News
Getting Down to Work
Last Sunday, many of our families celebrated Easter, with others set to celebrate in early May according to the Orthodox calendar. I wish you all a happy and blessed Paschal season. I also extend warm wishes to our Muslim families who mark Ramadan this month and Eid next week. Eid Mubarak.
With their teacher away from school attending a national art educator conference, I had the pleasure of covering a first-period painting class this morning. Before class, I sat at the teacher’s desk clicking away at my keyboard, focused too much on clearing my inbox and looking up every few moments to greet students as they settled in. At 8:55, the bell rang to mark the start of class. I closed my laptop screen, stood up, and found ten students seated around the room. They had brushes in hand, paint palettes on trays in front of them, and heads down engrossed in their work – nearly photo realistic oil paintings of fruit. I felt a little bad interrupting them to praise them for their focus and initiative! The experience is not limited to art. I’ve been in similar situations watching students initiate discussions in English class themselves when the teacher had to step out or students in math working on problems up at the board even before the start bell rings.
What’s different about the kids here? Their motivation is intrinsic. They own their learning. I know I speak for all of my colleagues when I say how much of a joy it is to work with these young people and how proud we are of the culture we have built together.
Purpose through Research and Action that Matter
This week, we heard from two BUA alumni at all-school meetings. Dheekshita Kumar ‘16 spoke about her career as an entrepreneur and the ways her BUA experience set her down that path. She told us about the time when she and her friends published a book of poetry as high schoolers with the support and guidance of their English teacher, who demystified self-publishing. She described the process of envisioning and launching BUA’s middle school model UN tournament (BUAMUN), which has now become an institution. The confidence she gained from her experiences bringing an idea to life at BUA gave her a lifelong I-can-do-that attitude, which has translated into entrepreneurial success at an early age during and after college doing socially meaningful work.
We also heard from Jon Freeman ’04, the recipient of this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award. Jon is a professor and researcher at Columbia University studying social psychology, combining that field with neural imaging to better understand decision-making broadly and implicit bias more specifically. He has also done some important data-gathering work related to LGBTQ+ representation in STEM. He described the BUA roots of his passion for psychology and neuroscience, having had a chance to explore those fields in BU courses as a high schooler. He has found a way in his adult life to take those areas of academic passion and produce insights and data that are changing the way we think about stereotype, bias, and a range of related – sometimes life and death – issues.
BUA’s strategic vision challenges us to help students “find purpose through research and action that matter.” We know that having a sense of purpose is one of the central components of emotional well being. Purpose is different than passion; it involves finding ways to contribute to something important and bigger than ourselves. I am delighted that we have graduates like Dheekshita and John who model that and inspire today’s BUA students to start on their path to purpose while they are here with us.
Global Trips and the Wall-Less Classroom
In just a few hours, 50 BUA students, guided by trip leaders from the faculty and staff, will be heading off on three place-based intellectual adventures. One group is off to Istanbul, where they will build on their BUA study of classical history, modern politics and culture, and geometry through Ottoman architecture and ornamentation. Another is off to Paris for a hands-on literary experience, visiting the places that so many of the expat writers from their American Literature course frequented and engaging in daily writing assignments while there. The third group heads to New York City for an art-focused whirlwind – jazz clubs, museums, operas, plays, and more – supplementing the work they do every day in the BUA studio, theater, and music room. These are not sightseeing trips. They are a wall-less version of the BUA classroom. I am grateful to all the faculty and staff members who have worked so hard to create these opportunities and to our students for choosing to learn together in this adventurous way over break. I wish them all wonderful trips!
