Island School Alumni Class Notes 2014

Our alumni have gone on to accomplish pretty amazing things since their Island School journey. Scroll down to read about what the past 15 years of IS students have been up to lately. A huge thank you to all the Class Agents for collecting and compiling all of these impressive updates. If you would like to send in your update or are interested in becoming a Class Agent, email alumnI@islandschool.org

SPRING 1999

Class Agent: Joshua Lichtman (If you are interested in helping Joshua out with his Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

FALL 1999

Class Agent: Lee Taylor (If you are interested in helping Lee out with his Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

Greetings Fall ’99 classmates. It’s shockingly been 15 years since we were on-island, and based on the updates that came in it sounds like everyone seems to be off doing great things in life! On to the specifics… Kempie Blythe continues her work as an international experiential educator leading semester and summer programs abroad for gap-year students (primarily in Morocco, Jordan, West Africa, and North India). She wrote her update from South Arica where she was winding down her most recent trip and his headed back to the bay area until her next adventure begins. Anthea Dexter-Cooper is living in Vermont and has apparently decided that morning exercise is for wimps… as she will be competing in a 50 mile trail race in September. Stephanie Falconi continues to find her way underwater as she just returned from a snorkeling trip to the keys with her boyfriend and family. In addition to her duties as an Island School board member, Francesca Forrestal is ploughing through her PhD in Marine Biology and Fisheries, and is otherwise enjoying the good life in Miami with her husband Ian – who apparently has caught the IS bug and is visiting this winter in order to help set up a coral nursery at the Cape Eleuthera Institute. Alyssa Maloney continues to make sure the US military functions properly as an engineering consultant based in Norfolk, VA. Katie Miller Willie is loving the creativity in her new role as the marketing director of her family business, LockNet – and is living in Kentucky with her husband and 2 ½ year old daughter, Sarah. Shawn Parell wrote her update from an airplane while flying back from leading a yoga and trekking retreat in Chapada Diamantina in Brazil. She lives in Santa Fe, NM with her husband, Russell. Molly Pickall has been staying in close touch with her IS classmates, making the trek to California for my wedding and is rumored to be enrolled in Shawn’s upcoming yoga retreat in northern New Mexico. Julia Rogawski is living in New York City, where she practices law. Julia also shares my amazement that it’s been 15 years: “15 years – that is nuts! Where has all the time gone?” As many of you have probably already noticed from Island School emails, Barrett Summerlin and Thatcher Spring have joined forces to start a new company – Gear Launch. The new enterprise helps develop and sell custom apparel, and you may have noticed they are the source of the Island School’s new 15 year t-shirts! Thatcher and Barrett are both based in San Francisco. James Miles Fisher is engaged to be married to Lucette Blodgett this June in Beverly Hills, California. Jon Cotton F’99 is a Groomsman. The couple met two years ago after being introduced by a mutual friend. Miles proposed while the two were living in New York – he was shooting a TV show for Comedy Central and she was working for HuffPost. The couple reside in Brentwood, CA. Back in New York, Corydon Wagner is still kicking a** and taking names in the film business having recently shot commercials for Microsoft and Sony and is signing clients from LA to Paris! Daria Szelag worked as a pediatric nurse for 6 years in Tucson, AZ. This weekend she is graduating with her Masters of Science in Nursing from the University of Arizona and will soon be a certified Pediatric Nurse Practitioner. Daria got married in December 2012 and had a baby boy last September. As for Lee Taylor (please forgive the 3rd person reference), I’m living in Boston with my wife, Andrea, and am preparing for the new addition to our family. We’re expecting our first in September, and as soon as we know the sex I’ll be able to complete his/her Island School application… All the best to everyone from Fall ’99, and give me a shout when you come through Boston (301.537.2008). – Lee

SPRING 2000

Class Agent: Monique Johnson (If you are interested in helping Monique out with her Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

Jimmy Patrick is enjoying the family life. Monique Johnson laughing loudly and stepping on the stars. Jaime Neely is keeping it cool in aviator sunglasses. Mike Brown is overjoyed as he prepare a new home for his baby girl coming in September. Louise Kiefer is dancing in the raindrops. Suzy Newbery is working hard, writing, and doing some teaching. Ryan Eavey is working at the Santa Monica bike taxi. Andy Monk is selling the keys to success. Christie Roberts is enjoying life and playing flag football. Ellie Rogers is travelling the globe while riding motorcycles. Emily Cummings is inventing the wheel of life. Susan Lintern is enjoying the married life. HT Rice is thinking real hard about how to deliver the good news. Dan Cambria… gone fishing. Tyler Gambal is trekking the globe. Lizzie Rosenberg is embracing life one day at a time. Samantha Gladis is continuing to be fabulous in the big city of NYC. Sarah Swett is jumping on the moon and chasing rainbows. Mary Assini is making a difference. Chloe Guimond is enjoying the married life. Abby Lowell is getting married soon. Abby Jenkins is exploring mountains and capturing nature. Sarah Lucas is leading the youth of tomorrow. Meg O’Sullivan is healing hearts. Alta Buden is conquering the museum business. Katie Stratton is touching hearts and minds. Javier Piggee is inspiring young minds. Glendaly Munoz is dancing in the rain. Elizabeth Tocci is performing medical miracles. Sally Yazwinski is tending the fields of dreams.

FALL 2000

Class Agent: Richard Woodhull (If you are interested in helping Richard out with his Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

SPRING 2001

Class Agent: Nina Kumar (If you are interested in helping Nina out with her Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

FALL 2001

Class Agents: Meg Bunn, Mary Coleman Farrell

Meg Bunn is still living in NYC and recently moved to the Upper Eastside. She continues to work at JPM private bank. For the past two years, she has been part of The Philanthropy Centre, which provides private clients and their families with innovative advice, thought leadership and collaborative opportunities. Meg is still in touch with Mary and the two met up for brunch a few weeks ago! Sofie Malinowski just started a new job at American Prairie Reserve (APR) in Bozeman, MT. APR’s mission is to create and manage a prairie-based wildlife reserve that, when combined with public lands already devoted to wildlife, will protect a unique natural habitat, provide lasting economic benefits and improve public access to and enjoyment of the prairie landscape. When fully assembled it will be the largest wildlife reserve in the lower 48 states. APR hired Sofie as the new Development Manager. There are two other IS alumnae that she sees in Bozeman – Annie Owen and Molly Pickall. Sofie also recently got engaged and is getting married June 20, 2015. Mary Coleman Farrell lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Stuart, her 15 month old, Thomas, and her dog, Pete. She is a stay at home mom and spends her time hanging out with her family and volunteering with The Junior League of Washington, Lawrenceville School, University of Virginia, and Daughters of the American Revolution. Mary recently saw fellow Fall ’01 classmate Meg Bunn in NYC! Charlotte Rand has been running a program based out of the University of Connecticut for the last three years that connects high school students with specialized training and environmental monitoring projects in their community. She will be starting at Vermont Law School in the Fall and plan to study Environmental Law. Alex Proelss still working at Sperry Top-Sider as the Senior Marketing Brand Manager. It’s been an amazing 7 years growing a basic boat shoe company into a global performance and lifestyle brand. In the bit of time off she is taking advantage of travel opportunities – a week in Amsterdam, skiing in Park City, and volunteering at beach cleanups on the east and west coast. Alex is living in Boston and also recently became an aunt.

SPRING 2002

Class Agent: None–please contact alumni@islandschool.org if you are interested!

