Community Conversations
What is the key to understanding each other? What allows us to open ourselves to the diverse experience and perspectives of others? How can we create a community strengthened by our differences, rather than one divided by them? How can we engage in difficult conversations around important—and even polarizing—issues in ways that support, respect, and validate all our community members, their belief systems, and backgrounds?
By his junior year at CA, Andy Walsh was grappling with his future. An accomplished hockey player, he toyed with the idea of taking a gap year to play competitively.
The importance of college was always at the forefront of Ritu Prasad’s CA experience.
When Ben Hatfield was a toddler, his parents took him to an air show at Andrews Air Force base. He immediately loved seeing all the planes flying in the air and his love of all things aeronautic was locked in.
Ziyana Greene knew what she wanted for college: a small private school with resources on par with a larger university and a diverse student community. She’d always assumed that she’d find that experience at a historically black college or university (HBCU). It was a shock, then, when touring, she found that “despite being great schools, they just didn’t feel right. They didn’t click for me.”
By all accounts, the last few years of Deming Haines’s CA experience were challenging ones. In 2014, he had transferred into CA as a junior—a tricky transition in and of itself—made all the more difficult by a serious medical condition. He was grappling with post-concussive syndrome which left him with debilitating daily headaches. The headaches would prove so disruptive as to necessitate repeating his junior year.
