Katerine Zoepf ’96 Returns to Seven Hills for Speaker Series

Journalist and author Katerine Zoepf ’96 returned to the Hillsdale Campus to speak with Upper Schoolers about writing, global politics, and working in the Middle East as part of the Alumni Speaker Series.

Her essays, reviews, and features have appeared in The New York Observer, The New York Times Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Affairs Magazine, The Diplomat, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and she has reported for The New York Times from more than a dozen countries.  A past fellow at the New America Foundation, she has also taught journalism at New York University. She decided she wanted to become a writer as a second grader at Lotspeich and thanked her Seven Hills teachers for their guidance, encouragement, and support.

Zoepf commended the Upper Schoolers who submitted work to the Scholastic Writing and Arts Awards at a lunch held for them in the Commons.

“I think it is incredibly brave and cool that you guys decided to put your writing out there for judgement,” she said. “That is honestly the biggest hurdle of becoming a writer or a career that involves a lot of writing.”

She read an expert from her book “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who are Transforming the Arab World” and spoke about reporting in different areas and countries to the journalism and global issues classes.

At the all-school meeting in The Schiff Center, she touched on the challenges of reporting on conflict in the Middle East for an American audience, how she chose what topics to write about, and the differences between writing news articles and her book.

Students honored for writing courage

More than 100 Upper Schoolers were honored with a special lunch in the Hillsdale Commons on Jan. 8 for submitting their work to the Scholastic Writing and Arts Awards.

Students submit their work in categories like critical essay, poetry, and personal narrative, English department chair Mark Beyreis said. Some students, he added, submit all the essays they write for the classes.

“It tells you something about the high quality of work students do here day-in and day-out,” Beyreis said.

The submitted work is first judged in the regional competition, which includes southern Ohio, Northern Kentucky, and parts of southeast Indiana. More than 40 schools submit work each year and the number of regional awards, which means advancement to the national competition, is limited.

Experiential Learning Fair

The Upper School welcomed more than 30 organizations on Jan. 24 for the first ever Experiential Learning Fair. Set up throughout the Upper School, representatives from the organizations told students about community service opportunities, summer jobs and internships, and student grants. Director of Experiential Learning Karen Glum hosted the fair to show students all the possible experiential learning opportunities they can take part in during their time in the Upper School.

African American Studies students debate best path to freedom

Upper Schoolers in Kyla Young’s African American studies class capped off the semester with a trial about securing freedom.

“This is the culminative of our class that has been asking the question, ‘what is the best path for freedom for African Americans?’ We have looked from Reconstruction all the way through to modern times and we have been considering seven paths to freedom,” Young said.

One group of students picked culture and education, and the other group picked. economics and political institutions. They divided into two teams to argue their paths in a mock trial. The students used primary and secondary sources and prepared a case file for each side and submitted them to the other team. Using their research and what they had learned in class, the students portrayed lawyers for both sides as well as different Black intellectuals and historians, like Fannie Lou Hamer, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbottom, who appeared as a witness in the trial.

Microengineering students show off projects

The Upper School microengineering students held a showcase to share their individual design projects with fellow Upper School students and teachers. The projects highlighted the engineering design process and showed their skills with silicone molds, 3D printing, circuitry, and more.