FALL 2002

Class Agents: Mike Cortina, Skyler Hopkins, Sara Rodell

Horatio Smith is still in the party planning business. He has his own company and does wedding and parties. He tries to make his way to The Island School at least 2 times a year and says the place looks awesome! Taylor Lalemand changed jobs in December. She was working for a non-profit based in Boston, the Consortium for Energy Efficiency, which works with utility energy efficiency and demand response programs to centralize the purchasing power of utilities to help drive the development of high efficiency products and the implementation of highly efficient practices across North America. (A good example of this would be the rebate programs for high efficiency refrigerators that some utilities and department stores provide.) Now, Taylor is still doing similar work with utilities and the grid, but for a company called EnerNOC. She’s finally not working such crazy hours, and life is pretty sweet. She had a great winter snowboarding in Maine and Vermont whenever she could escape the city to get to the mountains. Taylor is really hoping to go back to Eleuthera, after all these years. Alex Deblois is still living in Boston. He works for a public affairs firm called VOX Global located in DC. He primarily works on the corporate responsibility and sustainability team, working with clients on energy, supply chain, and fleet/transportation programs. Lucy Zimmerman is living in Cleveland finishing up her MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. She works part-time at the Cleveland Museum of Art as a curatorial research assistant in modern European art. They can’t hire Lucy full time just yet so she also works as a private chef for clients who have dietary restrictions to help pay the bills. Lucy reports that overall life is good, and if anyone finds themselves in the Midwest, to give her a holler! Not a day goes by that Jess Blackwell doesn’t think about her amazing time at Island School. After IS, Jess went off to film school at USC and had a pretty awesome time. She worked as an editor for a couple years after before deciding that she didn’t enjoy the LA lifestyle and missed the seasons and beauty of the East Coast. Jess is back in Princeton now photographing multimillion dollar homes for Sotheby’s and learning how to design and build furniture on the side. Once Jess’s boyfriend finishes his Ph.D., the two of them will be moving somewhere and the excitement of having the world so open gets the best of her sometimes! Anyone have any suggestions for interesting cities to look into? Preferably near a coast so Jess can get back to diving and kayaking. Charlie Miller works for a small local mutual savings bank as a loan officer in Portland, Maine. He has been back in Maine for about 2 years now and loves every minute of it. Charlie has caught the golf bug in the past few years and recently joined a local club. If anyone needs an eating and drinking tour of the city you know who to call! Kristy Bullard has a degree in General and Special Education and has been teaching for about 5 years now at one of the primary schools in New Providence, Bahamas. She was a stingray diver at Blue Lagoon Island for a year but she really loves teaching and even more she loves her summers off. Kristy actually lived and taught in Eleuthera for a few years and most recently in Abaco and she is moving to another island in the new school year. She loves the Family Islands of The Bahamas. There is nothing compared to being surrounded by the most beautiful and secluded beaches in the world. Kristy gets to see Horatio and Dane from time to time. She also saw Vicky a few times when she made Nassau trips. Life is great otherwise and she actually has been to Island School with some friends and camped out on the beach. Everton Joseph graduated from the College of the Bahamas, then went on to get his Masters of Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Buffalo. He graduated at the height of the recession and so he switched I to food science. He probably had a hand in any Kellogg’s fruit bars you may have eaten in the last 2 years. Now, Everton calls Richmond VA home! He’s still working in food science but started an ecological landscape design company that specializes in ecologically friendly and sustainable designs that matches the clients’ needs and wants. It would be great to get back to Eleuthera and do some diving there! Laura Fleck is still living in Marblehead, MA, but did finally finish grad school in October. She started working as a Postdoctoral Fellow for a diagnostic company in Beverly, MA in March. I work on optimizing and developing new diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. Laura also teaches night classes for the College of Professional Studies at Northeastern to help pay the bills. As far as other life events go, she is getting married in October, so 2014 has turned into a very busy but exciting year! Laura had the pleasure of meeting up with Mike and Taylor at the Island School reunion in Boston in January 2013, but have otherwise admits she has been terrible at keeping in touch and thinks a reunion in Eleuthera sounds amazing! Michael Sewell graduated from Georgia Tech in 2009 with a Mechanical Engineering degree and immediately moved to Alaska for an engineering job in the oil and gas industry. He lived in Anchorage for 3.5 years living the whole Alaska lifestyle with camping, fishing, hunting, skiing, snowmobiling, rafting, etc. For the last 3+ years he has been working an engineering job in Prudhoe Bay, AK on a 2 week on, 2 week off rotational schedule that has allowed him to do tons of traveling during his time off. Some of the highlights of his travels are Italy (twice), London Olympics, India, Hawaii (5 times), Belize, Mexico (twice), and multiple trips all over the lower 48. Last July Michael got burned out with traveling and picked up and moved to Denver. The drive from Alaska to Colorado was awesome–he highly recommends it! He still works in Alaska on the rotational schedule, but I spends his time off hanging out in Colorado enjoying all the things he did in Alaska but with sunshine and warmth. Alessandra Echeverria graduated from Trinity College in 2008 and joined the Teach For America New York 2008 corps. She taught elementary school for 3 years, got her masters in teaching, and then joined Teach For America staff full-time. She has had a number of different roles, but for the past 2 years Alessandra has been on their New Site Development team helping TFA to build relationships in communities and launch new regions. Her specialty is teacher certification. She travels quite a bit and actually has a final interview (fingers crossed) next week to take a on a new role that would allow her to focus on training and developing other TFA staff in her areas of expertise. Alessandra has lived in New York since she graduated college but is moving to Atlanta on May 31. Sara Rodell is living in Austin, came back there from NYC 2 years ago to try her hand at a start up. So far it has been a pretty interesting ride, lots of highs and lows. Sara has always been focused on gifting. At first she built an app to make it easy to treat someone to lunch, coffee or a drink but changed after it became too onerous to have to deal with a network of local merchants. She launched their new site, Loop & Tie in November and it’s been much more successful than the first product ever was! With Loop & Tie you go on to the site and choose how much money you want to spend on a gift and enter your recipient’s email. They never see what you spent, but get to pick a gift from the collection. The focus is on corporate gifting where there’s a ton of waste with buying everyone the same lame gift basket. Sara’s company can make that process faster and make sure that each person gets what they want ;) After 5 years in Boston working in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector and needing a change of scenery, Jess Baylor moved to New York City in August to pursue a Master of Science in Organizational Change Management at the New School. Jess says she gets a lot of confused looks when she says that. Think human capital strategies or organizational development. She loves the degree and is loving being in New York. Jess will finish the degree in 2015 and is not sure where she will be next, but she hopes to keep trying new places. (As many of you have done!) As for Ashton Haney, she is living in her hometown of Myrtle Beach, SC finishing up an RN program this August, then on to her BSN, Master’s…Nurse Practitioner is her end goal. It’s been a slow decision process for Ashton to finally get the ball rolling with a career in nursing, but after trying her hand in several different fields she thinks she has finally found her niche with a passion for OB and Women’s Health! While still in school she’s working as personal trainer at a local gym and is also having a blast teaching hip-hop group exercise classes there as well…in other news, Ashton absolutely loves being a proud Aunt of three sweet little ones, Maybin-3, Malachi-2, & Marcus-2 months! Blessed beyond words & Life is Good! Ashton did make it back to Eleuthera during her undergrad (feels like forever ago) and had a blast building reefballs for a summer with Mike Cortina as their supervisor–fun times! Nick Del Vecchio is out in Denver these days. After four years in the concrete jungle of downtown NYC, he decided to pack up and head west for the mountains and sunshine. After a two month long road-trip, Nick ended up at the foot of the Rockies. It’s been a great two and a half years out there; he looks forward to many more. Nick worked for an engineering consulting firm in NYC, specializing in energy analysis and sustainability for new construction projects, and has been working remotely for the same firm since relocating to Denver. Nick has also been fortunate to make it back to Eleuthera these past few years as part of the Alumni Advisory Board (AAB). He finds it pretty remarkable to see how far the organization(s) has come since Fall 2002. Although the AAB has recently dissolved, there are always opportunities for alumni involvement, should anyone have the urge. Currently Caitlin Hoffman is in Philadelphia. After graduating from Penn State, she lived in Honduras for a year working in a public hospital. She lived with a family and spent her days working on sanitation/personal hygiene projects for families with kids diagnosed with cancer. After a coup happened when she was there, her project was cut short by a month and she had to be basically evacuated out of the country. Afterwards, Caitlin got a job at the Philadelphia Health Department working in STD/HIV control. She is a bilingual public health official looking at disease outbreaks, developing health campaigns and running some small internal projects to help curb our city rates of infection. Once she is done with her thesis this summer, she will have a Master of Public Health from Emory. Like a lot of you, Caitlin is also looking to go somewhere new and exciting with her degree but hopefully staying in the sexual health/education area. Caitlin’s sister Taylor actually works for the Island School so she gets to hear alllllllll the good gossip and new developments with IS. It is pretty amazing how far they have come. Caitlin has been down there three times since Fall 2002 and plans to head down next spring as another family member of hers is attending. If anybody needs persuading, play cards against humanity with Maxey and she promises your trip will be worth every penny. Zindzi McCormick is living in San Francisco, where she works at YouTube as a product manager. She pretty much professionally watches YouTube videos. Zindzi moved out to SF two years ago, after spending three years in New York after graduating from Brown. She is getting married in November and has definitely thought about a honeymoon in Eleuthera… crazy to think it’s been a decade since she has been back! James Byun has been in DC since finishing Hopkins. Actually, he and Skyler Hopkins randomly did an internship together during college and have continued to run into each other in DC throughout the years. He also lived close to Mike Cortina so they would chill every so often too.  James ended up doing investment banking for a few years and left to go work at an internet startup last summer. He is headed off to UCLA to go to business school this fall. He is hoping to get into design consulting or product management. Emily Hardej recently just moved back to the Boston area and is working in Boston City Hall for the the Public Works Department. She lived in New York for 9 years before that after graduating from Hofstra and has enjoyed getting to know Boston now. Emily is still figuring things out but is considering going back to school for radiology. Kathryn Hyde moved to NYC after graduating college where she worked for a year before going back to school for nursing. She got her BSN at NYU and then moved back to Portland, Maine to work as a cardiac RN for a few years before she and her fiance went on a traveling journey. They roadtripped from Maine to California, flew to Vietnam where they volunteered with disabled children in Hanoi for about a month and then travelled about Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand) for a few more weeks. They then returned to southern California, where they took travel/contracted jobs (3 month assignments) in LA. Kathryn worked at USC medical center. After about 5 months in LA, her finace (who is a Speech Pathologist) got a job in San Francisco, so they moved to northern Cali and she worked at Stanford Hospital. This winter they drove back across the frozen country to New England because her sister had a baby and Kathryn and her fiance are getting married. Kathryn currently works in Boston at Mass General, however they will be moving to back to Portland, Maine and will try to stay in once place! Kathryn will be starting as an RN in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Maine Medical Center and is planning to go back for her Nurse Practitioners degree sometime in the next year or two. She is getting married this August and will have one of her Island School buds, the beautiful entrepreneur Miss Sara Rodell, standing beside her as she does so! After working for IBM as a consultant in the Energy & Utilities sector for a few years Skyler Hopkins decided that sitting in an office staring at a computer was not his cup of tea. So, he pulled a Del Vecchio and took the summer of 2012 to drive cross-country to Los Angeles. (Side Note: If any of you haven’t been to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Bryce Canyon or Zion National Parks you need to get it together go…NOW!) Once he got to LA, Skyler spent some time writing, producing and acting in a few small productions but quickly decided that was also not so much his cup of tea. He started coaching lacrosse when he first got out here as something to do for fun and have slowly been coming around to the idea that despite his best efforts to deny it, nothing makes me happier than coaching, teaching and working with kids. Skyler and his best friend started their company Catch! Lacrosse (Shameless Plug – www.catchlacrosse.com) in January and have been working non-stop to turn this into something that can actually support us. Lacrosse is just blowing up on the West Coast and they feel there is a wide open place in the market for good coaches to help kids really learn how to get better. He’s not sure how much longer he will want to be in Los Angeles. Running your own business in exhausting and chasing kids around a lacrosse field usually puts him out around 9pm every night but he couldn’t be having more fun. Alison Ercole currently lives and works in Philly as a full time as an RN at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in the Trauma and Orthopedic Department. She is also going to school at Penn and will be graduating with her Masters of Science in Nursing in June so then she can get my Nurse Practitioner license in psych-mental health. Alison may continue working as a RN though because she really enjoys it. Alison participated in the Broad Street Run in Philly last weekend, which was her first big run since the 1/2 Marathon 12 years ago! Although she hated it at the time, she is so thankful for all the grueling stuff they had to do for Maxey back in the day. Although, she wishes she had a running partner like Emily Brown with her for this one! Ryan Bates graduated from Wake Forest in 2008 and had the fortune of going to undergrad with Miss Lucy Zimmerman, so they shared some laughs together from 2004-2008. From there, Ryan went to law school at Duquesne in Pittsburgh, passed the bar in 2011, and has been in private practice ever since. He lives in rural PA, a bit west of Allentown and a bit north or Reading, in a small town called Orwigsburg. He works in Pottsville, and if that name isn’t ringing a bell, Ryan could step outside right now, throw a baseball and be able to hit the Yuengling brewery. Ryan’s practice is very small town, potpourri law from criminal, to contracts, to domestic, to injury, etc., spending a lot of time in the courtroom. The hours are long, but he can’t complain. His dream/goal is to work hard now and eventually get his golf game back in order to become a teaching professional somewhere. Lindsey Gael graduated from UPenn with a Master’s in City Planning last year and is currently in NYC working as an urban planning consultant. Her firm does a lot of development and planning of public spaces–designing and improving parks, waterfronts, civic buildings, etc. Lindsey is actually moving up to Boston at the end of May and is very excited to be moving to a smaller town with a slower pace of life. Lindsey was in Boston in January for The Island School’s 15th Anniversary Celebration and met up with Mike. It was pretty crazy to see the massive crowd of IS alum assembled there and to see the community and energy that Maxey has helped create. As soon she got back from her semester on Eleuthera, Nina Sherburne transferred to a small specialty high school called the School of Environmental Studies where she my classes took place outside, at the Minnesota Zoo, on the road, or in other unconventional locations. After her time at The Island School Nina couldn’t have it any other way. She then attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma WA where she studied environmental policy and the history of science. All the while, she spent her breaks and summers working with children, getting them outside and in direct contact with the natural world. So right before Nina graduated she decided to shift her focus to helping our younger generations develop an environmental ethic. Since 2009 Nina has a preschool teacher in DC at Georgetown University doing just that. A little over a year ago Nina got the chance to work with Christian Henry, the principle from Deep Creek Middle School, and a few others as they considered opening an early childhood environmental program from the children of Island School staff.  It was great to connect with IS people again and help support such an awesome initiative! In her free time Nina volunteers with two divestment campaigns, GU Fossil Free and DC Divest where they are trying to persuade the Board of Directors at GU and the DC City Council to take their endowment and pension funds, respectively, out of the fossil fuel industry.  The road to a more stable climate will take a lot more than this type of action, but for now she is enjoying the work and being a part of the movement. Nina is going to Hawaii for a long trip in June and it will be the first time she has been diving since Eleuthera! photo-2 (1)Oliver LaFarge is first mate on a beautiful 60 year old wooden sailboat currently sailing through Greece. He got this job back in 2004 and has been sailing this boat seasonally all over Europe and the eastern North America from Canada to Norway to the Bahamas. He was actually cruising in the Bahamas and were tied up in Harbour Island long enough for him to hitch down to IS. After about a dozen rides Oliver found the campus was deserted because it was the day all the kids left and the teachers were all out partying. He had about half an hour where he had the place to himself and just walked around thinking of all the good times. Later on got to say hello to some folks. When he’s not cruising Oliver is living with his girlfriend in a house they bought a couple years back in Burlington, VT. His girlfriend is going on her third term as a VT state rep. Together they have a devastatingly sweet dog they rescued last year and Oliver works at a boatyard restoring old boats. The winters are long and he has taken up ice fishing. Oliver also wants to say to Horatio that not only does he still have that Coca-Cola t-shirt he gave him but attached is a pic of Oliver wearing it yesterday!

