Proactive Presidency

By Chris Batchelder Adaptive

I believe that when addressing the issue of Student Council’s powerlessness, one needs to keep in mind the responsibilities of both the President and Student Council. In my opinion, proactiveness and adaptability are just as important as the age-old standby of student-administration communication in terms of ensuring our student government’s effectiveness. I do not agree with the perception that Student Council is powerless, and I plan on working with Student Council in a way that strays from standardized procedure. Instead, I will attempt to establish a system that pursues the most effective means of seeing ideas through. Student Council needs to adapt to the needs of the very people it works to benefit: the students. If the students set a reasonable goal that can be reached without overstepping the budget or crossing any boundaries, then Student Council should do everything in its power to see that we...

Savor the Risk

By Allegra Asplundh-Smith ’04

This article is a follow-up piece on last week’s feature concerning female leadership at Phillips Academy.

Reflecting on the opportunities of young women at Andover seems surreal from my current vantage point as a Peace Corps Volunteer. In many corners of the world (including the green island that I currently inhabit), teenage girls balance schoolwork with carrying water and helping their parents with farming. In their lives, leadership opportunities are more likely to surface as they resolve a family conflict or raise babies than in school. Every now and then, it’s good to wake up to the simple fact that by winding up at Andover, we already won a leadership lottery. A substantial number of people in our lives expect us to tether our futures to our own ambitions. No small gift.

I decided to campaign for School President on a clear winter night, while in my prefect room...

Happiness Is Key

By Jack Sykes

I recently began thinking about what it means to be successful here at Andover. Whether it be coaches, teachers, advisors or even ourselves, people constantly remind us of our obligation to strive for “success.” Over time, however, this word has taken on a sort of mysterious allure. Success is often our aim. However, its indeterminacy seems to put it beyond our grasp. We strive to be “successful” but can rarely say what it is that we actually desire. We set it as our goal and embark in its pursuit yet often continue without direction. In short, it exists as an idyllic goal to which we head blindly yet passionately. In my short time here, however, I have realized that success comes in many forms. What meaning it takes on depends upon the person. It is unique to the individual. This is a fundamental truth that stems from...

Choose Your Own Adventure

By Thea Raymond-Sidel

When I was six, my family moved to India. My sister, who was ten at the time, liked scouring secondhand bookstores from the British colonial era with my dad. I believe it was there that she found her reason for attending boarding school: a series of books about a boarding school for English girls in Austria before World War II. Though there was a total of 62 books in the series, my sister and I made it through about 30 before we declared ourselves both too old and too broke to handle any more.

These stories were an extremely important part of my childhood. The characters weren’t the sort of let’s-learn-sewing-and-French-and-marry-at-sixteen schoolgirls either, mind you. They learned four languages, went to Oxford and the Sorbonne and became scientists and historians. They hiked up mountains, fell off cliffs and got stuck in blizzards. They escaped the Tyrol region after...

Control the Obsession

By Amanda Zhu

A celebrity is simply a well-known person. A celebrity is not necessarily a philanthropist, a role model or, unfortunately, even a good person. Boo hoo. It’s a sad reality, but it’s life. To assign such duties to celebrities merely exemplifies the rising public obsession with celebrities.

Why is that we even expect people like Taylor Momsen to be role models? She’s an actress, best known for playing Jenny Humphrey on “Gossip Girl.” This is the show “Gossip Girl” that we’re talking about, not “Sesame Street,” “Hannah Montana” or “Barney.” I personally find it implausible that teenage girls see the stars of “Gossip Girl” as role models. We’re talking about a show full of catty girls who stab each other in the back, have sex with their friends’ boyfriends and use drugs. Taylor Momsen could be a role model, but she’s not, and it’s not her responsibility to be...

My Metamorphosis

By Margaret Curtis

We can all agree that winter is the bleakest of all seasons. The cold and short days get to all of us, and everyone starts to become drained and unexcited. It is easy to become unhappy with your life and lose the drive to work hard. Students start to become tired of everything: school, friends and even themselves.

I am not implying that anyone should change themselves entirely, especially if the reason is to fit in with a different group of people. I do feel, however, that every person can make the small changes in their outlook on life that will make them happier. This winter, I have deliberately changed some of the things about myself that were weighing me down. My outlook on life, for example. Now, I live from each small victory to the next instead of waiting for huge, monumental differences in my life. I...

Don’t Shy Away

By Chris Meyer

The ephemeral excitement I felt five hours ago has drifted away. My eyelids feel like stone, but succumbing to the fatigue that permeates every corner of my body is not even a remote possibility. The objects around me have melted into one another, and the room steadily becomes a blurry mess, intensified by the harsh fluorescent light that pounds relentlessly against my forehead. Weariness has invaded my brain to the point where I can barely read, let alone compose a sentence to busy the cursor that blinks on my computer screen, no doubt taunting the feeble products of my beleaguered brain. My digital clock reads 5:00 a.m. And I begin to doubt whether it is worth finishing.

And then it’s over. At 6:00 a.m. that same morning, I completed and submitted my application for a position on Associate Board CXXXIII of The Phillipian.

If Andover stereotypes mean anything at...

Choosing to Suffer

By Tia Baheri

It is true that affliction and anguish do not know class lines. Members of society’s more privileged classes can suffer from the loss of a loved one just as much as someone in Haiti can suffer from the loss of a family member. The rich are also capable of experiencing loss, grief and disappointment. They can also feel lonely, sad, depressed and even suicidal. As Julianna Meagher ’11 suggested in her February 12th Letter to the Editor, suffering is not “limited to a lack of purchasable opportunities or necessities.” However, it would be thoughtless to suggest that financial security does not shield us from certain kinds of suffering and grief. Similarly, it would be imprudent not to note the difference between the suffering felt by students at Andover and that felt by those in Haiti.

I, too, know many people who choose not to eat or to run...

President and Teenager

By Hadley Arnold ’82

My role as School President was fun, complicated and only somewhat satisfying. Fun was where it began. It was fun—just like running races in grade school—to beat some boys. It was 1981, and beating boys at 200 year-old games was still a thrill. Was there a platform or a set of issues on which any of us ran? I don’t remember one, and I’m not sure if I had one. Service of some kind was simply what was expected of me. Like the boys I ran against, I imagine, I’d been raised not to flinch from the possibility of serving out in front. A girl running and winning was a bit of a novelty. It got publicity and made the local papers. In retrospect, however, iall of this attention was a bit empty-headed.

As for the presidency itself, the tasks evolved over time. Some content entered the picture...

An Uphill Battle

By Louise Kennedy ‘76

It’s been 35 years since I became the first female president of The Phillipian, so I was both delighted and disheartened to be asked to contribute to this conversation about gender and leadership on the Andover campus. Delighted because it’s always nice to be remembered; disheartened because — sheesh, have we still not come any further than this?

Well, no, we haven’t, as I know from my own world as well as yours. Certainly there are more women in newsrooms than there were when I began, and those of us working in features sections are generally there because we want to be, rather than because the “women’s pages” are the only ones that will let us in. But at the top of news organizations, women’s leadership is still, unfortunately, news — that is, not old, not routine, not so normal as to be too boring to mention.

The news...