My daughters have taken an interest in my high school diaries, these records of quotations I loved, crushes, friends, and Kent News op-ed ideas. That they know many of the friends mentioned, and that the teachers and staff continued to mentor me long after Prize Day, is stunning to them and to me, too.

It’s an honor to be the Alumni Council President. Part of my role is helping bring alumni together, inviting them to (re)connect with their alma mater, and encouraging them to visit the valley. (My class’s 30th reunion is in June, so I feel this charge more urgently this year!) It is one way I can give back to our school that has given me so much, my list too long to share in this letter. Everything I’ve shared about Kent in my public speaking has been an attempt at saying thank you. Ask me, for example, how memorizing the first 21 lines of Canterbury Tales in the Fifth Form changed my life.

At the start of every school year, I think of September 1993 when my history teacher, Mrs. Wagner, mother of Robert '95, invited Mr. Wink Lampe, the Director of Admission, to interview me at my international school in Saudi Arabia. I was not on his original itinerary. I could not have known then—I, a Filipino kid who had never been to the US— that that kind moment of serendipity would be the beginning of not just my Kent story but also my stateside life. I’ve felt lucky, so lucky, since.

It’s been thirty-two years since my mom moved me into Kent, sight unseen, and I want to whisper to that Fourth Former, standing on the RAD House lawn: you have no idea what’s to come.