SPRING 2003

Class Agent: Melissa Buck (If you are interested in helping Melissa out with her Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

Spring 2003 has been a busy class of people! Engagements, marriages, babies, and graduate degrees seem to be the recurring themes for this update—congrats to everyone on your amazing adventures!

Alex Penny is still living in New York and swears she has nothing exciting to report, except that she is loving life. Ali Hoffman is also still living in New York working for Blackrock. She’s spent the brutally cold Northeast winter escaping to Vermont to ski and sunbathing in Florida and Aruba. She also recently headed out to the Hamptons to celebrate Logan Morris’s bachelorette party. Logan is getting married this June in Princeton. She’s looking forward to visiting Eleuthera at some point this year to show her fiancé Tom the pink sand at Lighthouse, conch shells at Brittney island, and the marina where we all secretly devoured 5 snickers bars in a row during our free time. Samantha Ashley Demartino is currently splitting her time between DC and London as she writes her PhD in Economics at the University of Sussex in the UK with a focus on incentives to motivate people to conserve the environment. She’s also working for the World Bank on sustainable development projects and Innovations for Poverty Action on behavioral analysis of households in randomized impact evaluations of international development programs. As if that didn’t keep her busy enough, she’s also teaching yoga, photographing and painting, and trying to learn acrobatics in her spare time. She was excited to see Brenna Leath while in North Carolina last year and hopes to see more IS alums soon. Brenna is working at SAS, a Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Software group, for the past 6 months as a development editor/project manager in their press. She’s in the process of buying her first house in downtown Raleigh, NC and continues to play music several nights a week (listen at thehellno.bandcamp.com). She recently started a second Girlsschool-inspired metal band and has been enjoying performing the national anthem at a lot of sporting events lately. This summer she’ll be traveling to play gigs in South Carolina and Tennessee and then headed up to Canada for a family reunion. Melissa Buck recently relocated from snowy Boston to foggy San Francisco. Melissa is working at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, an ad agency, working on Nickelodeon and Häagen-Dazs and living in the Pacific Heights neighborhood. She’s planning to go to Napa soon and hopes to see Samantha Rudd who is working as the General Manager at Clos Pegase Winery in Napa Valley. Anyone care to join for a wine tasting? Before Melissa left Boston, she was excited to see several IS alums at the 15 year celebration at the New England Aquarium, among them Skylar Miller and Greg Henkes. Skylar just completed a year of field work out of the Cape Eleuthera Institute and is now back in Barbados at UWI finishing her master’s thesis on coral reef fish recruitment patterns in Eleuthera. She got engaged in December and will be moving to Boston in the fall to stay. Greg was married last year and is living in Baltimore finishing up his PhD at Johns Hopkins. Molly Carter is graduating from the Rice MBA program on May 16th and gearing up to get back to work after a break this summer. Apparently it’s been a big spring in the love world for Spring ’03. Keenan Grayson, Madeline Bierbaum, and Kira Castro all reported they got engaged in the past month! Keenan is living in Charleston and working for Benefitfocus. Madeline is living in NYC, working as a special education teacher and works with students with severe autism. After completing the NYC Teaching Fellows program in 2010, she’s now going back to school for her Master of Education in Educational Leadership at the Summer Principals Academy at Columbia University. She’ll graduate in July and plans to teach for a few more years before hopefully opening up a progressive school for students on the autism spectrum. Kira Castro is living with her fiancé in Raleigh, NC and working as a research associate for a contract research organization, providing support to federally funded research studies at the National Institute of Dental and Cranofacial Research. She is also studying to get her personal training certification through NASM and plans to sit for the exam later this year. Brenna Hughes is in med school in Chicago and is getting married Memorial Day weekend on Southport Island in Maine to a childhood friend. They’ll be starting off the weekend in proper Island School style with a 5K the morning before the wedding. Fellow S’03er Sally Elliott is a bridesmaid in the wedding, and Sally will be celebrating her own nuptials this July! Vicky Kahn finished law school in DC last year and moved back to NYC this past fall. She is working as a lawyer in capital markets. Now that she’s settled into the city after her move, she’s looking forward to reconnecting with fellow IS alums in the area. Jen Purviance (Boone) and her husband welcomed their second son into the world this spring. Carter Jones Purviance was born on April 15th. Big brother Boone loves having a baby brother! With an expanding family, Jen and her husband are also building a new house, so there is plenty to keep her busy in Casper, WY! Lydia Russell-Roy is finishing her second year of med school at UNC-Chapel Hill and is excited to spend her third year living in Asheville, NC. Kelsey Jones is living in North Haven, Maine and just completed her first year of grad school where is she working toward her Masters in Expressive Arts Therapy. She is hoping to begin a community therapy practice that serves the Maine island communities.

FALL 2003

Class Agents: Kylie King Ebbutt, Kate Parizeau

Connor Boals recently joined CNN in New York City where he works as a producer for CNN Digital Studios, developing new content for CNN’s digital and television properties. He loves riding his bike. Mary Sugiyama is still living and working in Milwaukee,WI as an art education coordinator at a non profit called Walkers Point Center for the Arts. She is getting married August 28, 2014 to Nicolas Sanchez at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee! She makes frequent trips to Chicago as that’s where her fiancé currently lives if anyone wants to ever meet up! :) Kylie King Ebbutt is nearing the end of her first year of teaching 6th grade English in Grand Rapids, MI. She and her husband Dan just sold their house and are moving to Nashville this summer for Dan’s new job. She is excited about the move and can’t wait for a new adventure in Tennessee! Tim Hoisington is currently in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua, working in the environment sector. He is teaching environmental science in the primary schools and doing fuel efficient stoves and ovens in his free time. Camden Hauge has been living in Shanghai for a year and a half, 3 months of which she took out to travel around SE Asia, backpacking through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. She is trying to explore as much of this part of the world as possible while here, having also recently been surfing in the Philippines and visiting friends in Australia. She is currently still working in advertising, and running a monthly Supperclub (Shanghai Supperclub -shsupperclub.com) on the side. Maggie Crosland recently moved from Los Angeles to Chicago to start a position at the Art Institute of Chicago as a researcher in the European paintings and sculpture department. Trygg Larsson-Danforth is currently living in Baltimore, MD. He is heading to UNC in the fall for business school where he will be working towards an MBA. Katherine O’Koniewski (Mel) is about to finish up her first year at Michigan Law. She will be heading back to Boston this summer to intern with the MA Attorney General.

SPRING 2004

Class Agents: Bekah Klarr, Candice Springs

Candice Springs recently moved from Charlotte, NC to Greenville, SC and works for Greenville Health System as a Project Coordinator for their Clinical Integration Network. Candice is so happy to finally be back in the same town as her identical twin sister Caroline Springs Giguere (S’05), who got married in March of 2013. Also, Candice has been enjoying serving as the Class Agent for Spring 2004 and is so proud S‘04 achieved 2nd place in CONCHtribution. Candice is hoping to plan a trip to Eleuthera soon with her family as the last time she visited the Cape was in December 2012. Hayley Plack lives in Washington, D.C. and works at the National Gallery of Art in their research institute. She attended Katie Hudson‘s wedding in October 2013 along with Cat Weiss and Lizzie Horvitz. Izzy Cannell is currently finishing her last semester of a Masters in City and Regional Planning program at UPenn’s School of Design, with a concentration in Land Use and Environmental Planning. She will be graduating in May and is currently looking for Planning jobs in the Northwest! Bekah Klarr is alive and well. She has loved being involved with IS via the Alumni Advisory Board and also can’t believe it’s been 10 years since SP’04 all met on (a much less developed) IS campus on a windy day on Eleuthera. Bekah has lived in sunny Denver for the past two years but is contemplating a move soon – stay tuned. She received her private pilot’s license last year in the Denver area and is planning to advance her flight skills this summer while hopefully living at the family lake house in northern Michigan (cheap rent). She has developed a new hobby/profession freelance writing about women in the hunting and fishing community and hopes to further her writing resume this year. She enjoys striving to represent the hunting community in a fresh way. Bekah has a faithful four-year-old Border Collie mix named Goose who co-pilots for her often in the skies and on the road! The five Klarr siblings convene in Texas (where S’02 Abby lives) and Michigan often to talk about their love of IS. Bekah recently returned from a week on Eleuthera fishing with her Grandmother and brother Nathan (S’11) everything is the same on the island – steady sunward! Jensen Lowe is enjoying living in New York City and working for CipherHealth, a healthcare technology company that helps hospitals reduce preventable readmissions and improve the patient experience. Before starting at CipherHealth, Jensen was in the Philippines for 27 months, where he was using as a Peace Corps Volunteer, using his Island School skills as a Coastal Resource Management Volunteer. Lizzie Horvitz is currently pursuing a joint-Master of Environmental Management and MBA at the Yale School of Forestry and the Yale School of Management. She still keeps in touch with numerous Island Schoolers and is looking forward to making it back on the Cape at some point soon. In May of this year Sarah Bailey will graduate from Stony Brook University with her Masters in Marine Conservation and Policy. She was recently awarded the first annual J.R. Schubel Fellowship from her school for her work and commitment to work towards increased communication between scientists and their research to members of the community. She has also been awarded an internship with NOAA (with less than 20 nationally selected students each year) and will be working in NOAA’s Narragansett Laboratory with Dr. Jon Hare focusing on fishery stock populations with recent climate change events. She hopes to visit the Island School again soon, as her last visit in 2012 as a Marine Ecology Mentor was incredible to come full circle and become part of the staff. Moving forward she is hoping to either continue furthering her education and working towards a Ph.D or obtain a job in conservation biology. Hilary Keefe is loving life in NYC, living in the West Village and working in advertising at Conde Nast. She visited Eleuthera in the Fall where her youngest brother, Peter (F’13), was the 4th and last of the Keefe family to experience IS – amazing trip, obviously! She is looking forward to summer and hopefully seeing everyone again soon! Hillary Bunn is living in New York working at Gagosian Gallery and missing the Cape more than ever after this brutal NYC winter! Mallery Stone recently moved to the South End in Boston after living in Hawaii for 3 years (amazing scuba diving and surfing)! She loves her job as a sales representative for a medical device company where she runs software to help surgeons navigate spine surgeries. Mallery also studies nutrition through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition as a hobby. She misses the beach and sunny weather of the islands, but will look forward to spending time on Cape Cod and SE Connecticut shore this summer! Chris Carson is currently a second-year law student at the University of Kentucky College of Law in his hometown of Lexington, KY. This summer he will return to Washington, DC to work. Chris enjoys traveling and FaceTiming with Trip McDermott. He is not married or engaged. Trip McDermott is currently living in downtown New York City. Much like the Island School, he embarked on a new adventure as a part of a team of eight starting KLR Group, an Oil & Gas focused investment & merchant bank. Since April of 2012, the firm has grown to 30 people and has offices in New York City and Houston, Texas. Trip has continued his passion for the energy sector from the Island School through college, and has made it his profession. In his free time he sails competitively in and outside of the United States. In addition to sailing, he continues to SCUBA dive and ski. He is looking forward to getting back to Eleuthera to see the developments since his Spring semester in 2004. Trip’s sister Dr. Cristin McDermott also attended the Island School in Spring 2002 and is currently living in Pittsburgh, PA finishing her residency at the Children’s Hospital as a Pediatrician and Child Psychologist. Keep on keepin’ on. Kaila De Maria (was Pearlman when at the Island School) is living in Syracuse, NY where she and her husband have been for the past year after living in California for almost four. She currently works as a Prekindergarten teacher but has recently been accepted to nursing school, which she will attend full-time beginning in the fall. Her new goal is to become a nurse and then a nurse practitioner as means of helping the country’s neediest communities combat pervasive health problems. This career change is a perfect example of the lessons Kaila learned at the Island School- two of which include the importance of getting out of your comfort zone in order to grow and improve and to relentlessly strive to make our communities a better place in which to live. She misses the Island School and thinks about its impact on her life every day!

