Alumni Day 2015

Please join us on Thursday, December 17 as we welcome all Woodlawn alumni back to campus. It’s a day to trade hellos and hugs over coffee and hot chocolate, visit […]

Graduation ’15 Gallery

Thanks to all the alums who came out to help the Class of 2015 celebrate Woodlawn’s sixth commencement. We loved seeing you all, and you looked super sharp in the […]

Sayre Weir ’11: Anything but Ordinary

Ask Sayre Weir, ’11 what her most memorable moment has been her past 4 years at Middlebury College and it might surprise you to hear… silence. Finally! A question that […]

Bowman ’11 Gets Published, Prepares for Life After College

Back in the day it wasn’t unusual to see this alum skipping through Woods Hall humming some made-up tune about Sissy Jupe in Dickens’ Hard Times while wearing a bright red t-shirt with the phrase, “It’s Gonna Be Fantastic!” written across the chest. Four years later Sawyer Bowman ’11 still has plenty to skip and hum about. With graduation from Bowdoin College just a semester off, he recently received word that a research paper he co-authored with a Bowdoin professor has been published in the technical journal Big Data and Society. “It’s not something people typically associate with a small liberal arts school like Bowdoin,” Sawyer admits. “We’re not a research school, and we’re not even really known for Computer Science (his declared major).” But in the spring of his sophomore year, a sociology professor approached him and asked if he’d be interested in a research fellowship in the “Social Innovation” lab. His job would be to bring big data-ready technology to fields that normally don’t use technology. “The professor leading the research was interested in behaviors of people online (such as users of Facebook and Twitter),” explains Sawyer. “There’s so much data out there, and it can be very difficult for people (like sociologists) to manage it and draw conclusions from it.” Sawyer, along with two other research fellows, built a system to capture five million tweets a day, equivalent to one percent of the complete Twitter feed. “The part of the paper/research that is revolutionary is that we demonstrated to non-tech fields that “big data” is feasible for their research purposes and can be used to gain meaningful insights,” explains Bowman. “This is the future!” Bowman has another paper pending publication as well. “The paper in review is more of an empirical study whereas the one already published is a methods paper.”

So what’s life like for a college senior with just a semester left? Any room for a senior slide? “I’m actually finishing stronger than I started,” says Bowman. “I’m ready to go do something different, but at the same time, I’m still very excited about what I’m learning.” Sawyer also spends his time at Bowdoin giving admission tours and working as a TA in the computer science department. “On top of that, I had this crazy idea with my roommate to bypass cross country season this fall and train for a marathon. I needed a switch-up and thought ‘Why not race 26.2 miles?’”, says Bowman. Little did he take into account that he’d be training the long miles through the winter… in Maine… where it gets dark at four in the afternoon…and it’s freezing cold. “I didn’t plan that one out too well,” Bowman laughs. “Terrible idea! We ran the LL Bean Challenge for an 18-miler one day in late November,” he says with a hint on anguish on his face. “It was great coming into the town of Freeport on foot vs. a car but then Henry (his roommate) and I looked at each other and said, ‘We have to go all the way back!’ Around mile 15 we fell apart.”

Zach Lingle ’12 Digs Crete

Zach Lingle ’12 is currently a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill, majoring in chemistry with a minor in archeology. He spent most of the summer of 2014 far away from the […]

Kathleen Elkins ’10 Blazes New Trail

It seems like just yesterday when a small-framed, shy, freckle-faced girl named Kathleen Elkins showed up on Woodlawn’s campus. That was in the early days of Woodlawn, two thousand and three to be exact. The school was in just its second year, and Kathleen was in the sixth grade. It wasn’t long before she began to make a name for herself here at Woodlawn and beyond. A nationally ranked tennis player (then and now), you could also find Kathleen in true Trailblazer form on the cross-country trails and eventually on the track (she still holds the girls cross country 5k school record). She excelled in both athletics and academics, graduating from Woodlawn with summa cum laude honors in 2010. It was a significant moment in the history of Woodlawn—she and Chad Raines (St. Johns, ’14) would forever be remembered as the two who blazed the trail for all future Woodlawn grads. “I had an incredible experience as a middle schooler, and I could not imagine going to school anywhere else for the next four years — I thrived in the small classroom environment where creativity and curiosity were encouraged,” explains Kathleen on her choice to stay through high school. “Looking back (and I did not realize this at the time), Woodlawn truly shaped me into who I am today — much of my personality and who I grew to be can be credited to Woodlawn.”

“When I tell my friends in college that I graduated with one other person, they get all excited and say things like ‘No Way!’ and ‘Is it a homeschool?’ and I explain to them that, no, it’s not a homeschool and it sits on something like 60 acres and all, and then they grab their phones and start to google Woodlawn to make sure I am not kidding,” jokes Kathleen. “It’s a great conversation starter for sure.”

