Class Note 2013
Our class never ceases to inspire me with their updates, and this month was no different. Thank you for the incredible response to my last-minute call for updates! Whether pursuing graduate degrees, playing professional sports, serving our country, starting companies, conducting research, jet setting around the world, working awesome jobs or bringing new life into the world, you all are truly amazing. Let’s get to the updates!
Grace Best gave birth to her first son, Parker Jayce Best, on January 23. Congratulations, Grace!
Michael Keenan is currently playing professional hockey, splitting time between the Orlando Solar Bears in the ECHL and the Albany Devils in the American Hockey League.
Matt Peterson bought a house in Houston—the class’s first homeowner, perhaps? Congratulations!
Evan Gray recently returned from a medical mission trip to El Faro, Guatemala, where she served four villages with a team of doctors, optometrists, dentists and spiritual leaders.
Ashlee Roberson’s first first-author research manuscript, “Antidepressant nonadherence in routine clinical settings determined from discarded blood samples,” will be published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in the coming months.
Phil Gordon is currently in his first year of medical school at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and became captain of the Jefferson Medical College club hockey team. Dan Marcusa is working on his M.D. at University of Michigan Medical School and Annabel Frank is a first-year medical student at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Racquel Bernard is currently a master’s student at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. She recently presented a paper titled “Reclaiming Bumboclaat: Peter Tosh’s Subversive Speech Acts and Social Change” at the International Reggae Conference. She is currently considering offers from several Ph.D. programs.
Savannah Martin is finishing up her first year of a six-year Ph.D. program for physical anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She would love for other alumni to contact her if they’re in the area! Blaine Johnson is writing her master’s thesis on waste management behavior in Shanghai’s residential communities and hopes to graduate this year.
Julian Sarkar is studying at UC Hastings College of the Law and clerking at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.
June Yuan Shangguan will spend the summer in Seattle conducting Amazon research. She says, “I am very excited to be able to put my Ph.D. studies into real products.” Casey Conway will be working at Apple in Cupertino, California, this summer.
Larissa Russell’s venture Green Pea Cookie is halfway through a Kickstarter campaign and doing great! She reports, “We reached our initial goal in seven hours, have since exceeded it by more than 500 percent and we’re aiming to reach our ultimate goal of mailing off 1 million cookies in Kickstarter rewards!”
Gregg Fox has been living in New Zealand for the past six months and exploring the North Island on the weekends. He and his girlfriend are next going to spend some time in the Cook Islands before traveling around the South Island of New Zealand before returning to the United Kingdom. Sounds like an awesome adventure!
Jeff Ledolter moved to Seattle in January and started working as an associate consultant for the Spur Group, a management consulting firm.
After living in New Jersey for almost two years, Yi-Jie Wang recently moved to Detroit to start a new position as an associate at the Boston Consulting Group.
Danielle Jellerette got a new job as a consultant at Deloitte in the greater Washington, D.C., area.
Benji Kessler moved to New York to pursue standup comedy and Zach Martinez recently moved to Philadelphia for a job in Camden, New Jersey. Raghu Vaidyanathan is currently doing macro research at Fidelity in the Boston area.
Chase Womack is working with Merriman Capital, an investment bank run by Jon Merriman ’82. Womack actively seeks investors for early-stage technology, healthcare and energy companies.
—Emily Fletcher, 1375 Fairmont St. NW, Apt. 809, Washington, DC 20009; emilyefletcher@gmail.com
