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10 Questions With Robert Perry

Robert Perry is a coordinator and evening proctor at the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library. He holds a passion for playing basketball, watching athletic games, attending musical performances, and being part of the Big Blue community. He secretly enjoys staying up late into the night to read books. Before coming to Andover, Perry worked for 25 years in cost accounting and finance.

  1. What was it like to work in accounting?

[Accounting]’s sort of what most of my life was. That’s where my education was, and I spent 25 years in a corporation working in finance and accounting. For me, it’s just one of those things that I’ve always liked: numbers, budgets, formats, and paying bills. So, it’s fun.

  1. How did you decide to transition to work in a library?

It was a huge decision. I was relatively young and [my] corporation offered good deals to people who were moving on to other corporations, because I was working for a landline telephone company and we were downsizing constantly, very stressfully. So, it was a life decision, and I live nearby here. That’s why I was attracted to Phillips Academy and working here.

  1. What is your role as the library coordinator?

We buy a lot of things for our students and for faculty, so we have a significant budget to do that kind of thing. [My] role is to work within that budget to buy the materials we need and pay for them, and have them accounted for properly with our controller’s office.

  1. What’s your favorite part about working at the library?

Definitely the students. The evening part of my job, I do because it’s a way to stay around young people and watch them grow into adults, and it’s really a fascinating and fun thing to imagine yourself as having some role in it all going well. It’s fun and rewarding.

  1. What is your favorite place on campus?

Garver Room, silent study. Sometimes in the evening, I look out over [and] there are 72 people sitting down quietly, 72 chairs, grinding, working, and I think this is the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen… When I’m hanging out in [Garver], I’m not exactly the most welcom[ing] person, but sometimes I will stand in there for five or ten minutes and just think back to previous years [and] previous students, where they’d be sitting, and watching all of you doing the same thing. I would say it is a favorite place to hang out for sure, but I don’t try to overdo it, because sometimes students are ready for me to move along [and] come back later.

  1. What is your favorite memory from your time working at Andover?

My favorite time of the [school year] is at the end when our Seniors are in their last week or so, and going into that last glorious weekend. I’ve had a couple of experiences with them that I would point out. One was, in Garver Room during finals week, we kind of let them have their way, and we must have had 200 or more seniors in there with music blasting. It was a Wednesday evening at 8:30 p.m., so we just kind of let them have a little dance party for 15 to 20 minutes – and the joy in their eyes… For them to think back [at] all the time they spent there studying, for them to be sitting up on tables and screaming and dancing.

  1. What do you think is the coolest fact about you?

I feel like I’ve reached a point in life where I’ve got some perspective on stuff. I’m at [the] point [when] you’re really not in it for yourself anymore, you’re in it for other people. It happens when you become a parent, for example, but at some point in the last 20 years I kind developed enough perspective to know that it’s a lot more fun to be about everybody else instead of myself.

  1. What’s a favorite hobby of yours that most people would not know about?

My secret hobby that I try not to tell anybody is that I like to stay up late at night. I stay up late and read, and I watch maybe an athletic game from the West Coast that’s still going on live at two o’clock in the morning… I find peace in that. I still do it to this day… It hit me when I was working a lot and stressing out a lot: what I found was [that] my family is all tucked in at 11:00 p.m. and it’s [then that] I can relax… I suppose that I don’t sleep that well anyway, so I’m not that dying to go to bed, and so I stay up late and I have a couple of hours of fun.

  1. What are the top three things you would bring to a desert island, assuming basic food and water will be taken care of?

I assume our phones aren’t going to work out there, but if they would work, I would take one with me. That would be one way to stay in touch with the world. I would take my daughter, because I don’t think I could bear a life just never seeing her again… [And] sunscreen, otherwise I would be in big trouble.

  1. If you could have dinner with one famous person, dead or alive, who would it be?

I would definitely choose somebody from my lifetime even though I know that’s a little bit narrow, but I would want it to be somebody I remember. I would say President Kennedy. When I was a young boy, he was president, [and] he was a heroic figure to a lot of people. He was killed instantly and then became the most fascinating person I’ve ever read about. I spent some time obsessing about reading everything about him and his family and all that, so to be able to sit down and have a conversation and see what the real him was like – that would be pretty fascinating.