multitasking can be kind of exhausting after a while, but it’s still my favorite part.

How did you become interested in engineering?

I loved all my science classes at St. Andrew’s. I sort of always knew I wanted to go into science, but we didn’t have any engineering classes like the school does now. So I don’t think I really thought about engineering too much until, well, I guess it was the first week at Harvard—they gave us this big book of all the concentrations (most schools call them “majors”). I think there were 48 concentrations, and I went through every single one, read the description, thought about whether or not I’d be interested in it, crossed off all the ones that were hard no’s, and I was left with all the engineerings, computer science, and astrophysics. At that point I knew I didn’t want to do pure science—pure biology or physics, for example. I have an aversion to closing myself off from any one of the disciplines—I kind of wanted to know them all. I also didn’t want to settle down on any one thing too early, and I think ultimately I decided on biomedical engineering because it had everything—it’s mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, bioengineering, and as you get further on in your education, you can tailor your work, your research, and ultimately your job to what [aspect of the field] you enjoy the most.

What was your St. Andrew’s experience like? Do you think that your St. Andrew’s education informed the work that you do today?

I took as many math and science courses as [then-Dean of Studies] Mr. [Nathan] Costa would allow. I think there was one year where I took five and two, and four of the five main classes were math or science, and I loved them a lot—Mark Hammond’s physics classes in particular. He is a great teacher—he helped really boost my confidence in independent work. You felt like you were really working through interesting problems and independently discovering important fundamentals of physics.

But having a great math teacher or science teacher is sort of icing on the cake for me because I already love those subjects so much. So in terms of what had a really big impact on me at St. Andrew’s, I’d probably say my English classes and Mock Trial. I was built to love math and science, but I was not really built to love English and not built to love the stressful public speaking involved in Mock Trial.

But I learned to love these things at St. Andrew’s, and they inform what I do now. In both cases, you have to learn how to spend hours and hours digging through texts with the implicit understanding that so much of what you’re doing will involve going down the wrong paths. In Mock Trial, we would be overhauling opening statements even on the van ride to the courthouse, and so much of my English career at St. Andrew’s was spent accepting the fact that the first draft of a paper needed to be completely re-written and my thesis re-worked.

That kind of experience is reflected in my work right now, except it’s not wasting a day—it’s wasting months. You go down some path and you realize, oh my God, this isn’t working, this isn’t where the research needs to go. But you have to be excited when you figure that out, not frustrated, and see that failure as a step in the right direction.

What are you most looking forward to about being back on campus for Women’s Network Weekend?

I always love to come back to the campus. It’s so beautiful.

I really just want to see Noxontown Pond! And see all my teachers—Mr. Hammond, Mr. Finch, Mr. O’Connell— they’re still some of my favorite teachers. St. Andrew’s always feels like a second home that you come back to, or like you’re seeing your old family members. It’s a very calming place…. It’s a nice environment to sort of re-center yourself and think about the future.

I can remember, senior year, Mr. O’Connell took our AS Bio class out on canoes at night. We’re out on the pond, it’s after sundown. We strapped our canoes together, and we all lay down and looked up at the stars as he read us nature poetry. It was amazing. I remember thinking about where I was going to go, what I was going to do in college, and the many, many doors that were open for me. This was the very end of senior year, and I was just starting to figure out what path I wanted to take. So yeah, I’m just excited to go back to St. Andrew’s and have that kind of re-centering. •

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Using the Past A to Build the Future HOW MICHAEL EVANS ’98 COMBINES A PASSION FOR ARCHITECTURE, HISTORY & RAIL TRAVEL TO REDEFINE URBAN TRANSPORTATION

50 / REIMAGINING SPACE & PLACE

sk Michael Evans ’98 to give you the short history of his life, and a few common themes quickly emerge. Evans doesn’t hesitate to take huge leaps into new experiences; he is drawn to beautiful, functional places and spaces; and he loves trains. Yes, trains.

“Train stations are really unique,” Evans explains. “If you think about it, railroads are the first real mass transportation. There were ferries and ships [before trains] but these were located on the water, on the edges of cities. The idea of a grand place for transportation, in the middle of a city—that starts with the train station in the 1800s, with private companies building what were essentially cathedrals to transportation and progress. These stations were modeled on ancient Greek and Roman temples, or basilicas, or the Baths of Caracalla. So I think if you’re interested in architecture and urban history, then you might also have an affinity for rail travel.”

Evans, who serves on St. Andrew’s Board of Trustees, shared his musings on train travel during a visit to campus in November to participate in our 2019 Women’s Network Weekend, which he helped to organize. Every other year, St. Andrew’s Women’s Network hosts a weekend of events—talks, panels, workshops, and gatherings—centered around a certain theme or field; past weekends have celebrated SAS alumni working in medicine, education, and the arts. The idea is to give alumni (both women and men) the chance to return to campus, reconnect with each other and with the school, and share their professional expertise and insights with current students.

This year’s Women’s Network theme, The Built World: Reimagining

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Space & Place, was the brainchild of Evans and Women’s Network Chair Elizabeth Roach.

“After the last big Women’s Network Weekend [in 2017], I remember thinking, ‘This is such a cool idea,’” Evans recalls. “And I started to think about the fact that, when I was a student here, there were all these jobs I had no idea even existed—I had no clue there were jobs like my own.”

His job? President of the Moynihan Station Development Corporation, where he oversees the expansion of Penn Station, America's busiest transit hub, into the landmarked James A. Farley Post Office Building on 8th Avenue in New York City.

This new, light-filled train hall is being constructed within the old mail sorting room of the post office building, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece designed by McKim, Mead & White and built in 1912. When complete, the station will be named after the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who first conceived of and championed the project in the 1990s. Amazingly, Evans can remember picking up a copy of the New York Times in the Main Common Room while a student at St. Andrew’s and reading an article about a new proposal to turn the Farley Post Office building into a gleaming rail station. “I was fascinated by the artistic renderings of what it would look like when it was completed, and I had the fleeting thought that it would be ‘cool’ to work on a project like that in the future,” Evans recalled in his introductory remarks during Women’s Network Weekend.

In this line of work, Evans is putting his own passion for architecture, urban history, and rail travel to good use—while also managing the progress, politics, and budget of a $1.6 billion project that has been in the works, in some form or another, for three decades. Prior to joining the Moynihan Project team in 2011, Evans had worked in the New York State Governor’s Office in various capacities, where he had been “functioning at 100,000 feet, parachuting in to [deal with] different problems,” Evans recalls. “But I wanted to really understand what it would take to actually deliver a major, multibillion dollar project.” He originally came on board the team as a deputy, and when his predecessor retired in 2013, Evans began running the project.

The standout feature of the new Moynihan Train Hall will be a grand skylit atrium and boarding concourse about the size of Grand Central Terminal’s famous, landmarked Main Hall.

According to Amtrak’s website, the new facility will also improve passenger comfort, safety, and security; offer increased accessibility for passengers

with disabilities; and relieve the overcrowded condition of the current Penn Station. “Penn Station has between 600,000 and 700,000 people going through it a day, but it was designed for about 200,000 people a day,” Evans says, noting the station was built in the 1970s, during a low ebb in passenger rail travel in the U.S. Since that decade, ridership in the Northeast has dramatically increased.

“What we are hoping to do with this project, first and foremost, is to make a great and functional transportation facility, but more than that, a civic space that people want to come to—a place that you want to go have lunch, or a glass of wine, or see the performance of city life happen,” Evans explains. “We have a model for how this is done [in Grand Central]—it’s not reinventing the wheel.”

The Farley Post Office Building was built as the companion structure to the original Pennsylvania Station, which was also designed by McKim, Mead, and White. That original station was considered one of the iconic buildings of New York City, but was demolished in 1963 after its owner, the Pennsylvania

I THINK IT WOULD BE REALLY HARD TO LIVE IN A PLACE WHERE I COULDN’T WALK AROUND. AND I THINK THAT STARTED AT ST. ANDREW’S FOR ME— WALKING FROM DORM TO CLASS, OR WALKING IN THE FIELDS AND ON THE TRAILS. TO HAVE THAT REPLICATED IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT AS AN ADULT BECAME REALLY IMPORTANT TO ME.

