Annelise Matthiesen, Staff Writer
This summer, Macie Mohler (C ‘28) cruised the river through Switzerland, Germany, France, and Amsterdam with her parents and friend, Payton, who had never been abroad before. They attended a German opera, visited the Anne Frank house, explored Van Gogh and Monet art museums, and toured beautiful churches and cathedrals.
Mohler’s favorite city was Amsterdam because of its all-you-can-eat Korean barbeque restaurant and its striking cultural differences from the U.S. that she observed while walking its streets and browsing its souvenir shops.
“It’s basically Sex in the City,” Mohler said. “America makes things like sex and tobacco taboo, but I feel like Europe doesn’t. It was super fun to experience other people’s perspectives.”
Another of Mohler’s Amsterdam highlights was using the French language skills that she has developed in her Sewanee French classes. She was especially proud when a French-speaking man offered her family tickets to the Anne Frank house and she fluently responded that, yes, they would happily take them.
Despite Amsterdam being her favorite destination, Mohler quickly discovered that the city has its dangers when an electric bike collided into her while she was crossing the street.
“There are more lanes for bikes than cars, and you’re more likely to get run over by a bike than by a car,. They don’t care. They’ve got places to be.” Mohler said.
Mairyn McGilvray (C ‘26) attended a poetry workshop through the New York State Summer Writers Institute, in Saratoga Springs, New York. She received scholarships from Sewanee’s Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund and from the institute to partake in their advanced workshop taught by one of her favorite poets, Henri Cole.
On having Cole as an instructor, McGilvray stated, “He’s as wonderful as I could ever have expected or hoped he would be… he was really funny and from a generation of poets that doesn’t really exist anymore. He’s very traditional.”
Over two weeks, McGilvray workshopped three poems she wrote during the workshop and had one-on-one meetings with Cole to discuss work written prior to the workshop. She made “great friends” from “all over the world” from Canada to Pakistan and glimpsed many aspects of the poetry and larger literature industry.
“From the first poem that I turned in to the last poem that I turned in, Henri said that he liked my last poem the most, which was really encouraging. I’ve been reading more traditional poets or older poets like Elizabeth Bishop because he gave me a lot of people to read and was pushing me toward more interesting language. I’m excited to work on expanding the language that I use and being a little bit more descriptive.” McGilvray said.
McGilvray’s favorite workshop moment was listening to Cole read poems “Twilight” and “Self-Portrait in a Gold Kimono.”
“He’s got a measured, amazing voice, and it was really cool after all of this time working with him to hear him recite and read these poems that mean a lot to me,” McGilvray said.
This summer, Birmingham native Sebastian Hartley (C ‘28) worked as an intern at the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA). Hartley described PARCA as “a non-profit, non-partisan, non-biased research council” that researches public policy, law, education, and voting, and undertakes “other huge projects that are really helpful to the city.”
Over two months, Hartley contributed to three projects. In one project, he worked to evaluate the compensation of city workers and “make sure that pay (in Birmingham) matched for similar cities.” In another, he examined education data, including third-grade testing data and the variables affecting test scores, and in a third project, he assembled graphs on population data.
The education project was Hartley’s favorite because through it he learned new skills in statistics and the program Excel.
“That was my favorite part because I had to do it on my own. The guy set me up with it. He was like ‘now you’re going to do it on your own. I’m not going to help you. You’re going to figure it out, and then, you can come to me if you need it, but I trust you to figure it out.’ I did figure it out, and it was really informative,” Hartley said.
Through his internship, Hartley came to appreciate more greatly his classes at Sewanee and the knowledge they provide. “It’s not a waste of time. You actually learn stuff, and I’ve learned that you can have an effect on the world with that kind of stuff. I’ve learned that even if you don’t feel like you’re having an effect on the world by doing something, you actually are,” Hartley said.
McLean Broaddus’s (C ‘28) summer was divided between working as a camp counselor at Brilliant Summer Camp at her alma mater high school, St. Catherine’s, in Richmond, Virginia and touring the hustle and bustle of New York City (NYC).
During her six weeks at camp, McLean looked after and entertained mostly four- to six-year-olds. Each week, she led the kids in a new activity. Artistic week, they learned about a new artist, watched a video, and completed an art project. “It was really great to be with all the kids because they could be a little bit rowdy sometimes, but they were really fun and cute,” she said.
McLean’s favorite part of her job was getting to know the kids. “One day, I had to sit outside with one of the kids, and the rest of the week, she would come up to me every time at lunch because she had a wiggly tooth. She would show me how much more wiggly it was, and it was really sweet,” she recalled.
Opeoluwa Odusote (C ‘28) spent much of her summer in Sewanee, participating in two math department projects with Prof. Drinen and Prof. Cavagnaro. With Drinen, she learned to use an animation software based on Python, “a programming language,” to “create explanatory videos.” With Cavagnaro, Opeoluwa used Monte Carlo simulations “to study flight times” by generating thousands of random paths from one point to another, computing each path’s time, and determining the shortest path.
Opeoluwa’s projects prompted her to think about things she had never thought about before, like the concept of randomness and how it applies to so many different aspects of our reality. She also reflected that both projects taught her patience, problem solving, creativity, and how best to communicate complex information so that it is “entertaining but also informative.” “Generally, with computer science, you write things and you expect it to work and then it doesn’t,” she explained. “And so it taught me to calm down and go through it and find out ‘Ok. What’s wrong?’ I really appreciated that.”
But Opeoluwa’s greatest takeaway from her projects was the importance of understanding. “A lot of my life, it has been about being the best, getting all A’s, but right now, I want to actually know what I’m doing,” she said. “I want not just to have good grades but I want to understand and be able to apply myself to different things, even things I have not seen before.”