Senior Dinner, Honoring the Class of 2024
To kick off graduation week, the Class of 2024 received an early welcome into the St. Andrew's Alumni Association at their Senior Dinner. This event was created to celebrate our newest classes of alumni as they join the ranks of the many St. Andrew’s graduates who have come before them. Alumni volunteers and donors were in attendance, including this year’s Senior Dinner speaker, Irfan Alam ‘14, who shared how his St. Andrew’s relationships and experiences at St. Andrew’s have held strong through life’s various milestones. A full photo album from the event can be found here.
For the last several years, the Senior Class has been asked to complete the Senior Challenge, a class-wide competition that consists of 3 tasks: updating their email address, joining our True Blue Alumni Network, and making a deferred pledge to the St. Andrew’s Fund, to be fulfilled by their five year reunion in 2029. The St. Andrew’s Alumni Board has graciously agreed to match that pledge, dollar for dollar, in our current fiscal year.
The results are announced at the Senior Dinner, in front of the entire class, faculty and alumni in attendance. This year, Alumni Board Member, Merritt Bury Rasmussen ‘09 announced the following Senior Challenge results:
- 60% of the Class of 2024 had updated their email addresses
- 24% of the Class of 2024 had joined our True Blue Alumni Network
- 41% made a participatory pledge to the St. Andrew's Fund, to be fulfilled during their 5 year reunion in 2029. The Class pledged a total of $1,850.
After the results of the Challenge were announced, it was time for Irfan Alam to address our Senior Class.
Irfan attended Bowdoin College, where he served as the Student Body President, Chair of the Treasury, and Representative to the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees, among many other impressive leadership positions. He went on to attend Harvard Business School, but made a decision to defer after one year to develop his own business.
Irfan is a Forbes Austin 30 under 30 honoree, after he raised $3 million to launch Frontrow Health, where he is Founder and CEO. You can read more about the development of Frontrow here!
Irfan and his wife, Zaynab, are expecting their first child this spring. As they are preparing for this new chapter in their lives, they considered what lessons they would pass down to their child.
Zaynab asked what, if anything, Irfan would want to take from his experience at St. Andrew’s. Irfan was initially stumped by the question, and it wasn’t until a few months ago that an answer came to him.
As a lifer, Irfan spent 12 years at St. Andrew’s, and has lately had a few serendipitous encounters with his former classmates and teachers. A few months ago, Irfan was able to reconnect with his second grade teacher, KimMarie Suhr. She is now the Principal at Hyde Park Elementary, and Irfan always had a fond memory of her kindness in the classroom.
“I was a very anxious kid growing up, and I looked very different from the rest of the kids I grew up with,” Irfan said. Mrs. Suhr's kindness in the classroom was formative and memorable for his time there, helping him break out of his shell. Irfan posed the question his wife had asked about what to pass along to his future child.
Mrs. Suhr laughed, pulled out a folder, and handed Irfan a letter he had written her in second grade. The first line read, “Dear Mrs. Suhr, you changed my life and you taught me how to be kind.”
As Irfan was recalling this, he said, “I didn’t think much of that moment other than it was so random and cool that she remembered that, and that she shared with me that this was something that had stuck with her…that teaching the practice of kindness and it being imparted on her students was so critical to the way she followed her philosophy of teaching.”
It wasn’t until a month or so later that he realized why that was relevant to the question of what to pass on from his time at St. Andrew’s.
As Irfan was going through some things with his father, he stumbled upon a book that was given to his father by our late, former Head of School, Lucy Nazro. She included a letter of gratitude to Irfan’s father, who had been part of her medical care while he was in grade school.
In this letter, Lucy included a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, “malice toward none with charity for all.” It was in reading that quote, that everything came together.
“As you all, as stewards of the privileged education we have at St. Andrew’s, go off to your next adventure, and meet people from different walks of life, with perhaps very different opinions and perspectives, to remember what Mrs. Nazro was perhaps trying to call attention to: that we ought to seek out these commonalities because that is what allows us to find bridges of empathy, and to be kind, which can have a unifying factor in a time like today.”
Thank you to Irfan, and of our alumni who attended this celebration of an important milestone for our Senior Class. Welcome to our newest class of alumni, the Class of 2024!