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Railroad, sold the air rights to the property following two decades of declining ridership. (The modern historical preservation movement has its roots in the demise of the original Penn Station.)

“What we are trying to do is take this underutilized building across the street [from Penn Station], and do it justice with the renovation, and bring back many features of the old Pennsylvania Station— natural light, spaciousness, clarity in terms of its design and wayfinding,” Evans continues. “Most people don’t realize that the interior of the post office was a warehouse where mail was sorted and handled. So what we’ve done is try to preserve the industrial history of the building and celebrate that, and also make these contemporary interventions.

It’s a preservation project, but it’s not a restoration project.”

The $300 million first phase of the project opened to acclaim in June 2017, and the $1.6 billion second phase is now under construction and

A LOT OF MY INTERACTIONS WITH MY TEAM AND MY COLLEAGUES ARE NOT DISSIMILAR TO A SEMINAR TABLE DISCUSSION AT ST. ANDREW’S....

IT’S HAVING A DISCUSSION ABOUT REALLY CHALLENGING ISSUES AND PROBLEMS AND WORKING THROUGH THESE ISSUES COLLECTIVELY. targeted for completion at the end of 2020. “We’re on time and on budget, and nothing has gone as expected,” he says with a smile.

In overseeing the project, Evans coordinates innumerable moving parts and professions: historical preservationists; urban planners and city planners; architects and all kinds of engineers—structural, mechanical, electrical, acoustical; environmental and transportation consultants; government and civic agencies; escalator and elevator designers, lighting designers, wayfinding designers, industrial designers, interior designers; real estate developers and advisors and brokers; contractors and specialty subcontractors (electricians, masons, glaziers)—the list goes on. “Choose your analogy—my role is akin to a quarterback, or an orchestra conductor, where you might not play any one of those instruments that well, but you know what each one of them does, and you know how to get them to work in sync,” Evans notes. “The value of a St. Andrew’s education, and of a good liberal arts education, 52 / REIMAGINING SPACE & PLACE

is that it gives you an ability to see the bigger picture and how things fit together. That takes a lot of listening. An important part of the job is just trying to make sure that you fully understand a problem, and if you can’t solve it, how do you get the right people around the table who can? A lot of my interactions with my team and my colleagues are not dissimilar to a seminar table discussion at St. Andrew’s. It’s not me standing up and telling people what to do. It’s having a discussion about really challenging issues and problems and working through these issues collectively.”

All of which also got Evans thinking about a “Built World” theme for this year’s Women’s Network Weekend. “I asked Elizabeth, ‘How do we give students a little bit of exposure to these kinds of jobs—architecture, or urban planning, or engineering—which they might not otherwise encounter in an algebra class or a history class?,” Evans says. “The goal was to link the school to these other career paths, and make them a bit more tangible to students.”

“For an organizing framework, the idea of ‘the built world’ jumped out at me, because so much of the world we inhabit has been humanmade,” Evans continues. “We don’t live out in the wild, and even the places we go camping are built environments. St. Andrew’s campus itself is a completely constructed environment. The Front Lawn, which is the centerpiece of one’s experience here, was created and shaped with bulldozers, and defined by Founders Hall, which is designed in a particular way to frame the lawn, and make it feel like an intimate space. Noxontown Pond is not a natural body of water—it’s a man-made mill pond.

I’m not sure how many students realize that.”

The Built World weekend also celebrated a few recent developments at St. Andrew’s: in 2017, the school began offering a number of new or expanded science and math electives in engineering, bioengineering, and computer science. And this fall, St. Andrew’s reopened Amos Hall, its STEM building, after a massive gut renovation to bring the facility into the 21st century. (Read more about that project on page 54 of this issue.)

Funnily enough, you could say that the journey that brought Evans to the work he does today all began with a single train ride. Evans was born in Dallas, and though he notes, “going to boarding school was not particularly common in that part of the country,” he became interested in the idea and researched a number of schools throughout the South. “St. Andrew’s was really, really far north,” he recalls. “I don’t think I’d ever been further

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north than Oklahoma.” It was too far to travel for an on-campus Admissions interview, so Evans interviewed with Trustee Kent Sweezey ’70. “We had this connection, and he insisted that I come see the school. And when I did, I was mesmerized by the campus. Of all the schools I looked at, this was definitely my favorite.”

A few months later, Evans arrived to St. Andrew’s as a III Former in the fall of 1994, having taken the train, with his parents and a steamer trunk in tow, from Dallas to Philadelphia by way of Chicago.

(For his part, Sweezey went on to become the Chair of the Board and was in that role when Michael himself joined the Board in 2014, 20 years after their interview.) “It wasn’t easy, but I think it went pretty well,” Evans says of his transition to life at SAS. “I loved the school from the second I stepped on campus. It’s a small school, and for that point in my life, that was something I really benefited from.

You got to know everyone and you could have a level of interaction with faculty that you might not get at larger schools. It was very different from life in Dallas—the people I met came from all over, and had different backgrounds and experiences and accents. It’s pretty neat to be 14 and thrown into that level of economic and national and international diversity.”

“Plus,” he adds. “The place is beautiful.”

Place is clearly of central importance to Evans.

In sharing memories and anecdotes of St. Andrew’s, or college, or graduate school, or even his current life in New York, he is careful to note details about, and connections between, the spaces, buildings, and environments in which those memories were formed.

He recalls the “famous sandstone main building” at the University of Sydney in Australia, where he pursued an undergraduate degree in history, and the “beautiful Gothic architecture” and close-knit residential communities at Oxford University, where he obtained his M.Phil in International Relations.

He notes that he has never owned a car, thanks to the fact that he has lived in “walkable” cities and communities ever since he attended St. Andrew’s. “I think it would be really hard to live in a place where I couldn’t walk around,” he says. “And I think that started at St. Andrew’s for me—walking from dorm to class, or walking in the fields and on the trails.

To have that replicated in an urban environment as an adult became really important to me. New York is actually in some ways not that different from St. Andrew’s or Oxford—people get overwhelmed

by New York, but it’s actually just a collection of little neighborhoods. I run into people [I know] on the street all the time. I have more random social

interaction with people in a city of eight or nine million, than you might if you lived in a town that’s car-based.”

Evans can identify many other “red threads” between his experiences at St. Andrew’s and the values he lives out today. “I think a challenge that a lot of St. Andreans face when they leave the school is how to balance the realities of the world beyond the gates here, while preserving that ethos that you learn here and internalize,” Evans says. “I think St. Andrew’s really nurtures and cultivates that drive to do something meaningful in the world, and that stays with most alums. It’s always a guiding kind of light.” His advice for young alums: “Your first job may not be inspiring, and that’s okay. How do you have a career that you are excited to wake

up to every day, and where you feel you’re doing something meaningful? It can be really hard to figure that out when you’re 22 and getting out of college, or 25 and coming out of graduate school, and you just need to pay rent. But it will be okay, as long as you don’t let it get you down, and don’t lose your goal of working on something that’s really meaningful and significant to you.”

When asked if he feels that he has found work that is at once exciting and meaningful, Evans gives an enthusiastic yes. Leading the Moynihan Project “has been an amazing role,” he says. “It’s not without its challenges, and it can be very stressful at times, but I love the project, I love the team, I love getting up in the morning, for the most part, and going to work. It’s a really unique opportunity, and I realize how lucky I am.” J WOMEN'S NETWORK WEEKEND 2019 / 53

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STEM Regenerated

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n September 3, students and faculty opened the doors of “Amos Hall 2.0” for their first day of classes. Our 52-year-old science and math building underwent a $13.6 million renovation during the 201819 school year—a renovation designed to modernize and update our STEM spaces, bringing these spaces in line with the innovative teaching that happens within their walls.

“No other aspect of St. Andrew’s academic program has changed so dramatically over the past decade as our approach to math and science teaching and learning,” nortes the School’s current draft strategic plan. “Since 1967, Amos Hall has served St. Andrew’s well, but… a building focusing on collaboration, problem solving, creativity, and innovation requires new, imagined spaces.”

