| Kenyon Class of 2012 Fall Class Letter
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| Dear 2012 classmates,
Kenyon couldn’t be more Kenyon than it is in the fall. Cool breezes balance out the afternoon sun, crunchy leaves blanket everything in autumn colors, and an endless supply of friendly faces to greet you along Middle Path. We look forward to returning to the Hill again soon!
And what a campus we’ll return to. Chalmers Library is open and beautiful. All four classes are studying together again in Gambier, with a bonus first-year cohort finishing a semester in Copenhagen! Plans are taking shape for our unforgettable Reunion 2022 on the Hill. Remember to mark your calendar for the weekend of May 27. We can’t wait to celebrate with you all!
In other exciting campus news, the College just shared its new strategic plan that will guide its planning and actions leading up to the bicentennial in 2024 and beyond. You will be pleased to see it includes core elements like developing a computer science program informed by the liberal arts; enrolling, retaining, and graduating a student body that is representative of the talent and diversity of our nation and the world; implementing a holistic approach to health and wellness, with an emphasis on mental health; and expanding its commitment to environmental responsibility.
You have also likely heard the announcement of the Kenyon Access Initiative which will bring more high-achieving students to Kenyon thanks to a $25 million matching grant from the Schuler Education Foundation. Any amount we give through the Kenyon Access Initiative will be matched 1:1 and will go to a new scholarship for students from families with limited means and those ineligible for government aid — up to $25 million. Scroll on to learn more about Kenyon’s strategic plan and the Kenyon Access Initiative (and how they fit into our 2024 bicentennial celebration).
As you read about what’s in store for Kenyon’s future, we hope you’ll consider supporting today’s students with a gift to the Kenyon Fund and, if able, making an additional gift to the Kenyon Access Initiative that has the potential to bring 50 additional talented students to Kenyon each year.
Kenyon couldn’t be Kenyon without involved and supportive alumni like us. As the bicentennial draws closer, we hope that you will consider giving a gift that helps make Kenyon the special place it is. This could mean becoming an alumni volunteer, attending a College event, submitting a class note, or setting up a recurring monthly gift.
Thank you and see you (hopefully) in May!
Your 2012 Reunion Committee
P.S. Enjoy our 2012 class notes listed below!
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| There's a lot happening at Kenyon today.
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We want you to be a part of it.
The Our Path Forward to the Bicentennial campaign is about building a strong foundation for Kenyon’s third century by growing our endowment and strengthening alumni connections. Get involved by:
Staying connected to Kenyon
You may only be a Kenyon student for four years, but you’re a member of our alumni community for life. The Office of Alumni and Parent Engagement strives to make it easy — and fun — to stay connected. GET INVOLVED
Making a gift
Gifts of all sizes add up: every year, gifts of $100 or less to the Kenyon Fund total more than $250,000. Also, every dollar given to the Kenyon Access Initiative between now and June 2026 will be matched and used to create permanent new scholarship funds to enroll exceptional students with limited resources and those who are ineligible for government aid. MAKE A GIFT
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| Upcoming Events for Alumni
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Save the date for these upcoming events for alumni taking place online and on the Hill.
- Kenyon Women Giving Back
The quarterly event series continues on Tuesday, March 22 via Zoom.
- Kenyon Together
The 36-hour online giving challenge kicks off Tuesday, April 12.
- Reunion Weekend
All alumni are invited to join us on the Hill May 27–29.
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Reunion Committee MembersReuion Committee Members are your connection to campus. If you would like to learn more about becoming one, contact Parker Subia at subiap@kenyon.edu.
• Kellyn Caldwell
• Callie Furste
• Alexis Gonzalez
• Hans Meister
• Ryan Motevalli-Oliner
• Nikola Popovic
• Kimberly Qualls
• Dan Rooker
• Tatenda Uta
• Aaron Yeoh
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Sonam Lhaki - Dear Class of 2012, this year and the last have been trying for the whole world. I pray and hope that you and your family have been able to weather it well. I hope Kenyon Professors and other Kenyon staff have been well, too. Please take care. The situation in my country is under control. Sending warm wishes from Bhutan.
