15 Seniors, Part I

FM's 15 Seniors for the Editors' Issue:

Matthew E. Spotnitz

In a past life, Matthew Spotnitz was a Quantum Cellular Automata Architect—for six months at NASA during the year after his high school graduation. (In response to an FM request to clarify what exactly a Quantum Cellular Automata Architect does, Spotnitz answered, “A Quantum Cellular Automata Architect designs circuit patterns with Quantum Cellular Automata.”) “I was surrounded by PhDs at NASA’s JPL [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] in Pasadena,” the chemistry concentrator explains. “And I had only taken AP physics. I had been thinking about studying brain science or being a doctor, but I wanted to try something different. So I picked NASA. I figured it was a highly productive place.”

Now, the New York City native has moved from circuit patterns to nanotubes. When asked if his thesis work will be a breakthrough in nanotech, Spotnitz laughs and calmly answers, “We seem to think so.”

Spotnitz’s thesis adviser, Howard Stone, who is McKay professor of chemical engineering and applied mechanics, and his lab team have been working on controlled alignment of carbon nanotubes on curved substrates. While this may not mean much as stated, it actually can have many important applications in medicine and other fields. “Developing methods that control the alignment of nanotubes successfully may facilitate the fabrication, or mass production, of nanotube-based microprocessors and sensors,” he says. And because it has never really been done before, it represents both the possibilities for nanotech and for the researcher in Spotnitz. “Research is a creative process,” Spotnitz says. This is one reason it has held his interest for so long and takes up so much of his time and energy.

Spotnitz has been interested in research since Mrs. Snyder encouraged her intensive chemistry students to conduct experiments in the 10th grade. It was an illustrious start. Spotnitz went on to win state honors at the Westinghouse Competition for his work on the physiology of hemispheric asymmetry. (“It was a psychological study that compared left-handed to right-handed people—left-handers were more adept at the divergent thinking task,” he says.) Though it was more of a psychological experiment, Spotnitz says that this was the time when “it clicked.” He was in love. His life began to follow the path of his research.

“I want to ride the nano wave right now,” Spotnitz says. “I want to stick with nanotechnology while it’s still hot.”

But Spotnitz is unsure of where his research—this nano surf—is taking him next year. He is applying to a number of chemistry and material science programs but says he is very open to other options. “I’d love to be the head of my own research team,” he says. “But I’m not ruling anything out. It’s hard to say where I’ll be in 15 years.”

Though it seems Spotnitz is headed for science fame, he still plays it cool, playing down his achievements. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do” is a popular advertisement for Apple computers. It’s also a truism to which Spotnitz wholeheartedly subscribes. While he may not be insane, Spotnitz certainly is capable of changing the world.

Tiffany C. Whitton

Tiffany Whitton certainly knows how to get on FM’s good side: “FM is the one newspaper that I read,” she asserts. Sincerely, of course. Whitton has an air of sincerity about her, with California-girl freckles and strawberry-blonde hair, she hails from what she calls a “conservative, Orange County family.” But underneath her unassuming demeanor lies an athletic powerhouse. “She is one of the most talented softball players in Harvard history,” says head coach Jenny Allard. Whitton is the tri-captain of the Harvard varsity softball team for the second year running. She pitches, plays first base and outfield, and has made First Team All-Ivy for the past three years in a row—each year for a different position. She was named Ivy Player of the Year last year and led the nation in RBIs per game. She also ranked sixth in batting average and third in home runs per game in the nation last season. And she topped it off by winning regional All-American honors.

But Whitton doesn’t take herself all that seriously. She offers a story from a game against Drexel last year. She was on second base when the next batter hit a long fly ball to centerfield, which Whitton judged to be at least a double. She took off running, but it wasn’t until she had rounded third that she realized her coach was frantically signaling—the ball had been caught by the Drexel centerfielder. Whitton says she used her Harvard logical reasoning skills to get back to second base: “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” To the wonder of all who watched, Whitton skipped third base and cut straight across to second. She, of course, was out.

Whitton laughs at the memory. “My coach had a really hard time disciplining me, because it was just too funny,” she says. According to Allard, this response is characteristic of Whitton’s personality. “We’re talking about someone who is in the upper echelon of talent, but to not know how to run the bases is typical of Tiffany. Her response is not to get mad at herself, but to laugh at herself,” Allard says. “It was so ridiculous that everyone learned a lesson.”

“If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?” Whitton asks. “The things you really remember about college are the stupid things you do.”

Like the time in her first year when Tiffany and her roommates staged a water gun siege on Annenberg. Whitton recalls how stereotypes worked against her: “Some guy thought I had spit in his ear! He said, ‘Well, you’re a softball player.’” Whitton assures FM that she steers clear of the chaw. Nor is she just about softball. She is a government concentrator, writing a thesis on the National Organization for Women, and she co-chairs the student-athlete advisory committee.

It’s softball, though, that puts her center stage—even in her love life. Softball played cupid when Whitton met boyfriend Christopher T. Brown ’05 at a team party last year. “I was a junior and he was a freshman, so it was very scandalous,” Whitton says. As for Brown, a heavyweight rower, it’s not the age difference that bothers him. “The hardest part about dating her is getting used to being known only as Tiffany’s boyfriend,” he says, laughing. “I figure she’s my best chance of getting my name in print since she gets more news coverage than our whole team put together.”