The footprint of the building remains the same, but the interior was entirely gutted to maximize and optimize the interior. The amount of laboratory teaching space in the building was doubled, and new dedicated spaces were made for a computer science classroom, a robotics lab, and collaborative project rooms. In addition, almost all of its windows and many of its interior walls were removed and replaced with 14” x 8” glass panels; the building is now filled with abundant natural light, and sweeping views of St. Andrew’s “other” science classroom—Noxontown Pond and its surrounding 2200 acres of school land.

The renovation was fueled by donors committed more than $10.2 million in cash and pledges, funding more than 75% of the total cost of the renovation.

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I THINK WHAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN TRUE AT ST. ANDREW’S IS THAT TEACHERS ARE WORKING HARD TO MAKE LEARNING HAPPEN. AND I THINK THAT’S STILL TRUE. WE JUST GET A MULTIPLIER ON THAT INNOVATION WHEN WE HAVE A BEAUTIFUL SPACE. — Dr. Harvey Johnson Dean of Math & Science

REMARKS BY ANNIE EGAN P’13,’13,’16,’16 AT THE AMOS HALL OPENING CELEBRATION

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ood evening and thank you for allowing me to be part of this exciting event. I am honored and thrilled to be on campus again and touring the new Amos classrooms today made me hungry for dissection tools, a Bunsen burner, and a review of organic chemical equations. As much as I love literature and history, I am, deep down, a science nerd, and as Dan O’Connell can tell you, I was the parent that recited the equation for photosynthesis at a Parents Weekend teacher conference long ago.

But as much as I love the shiny new classrooms and lab space, I think I am most in awe of how much a renovated Amos Hall—an Amos Hall 2.0— symbolizes what is best about St. Andrew’s.

First, the foundation of Amos Hall, like the foundation of this school, is strong. When the decision was made that the instruction of math and 56 / THE DEDICATION OF AMOS HALL

science could use a renovated space from which to operate, we didn’t need to tear down the old to make way for the new—the foundation and shell of Amos Hall were safe and secure, and consequently the outside of Amos is by and large the same. Since Felix DuPont laid the cornerstone in 1967, Amos Hall has looked, felt, and perhaps smelled the same.

Like Founders Hall, the courses taught within these walls are based on long-standing foundations. The discoveries of Newton, Euclid, and Crick are as much as part of the classroom experience as Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Homer are in the classrooms of Founders. St. Andrew’s STEM curriculum, like the building where it is taught, is built on a strong foundation.

Second, I love that a building dedicated to math and science is part of the triangle of the educational buildings of this campus, whose other vertices are Founders Hall and the O’Brien Arts Center.

Founders Hall, whose literal foundation is a chapel (an extraordinary example of architecture reflecting mission), faces buildings that embody the sciences

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The renovated Amos Hall includes: • 2 biology labs • 2 chemistry labs • 2 physics labs • 2X the amount of lab space • 4 math classrooms • 1 computer science classroom • Rooms for robotics, a makerspace, and a 3D printing lab • An outdoor classroom—named in honor of longtime biology and environmental science teacher Peter K. McLean, who retired in 2019 after two decades of teaching, exploring, and encouraging sustainability at St. Andrew’s.

of technology and the expression of art. The triangle has been used in the design of buildings and other structures since Ancient Egypt, as triangles provide strength and stability. Often schools attach STEM classrooms to existing school structures, and put labs in (hopefully) well-ventilated basements. Here, math and science, the humanities and the arts are in balance. We have been told time and time again that students need to be educated to thrive in an evolving and increasingly automated and technological world. Students will need to be able to move horizontally between many careers over the course of their lives, as industries and the world change around them. The skills that will matter most in our evolving world are the skills taught in Founders, Amos, and the Arts Center— critical thinking, intellectual flexibility and adaptability, communication, teamwork, and writing. Despite popular rhetoric, both quantitative and anecdotal evidence suggests that employers, especially in the STEM fields, deeply value the skills they find in liberal arts graduates. They recognize that the future isn’t just about technology, it’s about how you can marry technology with the human experience. Mark Zuckerberg is famous for saying that Facebook is as much about psychology and sociology as it is about technology. Steve Jobs said, “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that makes our heart sing.”

Like the academic triangle, this school believes in the interplay of the humanities, science, and the arts. The requirements for graduation emphasize being exposed and nurtured in all of these disciplines. And

The building will be LEED-certified, thanks to features such as: • Cool-roof shingles • Extra ceiling insulation • LED lighting • Water-efficient fixtures • 14” x 8” high-performance windows • 75% of demolition waste was diverted from landfills • 30% reduction in water use expected

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based on the myriad of careers that our alums pursue, this foundation serves them well.

Third, the new classrooms and energy of Amos can’t help but entice the most hesitant student to embrace challenging STEM concepts. I don’t know about the students or alums who are here tonight, but when my children arrived here, their first phone calls home reported that “St. Andrew’s is hard.” Science was no longer just the memorization of facts and theorems. French was taught, amazingly, in French. They were reading Shakespeare and debating primary sources of American history. All were a far cry from their academic backgrounds at home.

It didn’t take long, however, before this challenging new academic world became not only more comfortable, but exciting.

Culturally, St. Andrew’s welcomes new students to the challenging world of boarding school with a square dance and a romp through the woods. Much like our shiny new Amos classrooms, the culture of kindness and goodness embraces students and supports them, whatever their background. By the time my children had been at St. Andrew’s for a week, their transition to residential life was complete and they were ready for the bigger challenges of the classroom. This school seeks to allow students to embrace challenges of all sorts— academic, athletic, social, and cultural—while providing a safety net of kindness and goodness. In all ways, St. Andrew’s seeks to make this campus both safe and stimulating.

Fourth, while traditional and familiar on the outside, Amos 2.0 is entirely new on the inside. The new classrooms and gathering spaces remind us that while the exterior of the building may be mostly the same, what has been taught, discussed, and nurtured within its walls, is not. In 1967, the math curriculum included five classes and was focused primarily on didactic methods. Today, math is dynamic with active problem-solving curricula. Computer science was first offered in 1995; there are now six classes devoted to this subject and it is 58

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integrated into other coursework. Physics classes still review Newton’s laws and Biology classes fortunately still discuss photosynthesis, but the science curricula have exploded with the offerings of robotics, app development, bioengineering and other subject. In 1967, when Felix DuPont buried a time capsule under Amos Hall that included S&H green stamps, I doubt he could have envisioned Bitcoins, Venmo or even ATM machines or, for that matter, an on-campus solar array. Like those in Amos Hall, the classes taught in Founders Hall may look similar to those classes taught in 1929, but we know that the breadth and depth of these classes is profoundly different around those seminar tables.

Tolstoy, Faulkner and Shakespeare are still on the book lists, but so are the works of Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, and Bryan Stevenson.

Not only are the courses offered at St. Andrew’s simultaneously familiar yet profoundly different—so is our student body. The Amos time capsule also included photos of the then VI Form, clearly sending a message to future Saints that this building’s foundation was its students. When Amos was built, our classrooms, dorms, and fields were filled with students and faculty in coats and ties from relatively diverse backgrounds. Now as we re-dedicate Amos, St. Andrew’s students represent a diversity of backgrounds and cultures that goes far beyond what Felix DuPont could have imagined. Although our buildings may be old and the dress code traditional, the subjects and those who engage in the educational excitement within these walls is entirely current and new.

Fifth, Amos Hall wasn’t named for a donor; it was named for a teacher. Like the O’Brien Arts Center (named for a Head of School) and the Demers Locker Room (named for a coach), St. Andrew’s has a history of naming things for people that matter—not only our extraordinary donors but also our faculty. In that time capsule, there were grading sheets. The message then, much as the message is now, is that St. Andrew’s focus is its students and its faculty, the very participants who engage in the transformational power of education, discourse, and learning.