Amelia McClure - My husband, Mark, and I welcomed Charlotte Wren Dunbar on August 14, 2021. She arrived three weeks early and only one week after celebrating her baby shower with Ciara Sanchez, Leanna (Burckley) Watt, Ian Watt ’13, and Cam Ash ’13 (and other wonderful Kenyon friends from afar). We are loving watching her bloom into her world, especially those sweet smiles which make up for even the longest nights! When not on maternity leave I serve as the Assistant Director of Government Relations and Compliance at Indiana University. Mark and I live in a community on the grounds of an old insane asylum in downtown Indianapolis and like many COVID couples spend much of our time taking walks.
Garrett Fields - Arielle (née Ismail) and Garrett, along with two-year-old son Philip, left their small, one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn last summer and moved to a home in State College, PA. Ari is pursuing a PhD in Art History at Penn State University. After three years at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, Garrett started a clerkship with a federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Philip is enjoying day care and happy to have all the extra space. He loves cruising around town and watching all the PSU undergrads, particularly on game days—sadly for him, he has some time before he can join in on all the festivities.
Aaron Yeoh - Hey everyone, I'm still at Stanford Hospital and living in Palo Alto, CA. Finished my residency in Internal Medicine and now in my second year of Gastroenterology fellowship. If you're ever visiting the SF Bay Area and want to meet up, drop me a line. Hoping to see a lot of you at the 10 year reunion.
Zack Goldman - Hello! Hope everyone’s doing well.
Rebecca Kobayashi - This summer, Rebecca started her job as an editor for the communications office of George Mason University in Northern Virginia. Late last year, she returned to the U.S. from Japan, where she had worked as an editor and Japanese-to-English translator at a Tokyo corporate communications company for over 5 years. She sometimes misses the unbeatable convenience of the Tokyo Metro, but she’s looking forward to becoming better acquainted with the Washington, D.C., area and all it has to offer. Once international travel becomes safer, she has her sights set on once more discovering new places.
Ryan Motevalli-Oliner - This note submission deadline could not have come at a more exciting time for me and my wife, Brittany Thielke. In the last few days of September we welcomed our son, Emmett, into our lives. This was happening as I was concluding my job at Ohio Wesleyan in anticipation of starting my new job in Kenyon’s admission office in mid-October. I am excited to start this next chapter in my life helping to recruit future Lords and Ladies with my son by my side.
Caitlin Starling - My newest book, The Death of Jane Lawrence, came out October 5th from St Martin's Press! Aside from that, David Hohl and I are in Chicago while he completes his Masters degree in biology.
Tatenda Uta - This year has been an interesting year. I started a new job at the beginning of the year and in March I became a US citizen. You would think becoming a US citizen was the best part but in May my wife and I had our first child, Rudo Grace-Lee Uta. Rudo means love in Shona (mother tongue). Since both of us were working from home it felt like the best timing. She’s the best and our hearts are very full with this new addition to our family!
Nicolyn Woodcock - Hello, classmates! Since January, I have been living in central Massachusetts, where I now teach at Clark University. It's been a doozy being back on campus after a year of remote instruction, but it is so nice to see all these (masked) faces, have informal run-ins and spontaneous (outdoor) coffee dates with colleagues, and hear student chatter everywhere. Just a couple weeks ago, I (remotely) attended my first Alumni Council meeting and I'm excited to represent you all there during the next three years. Finally, I had the great pleasure of gathering Zoom game night with my best KC friends on Oct. 2nd: Vivian Cherng, Helen Liutongco, Amanda Myers, Phan Truong '11, and David Sowa. Missing you all and I hope we'll make it back to campus in the spring for our 10 year reunion!