Asking Good Questions
Yesterday, our 10th graders took part in a lunch talk with Dr. Ingrid Anderson, the Associate Director of BU’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. Dr. Anderson, who received her doctorate at BU, took many classes with Elie Wiesel when he was a professor here, worked closely with him, and has done a great deal of research and writing focused on Wiesel and his work. The students are in the midst of a unit in their history course exploring the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. They recently read Elie Wiesel’s Night, the famous memoir of Wiesel’s experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Holocaust, and will be reading Wiesel’s Dawn shortly, a fictional work set in the immediate postwar period. Dr. Anderson shared personal stories about what Wiesel was like as a teacher and mentor, explored his views on morality and politics, described the hundreds of pieces of correspondence he received daily, and celebrated Wiesel’s lifelong advocacy for human rights. How rare and special to get this kind of first-hand view into the life and mind of such an important historical figure.
The talk made a powerful impression on me. So too did the students’ questions. They asked about the line between morality and politics; how Wiesel might react to contemporary events in America and in the Middle East; what his relationship with God was like and how it changed as he went through life; how he squared the horrors he had experienced with his faith; his connection with the Book of Job; and more. The ability to ask good questions is a critical skill, particularly now – in an era where misinformation and disinformation are rampant, social media feeds and news outlets cater to our points of view, and society and politics push us into ideological silos. BUA’s curriculum has always had critical thinking – and questioning – at its core. It was inspiring to see that in action.
The Beauty of Many Hats
What an exciting week here at BUA! Last Friday, the Jazz Band and Swamp Cats entertained students, faculty, staff, parents, and even grandparents for our Valentine’s Cabaret. The dance floor was quite a scene. Yesterday, both the boys and girls varsity basketball teams won their league championships in close games in front of a lively home crowd. In the girls game, senior Anais Kim reached a rare milestone – scoring 1,000 points – which is even more impressive given that she did so in just three years (COVID canceled her 9th-grade season). Tonight, we will celebrate the Lunar New Year in that same gym. Students from the East Asian Students Association, along with dozens of parents, have organized food, music, and games to share this important cultural moment with the whole BUA family. All are welcome, and we hope to see many of you there.
I’m struck by how many of our students are engaged across these activities and more. Students who played in the Cabaret last Friday were also playing in the games last night. Some who were on the court last night will be in the gym tonight organizing Lunar New Year. BUA is a small school. Our vibrancy depends on kids wearing many hats. Rejecting a broader societal push for specialization and balkanization, BUA’s culture rewards trying something new and getting involved. Our community certainly benefits, and I believe our students do too.
Leadership is Learned
On Tuesday, Boston University’s interim President, Ken Freeman, spoke at our all-school meeting. President Freeman has a distinguished history of service to BU, including eight years as the Dean of BU’s Questrom School of Business. That service followed a nearly forty-year career in industry, including senior executive positions at Corning, Quest Diagnostics, and private-equity firm KKR. In 2013, Harvard Business Review named him one of the 100 best performing CEOs in the world. He knows some things about leadership – his topic that morning. He offered a lively overview of what we know about successful leadership, peppering his talk with anecdotes and grounding it in decades of scholarship about what works and what doesn’t. He invited students to think about their own preferred leadership styles and challenged them to begin developing their own leadership philosophies. He touted the centrality of EQ. Most notably, he assured our students that leadership is learned.
Before introducing President Freeman, I shared a brief story on this last theme. After years of teaching, I was thinking about becoming a head of school but was intimidated by the idea. I thought about my role models – my headmaster when I was a boy, heads of school I had worked for, and many others I had come to know and admire over the years. To my mind, they all “had it.” I assumed that their leadership ability was somehow innate – that they had emerged, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully grown, clad in armor, and ready for battle. Did I have it? What if I didn’t? I mentioned my hesitation to a mentor who very quickly set me straight. He assured me, like President Freeman did for our students, that leaders are grown. He offered me a reading list and a series of coaching conversations with him to process what I was reading. He gave me the confidence to try.
I heard from dozens of BUA students about how much they enjoyed President Freeman’s talk. My hope is that, at least for some of them, his words give them the confidence to try too. We will all be better for it.