And last, renovated Amos represents the strengthening of our educational triangle for St. Andreans today and also for the St. Andreans of the future. Much like a building that must change to meet the evolving educational needs of its students, St. Andrew’s has always prepared students for a world that is always in a state of change. Just as educational offerings, book lists, and subjects offered have morphed to meet the needs of the current age, like the newly designed spaces of Amos, our graduates will need to be adaptive, engaged in self-directed and continuous learning and selftransformation. The technology of today will create a world that Felix DuPont nor we can barely imagine. Like St. Andrew’s, the future will be a product of technological change that will undoubtedly challenge our humanity. Just as the technology of bronze created coins that created a mercantile class, and the technology of iron created weapons that allowed wars and tyranny to evolve, and the

technology of steel allowed the building of printing presses that allowed our beliefs, poetry, and histories to be shared broadly, the next great age will be born of a technology that will challenge our current societal norms. Television brought the images of assassination into our living rooms for the first time. The influence of social media cannot be underestimated in facilitating the Arab Spring. I don’t have any idea what the next great technological breakthrough will bring, but I do know that St. Andreans will be there in its creation and in understanding how it affects our human experience because, as the school’s website reminds us, St. Andrew’s work is not just to educate, but also to awaken our students to the responsibilities we share for the world.

So, thank you, Tad, for inviting me and allowing me to use the word transformational so often in these remarks.

Thank you to the Board for approving this project and to the extraordinary donors who made it happen. Thank you to the students and faculty here today who, like those who were on campus when Bill Amos was a teacher, will be the ones who not only benefit from the new classrooms and laboratories of Amos but will also carry the flame of scientific inquiry and transformational discourse to those students and faculty who will be on campus decades from now.

And thank you to Felix DuPont, who profited from a new technology and turned those profits into this sacred place, and who not only put a time capsule under the foundation of Amos Hall that reminds us of our priorities, but also of our vision. Wouldn’t he be pleased at how this school and Amos 2.0 are built on strong foundations; that the STEM, humanities, and arts curricula are interdependent and also individually transformational; that nervousness and anxiety are overwhelmed here by excitement and kindness; and that new ideas will forever flourish within these walls to build better technologies, citizens, and Saints. •

Artist Luisa Adelfio P’16,’19 created and installed a custom work of art she created specifically for an alcove—that was itself designed to house her art—in the first floor of Amos Hall. This partnership between Adelfio, Amos Hall architects Zimmerman Studio, and the school was motivated by a desire to celebrate the collaborative nature of our academic program by making space for works of art within the science and math facility.

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My absolute favorite feature about the new Amos is that the students, every single day when they’re walking to classes, actually get to see and observe what classes they were in last year and what classes they might be in the following year. I think subconsciously or consciously these small observations make a difference—they can bring back these insights or a discussion that they may have had, or maybe they see a particular lab happening that they recall from last year, and start talking about how fun or how interesting that lab was. I hear those conversations happening fairly regularly, and it’s quite inspiring. When you walk into the first floor of Amos and you’re looking around, you see an algebra class, a geometry class, a precalculus class, and a calculus class happening all at the same time in four different classrooms. That all of us can see one another working, with openness and transparency, is really the physical manifestation of the idea that there are no barriers between these different courses, that they all belong together and actually lead into one another, and are cumulative. I think that’s the message that we’re trying to send as a math and science department, and I think this building communicates that perfectly with the open windows and the open concept.

— Chris Sanchez

Physics & Math Faculty

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can vividly remember freshman year Biology with Dr. [Peter] McLean. I’ve never been more confused yet excited than the first time I stepped into his classroom as a shy freshman and had my ears welcomed by whale sounds, and my eyes greeted by dead animals, ranging from birds to a moose’s head. Early mornings I would laugh at Josie [Friedli ’20] as she looked for birds behind Pell Dorm, but then I would suddenly realize I had to get out of bed and fill out my bird study as well. Old Amos is filled with great memories, ones where friendships were formed, and learning boundaries were exceeded. The creation of new Amos, though, makes these memories even more special and cherishable.

We are bonded with the memory of the past, yet have the opportunity to create new memories as well—ones filled with the same spirit and love of learning. From the student body and especially the Class of 2020, we cannot thank you all enough for the opportunity to find new and engaging ways to learn, and for giving us a new space to be our best selves.

— Steph Tanoh ’20 Student Body Co-President

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n behalf of the entire student body, thank you for all of the hard work you put into making this new, state-of-the-art math and science building absolutely amazing. It only takes one minute walking through this building to see how truly incredible and remarkable it is for St. Andrew’s students and faculty. As you walk down the hallways when classes are in session, you will see faces of confusion followed by enlightenment within group work and discussion. You will see students and teachers engaging with difficult problems on the new whiteboards and the “window whiteboards” that can be found just about everywhere. You will see the incredible new physics classrooms with robots strewn across the tables, the new chemistry classrooms filled with experiments in progress, classrooms with 3D printers slowly printing away projects, and the many study rooms filled with us students wanting to learn.

The energy in this building doesn’t just end at the close of the week when classes are over; you should come see students flock to this building on Sunday mornings to claim one of the classrooms as a study room. You will see our work haphazardly strewn across the tables as we continue meaningful discussions all throughout the weekend. Not only will you get to see us hard at work, but you’ll get to see us take breaks together as well. You will see the occasional classroom filled with rowdy NFL fans as they project a game live on the big screen. You will see us sit on the Adirondack chairs in the McLean Outdoor Classroom as we enjoy the warm weather. But best of all, you will see this building embody the St. Andrew’s spirit.

In only the first month of this school year, so many incredible moments have already taken place inside this building. Moments that we will remember for the rest of our lives, that will forever keep us connected to St. Andrew’s. Moments that get passed down as stories connecting generations of Saints together. Thank you for making this all possible.

— Billy Ewles ’20 Student Body Co-President

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2019 CONVOCATION TALK

BY TERENCE GILHEANY, RELIGIOUS STUDIES DEPARTMENT CHAIR

When my daughter Hannah was little, she loved the color purple. Whose favorite color is purple?

Show of hands. Excellent, me too. But, I’m not sure that anyone here loves purple quite as much as Hannah when she was little kid. She wanted—no, she needed—to wear purple every day. It couldn’t just be her shirt. It had to be her pants, her socks, her shoes, even her underwear. Now, when a small child has a strong desire, this makes life hell for the parents. Usually my wife Hilary and I succeeded in getting her into a clean—or mostly clean—full set of clothes in lilac, mauve, plum and lavender. Off she would toddle to daycare, a little grape-colored bundle of joy.

One day, we just got overwhelmed. Who knows what happened—perhaps Hannah had gone outside in the rain and gotten her one remaining purple outfit soaked. Maybe we had miscounted the number of shirts remaining. Whatever it was, there came a day when there was no more purple to wear. We proposed to Hannah that she wear another color, but that was not acceptable. Instead, she offered a counterproposal: she did not have to wear purple clothes to school. Indeed, she did not need to wear clothes to school at all.

We said no, and at that point Hannah asked the central question of this story: Why? Why can’t I go naked to school? Well, because otherwise you’ll be cold. Why? Because people don’t have fur like other animals anymore. Why? Because we lost it as we evolved? Why? Umm, because we did not need it anymore? Why? Because we were warmer because we invented fire. Why? To keep other animals away.

Why? So we were not eaten? Why? Because creatures want to survive. Why? Because life is precious. Why? Uh, because it just is? At this point, Hilary and I were exhausted. Also, I should note that my theory about why we lost our fur is only one theory, and a little research tells me it isn’t the most likely one.

Hey, it was the best I could do at the time.

When you ask yourself “why” over and over again, where do you arrive? I mean you, specifically, you, as an individual person. What is your final answer, the reply when you can’t make any more replies, the response just before “just because”?

Your answer matters because your final answer likely represents some of your core values. That matters, because your core values might not match someone else’s core values. Your self-evident truth might not be my self-evident truth. If your central claim about the world and my central claim about the world do not agree, perhaps we are going to end up in conflict.

At this point, I want to pause to thank Mr. Roach. Tad, thank you both for your thoughtful introduction and for the invitation to share this time with the community today. I also want to thank all of you for the gift of your time and attention. My wife often reminds me that all-school gatherings are particularly high-stakes moments for a school.

Consider the person hours represented by having all 400 of us gathered in one place. So today I want to work with you on a question central to both your life here at SAS and to the human condition.

We arrive at that question through the why game, through identifying our most tightly held beliefs, and through discovering that others possess different core values. What is this question that I think important enough to ask us to spend 400 person hours on? The question is: How can we get along?