FALL 2004

Class Agents: Patrick DiLoreto, Katie Garratt, Jen Groverman

Cam Powel, Katie Garratt, Lucy Minott, Emery Long, Patrick DiLoreto, Kate Gibson at the Spring Thaw in NYC this April.
Cam Powel, Katie Garratt, Lucy Minott, Emery Long, Patrick DiLoreto, Kate Gibson at the Spring Thaw in NYC this April.

Kate Gibson is still living and working in NYC, and will be getting married in July of this year. She is proud to have 3 lifelong Island School pals in her wedding as bridesmaids, including Stephanie Pitts, Cam Powel, and Kristin Paterakis. Despite the relentless, freezing cold winter in Boston this year, Cam Powel still chooses to live and work for The Island School from there, even though she could be working in The Bahamas. She had a blast catching up with the Fall ’04 crew in NYC for the Spring Thaw in April and is looking forward to reuniting with even more Fall ’04ers at Kate Gibson’s wedding this July. She and Katie Garratt ran a half-marathon together in Newton, MA this fall and have since taken a long hiatus from running. Cam looks forward to putting those running shoes back on and potentially finding another half-marathon for them to tackle together! Kathryn Arffa is happy to be back in The Bay Area after working at a farm and partner restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard for the season. Come visit at Scribe Winery, a small sustainable vineyard and winery in Sonoma! Patrick DiLoreto is happily going on 5 years in NYC, still busy working for a global fashion and apparel company. He continues to compete in the NY Road Runner races each year, a lifelong passion inspired while at the Island School and is excited about his entry in the 2014 NYC Marathon in November. He saw a lot of Kathryn Arffa upon her visit home over the winter Holidays in NYC. He frequently sees other IS friends in NYC, and just recently attended a reading by Derek Walcott with Kate Gibson. He looks forward to fierce competition with Cameron Powel in catching Kate Gibson’s bouquet at her wedding this summer – WATCH OUT CAM. After 3 years in the Bay Area, Kirsten Sheu moved to Winston-Salem, NC this past summer where her boyfriend is in med school. She’s currently in her 4th year as an elementary school teacher. She’s looking forward to seeing Laura McLaughlin at Laura’s wedding in early may, and Maggie Thomas this summer in New York City. Taylor Fargo has been living in beautiful Lake Tahoe, CA for the past two years working for the Sierra Nevada Alliance, an environmental non-profit. She has thoroughly enjoyed living in the Sierra and getting to know the West coast and all it’s magnificent landscapes, but misses the East coast and being close to family and friends. Taylor has started to look for a job in the sustainable agriculture arena and plans to move east by the end of this year. Bunk-mates for life, Hannah Mauck and Taylor continue to plan for their commune where they will live with their families and home-school their future children. Katie Garratt is going on 3 years in NYC this summer. She left the corporate world to pursue a job in the tech industry this year and couldn’t be happier! She’s looking forward to reuniting with her Fall ’04 classmates this fall to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.

SPRING 2005

Class Agents: Jane Kinney, Peter Meijer

Once again we find that spring 05’ers have managed to spread themselves throughout the world working in multiple fascinating industries. Ellen Oshinsky is a high school English teacher in Bogota, Colombia. She is looking forward to applying to graduate school soon, thinking of pursuing a Masters in primary education or social work. After Aaron Hamm finished college, he moved to Costa Rica and found a job teaching first through third grade at an international school in Guanacaste. Below is a blog that explains more about what Aaron is up to: http://pursuitforthemarrow.wordpress.com/. Max Siegal landed a job as a naturalist and staff photographer for Lindblad/National Geographic Expeditions. He works on their expedition cruises around the world teaching the guests about the biology of the area and how to improve their photography. It’s a great way for him to travel, pursue his passion in photography, and meet amazing people around the world! To see his portfolio of images from around the globe, visit his site at www.maxwilderness.com. Katie White returned from a year abroad in Laos and has started a new job, splitting time between Massachusetts and Florida — just a short trip from Ft. Lauderdale (i.e. kind of close to Eleuthera?). She has actually been dreaming of a trip back there one of these days. Other than work, she is attempting some running, and re-adjusting back to life in the US — mostly trying to spend as much time catching up with friends as much as possible. Peter Meijer is currently working for a humanitarian aid organization in a conflict area overseas. He misses getting the chance to see Alec Faggen, Erica Stine, and Lauren Willson in New York – along with Shannon Pincus in DC, of course – but will be home before too too long. Back in New York Alec Faggen is finishing up her first year at Cornell medical school in NYC. The morons (aka her classmates) elected her president of the school so her life has been a bit hectic, but she is having a ton of fun. If anyone finds themselves in the New York area she would love to meet up with them. She was able to see Peter and Caroline not too long ago, and reports that it was magical. Caroline Springs Giguere is currently living in Greenville, SC and working for Greenville Health System as a Cardiac Device Specialist. She has been happily married for a year now and is enjoying life as a 25 year old. She misses Eleuthera every day and hopes to visit again soon! Mellisa Nixon was also recently married (in October to Jared Burns). She is in her fourth year at dental school at University of Florida. She has been studying too much in preparation for her dental boards. Travis Verdier is finishing up his second year as a structural engineer at a logistics solutions firm – a position which he plans to leave in June. In early July he will embark on a journey to the Pacific Northwest to enjoy the scenery and to find a new job either in Portland or Seattle. Sarah Miller graduated from Tulane this past December with a Masters in social work. She is now working as a refugee health caseworker in Columbus, Ohio. She loves her job and is enjoying getting to know the new city and surrounding areas. If any ISers are passing through the Midwest her door is always open! Stephen Boatwright is still in Columbia, SC and halfway through getting his Masters of Divinity in Academic Ministries at Columbia International University. After graduation he plans on getting a Ph.D but has not determined the school. He recently became engaged to Holly Gerbec and their wedding date is set for July 26th. He reports that life is good! Jeremy Church just finished his last day in the United States coast guard aviation. He is moving back to Georgia to return to college and start a metal fabrication company. Also, he and his wife are starting a small, personal farm with their own pond in an attempt to become more sustainable. Abby Conroy is still living in NW Connecticut. She is working on her Masters in Conservation Biology through Green Mountain College in Vermont. Miles Douglas is working as a buyer for an organic food company that does home and office deliveries in the Boston area. He is still living in Boston and enjoys bumping into fellow IS kids around the city. He hopes to make a trip back to Eleuthera at some point in the near future! Molly Cousins loves her new job at Bright Horizons – she is on the Digital Marketing team doing equal parts SEO, site design, web analytics, and content marketing. She still lives in Cambridge and she and Kevin FitzGerald are planning to get a puppy this spring! She, Melissa, and Alec are planning a trip to Eleuthera in August for Kayak Trip 3.0 & an early 10-year IS anniversary. Fingers crossed that they can still handle the land crabs! Scott Aland returned home after two years on Eleuthera in August (sad) and just recently accepted an offer to attend Boston University for graduate school next fall. He will pursue a Master’s in Business Administration and a Master’s in Public Health as a Global Health Management student and hopes to return to resource-constrained settings (like Eleuthera) to promote healthcare initiatives in the future! Everyone should come visit Beantown! Rachel Clement is on the move again, back up to Martha’s Vineyard, MA to spend a beautiful summer in the sun. Beyond that is another adventure with more updates to come. Brett Simon is moving to Brooklyn in June and plans to pursue a MS in Interior Design at Pratt. Leah Miller is living in Los Angeles and managing operations at a Medical Scribe company in El Segundo. She has been enjoying the SoCal way of life and traveling as much as possible. She still has a vase filled with sand from Lighthouse beach in her living room. If you’re ever in LA, she wants you to hit her up!

FALL 2005

Class Agents: Stephanie Chaston, Justin Drazin, Annie Sholley

Jac Battjes & Drew Fink in Chile
Jac Battjes & Drew Fink in Chile

Eleanor Anderson currently is the 2014 Design Fellow at her alma mater Colorado College where she is going full-tilt making printmaking, fiber and ceramic art. She is excited to spend the summer living in a yurt with her boyfriend in Kelly, WY and teach art classes at the JH Art Association in Jackson Hole. She plans on spending some time backpacking, fly fishing and sketching the Tetons! Kylie Atwood is still living in DC and working for CBS News, primarily for Bob Schieffer and Face the Nation. On weekends she is working on reporting and hopes to someday be a reporter for CBS. This year she ran her first marathon in NYC! She credits her love of running to the Island School. She recently took a trip to the Bahamas with her family in the Berry Islands on Great Harbour Cay, where her mom is helping the local school to start a garden! So far they have eggplants and a few other things. They are still working out a few kinks but the kids are loving it. Caroline Ball is living in sunny San Diego, CA. She has been there for about a year and a half and loving every minute of it! She works for a commercial real estate firm doing tenant representation which is what she’s been doing since she graduated in 2011. She has a 1.5-year-old German Shepherd named Buck. He is full of energy and a HUGE goofball. Amelia Barisone moved up to Lake Tahoe after college in Santa Barbara. She spent an entire season on the slopes skiing and snowboarding. She ended up loving Tahoe and stayed longer than expected. She is now in San Francisco working as a nanny and taking photography classes. Her end goal is to lead photography centered trips. She wants to teach people photography skills in picturesque places all over the world. In June she will be heading to Nicaragua! Her boyfriend, Casey, got an engineering position at a resort down there and she has decided to tag along. She will be working in the travel department of a resort and will also teach yoga! Jac Battjes is still living in Santiago, Chile (where she recently got to hang out with Drew Fink and his girlfriend) and working at EY in Risk Management. She is still working on applications for MBA programs, but has decided to hold off starting until 2015. She was back in the states over the summer and toured some East Coast MBA programs, where she ran into Dave Seamans in Charleston! She also recently renewed her SCUBA certification in the freezing 50 degree water off the coast of Chile and will be diving in Easter Island this April!

