AlumnaeGreenwich Academy
Ashley Evans's Speech at the Cum Laude Assembly on March 6, 2008

Ashley Evans '98, Cum Laude Speaker

I have been asked to speak today to those who graduate with the praise of this school, and I hope in so doing that I speak to those who have been welcomed up here today, and that I address also those in the audience who receive plaudits for your performances on the stage, on the playing field and courts, in your community service activities, and in our art and dance studios.

I thought about what I could possibly say to you, just in the midst of your senior spring and approaching your freshman fall---looking back to last year and forward to next, with, I imagine, some trepidation and some relief, a good dose of glee, and maybe a little bit of sadness.

I thought about what must be your wide array of interests, achievements, and ambitions, some of you particularly skilled in the sciences, I’m sure, some in languages and some in lacrosse, some in music and some in mathematics, some in friendship. I thought about what, ten years ago, when I sat in this place with my own classmates, who are now – lawyers, actresses, psychologists, songwriters, businesswomen, political activists, teachers, mothers–when we sat in this place, what we would have liked to know.

I thought about this ceremony–this acknowledgement of all those varied interests, achievements and ambitions; this offering up of praise for your commitments to your talents–and I thought about all the other ceremonies of the coming spring at GA. With these ceremonies, the school takes time away from the good activity of educating you, to praise you. And these ceremonies of praise set off you graduates as if the laurels bestowed here are armor to protect and help you on your next adventure.

Are they? Isn’t praise more a salve than a source of protection? Is this praise just a carrot, a way of compelling us, headlong, into the next challenge? A method of encouraging the Gatsby in us to run faster, stretch out our arms further, until one fine morning…. Is our praise today designed to exclude, to separate, to distinguish?

I don’t think it’s any of these things. You have done some outstanding things at this school: some of you started here fourteen years ago with the alphabet, and since then you have learned whole languages; you started with adding and made it through calculus; you unsludged the sludge in your sludge tests; you read some of the great literature of all time and wrote your own poems and stories .......the list goes on.

And you have done these things, many of you, when there have been other distractions, appealing alternatives. You have taken seriously the fact that you are a member of a fine academic institution, and you have gotten down to the business of getting educated. You have had at your fingertips dedicated teachers as committed to your development as they were to that of students who preceded you by ten, twenty, thirty years in some cases, and as they will be also to the members of the classes of 2018, 2028, 2038. You have done what your teachers have asked you to do, and you have done it well.

But again, the school is not, and the society is not, praising you because you’ve followed instructions. Rather, the school and the society praise you today because, in doing these things, you have done what is right.

This is why, then, the motto of the cum laude society does not stop at mentioning that it recognizes academic achievement in secondary schools, but rather, as you heard from Mr. Fout, that it recognizes academic achievement, “for the purpose of promoting arête – excellence; dikê – justice; and timê – honor.” And similarly, Greenwich Academy’s purpose is not just to prepare us for college, but to prepare us for living, putting us through our paces here, toward the end of ingenium faciendum, building our characters, or, to parse the etymology a bit, making or shaping that which has been born inside of us.

I believe that the praise that the society and the school want to bestow upon you today has a moral purpose: we want you to know, and feel, inside of yourself, as your own source of strength, that not just our laws but our lessons too can be wise restraints that set us free.

When I found this out for myself, about five years ago, five years after I’d sat in your chairs, I was at Cambridge. It was the year after college, and I’d set out, partly from inertia, to pursue an academic track. I realized there that academia wasn’t the right place for me–it wasn’t right for my personality or my set of mind.

I remember going running that year, for the first time since GA, along the gorgeous River Cam. I exhausted myself with running---I didn’t know what else to do–-until the day I found I was stepping in time to Robert Frost:

Something we were withholding made us weak,
Until we found that it was ourselves
We were withholding from the land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.1

I left Cambridge that spring and I didn’t start the PhD program that I was supposed to start at Princeton the following fall. But it wasn’t just a poem that set me out on midtown Manhattan looking for a job, highly educated but without any relevant skills---it was my understanding, from the Emerson reading I’d done in my junior year here, that:

There is a time in everyone’s education when we arrive at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that we must take ourselves for better, for worse, as our portion…. The power which resides in us is new in nature, and none of us knows what that is which each of us can do, nor do any of us know it until we have tried.2

I’d reached that time in my education, and I had to be brave in that moment, and bold, to set out on a life and a way of living I hadn’t imagined for myself before.

I went to work at a small consulting firm, first. The one other woman at the firm took me out to lunch before I started and told me, as if this were completely ordinary advice, to be careful not to show my toes, or my shoulders at any time; to make sure I walked a wide circle around the floor rather than directly past the CEO’s office; and, above all, never to wear perfume or any other scents in the office. The CEO didn’t like scents.

But I have to say it was a good place to work. It was a busy time in the market and a small place, so I had opportunities to learn, and I had a manager who taught me the lessons in statistics and financial analysis that most of my colleagues learned in college. And that was how I learned lessons in patience that I will not soon forget.

I remember the day we finished our first project. We had been at the office through the night, my manager, another analyst named PJ, and I taking comments first from a partner in Seattle and then from one in Australia, having the production staff show us why we couldn’t move those PowerPoint boxes around in the way they had wanted us to. We had a printer break down the hour before the meeting, and as my manager took the faulty cartridges apart, the other analyst and I taught ourselves to bind the books that had already printed. We hurried out to Madison Avenue and when we couldn’t find a cab, I took my high heels off, and the two of us ran, with our piles of books, to that meeting.