Dan Rooker - Oh, geez. Where to start.
I resigned from the previous Chicago firm I worked for, in February, and started my own Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) firm! It took a few months to be official in Illinois, but it’s now 100% legit and also - wonderfully - 100% virtual: check out my linktr.ee lookalike page rookfinancial.com/ig. I didn't want linktr.ee to steal website traffic, so I created a wordpress page that looks just like one :D
Today, it’s already beyond what I had set for goals at the beginning of the year, when running the numbers to figure out how long I could float the business without adding owner equity from other sources of income. I started with 0 clients in June and as of writing this, have 21 clients who pay their monthly fee. I created an entirely new business model (something that I hope disrupts the traditional financial services model one day soon) and the response to it has been overwhelmingly positive.
Here was my Big Idea from a couple years ago, stemming from a couple questions I started taking seriously when I was listening to two podcasts/influencers, @ChooseFi and @StudentLoanPlanner:
Q: If Certified Financial Planners (CFPs) primarily serve the 1%ers...who’s serving the 99% well?
A: not CFPs
Q: Why is there general mistrust for financial advice in my generation?
A: I don’t know for sure, but it’s probably because most of my generation and most of my network are not 1%ers (yet) and the people giving them 2 mins of time to ask personal finance questions are mainly insurance agents masquerading as financial planners. So then what happens is they get sold products, not advice. Hello every big name insurance company or bank you see on ads.
Q: Why do CFPs not fish in the 99% pond, for folks who could be 1%ers one day?
A: They do! But not well. In fact, they try to do as LITTLE as possible to keep the younger folks engaged so that one day when they’re big fish, they come back to them. This is because the big fish clients CFPs already have, pay a lot more for more attention (like an easy $10,000 per year for every $1M account balance managed).
Q: Could I create a better model, something with lower cost but with higher visibility, that's actually profitable?
A: Idk maybe not, but I’m gonna try. I know for sure I'll need to scale it to make any real money.
So in 2020, just before the pandemic started, I wrote down some mainline inefficiencies that cause Advisors to either charge high fees to cover overhead or underpay their employees:
1. Advisors today, especially with older clients, are super resistant to having their clients use a scheduling tool. So they (or their junior advisors, interns, or other support staff) waste an unworldly amount of time sending emails or making phone calls to get their clients scheduled.
2. Advisors spend too much time (for me, it was probably 40%) writing beautifully crafted meeting follow up emails, including an executive summary of the client’s financial plan…that almost no one cared about or bothered to read afterwards.
3. Many clients fail to get recommended changes done because Advisors and their support staff inevitably fail to remind them.
4. Advisors ask their clients for some of the same information every year because they’ve forgotten it or don’t have an organized way to access the information for form-filling and this redundancy in data gathering wastes everyone's time.
So I found technology to solve #1, #3, and #4 along with a few other inefficiencies and it only costs me $1,000/mo. On top of that, I maintain the technology and template some of the client “siri reminders” so that it’s scalable. For #2, I realized that all I had to do was to make a value-add offer to clients so that I could get rid of a burden. In lieu of sending emails back and forth, I offer to meet clients on zoom, 1x per month, for 25 minutes. This way, we get to stay in touch often and we get to work towards the here and now goals (we always have the next year of 3-month goals set out and documented) with the long-term objectives on the periphery. Instead of guessing what they're trying to tell me over email, we do it live!
As for other changes: I work part-time as a Consultant for Student Loan Planner (yea! The podcast I started listening to in 2018, oh and I'm 1 of like 175 Certified Student Loan Professionals in the U.S.) and a Consultant for Daniel Glaser’s ’13 company, Glaser Property Management Inc. in the Santa Monica/Venice Beach/Brentwood area. Between those two, I’m able to pay bills and continue to save without paying myself from Rook Financial. Since I’m finally cash flow positive with Rook Financial, my plan is to reinvest everything towards hiring that next employee and scaling the business.