Oh crud, I hear you saying. I’ve heard this talk before. It was a Torah talk at your synagogue, or a talk from your middle school vice principal. We learn we are supposed to be nice to each other.

Now don’t get me wrong—I do think you should be nice to others—or be kind to others, which is a bit different. But that’s not the goal of my exploring this question with you today. Rather, in this talk I hope we can do three things. First, I want us to investigate ways we might identify some of our own and others’ core values. Second, I’ll ask us to reflect briefly on

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some of our own and others core values? Please raise your hand if you have written a goal statement in the last few weeks. Keep them up. Now raise your hand if you have discussed your hopes for 2019-2020 with a parent, a coach, a teacher, an advisor, or another trusted adult.

Raise your hand if you have written to your advisor about your aims for this year. Please raise your hand if you have written a philosophy of instruction. Finally, raise your hand if you have thought to yourself about what you want to accomplish at St. Andrew’s in the coming months. Thank you, you may put your hands down. So, it seems that many of us have considered our goals.

Indeed, even as you sit here you might have a to-do list running through your head linked to some of these goals.

Remember little purple Hannah with not enough purple? I’m going to ask you to play the same “why” game she played. As you recall, she began with the question of “Why do I need to wear clothes in public?” For you, you can begin with something on your to-do list, and ask why why a diversity of values might benefit us and our you need to do that. It could be the homework communities. Third, and most importantly, I’d that is on your mind or the lesson plans you need like us to ask how we may live together in peace to prepare. Let me offer an example involving Alex, as a school, or as a nation, or as a world, while a fictional first-year student at St. Andrew’s. Let’s say still taking seriously that we may disagree on Alex’s goal for tonight is to write a summary of the some fundamentals. scientific method. Why? Alex wants to have a solid Throughout, I will also use ideas that understanding of the method for the class meeting. Why? could only have come to our contemporary To build a strong base for the rest of the biology course. world through the efforts of scholars.

Why? To be able to use those skills in chemistry, physics, An urge to seek the ethical path is only and senior science classes. Why? To have the ability to effective if it is paired with a sharply think critically in college classes, in science and math, but honed critical faculty. To put this also in humanities and social sciences. Why? To contribute to another way: A good heart is essential, the welfare of humanity in a chosen profession, as a volunteer but it is also important to pair it with and as a voting citizen. Why? And here Alex pauses. Because it a good head. This may be one way of is good to contribute to the welfare of others. Why? It just is. It interpreting our school motto: Faith is inherently good, Alex thinks. Here, our fictional student has and Learning. At the beginning of come to a, perhaps the, core value Alex holds. our academic work together this So now, on your own, with the paper in front of you, I’ll ask year, I can think of no better way to you to please play the “why?” game until you get back to a point frame our efforts than to commit where you can’t ask another why. Don’t worry—you won’t have to them to a meaningful goal. share this with anyone else; it is for your own self-reflection and you As a base for this intellectual will use it again later in this talk. Start with any immediate, short exploration, let’s take it back term goal you have—let’s say something you want to accomplish to our experiences in the here within the next week at the most. Now, when you get to the end, and now. How can we identify you’ll know the final answer because it just loops around on itself.

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So for example, When Alex Israelis and Palestinian Muslims and Christians are in conflict. So if got to the “inherently good” positive morality was a shared goal of all these teachers, why were point in my example, some their students going out and fighting one another? Store that question might instead answer “because away—we are still in part one. When we get to part three we will Jesus commands us to love our return to the question of my interviews in Israel and the Palestinian neighbors as ourselves.” Why? Territories, and an idea about reducing conflict.

Well, maybe you could push it one Reach into your pocket and pull out your “chain of goals” more step and say something like paper. Now imagine what might be on other people’s papers. No “Because God is love,” but at this need to share them, but just imagine. The diversity of answers point I think—and I could be wrong, might be quite wide. It also might also have the potential to perhaps you can think of another bring you into conflict with other people. One person’s core step—you might just get to “Because values statement might be “obey God.” Depending on their God is.” Others might answer “Because view of God, that might imply that they think that their I want to live in the kind of world where neighbor is wrong for not obeying God. Another may think people act in this way” or “Because I that the person in front of them is ignorant for using a holy want my future children to be happy” and text like the Bible or Qur’an as the basis of their values. the next answer would be “Because I just do!” So let’s take three minutes to do this now. Go! OK, set that aside; I’ll ask you to come back and reflect on it more later. Now I want to tell you a story of my asking very different people these kinds of questions. A few years ago, thanks to St. Andrew’s, I lived in Jerusalem on my sabbatical. I was awarded a fellowship by the Fulbright Program supporting teachers who want to research some aspect of pedagogy, some part of teaching. As Mr. Roach mentioned, I teach religion and philosophy, and I absolutely love talking with other religion teachers. In Israel and the A third might think that both of the first two Palestinian Territories I interviewed many religion, people are being unnecessarily judgmental for philosophy, history and civics teachers—anyone who thinking this about each other, and the first taught about religion. My study was what is called two might think that the third is wishy-washy qualitative research, a mix of the scientific method you for their attitude. I would argue that such are learning in your math and science classes and the diversity is something to be celebrated, but at sociological analysis you are learning in your history, the same time, it is a major challenge. So we English and religion classes. I asked each teacher: why do have explored our first question: possible you teach religion? As you can imagine, this question led ways we can discover our own and others’ many of them to reflect on their core values. Jerusalem and core values. Let’s now move to our the surrounding lands are a particularly interesting place to second question: how might such values ask these questions because it is a major holy site for three of diversity benefit us and our world? the world’s religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the Can you think of a time when you modern era, it is also a place over which Jewish Israelis and have benefitted from encountering Muslim and Christian Palestinians struggle for control. someone who believed something The teachers’ answers were fascinating. Almost every teacher powerfully at odds with your said they wanted to help their students develop a good moral worldview? It could be about system, a positive morality. Whether they were teaching history politics, or gender, or religion, or in a non-religious Jewish school or Islam in a highly religious race, or class, or another aspect Muslim school, whether they were themselves a Christian priest, of life in which people invest a a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim imam, or an atheist, they almost all cited great deal of meaning. While “positive morality” as their most common and most important you think about that, I’ll tell reason for teaching. Positive morality. So they appear to share a you about one moment in my goal, if not core values. But remember, this is an area where Jewish own life. It was the beautiful

Can you think of a time when you have benefitted from encountering someone who believed something powerfully at odds with your worldview?

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summer of 1987 and having the areas of overlap would likely have been much greater. Today in just finished my first this room you may choose to identify as a girl, as trans, as Africanyear of college I decided American or Afro-Caribbean or African. You may describe to spend it… studying yourself a Latinx or Asian or Indian-American or Korean. You ancient Hebrew. When I may think of yourself as gay, bi, pan or questioning. You may be moved into my dorm room one of many flavors of Christian, or atheist or Jewish or agnostic for the summer, my roommate turned or Muslim or Buddhist. You may identify as a white cisgendered out to be a charismatic, sharp, funny Christian American boy, also, and you know what? Seriously, 20-year-old guy from L.A. who was on that is also awesome and worth celebrating. And if I didn’t his university’s varsity baseball team. I get to shout you out, know that I love you too. At the same thought of myself as a critically-minded time, our wider world is drawing closer together. Did your reformer, someone who would push great-grandparents grow up with people who spoke many against the status quo. My roommate different languages, traveled internationally to go to school, seemed the same. He and I ended up in or who heard regularly about the values and actions of great conversations ragging on the president those around the world? It is possible but less likely than at the time, Ronald Reagan. For the old it is of your generation. This identity diversity is leading folks in the room, that was the summer of the us to greater values diversity in some ways, and that is Iran-Contra hearings. Since we were studying exciting and enriching. the language of the Bible, my roommate So we have explored our first question: possible also laughed about what we saw as some of ways we can discover our own and others’ core values. the more extreme passages—as when God is We have investigated our second question: how might portrayed as commanding the Israelites to kill such values diversity benefit us and our world? Now everyone in a city they have just taken over. Yikes! we move on to our third question: how may we live Since I knew some things about my roommate, I together in peace as a school, or as a nation, or as naturally inferred the rest. I was therefore taken a world, while still taking seriously that we may aback when he told me that a major reason he was disagree on some fundamentals? In responding to studying Hebrew was his interest in becoming a this question, I’ll ask us to consider three possible Catholic priest. Now I had been raised Catholic, and proposals for responding to the potential for the priests I had known growing up were nothing like conflict. this guy. They were mostly old, serious and seemed Remember the puzzle raised by my part of the power structure, not people who would interviews of religion teachers in Israel and the critique it. Also, and most importantly to my 18-yearPalestinian Territories? Many teachers sought old self, they had taken a vow of celibacy. Wait a second! above all to teach positive morality, but their This guy was going to take a vow of obedience to one students were also the very people on the of the oldest hierarchies in the world, and was going to front lines of a deep-seated conflict. Well, I swear never to date again? Crazytown! Crazytown, by the noted something else about their teaching way, is the formal academic way of expressing that one’s practices: very few of these teachers taught core values system is in conflict with another person’s. Well, about religions other than their own.