David Blake in San Francisco
David Blake in San Diego

David Blake is working as the General Manager at Panera Bread in Birmingham, MI. He is looking to open his own restaurant franchise of some sort or start something of his own in the near future. Recently, he made it out to San Diego to visit his brother (another IS alumus!) who is in school for Marine Recon. He was in the Bahamas for the week of Easter and happy to get out of the brutal winter weather. His youngest brother is hoping to go to IS in a couple of years and David will have a good reason to go back! Jake Cerf is living in San Francisco where he works at a four-person video advertising startup called VideoGenie. When he’s not working, he enjoys going for runs in Golden Gate Park with his brother, roommate, and fellow IS alumni (F‘04) Bart, tearing up the city with friends from college, and journeying to the Peninsula and Marin for outdoor adventures. Jake recently made his first trip to SE Asia where he went to Vietnam and Thailand to visit a college friend living in Ho Chi Mihn City, and has another trip to Europe planned this summer. Stephanie Chaston has finally traded in her flip-flops and sunny Miami winters for snow boots and Boston weather. She completed her Master’s from the University of Miami in December in Coastal Zone Management—following in Maxey’s footsteps! She is currently working as a Staff Scientist for ESS Group, Inc., a Rhode Island-based environmental and engineering consulting company. She is traveling to Las Vegas in June and is always looking for her next trip. Luke Cherrington is living in Los Angeles but is fairly bi-coastal for work. He has been growing a startup for the past 2 years, and he’s managing the business side. The company is like Dropbox but for businesses not people. He has been fortunate enough to cross paths with Jake, Fink, Lizzie, Colton, Nate, Katie, Amelia, and Yager over the past year or two. Jackie Codair is working as a Consultant at a small management consulting firm in Boston called Vantage Partners, which specializes in relationship management and negotiation strategy. She is getting married in September! Anne Sholley will be a bridesmaid and Kylie Atwood will also be there! She and her fiancée bought a house outside of Boston last year, where they live with their Australian Shepherd, Toby! Colton Coughlin lives in Boulder, CO. He just celebrated one year in his new condo after it being built, and is still doing finish work on it. He is a Civil Design Engineer and has focused on roadway design in Transportation Engineering. Spending the winter snowboarding in the mountains of Colorado and wakeboarding next to his house in the summer.

Colton Coughlin & Dave Miller
Colton Coughlin & Dave Miller

He will be headed to Costa Rica in April and has been lucky enough to see Maggie Regan and Dave Miller recently as well as talked with Drew Fink and Nick Zbitnoff. Colton hosted an Island School “Have One of Us” happy hour in Denver and met students from other semesters and plans to continue hosting this event in the future. Kat Dembergh will soon be attending nursing school! It has been a dream of hers for the past two years and she is thrilled to make it a reality. She is back in Idaho after spending a year in New York City–where she ran into fellow Fall 05er Maggie! Chris Della Rocca has been living in Connecticut managing a Shake Shack and is heading to Brooklyn, NY to open another branch right across the street from Barclay’s Center in early July. Leah Downey graduated from UNC Chapel Hill last May and is now living in London, finishing up a Masters degrees in Economics & Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has no idea what might come next, but most likely she will continue to avoid real jobs and go on to get her PhD.

Leah Downey
Leah Downey

She is enjoying her time in the UK very much, the best part probably being her part-time job at a local pub pulling pints. She is not getting married and does not have a dog, but does spend a lot of time thinking about the collapse of capitalist society. She will finish up her time in London in late September and plans on traveling to Croatia, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, and a couple places in between. Justin Drazin is living in the Big Apple, where he works for a real estate development company called Delos Living. The company is based on the concept of human sustainability and designing, building, and programming interior spaces that are solely focused on the health and wellbeing of the inhabitants. If anyone is interested, we do have two condos in NYC for sale that we built (one is $45 million and one is $50 million, so readily accessible to pretty much all of us). Justin also continues his passion of writing, and has two more books coming out in 2014. His first book Albert and the Amazing Pillow Monsters had a great debut, winning the 2013 Mom’s Choice Award Gold Medal for Best Bedtime Story, the 2013 Gelett Burgess Award for Best Bedtime Story, and was a Finalist for the 2013 Cribsie New Arrival Award. He recently traveled to Miami to celebrate his grandmother’s 90th birthday and has been seen frequenting bars across Manhattan with the infamous Margaret Regan. He also encountered a fellow IS’er at the gym, where he was spotted wearing the Island School Fall ’05 sweatpants, while trying to get “Maxey-Huge” and training for the NFL Regional Combine (which he participated in at the NY Jets Practice Facility). In his many future travel plans, getting back to Eleuthera sits at the very top. Drew Fink is currently in Patagonia. He left his job at Bain in August and started slowly making his way down to Southern Chile in his pickup truck, eventually landing in Puerto Natales, where he works at a biomass energy company. He also spends a good amount of time working at a local foundation, where they are trying to develop and fundraise for sustainability projects in Torres del Paine National Park. He will likely leave Patagonia in mid-May, and from there, who knows! Before going down to Chile, he was fortunate enough to return to Eleuthera for the Alumni Advisory Board meeting in October, and the changes that have happened are quite incredible. Hallig House is beautiful, and clearly provides a space with a new use case for professional events on campus. In the past year he has seen Colton in CO, Dave Seamans on Martha’s Vineyard, Katie Romanov in CA, Leah in SF, Luke out in LA, and Ms. Jac Battjes in Santiago! Cassidy Hannigan moved back to Myrtle Beach, SC from Hawaii in the summer of 2012 to further pursue her career as an animal trainer. The following winter she landed another dolphin training internship in Key Largo, which was beyond amazing! When she got back last summer she finally got her dream job as an animal trainer in Myrtle Beach at a dinner show attraction called Pirates Voyage, owned by Dolly Parton Entertainment. She works with and trains 11 macaws, African-crowned cranes, Indian Runner ducks, doves, and 5 dogs for the shows. During the winter season she gets to work with camels and a donkey for the Christmas shows. She was offered a position as a performer (acrobat/aerialist) for the show because of her competitive gymnastics background. She also adopted a Great Dane named Mongo last summer! In the future she plans to move west, perhaps working with the dolphins at SeaWorld in San Diego! Henry Hatch is currently living in NYC with his girlfriend Sammi and working in Business Development for a distributed renewable energy company called Urban Green Energy. After graduating from Colorado College with Eleanor, he traveled through Europe over the summer and then moved to NYC right as hurricane Sandy hit. Olivia Jacobsen moved back to sunny Santa Barbara in January after a year and a half in NYC and a year in San Francisco, and is in the middle of taking Anatomy and Physiology classes. She is loving her time in the cadaver room. Once she’s done this spring, she will be applying to Nurse Practitioner programs. She is still working (remotely) for an NYC-based management consulting company mostly as a recruiter with a few other interesting tidbits thrown in to keep her busy!

Jake Cerf and friends in San Francisco
Jake Cerf and friends in San Francisco

Chris Keally is still living in Washington DC and working at the State Department. He had the chance to travel out to northern California last summer for a road trip with some college friends. His plans for the next year include traveling to Turkey in the summer, as well as doing a better job of exploring the greater DC area. Michael Kratz graduated from NY Maritime with his Masters in International Transportation Management and a USCG Unlimited 3rd Mate. He is out of school and working as a deck officer on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Just watching the tuna swim by with no fishing rod. Hoping one day they’ll put wind farms off the coast of SC so he can work out of Charleston. Hanna Kruckman is working as a research technician helping collect lesser prairie chicken data, a species that may be listed as threatened this month in remote western Kansas. When she is finished with fieldwork, she will head back to Manhattan, KS, which is literally nicknamed “The Little Apple,” where she has been living since January 2013. Last year she took a break from school to get more work experience. When she is not working, she is usually out with her boyfriend hunting, fishing, or drinking Bloody Mary’s. This July she is headed back to school to get her master’s at Eastern Illinois University. Her thesis research will be looking at habitat selection and movement of blue and channel catfish on the Wabash River. Cordelia (or Delia) McKusick is on contract as a co-creator at Inanitah.org. It’s a Tantra, Yoga, and meditation center and Eco village on the island Ometep, in Nicaragua. She teaches yoga, and offers life coaching sessions, as well as manages volunteers and general daily organization. She is there with her sweetheart who organizes permaculture projects on their organic farm. They will be moving to Costa Rica in May where Cordelia will go to massage school after looking at a property in Panama to open a similar dream as Inanitah. Drew Melby is living in Baltimore, MD with his wife, Jessie. He works for an investment company called T. Rowe Price. He met his wife Jessie in college, and they got married in July 2012. They are moving out to Madison, WI this coming summer for work. They will be joining Hanna soon in representing that part of the country! Dave Miller is currently living in Boston working for Boulder based tech startup called PivotDesk. This has allowed him to travel out to the main office in Boulder and spend some awesome time with Colton. He was also fortunate enough to see Anne a few months ago at an IS get together in Boston. He completed the Boston Marathon in April! He worked with Cam Powel (F ’04) to get some pretty cool needle pointed IS hats made by a friend’s company (Harding Lane), so be sure to look for those coming soon! Toni Pryor is in the masters in nursing program at Yale where she is studying family medicine with a minor in oncology. She left her job at Memorial Sloan Kettering in May 2013 to travel all over the world to 10 countries in 10 weeks, 5 of which were at a clinic in rural Tanzania. The medicine in east Africa reminded her of the lack of medical resources on Eleuthera. After school, Toni may avoid working like Leah and pursue PHD/DNP programs. She feels lucky to know people all over the country and the world to reach out to when she leaves Connecticut in May 2015. Maggie Regan has been fortunate to hang out with some IS friends in NYC and Boulder over the past year. She is living and working in NYC and sees Justin Drazin on the reg. She finished at NYU in December of 2012 and graduated this past May! She has been living in Brooklyn (Greenpoint) for nearly 2 years and after busting her butt in a hipster Williamsburg restaurant, she was hired (by one of her customers) as the Client Experience Manager for a real estate startup called Suitey! If anyone ever needs help relocating to the city, hit her up!

