After CBC, I got my undergraduate degree at Wash U and earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Chicago. After working as a statistics professor at NC State and Cornell, I moved back to St. Louis in 2024 to join the faculty in the new Department of Statistics and Data Science at Wash U. It's a very exciting opportunity to be part of something new and to be back in St. Louis, which has allowed me to reconnect with old friends and even some of my former teachers from CBC.
Though my academic interests were in math and science, CBC provided an excellent all-around education. We were challenged to read classic books, confront moral and ethical questions, appreciate the arts, and develop our physical capabilities through sports and other activities. We were always supported by a teacher or someone in the administration when we wanted to start a new club or participate in extracurricular activities.
There were so many influential teachers. Looking back, I appreciate more and more the classes that were most challenging. Mr. Jackstadt's freshman Western Civilization course is the first that comes to mind. All of the students had to listen and rapidly take notes while he lectured and wrote on the (chalk!) board. He covered everything from the ancient Mesopotamians to the Sans-Culottes of the French Revolution, and the exams were hard! It was great preparation for our education in the rest of high school and beyond. I hate to single one out, though. There were so many excellent teachers and wonderful courses.
Running cross country and track was particularly formative. Having friends who are now high school coaches, I know that coaching involves a lot of time and sacrifice. Mr. Darst (track) and Mr. Quigley (cross country), as well as many assistant coaches, gave us an excellent experience. Mr. Darst wrote detailed workouts and kept absolutely meticulous records of every race. Mr. Quigley not only coached cross country, but ran a summer camp and encouraged us to train all winter and run longer races in a winter race series. If not for their consistent training and encouragement, I truly believe I wouldn't have improved enough to run in college at Wash U because I was a very slow developer as a runner, and didn't show a lot of promise early on. Running at CBC was also a lot of fun! My teammates and I developed close bonds and had a blast racing and logging miles together. Many of my closest friends were teammates.
Though it was a sad occasion, it was nice to reconnect with some classmates and teachers at Mr. Peterson's funeral last year. Mr. Peterson taught us freshman English and mentored the student newspaper staff. Working on The Turret, I learned a lot from him about research, writing, visual design, and even a little photography. Oddly enough, the week before learning of his passing, I had just told my own applied statistics students that my high school newspaper teacher taught us that we should strive to become an expert in whatever topic we were writing about. I explained how the same ethic applies to doing statistics because the best analyses will incorporate context about where the data came from, what it's measuring, and the scientific principles that govern the possible outcomes. There's a lesson there somewhere about the importance of being exposed to a wide range of experiences as a young person. CBC gave us that.