I’d like to say I got to know him extremely well, we had They would talk enthusiastically about many heart-to-heart conversations, and we are still friends teaching the values of Islam, or Judaism, today. Nah—I don’t think I was that brave or focused at that or Christianity. When I asked whether time in my life. But the encounter did benefit me by reminding they taught about other religions, they me that not everyone who belongs to a certain faith or who frequently explained that that was done has made certain commitments shares all the typical views of in another class. For example, a Jewish others of that faith. religion teacher would say that Islam Not only can we benefit individually from belief diversity, was taught in history class. But the our communities can gain as well. Consider our own community Jewish history teacher would tell me of St. Andrew’s. As we can see from examining our beautiful, that Islam was taught in religion evocative, and revealing mural in the Dining Hall, at its founding class. That leads me to explore our the St. Andrew’s student body was entirely white and male, and first possible response to values assumed to be entirely Christian, heterosexual, and cisgendered. diversity: to learn about the other.

This is not to say there would not have been differences in people’s Melinda Gates offers one personal goals and values in the SAS community of the 1930s, but powerful model of learning about

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the other. Gates is the co-founder, along with her husband Microsoft So the Gates Foundation, led founder Bill Gates, of the world’s largest private foundation. It seeks

by Melinda Gates, began to fund to improve the health of people across the globe. In her book The work supporting contraceptives for Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, women. Gates uses learning from Gates describes the value of learning about others using a wide many different sources to hone her range of tools. The breadth of her curiosity and the sources of understanding of the values of the her information are remarkable. When discovering new people other. She engages both with broad and their lives, she pursues multiple lines of investigation, from data and with personal testimony to face-to-face conversations to big data analysis, from surveys determine where best to put her time to medical studies, and from population graphs to reading and her energy, and to see the world literature. With this voracious openness to different modes from a different perspective. I would of knowledge, Gates reaches out to learn from people vastly argue that this understanding reduces the different from herself. What she has learned has helped her chance for intercultural conflict. more effectively serve others, or as Mr. Hutchinson speaks Notice also how Gates’ abilities of it in our own community service efforts, to “come to undertake this work can be derived alongside” of others. For example, Gates read studies directly from the skills we are learning in about the causes of early death around the world, and the St. Andrew’s classroom. As a software discovered that lack of vaccines was likely the place engineer, she uses her mathematical literacy where intervention could have the most powerful impact. to understand big data and to critically So she and her foundation committed themselves to spreading those vaccines. She then began a practice of going on listening tours several times every year to talk with people who would be receiving these vaccines.

In the words of legal activist Bryan Stevenson, Gates seeks to “get proximate.” Here Gates picks up the story:

how may we live together in peace as a school, or as a nation, or as a world, while still taking seriously that we may disagree on some fundamentals?

“I was out in the field talking about vaccines, and they were constantly asking me for birth control. In rural Africa, the predominant thing that they get is a shot every three months. It’s painful and intramuscular, but it’s covert so consume and evaluate statistics. She analyzes studies their husbands don’t know about it. They from sub-disciplines of biology and chemistry to would say, ‘You’re asking me about shots determine where the most effective interventions can for my children. I know about those, I care be placed. She learns about people’s cultures as we about them, and they’re in stock. But what seek to in history and religion. She listens and interprets about my shot? I go to that clinic, I walk people’s stories as we do in our literature classes. Like 10 kilometers, make up an excuse to leave Melinda Gates, we can—and should—use every method my field, take my babies…’ It was a rallying of inquiry available to us to learn about others. We can cry. I looked at the data, and I knew that use numbers, use words, and understand that we don’t contraceptives were in stock, but not the need to choose between them. There is no such thing as type that women were telling me that they “not a math person” or “not an English student.” As we wanted. That’s what happens when you commit ourselves to our courses this year, we can envision listen. I kept wanting to turn away, to empowering ourselves to make this first move, to learn about say, ‘No, let’s keep working on [only] others in all different ways to reduce conflict. vaccines.’ But eventually as I started The next response I want to propose is to seek out common to learn the history of this field— ground. The best politicians practice this habit. They battle each and how global health has backed other on various topics, but they also reach out to find areas on away from contraceptives—I knew which they can collaborate. In the United States, Democrats and someone had to take it on. I couldn’t Republicans have sometimes come together to make significant find that person. I kept looking for progress. A Senator from Delaware, Chris Coons, has a strong them. And I realized I had to step record of this kind of work. Recently he co-sponsored a bill with up and do it.”

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a Republican colleague to encourage wealthy colleges to give more peacefully together despite deep scholarships to students in need. This isn’t paying for college for differences. We can strive to all, as some on the left want, and nor is it the pure free market develop and to practice empathy. as some of the right would argue for. And indeed Coons and In his book The War for Kindness: the Republican Senator likely disagree on many core issues.

Building Empathy in a Fractured But they decided they both wanted better access to college for World, psychology and neuroscience underserved students and they worked to make it happen. professor Jamil Zaki writes about This same willingness to set aside our conflicting motivations ways we can develop the imaginative to make pragmatic progress is something you might see on a ability to place ourselves in the shoes sports team. You are each going all-out to win, but the reasons of others. His studies show fascinating could be very different. Maybe one of you really wants to connections and contradictions. For be recruited to college, another wants to look good to that example, Zaki and his colleagues firstperson you want to impress, another wants to be a great year acting students develop higher levels captain, another wants to avoid the coach’s wrath, another of empathy over the time of their course simply wants to win, etc. To succeed together you don’t compared to a control group of students actually need to dig down to your core reasons for being who did not take drama. In another case, those who read more novels showed greater concern for others than those who read less fiction. Let me ask you—why do you think this might be? Why might taking a drama class, or reading a novel, increase your level of concern for others?

A third experiment is interesting, and it reveals ways in which empathy can both hurt and help our ability to reach out to others. It turns out that when we are reminded of our affiliation with a group, we show greater compassion to members of our group but less to those outside of our group. This last one is a compelling story. A lab in London recruited rabid fans of the UK soccer team Manchester United. For one group, they had them write about why they loved Man United. Then they sent them to another building, telling them to hurry. on the team. So our second of three approaches Along the way the experimenters had them encounter is to seek our practical common ground and one of three actors: one wearing a Liverpool jersey, at set aside our deeper disagreements for the the time the most hated rivals of Man United, or one moment. wearing a Man United jersey, or one wearing a blank At St. Andrew’s we also do this in our shirt. These actors each pretended to twist their ankle academic life. We seek not to abandon our and writhe in pain. Having been reminded of their love differences at the classroom door, but to be for Man United, the participants offered to help the Man willing to engage despite those differences.

United jersey-wearer more than the blank jersey-wearer, We even ask ourselves to suspend an and helped the actor in the Liverpool jersey less often. assumption of what someone is going Then the London lab repeated the experiment, but to say. When we listen to the argument with one significant change. Instead of asking a group of someone around the St. Andrew’s table Manchester United fans to write about their love of their own is presenting, we listen openly and team, they asked them to write about what made soccer such a prepare ourselves to rethink our own beautiful game. Prompted in this way, this second group helped position at least in that moment and people in either soccer jersey at the same high rate, and at a for the purposes of that class. What higher rate than they helped the one in the blank jersey. Think we do in class matters, because it about this study for a second. What do you think would have prepares us for serving the common happened if the participants had been asked to write about why good beyond the classroom. they loved humanity? Perhaps then the number of Man U fans that I want to draw our attention stopped to help the injured would have risen, no matter what color to one final approach to living

When we listen to the argument someone around the St. Andrew’s table is presenting, we listen openly and prepare ourselves to rethink our own position at least in that moment and for the purposes of that class.