Dave Seamans & Jac Battjes
Dave Seamans & Jac Battjes

Dave Seamans is working at Merrill Lynch helping people with their finances, and living in Charleston, SC. He got a golden retriever named Gus! He lives and works downtown and spends most of his free time hanging with Gus. He will be attending Big Mike’s WEDDING in May and hopefully visiting Drew in Martha’s Vineyard this 4th of July. He loves wearing his IS stuff around to see who will stop him to talk about the best place on earth–Eleuthera. He has been fortunate to have seen Colton, Luke, and Jac recently. Dan Shea is still working as a structural engineer just outside of Boston where he has been for two years. He is waiting to hear back from a few MBA programs for Fall 2014. He is the best man at his cousins wedding in the fall so his travel plans revolve around a bachelor’s party in New Orleans sometime in June. Anne Sholley is working in Somerville, MA at Recover Green Roofs, LLC, a design/build firm that specializes in green roofs, rooftop farms, and living walls. She recently moved a mile up the road from Cambridge into Union Square in Somerville (all the cool people are doing it). She is healthy and happy and feels like her roots are taking shape after being in the area for almost three years. She feels especially lucky to see Jackie Codair every so often for dinner and is honored to be a bridesmaid in her upcoming wedding. Eliza Templet is currently living in Burlington, Vermont. She is working as a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse, Case Manager for the Visiting Nurse Association of Vermont. She is eager to expand in her recently found passion–dual-diagnosis/addiction medicine-nursing. Until January of this year she was working as an acute alcohol and substance abuse detox nurse in a 41 bed outpatient rehab facility. Unfortunately, due to financial strain the facility had to eliminate all nursing staff moving from acute care to sub acute. This has motivated her to dive into furthering her professional career in this facet of nursing. She will be moving to Somerville in mid-May to begin her new nursing position at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA! She also has four-legged travel companion–a 3-year-old lab named Granger! Lizzie Votruba is currently living in northeast England and working towards a Masters in prehistoric archaeology at Durham University. After completion in September of 2014, she hopes to pursue a career in the field, and she dreams of researching human origins in Africa. If this doesn’t work out, she will happily return to the mountains and go fishing and skiing. Danny Waldman graduated in May and headed home to get his shoulder re-done. He was hired to coach a high school lacrosse (Henryclaylacrosse.com). He’s been coaching year-round, tutoring high schoolers, and frolicking in open fields with his best friend Ajax (a German Shepherd pup). He also paints on commission, so if anyone is making bank and has empty walls in their apartment… letta brotha know. Nick Zbitnoff is currently backpacking in Europe for a couple months and was lucky to do the same in Asia and Africa for almost half of last year. He is still working in Alaska during the summer months to make money for traveling. He will hopefully be able to meet up with Leah soon in London.

SPRING 2006

Class Agents: Taylor Hoffman, Wes Norton

While he may have been the last one voted cacique, Shane Gary is the most recent SP’06 visitor to Eleuthera! He finished at Colorado State this past December with a major in anthropology and a minor in environmental science. After he graduated, he took off for Utila in Honduras for his scuba instructor’s course and returned back to Eleuthera to help with certifications. He even got to certify Doug Parizeau’s brother! He will be back in Colorado this summer guiding rafts down The Poudre, Clear Creek and Colorado Rivers out of Fort Collins. Both Taylor Hoffman and Maggie Cissel are currently working for The Island School. Maggie (soon to be Auntie Maggie!) returned to the campus this past fall as a Communications Associate just as Taylor was leaving Eleuthera to work for The Island School in Boston. Wes Mize, Doug Parizeau, Steve Cargill, and Derek Shooster all live in Boston as well. Wes is a civil engineer at FST, Doug is an Investment Associate at WindHorse Capital Management, and Steve says he works at Experian Data Quality but no one ever sees him! Derek is working full time as a property manager at Charlesgate Property Management while also enrolled as a full time student at Boston University’s Metropolitan College for a Master’s in City Planning. He recently just biked the Boston Marathon route round trip for the second year (52 miles!). Let’s hope he had a better bike than those on Eleuthera! Maya Tepler, Cassie Siegel, Luke Tubergen, Jimmy Nannos, and Adriana Misoul are all living in New York City. Maya is pursuing her acting career in the city but supports herself waitressing. She ran her first marathon last fall and didn’t pass out once (she only does that around Farrell..). Cassie is working full time as a commercial real estate broker at CBRE. She is getting back into running shape and encourages anyone to do a half marathon again with her! She also lives minutes from Luke with her adorable Australian Shepherd, Skyy. Luke also lives with a little furry friend, Charles Bartholomew Bass, a little Cairn Terrier. He works for AEA Investors, a private equity firm, and is involved in several nonprofits. He is currently mentoring a student from the Bronx and wishes him luck on his SATS! Justin Livingston works for a digital ad agency in Atlanta but will be moving to Manhattan this May! Megan Gallivan is currently in Minnesota working at General Mills but will move to New York City in August to get her MBA at NYU Stern. In a world of her own, Kelsey Moody lives in San Francisco and works at Tiedemann Wealth Management as a financial analyst. She will move back to the east coast one day, we all know it. Outside of the big cities, Anna Elam graduated from Lewis & Clark College with a degree in biology and now is living the good life in Montana teaching at a Montessori school. Kelsey Head recently took a big leap of faith, quit her job of four years at an environmental education program, and now works as a carpentry apprentice studying restorative and historical architecture and building. She lives in Burlington, VT with her partner Zach and their cat Frankie. Although in Vermont, she still makes her way to an island somewhere to scuba dive and bring back memories of Eleuthera! Hayden Stebbins recently finished his masters at Schumacher College in the UK, biked from England to Venice and back, using ancient trees as his waypoints. He then moved to Bhutan to work with the Gross National Happiness Centre. While living in Connecticut for the past few months, he has recently decided to move out west in pursuit of a career relating to ecological restoration/restoration agriculture/holistic management of rangelands in late April. He is planning a big cross country road trip this Spring, so if you find yourself anywhere between CT, Texas, Seattle, and Wyoming, give Hayden a call! Wes Norton recently moved to Seattle and began working at Woodland Park Zoo. He has spent a lot of the winter skiing the Cascades with Cooper VanVranken SP ’08 and is looking forward to a summer of more adventure.  Lastly, Leighton Cusack reached out to buy a 15 year shirt and prevailed through technical difficulties!

 FALL 2006

Class Agents: Sydney DeVos, Lexie Marino

Kelsey Muller is currently living in Bozeman, MT focusing on work, skiing, and her new border collie puppy. She will be starting a masters program in biomedical engineering next fall. Molly Lloyd graduated from college in May and is now working at the Federal Reserve in DC. Chris “Beans” Megrue is graduating this year from Dartmouth College with an Environmental Studies major and is going to be working in Davenport, Iowa next year for an agriculture data start up working to build a network of farmers and a platform with which they can use to evaluate their methods and see if other techniques exist that they could use. Beans just started this spring building a vegetable garden at his parents’ house and plans to grow way more food than he could possibly ever eat. Abram Dawson lives in San Francisco and for the past year and a half has been working at SV Angel, an early stage tech investment firm. He spends most of his time in the city, but he tries to spend as much time as possible in Lake Tahoe and/or on the east coast. Tom Weaver recently left his job spreading democracy in Pakistan with the Washington, D.C. – based NGO, the International Republican Institute, to pursue a career as a software engineer. After graduating from Penn last May, Bridget Ercole is now an ICU nurse at Georgetown. Molly, Hanna, Tom, Lily and Bridget had a nice little reunion in DC in the fall! Meghan Weiler is graduating grad school and getting her masters in counseling psychology from Northeastern. Mackey Violich is a research assistant with the Shark Research Team at CEI. She is teaching a research class to The Island School students on deep-water scavenger fauna, using baited traps that go down to 500-1200m deep in the Exuma Sound. Sage Disch graduated from Haverford College in May 2013 and is currently living in Philadephia working as a Management Consultant for Accenture. Sage is also starting a men’s fashion company with her brother and cousin called Ace & Everett, initially producing the finest American made dress socks. Henry McNamara is living in Manhattan, working for a venture capital firm investing in early stage tech startups. He and fellow ISer Abram Dawson do a fair amount of work together from separate VC firms and Henry sees him and other Fall 06ers in SF during regular business trips. Henry often ponder what Matt Thomas spends his days doing as he drifts off to sleep on a nightly basis… Henry keeps up with Sam Miller and Sage Disch when he’s in NYC and look forward to seeing more Fall 06 in the coming months. Sam Miller has been living in NYC the past two years working in finance and is currently launching a food blog called Slammer Style Food for people who love food and enjoy cooking. Living the Gauntlet lifestyle every day. After graduating from Bard College with a degree in Environmental and Urban Studies, Hanna “Mitch” Mitchell made a brief stint in NYC to perfect her latte skills. She is now working with Greenpeace in Charlotte, NC to bring cleaner cheaper energy options to North Carolina through a community solar initiative. She still thinks of the Island School frequently as a catalyst for personal growth and inspiration for the value system that motivated many of her educational and professional choices. When not working, she may be found on her yoga mat, out salsa dancing, or exploring a new running trail. Lexie Marino is living in Grand Rapids, MI and working in the financial services industry. You can typically find her with fellow ISer Sydney DeVos. Tristan McCormick lived the dream in Portland, Maine this summer, worked at an engineering firm this fall, lived on couches up and down the east coast for a few months this winter, and just started a new position as a software engineer in Minneapolis. Alexandra Patane managed to hit 200% of her sales quota and save up enough funds the last year and a half to do something worthwhile. After all the hard work, and enough time behind a desk, she decided to take a much needed gap year. She has already spent a month in Brazil, and has since been a ski bum in Mammoth, CA. She’s heading to Costa Rica next week with some friends, then Thailand. In June she will be going back to Sweden to celebrate the Swedish Midsummer. Alex is leaving the rest of the year open to figure it out as she goes, but she is planning to end the year (or likely longer) working somewhere as a Divemaster…hopefully the Maldives, (inspired by Edd and Annabelle’s time spent there.) She plans to get in as much diving as she can before then! Nick Ognibene is in his first year of law school at the University of Michigan after working in Sierra Leone last year.

SPRING 2007

Class Agents: Dominique Keefe, Scottie Thompson

Juanita Andersen is about to graduate from Northwestern U this June as a Theatre/Latino Studies major, and plans on staying in Chicago to act professionally. Dominique Keefe moved back to NYC from Montreal in January and is working in energy finance. She is excited to be back! Hilary Walecka is finishing up her first year of her Masters at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara. It’s an interdisciplinary and professional 2-year program. Hilary says it’s an awesome program and she would definitely recommend it! Maddie Hensen is currently finishing my term as a naturalist intern at the Laurentian Environmental Center. She has had a wonderful time teaching elementary and middle school students about outdoor survival, local flora and fauna, archery, snowshoeing, and ice fishing. As her time there come to an end, Maddie is preparing to Juno Beach, Florida where she will be doing sea turtle research and conservation work with the Loggerheard MarineLife Center. She is very excited for this new opportunity and will be working with another Island School alumnus from one of the Island School’s college research programs. Matt Ayres is living in San Francisco, graduating from Connecticut College this spring and working on his United States Soccer Federation class A license. Also he would love to organize an Island School event in SF!