Our Diversity is Our Strength
Students from the Geography Club and from Student Council’s PR Committee posted a world map at the foot of the staircase by the main entrance earlier this week. Attached to the map is a basket of pushpins and a request for students to add a pin to any locations connected to their heritage. Just a few days later, the map has now come alive with hundreds of multicolored pins. Yesterday afternoon, I joined some students gathered around the map analyzing the data – noticing the significant coverage of Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and parts of North America; tight clusters in East Africa, Central America, and the Middle East; and scattered points throughout the map. The story it tells is a beautiful one of a local school composed of and enriched by cultures from around the world.
We are proud that BUA is a place where families and students across cultures feel at home. That is part of our strength and a great differentiator for us. So many of our families have recent immigration experiences in their histories. Our students talk and write about their cultural heritage and family traditions, weaving that into their academic work, art, and social lives. In a way that might seem counterintuitive, being at a place where there is such freedom to share and celebrate individual identities – rather than atomizing us – helps create a cohesive whole. It helps us recognize our common humanity and creates the space to reinforce those key beliefs we share: the centrality of kindness, joy in curiosity, and the transformative power of education.
Research Highlight: Finn McMillan ’24 Works to Optimize Plant Growth for Sustainable Production of Biofuels
For his senior thesis, BUA senior Finn McMillan ‘24 is working in partnership with Boston University’s Daniel Segrè Lab to investigate the optimization of plant growth for the sustainable and affordable production of consumer biofuels.
Finn was first introduced to the Segrè lab when he toured it as part of the STEM Seminar in his junior year. Intrigued by the team’s work, which focuses on bioinformatics and metabolic networks in living systems, Finn reached out to Professor Ilija Dukovski, a researcher in the Segrè lab, and arranged to spend his summer conducting research in the lab. Finn’s – and the Segrè Lab’s – work focuses on a small piece of a much larger, multi-institutional project called the Microbial Community Analysis & Functional Evaluation in Soils project, or m-CAFEs, “a collaborative, coordinated and integrated mission-driven proposal that interrogates the function of the soil and rhizosphere microbiome, which has immense implications for carbon cycling, carbon sequestration and plant productivity in natural and agricultural ecosystems.” In Finn’s words, “m-CAFEs seeks to identify the interactions that influence carbon flow in particular; combined with CRISPR-Cas and RNAi community editing, the goal of the research is to artificially optimize plant growth for the maximum yield of biomass.”
In order to optimize plant biomass, researchers need to understand which bacterial colonies promote plants’ growth, and which inhibit it. As Finn explains in his thesis, one method of plant microbiome analysis utilized in the m-CAFEs study is “performed through Computation Of Microbial Ecosystems in Time and Space (COMETS), a multi-scale modeling framework that computes group dynamics through metabolic stoichiometry, separated from any prior assumptions of how species interact. First becoming publicly available in 2014, COMETS was founded through a collaboration between researchers at Boston University, Yale University and the University of Minnesota. Rather than utilizing classical kinetic models in community analysis that require large-scale kinetic parameters and differential equations, COMETS employs both stoichiometric and environmental modeling in accurately predicting metabolic activity at the genome-scale and community level.”
As part of his research, Finn was tasked with the job of ensuring that the COMETS simulation matched the experimental data for plant microbiome analysis. In order to accomplish this, Finn developed a machine-learning algorithm using a technique known as simulated annealing, “which is beneficial in its ability to identify global minimums and maximums.” Using the code he wrote, Finn perfected a simulation of the bacterium Pseudomonas simiae (P. simiae), “by finding ideal Vmax and Km values for the simulation.” Finn then compared the simulated and experimental data of P. simiae in order to measure the kinetic parameters that dictate how this particular bacterium grows.
Finn’s research and the work of the larger mCAFEs project has the potential to revolutionize the biofuels industry by “enabling biofuels such as ethanol to become more sustainable and feasible for consumers.” Finn will present his findings as part of BUA’s Senior Thesis Symposium on May 13, 2024.
