By the time they move their tassels, many Whitman seniors-turned-graduates will have already determined what they will be doing once they leave Walla Walla. The Pioneer spoke with three students about their future plans and where life after Whitman will take them. 

Jeremy Schofield

“I’ll be going to Yale University and attending their biological and biomedical sciences Ph.D. program. It’s a five-to-six-year program, and it focuses on research, which is sort of my goal from here on out––to do research with biochemistry [and] molecular biology … in the academic setting … I’ve always been very passionate about science, and I’ve pretty much known since I got to Whitman that I wanted to do a science major. [After college], a lot of people either go to med school or a graduate school research program. For me, research was really what I was passionate about … [it was] a natural progression for me to go to grad school. And my goals of staying in academia sort of warranted needing a Ph.D. It was pretty much the step I had to take in order to go where I wanted to go … I applied to ten different programs, and it just felt like the one that I was most excited about … I’ve always really enjoyed research quite a bit … and so this is giving me the perfect opportunity … because they let you do a wide variety of different research while you’re there. Yale’s specialty is sort of RNA structure and catalysis and stuff like that, so that’ll probably be what I end up getting involved in.”

Tristan Gavin

“I’m doing Teach for America in New York City, so I’ll be teaching at a first-grade school in … Brooklyn. I applied early decision to Teach for America as a junior and got accepted, so I’ve known in kind of an abstract sense that I would be teaching … [I] got hired by the Success Charter Network …  a charter school network in New York City … strangely enough, [it’s] principaled by a Whitman graduate … I’m really fortunate enough to be in an assistant teacher role, where I will be working with a full-time teacher … and getting that experience for a year before I start running my own classroom. So New York and its charter schools offered to me, at least, an opportunity to get a lot of teaching experience in a very, very focused academic setting where they’re kind of questioning the way that we gauge education … I had a pretty cool realization a couple of weeks ago that there’s a class of kindergartners out there right now that are going to be my kids next year. It’s cool to think of it in a really concrete meaning like that.”

Julia Stone

“By the end of the summer I’m going to be moving down temporarily with [senior] Sean McNulty to Guatemala. We’re planning on pursuing a project recounting kind of this history of struggle for land reclamation in Guatemala … Sean and I first went down in 2011 for a summer Whitman Direct Action (WDA) project … We worked closely with Semilla Nueva––a group of Whitman grads that started a nonprofit doing sustainable agriculture down there. So they connected us with the community and key people, and we made a lot of friends … It’s kind of a weird thing to be graduating … most of my peers are applying for jobs or have fellowships or are going to grad school, but what I’m doing has no real time limit. So we’re hoping to be down there for a few months and then … be in a place where we can apply for a more official grant and funding, and find secure donors, file a 501C3, kind of a non-profit status to latch on to … Eventually I would like to come back and continue doing policy research in the U.S. somewhere about immigration issues.”