FALL 2007

Class Agents: Stan Burnside, Robby Spalding

Meeta Prakash is working in DC for a healthcare consulting company. Currently, she is studying for the MCAT. Meeta reports that DC is great, and she loves exploring the area. She is still playing frisbee with a spring league and excited to go to Kenya for a cousin’s wedding in a month! Nina Fisher was studying abroad in New Zealand this past year and will be graduating from Lafayette this May. She plans to go to physical therapy school next year. Sam Lagor moved to Burlington to pursue a MSc in Geology at University of Vermont. He is trying to figure out how some granite magma rose up through the crust as the Green Mountains were being built up…cool stuff, lots of time in the hills this coming summer. Stan Burnside is currently working as a stingray trainer for Disney Cruise Lines in the Bahamas. This past spring he received his Wilderness First Responder certification. Meredith Kaufman is working for a nonprofit called bicycles against poverty and will be moving to Uganda in July. Her organization micro finances bikes to people in rural parts of northern Uganda. For the past 10 months Meagan Gary has been back on Eleuthera working as a research assistant on the sea turtle project. She is working at CEI for two more months and then in August Meagan will be starting a MS program at Florida Atlantic University where she will continue studying sea turtles! She hopes to actually be doing her fieldwork for her masters at CEI. Henry Towbin is in New York, working at the Natural History Museum. He works in their imaging lab doing CT scans and electron microscopy. Henry says he has a lot of fun because he gets to work with samples ranging from dinosaur bones to meteorites. Alexio Brown is in Nassau doing my last semester at the College of the Bahamas. In the fall, he will be graduating with a BA in biology. For the past 2 weeks Alexio worked on Blount Small Ship Adventures as an onboard naturalist for their Bahamian out-islands excursion. For the past 6 months Robby Spalding has been training to operate cardiac rhythm management technologies. These technologies are used in surgical procedures for people who have irregular heart rhythms, the most common being atrial fibrillation. In March, Robby was hired by Boston Medical Center as an Electrophysiology (EP) Lab Technologist. His job is to help out with EP procedures like pacemaker implants and radiofrequency ablations. Robby will be living in Boston, so let him know if you are ever in the area!

SPRING 2008

Class Agents: Ned Adriance, Becca Williams

Tucker Blake graduated last year from Albion college with a bachelor’s in Fine Arts. Now he is currently in the Marine Corps station at camp Pendleton California. His is in the advanced infantry training battalion in the Basic Reconnaissance Course. He gets to do tons of fun amphibious training where he can gets put all the skills I learned at Island School to the test. Ollie Engebretson is both excited and sad to be finishing his fourth year at UVA. Next year he is deferring for a year and heading out to Jackson Hole before starting at UVa Law School. The last two years have been a whirlwind, as Becca Williams has been teaching in NYC and pursuing her Masters in Teaching English. As the school year and her course work wraps up, Becca is looking forward to a relaxing summer before heading to law school in the fall. She hopes everyone from S’08 is doing well and that they can meet up sometime in the near future. Emilie Geissinger is currently doing an ecology and evolution course in the Galapagos. She will be graduating this spring from Bates with Owen Minott and Maggie Carey. Emilie hopes to spend the next year teaching biology. Helena Witte graduated from Dartmouth this past June. She is living in Washington D.C. and working at an EdTech startup.

FALL 2008

Class Agents: Hadley Dawson, John DiLoreto

Maddie Andres is finishing up her junior year at Colorado College as a geology major. It seems as though every year I have spent out west I have spent less and less time on the east coast. This summer she received an internship in Glacier National Park doing climate change research on alpine lake sediments. I am so happy to have one final year to live it up at CC. Kevin Delaney just finished up a 6-week internship at CEI where he worked on the Flats Ecology research project before transferring from Villanova University to pursue his interest in studying Marketing at the University of New South Wales. He is now living and studying in Sydney, Australia. Hadley Dawson is nearing the end of her four years at Bates College: bittersweet, but looking ahead to new challenges and experiences. She is extremely excited for this upcoming summer, where she will be participating in the MiddCORE program at Lake Tahoe and will then be teaching as a Summer Term Alumni Mentor at the Island School. She is very grateful for being able to spend the summer at the Island School and to gain experience working with students. Leslie Panella is currently studying abroad in Copenhagen and enjoying the opportunity to travel around Europe. She will spend the summer working in a neurology lab at the Cleveland Clinic, and is excited to go back to Middlebury for her senior year. For her junior year, Dana Del Vecchio has spent the year abroad in Haifa, Israel and Amman, Jordan. Each country is incredibly different from the other, but the semesters have complemented each other nicely. Having taken the Arab-Israeli conflict class freshman year, she wanted to put a real face to the conflict. She spoke with Israelis and Palestinians, studied Arabic and did some independent traveling to the Palestinian territories (Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho). Her spring semester in Jordan exposed her to Arabic and has convinced her to consider moving to Jordan after graduation. Right now, she is interested in working in an education department of a refugee organization. Cicely Moreau is graduating from Case University in May with a BA in Music and Biology. She will be spending the summer performing in Italy with the Oberlin in Italy opera program before traveling around Europe, and will then be taking a year off to explore before pursuing graduate school. Alexander Keefe is graduating this spring from the University of Maine. At the end of March, Cordelia Kenney participated in Occidental College’s first ever TEDx event as a student speaker, giving a talk entitled “Reimagining Death.” She recently completed an honors project for the History Department that analyzed the United States’ first federal law to criminalize abortion and contraception. She also writes for Occidental’s newspaper (all of her articles are available online) and she is on the Leadership Council of the national nonprofit organization, Peer Health Exchange, at Occidental. Following graduation in May, she will be in Melbourne, Australia for the summer and plans to return to Washington, D.C. to work on international women’s rights and reproductive health. Valerie Zhao is finishing up her junior year at Dartmouth and is looking forward to spending her summer living at home. She will be working at Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation and Advanced Technology Center and studying for the MCAT. If anyone is in the San Francisco Bay Area this term, let her know!

SPRING 2009

Class Agents: Christine Brittain, Whit Powel, Matt Vetter

Christine Brittain is a junior at Emory, studying psychology. This summer, she will be studying abroad in Sweden at Uppsala University. Heather Hoffman is a junior at Duke. This summer, she will be working as a teaching fellow at Breakthrough Collaborative in Brooklyn, NY while living in Manhattan. Heather hopes to see some fellow S’09ers while there! Sarah Kistner is working for an IT staffing company called Talener. Sarah will graduate from Colgate with a double major in psychology and Spanish. At Colgate, Sarah was really involved with the ski team and her sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma. Eduardo Lopez will be working this summer at the Environmental Defense Fund in DC. He will be working with the “REDD+, supply chains, indigenous peoples” project. This involves looking at why deforestation occurs given stress from the cattle, soy and oil palm industries. It also involves finding ways to get the local communities/indigenous peoples to engage in sustainable development. The area of focus is the amazon in Brazil. Whit Powel is finishing up her junior at Denison University, where she is captain of the women’s lacrosse team. She is looking forward to working as a Senior Interviewer in Denison’s admissions office starting next fall. This summer, Whit will return to Eleuthera as a Human Ecology teacher for the Summer Term at Island School. After an amazing summer during Summer Term 2013, she is excited to go back and build on last summer’s experience! Lulu Stelle studied abroad in Rome and is now in London. She’s a biology major (inspired by Island School) and is working in NYC at the Natural Resources Defense Council in their oceans program this summer. Nic Strain is an English major at Middlebury. He will be a senior next year and this summer will be working at Wheelhouse Creative, a trailer production company in NYC. Krissy Taft is working at an environmental firm in Boston for the summer and will be graduating from Middlebury after next semester/fall. Jake Verter is a sophomore at Williams College, pursuing a double major in biology and English. Jake also runs cross country. He spent this past January at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA working to develop a small molecule inhibitor of the MYC pathway. MYC is a transcription factor which, when mutated, leads to unchecked cell growth and proliferation– cancer. This summer, Jake will be working in a Boston neurobiology lab and will spend all of next year abroad at the University of Oxford! There, Jake will take English literature courses, but also plans to study biomedical ethics and cell signaling. Christiana Whitcomb will be interning for the NYC Department of City Planning. She is a senior at Bowdoin, studying government and visual arts. Joe Sukup is currently in Peru until June studying globalization and indigenous cultures. At Wabash College, he studies Spanish language and Literature along with studio art.  This summer, Joe will be working at Camp Laurel in the Summer up in Maine. When he returns, Joe will be in the process of applying for a Fulbright Grant to teach in Europe and for Teach for America, along with some other teaching fellowships. Joe going to go into teaching and hopefully get to teach at the IS but hopes to work his way up into Education Administration.

FALL 2009

Class Agents: Alexis Sommerfield, Chip Wierda, Catherine Wilson

Erica Russell is at Calvin College in GR, Michigan studying recreational therapy and will graduate in May 2015. She hopes to work with children and young adults with special needs. She plans on doing graduates studies in either occupational therapy or applied behavioral analysis. Eva McKinsey is currently attending Colorado College and studying Political Science. She loves being at CC because she gets to play in the woods all the time and explore an unfamiliar part of the country. Catherine Wilson is finishing up her sophomore year at the UNC Chapel Hill and is double majoring in Political Science and Peace, War, & Defense with a minor in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics. She is also currently training for a half marathon that will be in June!! Duncan Saunders is playing lacrosse at UNC and is majoring in Management and Society with a minor in history. While going to school at Colorado State University, Sam Mackenzie is getting a Wildlife biology degree. He recently started a water polo team, which he is hoping to compete with in his last few years of college. He is also working in the Smith-Knapp plant ecology lab, where they are studying the effects of climate change on the Great Plains. Will Kister is currently an accounting and finance major and the University of Delaware. He has been interning for JP Morgan for the past 6 months. Chip Wierda is finishing his junior year at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is studying history with a minor in English. His summer plans are to get his wilderness first responder certification (inspired by IS), spend three weeks in the Caribbean through a program called Seamester, and travel around the western United States for a month pursuing beauty and interesting stories. He has no clue what he wants to do when he graduates college, but he’s okay with that. Liza Morse will be working at Grinnell college’s Conard Environmental Research Area this summer. She will be banding birds, tagging butterflies, planting native prairie plants, and taking care of a heard of goats responsible for removing invasive species, among other things. She will also be taking some R7R time before heading into her final year at Grinnell!

SPRING 2010

Class Agent: Hannah Cope (If you are interested in helping Hannah out with her Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

Nick Lanza has spent his senior year at Prescott College traveling through Norway, Chile, and Patagonia, Argentina as well as biking, climbing, and surfing in California and the south western US. After spending the past two summers teaching Island School Summer term, Nick will return this summer for summer term and stay on as the new Marine Ecology teacher for the upcoming year. Maddie Hawk spent some time in London and Paris this year, and is heading to Korea for the summer to learn Korean so she can speak with her grandparents in Korean. On return from Korea, she will be heading to Denmark to study abroad for the fall semester. Evan Lutvak is producing music albums, designing plays, organizing concerts, and generally killing it as he has been since he rapped to us for his Who Am I presentation. Steve Normington is majoring in Broadcast Journalism at Elon University and has secured an internship with the Carolina Panthers for this summer. Grace Bender is studying abroad this semester in Costa Rica, researching zoonotic parasites and enjoying the different pace of life. She will be spending the summer at the Mountain School in Vershire, VT working on the farm crew. Micky Mittermeier is in Queensland, NZ at the moment. His visited-country count is at exactly 70, with his most recent visits being Togo and Benin. This summer he plans to spend eight weeks backpacking from Singapore to Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, which will take his country count to 76. Erin Baker is also abroad in New Zealand this semester. Hadley Sachs is in Cape Town, South Africa this semester studying philosophy and politics. Lucy Triedman was doing shark conservation research in Fiji then traveling in NZ this past summer. She is currently studying social movements and human rights in Buenos Aires. For a few weeks in May she will be researching tourism in Patagonia. Sean McGurl has spent the past few months in Brazil studying music and plans to stay there through the World Cup. Rennie Meyers plans to spend this summer doing anthropological research on the aesthetics of sustainable tourism and development out of UMiami-Rosenstiel in Nassau, Abaco, and Eleuthera this summer. Hannah Cope has been at school at the University of St Andrews in Scotland this year. She has been competing in British Show Jumping competitions and also riding on the university’s equestrian team. She will also be President of the Polo Club for the 2014-2015 year, which involves organizing everything from weekly lessons for members to traveling around the UK to compete in tournaments, and also playing chukkas on St Andrews’ iconic West Sands beach. It has been a horse-filled year for Hannah!