I love the memory of that day, where I learned again every lesson about teamwork, and persistence, that I’d first learned at Greenwich Academy. I enjoyed the work of my new job, and the analysis it required, but I saw then that I really enjoyed also the shared efforts, the dynamic learning from others, and the presentation of a final recommendation, which would be objectively judged against the business realities that would, over time, come to pass.

I moved to Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division after some months, because I knew I would have a more thorough and rigorous training there. It was another difficult transition–-I did not know if I could do the work at first, but I also knew–again remembering Emerson–that I wouldn’t know whether I could, until I tried.

And, as I tried, again through many long nights, I found that once I was through the raw intellectual challenge of understanding this new industry, the real difficulty was in maintaining my distance from it, and my sense of self.

I remembered what Ray Maguire, then the chairman of the mergers and acquisitions department, had said when he welcomed our assembled group of starting analysts. He told us, with the bit of bluster that is typical of the industry, that he had in his time seen a lot of analysts succeed and more analysts fail. But he thought one thing distinguished those who succeeded – it was a bean of strength, a seed of separation from all the hub-bub and the busyness of what we do.

For me, that bean has been comprised of the lessons I’ve learned in my education, at Greenwich Academy and beyond, the perspectives I’d internalized from these learnings and made my own. There was Frost and Emerson, and there is also Paul:

Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given down with prophesies when the council of elders laid their hands upon you.3

And what a council we have here. Mrs. Wasserman, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Cragin, Ms. Hyman, Ms. Schmidt-Fellner, Mrs. Guggenheimer, Ms Hudson (now Finch) – we had so many classes together, and you gave me so many gifts.

Let me recall in particular the lesson Mr. Murdock used to repeat: that it is always your choice whether you do your homework or not; and that, while girls may learn better in single-sex mathematics environments–if we do do our homework, we certainly will learn better than the boys do, and we’ll show them that, by beating them in the competitions, every time.

It is not that infrequently, now (in fact – it happened yesterday) that I’m the only woman in a board room, and very often when I am, I remember the first year that Greenwich Academy went to Math Counts, in our kilts in the spring of 1992: though there were middle school boys laughing at us, and middle-school teachers who looked askance at Mr. Murdock: we were the ones laughing and clutching our trophies on the van ride home.

Do not neglect the gift that Mr. Schwartz gives us, every year, by spending endless hours after school, guiding us in our discussions of piles of students’ poems and prose, helping us to think carefully about what the elements of these pieces are that touch us, and to decide which to share by publishing them.

This spring break as I understand it, will be his twentieth, spent splicing text and PhotoShopping pictures; I fondly remember the decisions and revisions of Daedalus X, and I have enjoyed reading eleven to nineteen. Mr. Schwartz, Mrs. Tamalonis, Fay, Caity, Jordan, Caroline: I look forward to number 20. These are beautiful books and a testament to a great dedication and a great number of lessons learned.

I often remember the gift of confidence that Mrs. McKinley gave me, when I was a very shy sixth grader and very eager to avoid her public speaking classes. I am not so sure that I deserved to deliver my speech to the whole of the Middle School, but she presented this to me as an opportunity. After that, presenting to my homeroom didn’t seem so bad.

Mrs. Berman also gave me an important gift of confidence, after I penned a history paper that was far too ambitious for its scope, which ended up being just about the worst document I have ever written.

When she took me aside after class to discuss it, the first thing she said was that, when she read this paper, she knew what paper I had tried to write. She looked me in the eye and told me that she was glad that I’d “stepped off the curb,” and taken the intellectual risk I had taken. She also gave me some advice on how, the next time, I might make it across the street.

And I hope that every time we run, we’ll remember the gifts of Ms. Meiklejohn. When I was a student, Ms. Meiklejohn joined the cross-country team not because was our coach but because she wanted to run. She loved to run. I think she was the first person that I knew who did. I remember hearing her come up behind us on the course, running two steps to my every one, offering words of encouragement, and then passing us by. I’ve started to love running too, and I’ll run my first marathon later this spring. I will imagine, as I run, that I can still hear her behind me, and then ahead.

Thanks to Meredith FitzPatrick, I’ll remember too the words Ms. Meiklejohn shared with Devan: “We are capable of far more than we think. Limits are discovered only by going all out with no thought of failure.”

Let us go all out. The gift that we have been given, which has been born inside of us, is now our character, which it is our responsibility to protect, and develop, and with which we can bring forth good in the world. This gift can be a source of strength and of courage as we set forth on our next adventures.

As you set out – if you’ll forgive just a little more Frost–you’re likely to find that the land before you is unstoried, artless, unenhanced – but, if you go all out, you can, such as you are, give yourselves to it, outright.4

And that is how you’ll find that it is not today’s praise that is your armor, but the reason for the praise, which is this gift, which is something like a star,5 and which no one can take away.

Thank you, Class of 2008, Mr. Fout, Mrs. King, Greenwich Academy, for having me here today. My good wishes to all of you.

1. Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (Gender references in this quotation have been removed.)
3. I Timothy 4:14-16
4. Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”
5. Robert Frost, “Choose Something Like a Star”