Owen Bergstein, Resident Puzzle Master
For BUA sophomore Owen Bergstein ‘26, crossword puzzles are a way of life. Always an avid puzzler – like many BUAers – Owen does the New York Times crossword every day and estimates that he’s solved close to 1,000 puzzles since starting at BUA. But about two years ago, Owen took the leap from solver to creator and began to teach himself how to design his own puzzles. Tapping into a network of online and in-person crossword constructors, Owen found mentorship and guidance, and began to refine his puzzle-building technique.
Reflecting on his process, Owen said: “ I started out constructing pencil-on-paper, but soon learned that there is helpful software that the pros use. Every crossword is either themed or themeless. For themed puzzles, you build a theme, generally based around what's called a ‘revealer,’ an answer in the grid that explains the gimmick going on in other answers. Then you put that theme into a grid, and build words around it, cohering to 180 degree rotational symmetry of the black squares.”
Once he felt confident in his crosswords, Owen started submitting his puzzles for publication to a wide array of outlets. By his estimate, he has “a whopping 20 rejections to date.” But Owen’s persistence paid off, and earlier this month, Owen published his first puzzle in The Modern, the crossword feature on the Puzzle Society website.
When asked about how he approached the creation of his first published puzzle, Owen shared (CROSSWORD SPOILERS AHEAD!):
“Themeless puzzles, like the one published in The Modern, begin with some number of ‘seed entries,’ words that seem particularly fun or interesting and have never appeared in a crossword before. For my Modern puzzle, there were three: SLAY QUEEN, HEARTSTOPPER, and DENIM ON DENIM (I refer to entries in all caps, cohering to crossword customs). I generally try to put queer representation into my puzzles, since it's often lacking in crosswords, hence HEARTSTOPPER and SLAY QUEEN. I built this particular puzzle over two days in August. It was rejected at two other venues, including the New York Times, before finding its home at the Modern— just one example of the many instances by which crosswording has taught me resilience. The published puzzle is almost entirely my own creation. The grid is fully my work, other than an asymmetrical black square at the bottom of the grid that my editor Kelsey Dixon asked me to put in. The clues are mostly my own, but some were tweaked by Kelsey and the proofreader.”
Think your skills are up to the task of solving Owen’s crossword? Subscribers to Puzzle Society can try their hand at this link.
Our Alums
I’m just back from a trip to San Francisco visiting BUA alums with Mr. Stone. Over two days, we caught up with several dozen BUA graduates ranging from the class of 1997 to 2018. The trip confirmed a few things for me, aside from the fact that I am perhaps getting too old to function well after a red-eye flight. One is that our alums are doing remarkable and purposeful things with their careers, with a focus on technology given the location: launching a medical-technology company as part of the current Y Combinator startup accelerator cohort; pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence in education; investing in next-generation cancer therapeutics; developing LiDAR systems for use in self-driving cars. They spoke not just of their passion, but also of the ways in which their work will impact society for the better. It gave me a lot of hope for the future.
Another is that many of them credit their time at BUA for their success. I heard about the independence and project-management skills they picked up as part of the senior thesis – especially in finding an advisor or lab, switching gears when they hit a bump, and carrying through on a long-term project. I heard about the confidence and entrepreneurial spirit they built when starting a new club in high school with the support and guidance of their teachers. I heard about how BUA’s strong humanities program – with its emphasis on close reading, analytical thinking, clear writing, and deep engagement around the table – has been a major differentiating factor and reason for their quick rise in STEM fields, where those skills are not as common.
Finally, over and over again alums expressed their desire to pay it forward. They want to be helpful to this next generation of BUA students. So many already help as alumni interviewers, volunteers on the Alumni Council, class representatives, coaches and club mentors, career and college panelists, all-school meeting speakers, and so on. There is a real desire to do even more. In the coming months and years, we are exploring ways to connect BUA graduates – as well as current and past parents – to today’s BUA students for a range of things: informational interviews about career paths, shadow days at work, and more. I imagine that some of those preliminary connections will turn into longer-term mentoring relationships. It is exciting to think about how leveraging our alums’ remarkable energy, generosity, and experience can inspire and accelerate our students’ journeys.