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the shirt of those seeming to be in pain. Through deliberate practice, we can strengthen our empathy for others. Whether it is through attentive listening, reading novels, taking drama class, or reminding ourselves of our identification with others, we can increase our ability to feel along with those who have some different core values than we do.

Notice how the responses of learning, seeking common ground, and developing empathy push beyond generalized admonitions to “be kind” or “do the right thing.” They are specific, testable, and falsifiable or verifiable. They are products of careful study. Notice also that in your classes you are building the skills to design and critique such experiments. While we may How should we approach each other in a way that find better and more precise ways in the future, allows these diversities in moral commitments to be a I would argue that at the moment these are source of growth and not of conflict? I have sought some of our best approaches to helping people to explore in this talk a series of approaches. We of differing beliefs get along. can learn as much as we can about others and the I am an optimist. I have been lucky enough to world, using our numerical, scientific, narrative have spent time in a variety of different cultures, and artistic approaches to do so. We can seek some of which have recently emerged from conflict common ground, focusing more on our shared and some of which descended into conflict not long aims than those that divide us. Finally, we can after I left. So I have seen societies clash frequently consciously develop our empathy, seeking to and people suffer as a result. I have, however, also inhabit the worldviews of those different from studied history. To spend time listening to the voices of us. people from ancient Persia, or from medieval Europe, These are just a few possibilities, and I am or from the early United States, is I would argue to hear sure that as a community we can develop that suffering from violence was even more common in even more ideas. Specifically I invite any of the past than it is now. As cognitive psychologist Steven you who discuss this question further to a Pinker argues, “As one becomes aware of the decline chat with cookies and milk this Tuesday, of violence, the world begins to look different. The past September 10 in the Head of School’s seems less innocent; the present less sinister.” To say this common room. But more broadly I look another way, in many senses I would argue we are living in forward to continuing this conversation the most hopeful time in human history, a time in which it is with you throughout the year. I realistic to envision larger and larger groups of people living encourage all of us to continue to ask in peace while maintaining sharply different values systems. challenging questions in our classes, And while greater peace and harmony may be the direction like little purple Hannah. How do of history, how quickly we progress along that path will affect you think we can identify our core the life fulfillment of billions of people, including ourselves. values? How can we best benefit Indeed, given the massive collective challenge of climate change, from the diversity of those values? accelerating the project of productive collaboration may be Most importantly, how can we essential to our future. take seriously that we disagree on So we begin our academic journey for the year. Throughout some fundamentals, and still live this talk, I hope you have heard ways in which the scholars, together in peace? Thank you. J intellectuals, and practitioners we have encountered have used the very information and skills you are gathering at St. Andrew’s to take You can also watch or listen to on this essential question. We live in a diverse community, one in Terence’s talk at standrews-de. which our core motivations will have both similarities and differences. org/livestream.

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Teacher, Writer, and Podcaster Steven Dean ’90 Is Here To Share His Passion…. For Tax Law

BY ANNIE ROACH ’18 If you asked Steven Dean ’90, freshly minted Williams College graduate in 1994, to identify his dream job, he would have given you one answer: “Not a lawyer.” His perception of lawyers was mostly based on what he’d seen on TV, and he was completely uninterested. At Williams, Dean had majored in political economy, which explores the ways in which “politics and economics interact in the formation of public policy” (according to the Williams College website), and he had set his sights on a career in business or economics. After a one-year stint working for the National Economic Research Associates, he took a job as a transfer pricing research assistant at the large accounting firm KPMG—a position that turned out to be integral in shaping the rest of his life. At KPMG, he realized that the firm’s economists were simply doing the math for the firm’s lawyers, and the lawyers were doing the intellectual work that most interested Dean. He wanted to do the work the lawyers were doing, and soon, he found himself doing exactly what he once said he would never

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do—applying to law school. It was a decision that turned out to serve him well.

Dean ended up at St. Andrew’s almost by chance. He grew up in the Bahamas, where his mother was a high school guidance counselor. She ran an annual college fair, and through that work met a representative from Mount Holyoke whose children had attended St. Andrew’s. The way the woman talked about St. Andrew’s—enthusiastic, passionate—intrigued Dean and his mother, so they flew up and visited the school. The rest is history. Thanks to that woman, whose name Dean does not remember today, he was able to have a St. Andrew’s experience that he still praises, nearly three decades later.

He describes the teachers at St. Andrew’s as “extraordinary,” explaining that they opened his eyes to the power of clear thinking and writing, which went on to fundamentally inform his career. “The extent to which [my St. Andrew’s education influenced my work] is hilarious,” he says. “I would not have gone to Williams had I not

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gone to St. Andrew’s. And honestly, that’s where it all started. I wouldn’t be doing any of what I’m doing now if I hadn’t gotten the training in critical thinking and gotten the bug for writing and thinking that I got at St. Andrew’s.” He also cites the benefits of living with, getting to know, and learning from peers from all over the world, and from a variety of backgrounds, as another highlight of his time at St. Andrew’s. His time at the school coincided with the filming of Dead Poets Society, and he was lucky enough to witness Robin Williams performing stand-up comedy in the Forbes Theatre one evening.

Today, Dean is a tenured professor at Brooklyn Law School, but is currently on leave from that institution while he works in various capacities at NYU Law School, where he wears a number of hats. His first role is Faculty Director, leading NYU Law’s Graduate Tax Program, which allows lawyers from around the world to pursue a second, specialized law degree specifically in tax. Dean also serves as Professor of Tax Law, and in that role teaches a variety of tax law classes and shares his enthusiasm for the law with his students. His passion for the courses he teaches is palpable— he notes with a laugh that he enjoys teaching corporate tax law to an “almost unseemly degree.”

His work as a professor also enables him to write constantly, an element of his career that is deeply important to him. “When I’m not teaching, I’m often working on a writing project,” he says.

He writes about both tax law and social enterprise, and co-wrote a book with a Brooklyn Law School colleague in 2017 entitled Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit and Capital Markets (Oxford University Press), which became a number-one new release on Amazon when it was published.

A current work in progress is a book that takes a deep dive into what Dean and his co-author call “for-profit philanthropy” and will focus on the changing nature of philanthropy in the United States.

He cites the flux of our social and political environment as one of his motivations to both teach and write. “One of the things that I try to do, both on the tax law side and the social enterprise law side, is to engage with trends that are unfolding now, and how history informs [those trends],” Dean says. “For example, there’s a lot of attention being paid to multinational corporations not paying a lot of tax. The question that keeps coming up is: how can it be that a company worth billions owes the U.S. Treasury nothing? I don’t think we should dodge that question. I think we should tackle that kind of question head on, and I think we owe people answers.”

As Faculty Director of the Graduate Tax Program at NYU Law—a title he describes as a “mouthful”—Dean’s work involves managing the oldest and one of the largest graduate tax law programs in the country and possibly the world.

Dean oversees the curriculum, hires adjuncts, is involved in admissions, and works with all of the program’s students. “The program was founded in 1945, which was long before the school took tax law seriously,” Dean explains. “So NYU gained ‘first mover advantage’ and ultimately became synonymous in the legal world with tax law. The NYU Law Graduate Tax Program is a big part of the tax law community.”

He is unable to choose a favorite part of his work, suggesting that nearly all aspects of it are exciting to him. “I love the classroom, I love teaching, I love writing,” he says. “I love helping other people do their work. I would say my favorite

I love the classroom, I love teaching, I love writing. I love helping other people do their work. I would say my favorite part of my work is whatever I’m doing in that moment. part of my work is whatever I’m doing in that moment.” He does list grading as his least favorite aspect of the job, emphatically stating, “Grading is truly horrible; everything else is wonderful.”