SUMMER 2010

Class Agents: Grace Dennis, Ariel Verbrugge

Grace Dennis is currently spending her junior spring studying tropical island conservation and working on my Spanish with the School for Field Studies in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Grace is excited to spend this summer working with the Environmental Stewardship department of Royal Caribbean in Miami before returning to upstate NY in the fall for her senior year at Colgate University.

FALL 2010

Class Agent: Chris Daniell (If you are interested in helping Chris out with his Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

Chris Daniell is participating in a Marine-science oriented study away at Wood’s Hole marine biological laboratory in the fall.

SPRING 2011

Class Agents: Ami Adams (If you are interested in helping Ami out with her Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

Ami working alongside fishermen on a shrimp trawler in the Gulf of California
Ami working alongside fishermen on a shrimp trawler in the Gulf of California

Ami Adams going into her senior year at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona majoring in marine biology. She has spent the last year and a half at the school’s field station in Bahia Kino, Sonora, Mexico studying the Gulf of California, specifically the effects of commercial fisheries as well as shrimp aquaculture in the Midriff Island region. Ami looks forward to returning to the Island School this year for summer term as the marine ecology student mentor.

SUMMER 2011

Class Agents: Mackenzie Carlson, Henry Ogilby

Hana Bendy joined the sorority Kappa Alpha Theta at Yale University. This summer, she is going to Lima, Peru to study Spanish. This fall, Corey Coffey will be joining the freshman class of the University of Florida. Courtney Good will be going to Australia to study abroad next spring semester. Tiffany Hanson is playing for Princeton’s Women’s Rugby Team.  This coming summer, she will be moving to Florida. This summer, Tiffany will be completing the Fullbridge Program in New York City. Maggie Winchester will be studying abroad in Morocco next semester. Henry Ogilby is working for Chipotle as a marketing rep. He says he gets lots of free, good food from good places. Denali Balser joined the cross country and track team at UVM and will be living in Oregon this summer with a friend. This year, Olivia Erdman qualified and competed in nationals for collegiate ski races, participated in a alternative spring break building and fixing homes for Hurricane Sandy victims. This summer, Olivia will be conducting research looking at invasive turtle species in the area. Bazl Taliaferrow-Mosleh is currently enrolled in an engineering program and is getting his real estate license over the summer. Blake Turner was a talent escort at the CMA Awards for Luke Bryan. Clayton Meyer is a Division I rower at Cornell University and also a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity. Mackenzie Carlson joined the cycling and club running teams at Dartmouth college and is involved in Christian Union on campus. She also enjoys doing math, working as a physics research intern, and will be going to Cape Town, South Africa next winter to do research in astrophysics. Taylor Nichols is currently enrolled at Miami University in Ohio, which he says has been incredible. He also went to Africa which was amazing. Ariel Potter will be going to Colorado College next year. Last summer, she worked in a Bolivia as an English teacher. Julian Perez will be joining the freshman class at Texas A&M University at Galveston in the fall. He has done last of diving in the New York Harbor and can’t wait to try some cave diving while at A&M!

FALL 2011

Class Agents: Anika Ayyar, Grace Fowler, Griffin Hunt

 

A drawing by Jack Foote
A drawing by Jack Foote

Sam Saccomanno is having a blast at Colorado College, where she recently got WFR certified and spent a month in Italy for an Italian Cinema class. She’s still dancing, boxing, and doing acrobatics. This summer she’ll be in Bolivia working with The Foundation for Sustainable Development and another NGO called Warmi. She’ll then be traveling around Peru before returning to CC for RA training. Emily Peters is having a great time at the University of Vermont, where she is studying Environmental Studies. She’s been busy as an outing club leader and a DJ at 90.1 WRUV FM Burlington, and will be a camp counselor at Wavus Camp for Girls this summer. Grace Fowler is at Colby College studying Environmental Studies and Education and dreams of returning to The Island School someday soon. She’s a member of the rugby team, the environmental club, and a leader in the outing club. She learned to fly fish this winter in a JanPlan English class in California. She’s also getting her LEED Green Associate accreditation and will be conducting research on pollinator relationships and climate change at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado this summer. Tessa Tracy is excited to attend Barnard College in the fall! She’s been busy this year with the Marine Conservation Club at her high school and has fundraised money for the New England Aquarium Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Program. She’ll be living in Nicaragua this summer while working on a development project and teaching kids English. In the last two years many things have happened, to Jack Foote. He claims he remains the klutzy, accident-prone Jack you all came to know but now is slightly larger and wiser now and a proud owner of a full beard. He has been accepted to both Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida as well as Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, Hawaii. Jack is partial to West Palm Beach. He is planning on a double major of Marine Biology and Art. That’s right, since IS he has discovered a talent for the visual arts within himself with a specialty for sculpture and pencil art, as well as but not limited to: Ink, Paint, Spray Paint, and Charcoal. Some of his pieces have been recognized and won awards as well as earned a place in art shows. Jack is also in the process of completing a Portfolio to be judged for college credit with all the pieces are of the various creatures that inhabit the Oceans. He misses all of Fall 2011 greatly and the Island School and Eleuthera fill his daydreams often. He can’t wait to visit his brother during his semester in the fall. Benji Beardsley will be taking a Gap Year after graduating high school this spring. He is excited to be enrolling in a NOLS program in India for the first semester of his Gap Year, and will likely participate in a Spanish program in Central America for his second semester. Inspired in part by his IS experience, he will be earning his rescue or master diver certification this coming summer. Benji will be attending Trinity College (Hartford, CT) beginning in the fall of 2015. Griffin Hunt is just finishing his freshman year at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), where he was elected by faculty into both the Guided Studies Program and the Writing Associates Program. Though undeclared, he is planning to pursue a major in Public Policy and Law with an emphasis on environmental regulation. He spent this past summer working as a Communications Intern back at the IS campus, where he produced videos (including the CEI trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBR4jdNYBqY), took photographs, and created promotional materials for all facets of the organization. Griffin is ecstatic about returning in June as a Summer Term Alumni Mentor to support the human ecology team and to again work alongside teachers from his own semester. Just wrapping up her freshman year at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), Annie Bryan is a sister in the Alpha Phi sorority. An ambitious young lady, she plans on majoring in psychology, with a double minor in entrepreneurship and marketing, and serves as an eco rep in her dorm. Annie hopes to visit IS soon to play with Fritter.

SPRING 2012

Class Agents: Lauren Maida, Matti McAlpin, Hannah Piersiak

In the Fall of this year, Matti McAlpin moved to Punta Gorda Toledo, Belize and began an internship as a lab and field research assistant with the Toledo Institute for Development and the Environment. She focused primarily on a fresh water study determining the impact of a dumpsite on the Rio Grande River, using stable isotope and trace elemental analysis of aquatic species of multiple trophic levels. She also worked on a project trying to development a market for invasive lionfish in the Toledo district of Belize through community outreach. Matti later moved back to The Bahamas to intern for the Cape Eleuthera Institute as a SCUBA dive and lab assistant looking at larval settlement in Eleuthera, Bahamas. She will be attending Clark University in the Fall to study Biology. Kira Akka-Seidel has been loving her freshman year at UCSC! She’s on the club soccer team there, which has been a lot of fun playing against other schools in California. She is double majoring in environmental studies and legal studies (planning on going into environmental law). When at home Kira has been working at the frozen yogurt shop in her town. Lauren Maida is in the home stretch of her freshman year at Lehigh University, where she is studying Marketing and Environmental Studies. She is involved in the Marketing Club, Dance Marathon PR Committee, and is a newly initiated sister of Pi Beta Phi sorority. She is very excited to spend her summer exploring Greece, and then sailing in Lavallette, NJ. Max Spencer will be joining the University of Florida’s Class of 2018 next year! Go Gators! Natalie Grune will be attending Lafayette College next year, hoping to major in Neuroscience and Psychology. She is excited to be going back to Island School in a couple weeks for her senior internship, working with the sea turtle team!! Kyle Titsworth is finishing his first semester at the University of Vermont. He joined UVM Rescue, which is a state licensed advanced life support ambulance that services UVM, Burlington and the greater Burlington area. Kyle became an EMT last march, inspired by his teacher Rachel Shapiro after leaving Island School. This past summer, Casey Rutherford went to Fiji to study Bull Sharks on Shark Reef Marine Reserve. She will be graduating high school in May and will be attending the University of Miami. Casey plans on double majoring in Marine Biology and Marine Science with a Chemistry minor. This summer she is going diving with Great Whites in Isla Guadalupe, Mexico. Abby Anderson is a freshman at UC Berkeley and is planning to major in molecular environmental biology major. One fun thing she’s involved in is a club that works with kids with cancer and raises money for them to attend summer camp. Next year Tamara Pletzer will be attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She will be majoring in economics and mathematics and having a great time! After graduating from Noble and Greenough School last June, Sarah Allison worked as a canoe counselor at a girls sleep-away camp in Vermont, leading multiple-day canoe trips throughout NH, VT, and ME. She is currently a freshman at University of Southern California, majoring in Environmental Studies. On campus Sarah is a member of Delta Gamma sorority, the environmental affairs organization, and social workers for environmental justice. She is anticipating the start of the summer when she will be headed back down to Eleuthera as an intern in the shark research and conservation program at CEI. Tai Massimilian has had a really great senior year being a cheer captain and getting accepted into the University of Texas at Austin for Fall 2014. After graduating from Hockaday in May, Tai will be working in North Carolina and vacationing with her family in Nantucket this summer. She is then heading to UT for rush week before classes start. Tai is majoring in public relations with a focus on Business and she can’t wait to get started! Hook em horns!

SUMMER 2012

Class Agent: Ben Charo (If you are interested in helping Ben out with his Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

FALL 2012

Class Agents: Cate Ellison, Lauren Gould, Lexi Welch

SPRING 2013

Class Agents: Ben VanderWeide (If you are interested in helping Ben out with his Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)

SUMMER 2013

Class Agents: AJ Alcindor, Tim Gronet

 Many of the Summer Term 2013 class members are headed off to college in the fall. Gabi Jackson will be attending Niagara University. Jess Castelo is joining the freshman class at Washington and Lee University. Taylor Rado is headed off to Union College. Savannah D’Orazio will be attending Occidental College. Randi Block is going to Hillsdale College. Haley Stokas is going to Lewis & Clark College. Hector Altamirano is leaving the mainland of the United States to attend University of Hawaii. Juliette Alexandra is headed to Connecticut College. Chase Goldston is be attending Colby College in the fall. Emily Boring has decided to join the freshmen class at Yale University next year.

FALL 2013

Class Agent: Griffin Andres (If you are interested in helping Griffin out with his Class Agent duties, please email alumni@islandschool.org)