Behind the Humming Sound at Milton: The Answers in Dollars and Sense
“To an outsider, Milton finances seem like they ought to be simple, straightforward,” muses Rob Azeke ’87, trustee Budget Committee chair. Milton spent against revenues of nearly $60 million in FY 2015. What were those carefully allocated dollars aiming to achieve?
read moreCan Inadequate Metrics Drive Equitable Decisions? Seth Allen ’86
“I’m interested in stretching the notion of what ‘deserving’ means in this day and age,” Seth Allen ’86 says, one day in June when his normally teeming office is unduly quiet. Seth is vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Pomona College, and he’s directing his comment at college admission overall. As a process, applying and getting accepted to college provokes fixation, incredulity and frustration for many families, nationwide. It also raises urgent questions about access, affordability and value. “Four...
read more310 Emotional Touch Points: Dhruv Prasad ’95
“A local radio host can be a huge celebrity in town,” says Dhruv Prasad ’95. If Ryan Seacrest, TV host of American Idol, appeared alongside Brian Scott, the K2 Radio morning DJ, at a mall in Casper, Wyoming,
read moreChaos in the Circle: Donna Lee Chung ’79
When Donna Chung was 26 years old, she was ready to quit playing field hockey for good. The two-time collegiate All-American at the University of Iowa was struggling to earn a spot as a goalkeeper on the U.S. National Team. She figured the time had finally come to move on with her life. “I really did quit in my mind,” recalls Donna. “There was another goalie, and she was better than I was, so I thought, ‘I’m done.’” Then she had a revelation. “I decided I was going to play field hockey until it stopped being fun. And it never...
read moreDeliver Flavor: More Rather Than Less: Tomica Burke ’01
Tomica “Tom” Burke ’01 could check all the boxes on any “path to success” template: boarding school, excellent college, Capitol Hill job, prestigious law school, a position at a Manhattan law firm. But after two years, she left her law firm, and one year later she launched TomCookery, a catering company featuring Caribbean and Southern-inspired food, based in Queens, New York. “It all started at Milton,” says Tom. “For my senior project, I wrote a cookbook. This was before food was sexy, but I felt this urgency about wanting to...
read moreWhat Keeps College Counselors Up at Night
Each June for the past 14 years, I have taught at the Harvard Summer Institute on College Admission. For 55 years, the Institute has offered a weeklong, intensive introduction to all things college: the nuts and bolts of writing an effective recommendation; how to help families manage financial aid applications; the role of affirmative action; and what leadership in the college admission profession means, for example. Two of my colleagues on the faculty are high school counselors and 15 are college deans of admission and financial aid. At the...
read moreEighth Graders Take on Big Data
Grade 8 students are talking loudly in class. Today’s math teachers welcome that. Nancy Anderson, Milton’s K–8 math coordinator and Grade 8 math teacher, is reshaping the curriculum to optimize the value of talking. “Discussion in class is a huge topic in math education,” says Nancy, whose doctoral degree is in math education. “The data are clear that you want to get students talking, but it’s very hard to do that well — to use students’ discussion to move the class forward. “If we believe students learn by...
read moreKQED Is Executing a Pivot: Anne Avis ’77
“Part of the value and the beauty of the public media system,” Anne Avis says, “is that it reaches 99 percent of the country through this network of independently run local stations.” Not only in hip, urban centers but in remote, rural areas, NPR stations air news that is intensely local, as well as regional, national and global.“We need all of that news,” Anne says, “to make real and important decisions about the people and issues that affect our lives. That’s why public media is so important to democracy.” Anne recently...
read moreDiscovery: A Personal Model, a Business Model Ashley Fouts ’94
Last December, Ashley Fouts moved away from a lab bench. That is, away from her own lab bench. At Genentech, she began a new job keeping track of a molecule and the teams working on it. As a project manager, she facilitates the myriad decisions that are necessary to turn breakthrough science at the bench into life-changing drugs for patients. Genentech’s business is discovery. Genentech wants to be “the leading biotechnology company, using human genetic information to discover, develop, manufacture and commercialize medicines to treat...
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