Fast forward four years later to present day, and you’ll now find her still a small-framed nationally ranked tennis star, but with a sort of confidence and excitement that comes with the type of recognition she’s earned. A 2014 graduate of Williams College with quite a few accolades to her name, she still is mostly smiles and laughs, and she’s filled with happy anticipation of what’s yet to come, just like she was way back when she left Woodlawn in 2010. “I grew up in Davidson and I went to a small liberal arts school in Williamstown,” says Kathleen. “Now I am moving to Boston! I’ll be living in a city with tons of things to do.” Kathleen has signed on with Tenacity, a nonprofit that works with inner city youth. A one-year stint called “Coach Across America” involves working in the classroom and the tennis court with middle and high school kids. “It’s really a perfect fit for me,” says Kathleen. “I will get coaching certified in the process of this one-year program which is really cool.”

Sophia Spach ’11: Photog, Student, Gospel Singer, World Traveler

A mile-wide smile spreads across her face as soon as she’s asked about her study abroad. It’s something Sophia Spach, class of 2011, knows a bit about. Her sophomore year took her on a whirlwind back-to-back, semester-to-semester adventure, circling the globe from India to Costa Rica in the span of nine months. As she talks at 90 miles per hour about exciting cultural differences, the ancient sights she visited, and the exotic food she sampled, one recurring theme keeps coming up: People!  It’s clear Sophia enjoys the people most of all. Her enthusiastic voice and smiling face seem like the perfect combination while she describes, as she says, “living and learning in communities of people so different from me.”

Traveling to India and Costa Rica not only confirmed her love for people, but it also gave her deep perspective on her own life in the United States. “I traveled to India during winter term with the intention of studying Religion Caste and Gender in Contemporary South India,” says Sophia. “I loved everything about it! The people, the colors, the spices, the food! And it was really interesting to see the levels of wealth—basically rich people and extreme poverty surrounding those upper classes.”

Where in the World is TPW?

Tucked away in Central Europe, eating a spicy beef stew you’ll find Woodlawn’s own Terin Patel-Wilson ’11, now a junior at Yale University, doing a study abroad program in Budapest, Hungary. “We eat a lot of meat and potatoes,” laughs Terin. “I like meat, so it sort of works out for me!”

It’s a seemingly obscure place to land for study abroad but as Terin explains, “Budapest is sort of the hub for science and math. They have this theory that if you can do well in math and science, you will do well in life. And so they’ve put a major focus on that in Eastern Europe.”

A computer science major at Yale, Terin says he first developed his love of math/science at Woodlawn. “A lot of kids hate math in high school,” says Terin. “But some of my fondest memories involve the crazy projects we did in math.” Like the MacGyver movie, no doubt, which still makes a regular showing in Dr. Stutzman’s classes today. “Yeah, that isn’t going to be shown here is it?” laughs Terin. “I don’t want people basing their entire opinion of me on that one movie.”

Terin made the transition from math to computer science early while at Yale – his first comp sci course sealed the deal. “I was always interested in computers,” says Terin. “It’s funny because while we didn’t actually have a formal computer science class at Woodlawn, nearly everything we did had some technology piece tied to it. We became very tech savvy at a very early age and it has always piqued my interest. I mean, if you look at just my graduating class, there are three of us (out of 13) majoring in computer science: Darius, Sawyer, and myself. That’s pretty impressive.”

Zack Scott ’13 Conquers Houston Marathon

Anyone who’s spent time on Woodlawn’s campus in the past couple years probably remembers Zack Scott ’13, running (and sometimes hobbling) around our trail system. A member of our own cross country team since his 5th grade year, he even has a trail named in his honor. He’s run everything from the quarter mile to the 2 mile in track (and often times he doubled or tripled in those events) and of course he’s run plenty of 5k’s (3.1 miles) in his cross country high school career. And so it might not surprise you to learn that Zack recently completed his first marathon, The Chevron Houston Marathon. “It was the spur of the moment decision, really,” admits Zack. “I decided to register for the race in the summer and I sort of just got committed to it.” But 26 miles is a lot farther than three! “Yeah, about that,” he laughs, “the furthest I’ve run is a 10k (6.2 miles). I did not fully comprehend quite how long it’d be.”

Still, Zack stuck to his training program reaching his max long run of 20 miles. “It was a new level of sore I experienced,” he remembers. Following a program he found on the internet, he started training in mid-July. “I liked this program,” he says. “It justified the run lengths and talked a lot about the effects of marathon training like cell death, and how the immune system becomes compromised.” Despite intense summer and fall heat (he trained in Houston), he says it was relatively easy to stay on track. “I had a lot of support from my friends at Rice. Once you tell people you are doing it, you can’t easily back out of it,” he laughs.