In what exists of his remaining spare time, Dean has been working on launching a podcast about tax law, and started recording interviews with tax lawyers and tax scholars earlier this year. “It’s really just a chance to show those people who are not tax academics, and maybe not even tax lawyers yet, why people are so passionate about tax law,” Dean says. “It’s really not obvious to anyone why tax law would be interesting. But I want to expose people out there in the wider world to the ideas and the issues and the people that make tax law interesting and really bring it to life.”

And when Dean is not working, you can probably find him baking. “In my office now I have some biscotti I made,” he says. “Baking is what I spend most of my time doing, other than my work and my family.” J

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There’s Always More to Do & Learn Jeff Wieland ’01 on his Work at Facebook

by Annie Roach ’18

Expanding Accessibility at Facebook

AN INTERVIEW WITH FACEBOOK’S DIRECTOR OF ACCESSIBILITY JEFF WIELAND ’01 For his first job out of college, Jeff Wieland ’01 took a position at a young and fast-growing company called Facebook. Fifteen years later, Jeff is still with the company, and has witnessed its meteoric growth alongside the trajectory of his own career.

His first responsibility at Facebook was co-writing the website’s help pages (this would be prior to the existence of the iPhone or anything known as an “app”). Today, he is Facebook’s Director of Accessibility—a team that he pitched and founded for the company—and in that role oversees Facebook’s efforts to ensure its products are usable by people with disabilities. We sat down with Jeff earlier this year to talk about this work and his path from St. Andrew’s to social media’s global headquarters.

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As the Director of Accessibility at Facebook, what exactly does your job entail? What do you do on a day-to-day basis?

Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone in the world and unlock the power of community.

According to the World Health Organization, there are over a billion people on the planet with some form of a disability, so creating accessible products is critical to achieving our company mission. My job involves working with our team of engineers, program managers, designers, researchers, and more to make sure we’re building the right things to create inclusive products and to set the company strategy for how to make accessibility a part of everyone’s job.

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What are some previous experiences you’ve had, professionally or otherwise, that are influencing the work you do today?

Before I was a researcher, I was in customer support, working on everything from privacy and abuse, to product bugs, to writing FAQs for the Facebook help center. I even briefly worked as a product manager on our integrity team, making sure that friend connections on Facebook mapped to the real world. That diversity of experiences made it easier for me to pitch starting the accessibility team, because I knew how the company approached both operational challenges as well as product development.

Has your St. Andrew’s education informed the way you approach your job? If so, in what way?

From my time at St. Andrew’s, there are two things that stuck with me. The first is the daily ambition of being better than yesterday. We have a saying at Facebook that “this journey is 1% finished” and that’s a sentiment I felt in high school as well. There’s always more to do and learn. Secondly, I left St. Andrew’s knowing that I wanted to work in a space that made people’s lives better. In college I thought this might be the medical field or teaching, but I fell into the tech industry and have been really happy with that serendipitous path.

What do you find most rewarding about your work?

I find two big rewards in my work today. The first is bringing new products to life that people get

excited about, like our use of object recognition to describe images to people with vision loss.

I love launching a new feature that delights someone and unlocks something they’ve wanted to be able to do. The second big reward is helping my employees achieve their goals and personal growth targets.

My favorite part of my day-to-day work is the daily collaboration with passionate and ambitious colleagues. Every year I feel like I learn more than the last because my coworkers are amazing and we are constantly navigating new and fascinating challenges together.

What advice do you have for young people who might be interested in pursuing a career in technology or accessibility?

More and more companies are starting to focus on accessibility earlier on in the product development process—which means that there are more jobs popping up in this space. This has really been ramping up over the past half decade,

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Your team works on helping the company build products for people with disabilities. How did you become interested in this kind of work?

I first discovered the field of accessibility when I was a researcher on Facebook’s design team, studying and seeking answers to elusive questions about how people use technology. The more I learned, the more I became fascinated.

Accessibility is mediated by many different things—how the technology is built; whether someone is using assistive technology (like a switch device for someone with limited motor control); the platforms the technologies are built on, like iOS or Android. It touches everything, and I really liked that complexity. I also wanted to work on something that, maybe if only in some small way, might make a positive difference in people's lives. Giving people of all abilities a platform to tell their story scratched that itch.

which is fantastic! Unlike me, if you want to work in tech accessibility, your best bet is to pursue a degree in computer science, design, or humancomputer interaction.

One last piece of advice: don’t be afraid of changing course in your career. I’ve had four different roles in the past 12 years, and I don’t regret any of them. Each has made me a more well-rounded contributor and helped me to better identify what I enjoy doing most. J

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Class notes have been removed from the online version of the Magazine in order to protect the privacy of our alums.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED ALUMNI

Gay Browne ’78’s new book, Living with a Green Heart: How to Keep Your Body, Your Home, and the Planet Healthy in a Toxic World, was published by Citadel in March. Gay is the world’s first and only personal environmental therapist and is the founder of Greenopia, a company dedicated to achieving personal and community environmental health through small and large habit and behavioral adjustments.

T.C. McCarthy ’88’s latest sci-fi novel, Tyger Burning, was published by Baen Books in July. “Humanity had just begun its first tentative steps towards conquering the Solar System when the aliens came and took it all away,” begins the book’s blurb.

“Then they disappeared, leaving only wreckage in their wake…”

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Ann Cutter Patel ’86 self-published

Experiential Peacebuilding, a book that shares resources, practices and activities in peacebuilding that Ana has developed over a decade of work at the Outward Bound Center for Peacebuilding. She is excited to share this book with the greater peace and outdoor leadership communities— and St. Andrew’s.

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Imagining the “Science Temple” by

BILL AMOS

The single great event in the history of science at St. Andrew’s was construction of the science building, known for a while as the “science temple” and after 1984 as Amos Hall.

As early as 1956 the Board of Trustees recognized the need for a science building, not just as an end in itself, but also to augment the established program. Several times the trustees projected its planning and construction, but the expense was always too great or other projects, such as the new gym-field house, had higher priority. In 1962, Bob Colburn, Webb Reyner, and I embarked upon a two-year study, inspecting school and college facilities all over the East and consulting peers at Loomis, Andover, and Goucher College. In November 1964, apparently sensing a juggernaut in motion, our somewhat bewildered colleagues gave us approval to proceed. Next I presented our revised plan—by now a small book—to the Board of Trustees. After the Building Committee deliberated, approved, and appointed an architect, Fred Entwistle of Pope, Kruse and McCune in Wilmington, Henry Belin duPont had DuPont engineers who specialized in laboratory design review both our departmental plans and those of the architect and architectural engineer, William Carew.

The new building was initially slated to be in the gully between Trapnell Alumni House and Rally Point (now known as the grass dock), to be connected to the new dormitory (constructed at the same time) by a covered passageway. It was to have opened directly onto the lake with a biology dock, forming a square with a central glassed-in courtyard enclosing trees already in place. The design proved too expensive and too far removed from student traffic routes. The final location, at the head of the heavily forested and thicketed boathouse gully, allowed a simpler, more economical construction in the direct path of students between the gymnasium and the main building. In bad weather, the long corridor serves as a protected thoroughfare.

At a cost of one million dollars, an enormous rectangular shell arose. Despite its many rooms and complete facilities, the “Temple,” as those in the humanities promptly dubbed it, is a lean and flexible building. Few of its internal partitions are bearing walls; most can be shifted as need arises and objectives FROM THE DAY OF ITS change.

OCCUPANCY, THE IMPRESSIVE From the day of its occupancy, the impressive new building encouraged prospective students to apply for NEW BUILDING ENCOURAGED admission. It also affected those who worked in the PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS TO spacious laboratories, classrooms, science library, and APPLY FOR ADMISSION. research labs. “One reason I never pursued the lab sciences at Princeton was that I peaked at SAS,” John Seabrook (1976) writes. “Princeton facilities weren’t impoverished, still I thought, ‘Hey, compared to SAS this is nothing.’”

Excerpted from A Time to Remember: A Biography of St. Andrew’s School from the 1950s to the 1980s written by legendary biology teacher Bill Amos. Amos was a member of the St. Andrew’s faculty from 1947 to 1984. In 1962, together with Webb Reyner and Bob Colburn, Amos set out to create a top-notch, stand alone campus science facility, now known as Amos Hall. In A Time to Remember, he reflects on this journey.

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