Excitingly, Rebecca Wall wrote with an update in early June! I was curious as to her full postgraduation journey, and in response, Rebecca summarized, “In the 11 years since graduation I have not sent in a single update, so there is a lot to catch up on. After two years working for the Mahindra Group in Mumbai, India, I spent the next seven years in the Bay Area completing a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University alongside dissertation research in Mali, Senegal, and France, as well as becoming convinced California was the best state. More recently, I’ve been working as a history professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and regretting shedding my Dartmouth winter wardrobe in the intervening decade. After two years in upstate New York, I’m moving to Los Angeles to start a job as an assistant professor of history at Loyola Marymount University. Looking forward to reconnecting with all the other Dartmouth folks in the area and trading in endless winter for sunshine—reach out if you’re in SoCal or passing through!”

As volunteered updates have been sparse, I was on alert for classmates on Instagram in late May after submitting the last Class Notes column. (Feel free to DM @hillbearie with updates!) On May 21 Uthman Olagoke, Korey McCants, and Sarah Seng ran in the Brooklyn Half Marathon in N.Y.C., and Matt Raskind was in attendance to support Sarah’s run. They look overjoyed in their post-run photos; it was a beautiful day to be outside!

The same day I saw Ahra Cho post to Instagram stories a photo of our classmates celebrating a wedding. Today, dear class president Katie Paxton “pinged” (hehe) Erin (Jaeger) Gunaratna for details, and Erin wrote, “I married Mahen Gunaratna (Georgetown ’08) in September 2020. We met through Andrea Imhof and Katie Gandy in 2014! He was roommates with them in a five-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, and I had just moved to N.Y.C. We started dating in 2015, got engaged at the end of 2018, planned a May 2020 wedding, and postponed it four times due to you-know-what. Not wanting to put our lives on hold indefinitely, we officially tied the knot with our families on September 12, 2020. That was pre-vaccines, so we couldn’t do any sort of big celebration.

“Fast forward to September 17, 2021, and we welcomed son Ian Tishan Gunaratna and then just finally had our big wedding celebration on May 20 at the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire! We were incredibly lucky to have lots of ’11s in attendance: Shanel Balloo and Katie Gandy were bridesmaids, and Grace Taveras, Ahra Cho, Katie Paxton, Isaiah Berg, Calvin and Tess (Korndorf) Woodring, Masha Barsky, Lars Osterberg, Andrea Imhof, Jenii Shin, Anna Pudimat, Emily Baxter, Sophie Novack, Marielle (Battistoni) Fortune, and Dennis Zeveloff ’12 all joined us to celebrate. It was the best—we can’t believe it finally happened, and we are now very much enjoying the summer as boring married people and parents to a rambunctious and adorable almost-10-month-old!”

Thanks to Katie, Shanel also wrote in with a big update! “Isaiah and I had a baby last year: Elijah Berg, born July 2021. He’s been a pretty great baby overall, and at almost a year in, we’re still adjusting to being parents.”

On May 31 I saw that Allison Lure posted photos of Jen Fownes, Nozomi Hitomi, Kate Arion, and Stephanie Han at Amanda Devine’s wedding. I asked for more details from Allison and Amanda, but no responses as of press time, so stay tuned! (Getting Class Notes updates can be like herding cats!)

—Hillary S. Cheng, 26611 La Roda, Mission Viejo, CA 92691; (603) 546-8452; hillary.s.cheng@dartmouth.edu