In just a few very short weeks we will gather as a class for our “Not-Quite-Twentieth” 20th reunion! Our reunion committee and class officers have been working tirelessly to prepare for the big event and are looking forward to seeing everyone in late June! If you have yet to make your reunion arrangements, please check out our class website today (that’s 1996.dartmouth.org) for more details.


Though we will collectively be catching up with each other very soon on campus, we have a few updates from a few very busy classmates to tide us over until we gather again in Hanover. I received a detailed update from Rebecca Oettinger Feder, who had not sent in news in some time for fear of not having “saved lives, altered the course of our environment, made the business world more efficient or changed government.” She went on to observe that her “Dartmouth friends have bought new homes, switched jobs and Soraya (O’Brien) Jollon is now a blonde!” As such, Rebecca was happy to report that, for the first time in the nearly two decades since college, nothing significant changed in her life last year (a feat many of us can appreciate at this point in our personal and professional lives). Still happily married to her husband of 10 years (Russ), Rebecca keeps busy raising their two energetic boys Brandon (9) and Justin (7). The family resides in a 110-year-old home in the Princeton, New Jersey, area, where Rebecca has been a senior director in the human resources division of Tyco’s fire protection business unit for the past two years. They recently expanded their backyard “urban farm” full of veggies, fruits and flowers to include brown-egg-laying chickens (inspired by Amy Coughlin Jones). They also started making their own wine, bread, vanilla extract, ice cream-yogurt, granola, laundry detergent, etc. For someone who claims that this “is as close to a midlife crisis as [she] plans to get,” we should all hope to be as “update unworthy” as Rebecca deemed herself to be—the world would be a much better place!


As to a certain friend of Rebecca’s, her ears must have been burning, as I also heard from one Soraya (O’Brien) Jollon herself! She graciously took a few minutes out of her own busy daily life to convey that she and her husband welcomed their fourth (and, she promises, “final!”) child last July. She informs me that he is a healthy and beautiful boy named Severin, who joins older brothers Thiago and Leos and older sister Lucia. The now family of six lives in Brooklyn, where her event-planning company (known as Soraya Weddings & Celebrations) is in its 12th year of putting together high-end weddings and parties throughout the New York City area.


Speaking of those working to better the world, I also heard from Sara McKinstry, who moved to San Diego last August to coordinate the University of California, San Diego’s sustainability efforts. The opportunity presented itself after Sara had served as the associate director of the University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute for nearly nine years. She was happy to report that she now lives in the same city as her old Dartmouth roommate (one Eboney Simmons), whom she has gotten to see a few times since relocating. Spending time together is “bringing back lots of fun Dartmouth memories” and, while she misses her friends and family in New England, she definitely does not miss the snow!


Looking forward to seeing everyone in Hanover in June! In the meanwhile, happy spring! Keep sending in those updates!


—Garrett Gil de Rubio, 1062 Middlebrooke Drive, Canton, GA 30115; ggdr@alum.dartmouth.org