Enduring lessons learned
Seventeen years after graduating from Wheaton, Emily Ayer Thomas ’09 can still recite the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English. It is, she admitted, an
impressive party trick, but also a reminder of a lesson from Professor Michael Drout that has stayed with her far longer than the words themselves.
“Professor Drout told us how valuable it is to memorize beautiful pieces of writing with which you can furnish your mind,” she said. “I’m grateful for his encouragement to memorize good words. I’ve since added many more poems and excerpts to my ‘collection’ and try to pull them out in quiet moments in lieu of my phone as often as I can.”
The influence of Professor Drout’s advice to stock the mind with memorable poetry and prose exemplifies the enduring power of a Wheaton education. The college’s students rate their experience so highly that the Princeton Review ranked the school among the nation’s top 25 for offering the best classroom experience.
The guidebook’s recognition is not news to Wheaton alumni, who have been lauding their education for years. But spurred by the ranking, we asked alums to tell us about their favorite classes, and more than 140 responded with recollections of lessons that they continue to think about.
For Thomas, a classroom assignment became a lifelong personal practice. For Tony Laing ’96, independent study with Professor Jay Goodman helped establish the intellectual focus of his career.
“Professor Goodman gave me the intellectual freedom and encouragement to pursue a question that I was genuinely interested in. I conducted sustained research about Brown v. Board of Education and wrote extensively about educational equity, race, and the American education system. I later submitted a copy of the paper as my writing sample for my graduate school application. And I still have it today.”
A Wheaton trustee, Laing continues his work in this area as a scholar-practitioner focused on racial equity, inclusion, belonging and educational opportunity across K–12 and higher education.
Similarly, Susan Dahill Gagne ’79 recalled an assignment that helped to launch her career. While enrolled in Labor Economics with Professor Hilda Kahne, Gagne wrote a paper focused on her interest in the U.S. retirement system—covering private pensions, public pension systems and personal savings.
It became a key component of her job search and sparked professional roles in employee benefits. The course combined her majors of mathematics and economics. “Professor Kahn truly inspired me to understand how these disciplines could help me to find a career,” Gagne said.
She later spent many years leading global benefits for Thermo Fisher Scientific, a large life science company, before concluding her career at KPMG, one of the world’s largest accounting firms. “My Wheaton education was instrumental in preparing me for my successful career and the many concepts I learned from Hilda Kahne became a solid foundation of my experience.”
Sometimes when a student enrolls in a course, the connection between academics and a career are less obvious, but no less important. Tim Ziakas ’04 majored in economics, but was amazed by what he took away from the Natural History of New England Forests course taught by Instructor Deborah Fahey.
“What stayed with me was the idea that a forest is never really static,” Ziakas explained. “What you see is the result of disruption, adaptation, human choices, recovery and time. Part of our course requirement was to find a place on campus and document what we observed. We did this over the course of the semester.”
He discovered a correlation to his work today in leadership development—particularly around adaptive leadership and learning agility. “I help teams and leaders recognize when a challenge cannot be solved by expertise alone,” he said. “The work becomes understanding the system, questioning assumptions, experimenting and learning your way forward.”
Ultimately, he realized the course made him more interested in how people and systems respond to change. Ziakas noted, “That idea still shapes how I think about leadership today.”
The material does not always reveal the most influential aspect of the course. Ahaan Verma Singhania ’25, learned a work process from Professor Tania Schlatter that he continues to use every day in his business.
“The Design Studio course paved a way of generating confidence, a workflow and a solid pipeline to learn how to create for clients sustainably,” said Singhania, who learned how to work with all types of clients. “It was the most crucial skill for us service-based creators to master in an academic setting.
“Tania helped us to understand that things can always be made better with time. It is the main factor in quality and output. Learning how to pace a project with a structured quality goal was one of the greatest pieces of information I got from the course.”
After graduating just over a year ago, Singhania opened Cove Craft Studios, a 3D rendering and artificial intelligence media studio that offers virtual tours, 3D walkthroughs, and rendering for real estate and spaces.
Like the other alumni who responded Ellen Lavenson Stanclift ’87 remembers more than the content of a favorite course. She recalls a professor who recognized her potential and the future teacher she aspired to be.Professor Jerry Zuriff was a faculty advisor and mentor to Stanclift, a psychology major with an elementary education minor.
In Zuriff’s Lab in Experimental Psychology course, students conducted experiments on behavior reinforcement with live rats. Late one night, after her classmates had left and Stanclift was alone, tired and hungry, she lost her temper and screamed, “Listen, you dumb rat, ring the bell and get your cheese so I can go!”
Unfortunately, Professor Zuriff had not left. Before doing so, he approached Stanclift and softly said, “If you don’t have patience with a rat, how will you have patience with young children as a teacher?”
Stanclift explained, “Professor Zuriff made his point politely and it changed my life.” Now in her 38th year of teaching elementary school, Stanclift said she has never lost her temper in this way again. “Professor Zuriff taught me that a good teacher makes their point and lets it sink in. I am forever grateful.”