Here’s to hoping for the best, planning for the worst, and finishing out the year grateful to have found something I’m truly passionate about.
Meghan (Quinn) Sawyer - My husband and I just had a baby girl in June. I’m returning to work this month to teach 5th grade. We hope to see everyone soon!
Kimberly Qualls - I'm loving my new job at LifeLine Animal Project working to obtain grant funding and using my MBA on a wide variety of administrative projects. If you're ever in Atlanta, say hello!
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If you missed the chance to share your news for this letter, you can submit a class note at any time via class.letters@kenyon.edu.
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Kenyon is grateful to the following donors for their generous support of the College, including the Kenyon Fund, during the 2020-21 fiscal year. An asterisk (*) indicates a donor is a member of the Henry J. Abraham Society for loyal and consecutive giving. An obelisk (†) indicates an individual who is deceased. Please note that as of July 1, 2019 Kenyon’s annual giving societies have changed. Visit kenyon.edu/societies for more information.
2012
Annual Fund Total: $8,675
Class Participation: 19.4%
Gambier Society
Gifts of $600 to $2,499
(5-9 years post-graduation)
Mark R. Armstrong Jr.*
Kimberly M. Qualls*
Cody Shankman*
Kenyon Society
Donors of $1 to $599
Marion W. R. Akie*
Trudy V. Andrzejewski*
Ian M. Bakk*
Mary E. Barker*
Ellen D. Blanchard
Finneas V. Borge*
Michael E. Broida
Nolan D. Burger
Kellyn K. Caldwell*
Vivian Cherng*
Angela M. Coleman
Courtney E. Cowper
Heather E. Crowley
Rebecca Curry Hoag
Elizabeth M. Dahlburg*
Andrew M. Davenport
Andrew J. Doten*
L. Michelle Dunavant*
Sean E. Edelman*
Margaret J. Ericksen
Valerie M. Ernst*
Katherine Ey Turk*
Chelsea L. Farco*
Alexander L. Fernandez
Arielle A. Fields*
Garrett S. Fields*
Charles H. Fine*
Rob Fine*
Caroline K. Furste*
Tyler R. Furste*
Gian M. Garduque*
Marika R. Garland
Amanda R. Gold
Thea Goodrich
Melissa E. Hart
Jeffrey A. Hechler
Sarah Hechler
Meghan E. Henshall
Samuel D. Heuck
Courtney L. Himebrook
Elizabeth R. Jacobs*
Ann C. Kelly*
Virginia Koebley*
Jonela Kolasi*
Brendan G. Lambert*
Matthew J. Lasnoski
Daniel A. Levine*
Helen T. Liutongco*
Susan M. Livermore*
Hans J. Meister
Terence V. Mooney
Ryan I. Motevalli-Oliner*
Joseph D. Murphree*
Amanda M. Myers
Victor Nininger
Jordan L. Ohanesian*
Alexandra M. Patterson
Andrea E. Pohly
Nikola Popovic*
Jane E. Pryma
Madli Rohtla
Daniel J. Rooker*
Kate Ryan*
Danielle D. Smith
Jacob F. H. Smith*
Margo L. Smith*
Hannah W. Snyder
Margaret R. Straw*
Luke M. Sullivan*
Brittany L. Thielke*
Daniel P. Toulson*
Melody C. Travers
Alyssa N. Van Denburg*
Samuel A. Warlick
Dana L. Warren
Elizabeth E. Watts*
Abigail H. Westcott*
Adrienne E. Wolter
Nicolyn V. Woodcock*
Mia J. Wylde*
Aaron J. Yeoh*
George Wharton Mariott Society
These alumni have included
Kenyon in their estate plans or
have made other planned gifts.
Keith A. Miller
Nikola Popovic
Sewell S. Robinson
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Kenyon College
105 Chase Avenue, Gambier, OH 43022
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