Frederick K.K. Du Puy

For the past four years Rick Du Puy has spent the first Saturday of December participating in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Du Puy knows he has no chance of winning. He knows he is one of only a handful of humanities concentrators spending six hours in the Science Center trying to solve 12 proofs. But, as he says, “Emotionally I miss math a lot. The exam is like my Peter Pan. I don’t do well but it’s a fun thing to do. It keeps math alive for me. You emerge at the end of the day tired but exhilarated.”

His humor is only part of Du Puy’s very un-Harvard attitude. “Freshman year I thought I would be so interesting,” says Du Puy, who describes himself as shy but unconventional. “But in retrospect, I haven’t been.” This comes from a classics and music concentrator who worked on his class’ first-year musical, has performed in several shows, rings the Lowell House bells, tried out for X-Rated “on a whim” and ended up being one of five steppers with no prior experience, and wrote a madrigal for Music 51 about the Latin version of Winnie-the-Pooh. “I’m not excellent at anything,” Du Puy says. “But I don’t let that fact stop me from doing anything.”

Du Puy considers Harvard, and particularly his first year, his Never Never Land, his last connection to youthful innocence and energy. “I can’t tell you how depressed I am to be a senior,” he says. He then talks for more than 15 minutes about how depressed he is to be a senior.

“There’s the very real worry about what I’m going to do after senior year,” he says. “But I’m too caught up with what it means to be in senior year.” Du Puy should be working on his thesis, but instead enjoys 3 a.m. frisbee games in the snow and other luxuries of college life. “Being in senior year focuses your mind on doing all these things that you meant to,” he says.

Included among these incomplete but not forgotten goals are making a window seat, getting certified to use the telescope on top of the Science Center, sculling on the Charles, writing short stories and handing in papers on time. “I am so emphatically somebody who does not have my act together,” Du Puy says. He is totally serious.

He may not have his act together, but Du Puy is sure there are seniors out there who think he’s a fairly strange act. “I suspect I have some notoriety,” he admits. This may be due to his insistence on wearing shorts, no matter what the weather, or his constant singing and whistling. To clarify, Du Puy wears shorts only for the comfort and convenience, and not to make a statement. Du Puy doesn’t take himself too seriously, which is one reason why he sees his future as so wide open. “You always regret things you don’t do,” he says, “more than the things you do do.”

Justin A. Erlich

Whether you come for the hot food, the hot atmosphere, or—ahem, the hot employees—no one could accuse the Quincy Grille of false advertising in its “Always hot” campaign. During the critical 1 to 4 a.m. timeslot on weekend nights, around a hundred hungry Harvard students say hello to hamburgers, hip-hop music and hazy lighting, resulting in what can only be described as the hottest late-night scene on campus.

Grille proprietor Justin Erlich can frequently be seen sidling up to the neon “Quincy Grille” sign as the evening winds down, surveying the greasy leftovers of another successful weekend at this “social staple.” Sporting a blond coiffure he admits he “spends an hour on just so it can look like I just woke up,” Erlich chats up the regulars but is careful not to disturb the vibe he classifies as “bumping.”

Before Erlich, the Quincy Grille existed in name alone. “They weren’t consistently open, and never on the weekends,” Erlich recalls with playful distaste. The Quincy House Committee granted him stewardship of the Grille after a grueling selection process in which no one else applied. With a carefully crafted one-line application—“I would like to run the Quincy Grille”—Erlich assumed the reins.

Erlich has always had an entrepreneurial streak—he tried starting a note card company in high school, and wants to run a restaurant after graduating. But he says he also had altruistic motives in reforming the Grille. “I was pissed off that there was no workable social center for everyone to hang out,” he says. He went for a “coffee house/bar atmosphere” with low light and a hip-hop soundtrack. Erlich insists it was accidental that many of the employees were among Quincy House’s, well, hottest (“It was coincidental at first that the staff may have been good-looking,” he says), but it certainly didn’t detract from the ambiance.

Erlich believes the Grille became so successful because it filled a social void on campus. “With the passing of the Crimson Sports Grille,” Erlich says, “everyone was in search of another Grille. And although we didn’t serve alcohol to minors—or majors, or anyone—we did have Grille in our name, and we were open on weekends.” In addition, Erlich says, his Grille provides a late-night alternative to final clubs. “After 1 a.m., everything shuts down if you’re not ‘cool’ enough or connected enough to get into a final club,” he says. “I go to them, but they can only service one part of the community. There should be an option that doesn’t have to deal with qualifying to get in.”

As a senior, Erlich has had to juggle his business with his Government thesis on leftist movements in the post-Cold War era, focusing on Haiti. Sometimes, these priorities conflict—like this summer, when he contracted a mosquito-borne disease called dengue fever in Haiti and suffered severe headaches, chills, vomiting and muscle cramps. Erlich stayed home in Oakland, Calif. for the first two weeks of school. “It’s not treatable, so you just kind of have to grin and bear it,” he says. “It’s such a rare disease, no one knew what the hell I was talking about. They thought I had the Black Death.” But they lined up to buy curly fries anyway.

Matthew H. Espy

Matt Espy has much more free time than you do, so he travels the world. Airline e-mails keep him informed of discounted tickets, so he’ll skip class on Friday to hop a flight, returning sometime Monday. The man has serious frequent flier miles.

Where does he possibly find the time? Espy isn’t worried. Indeed, last year, he played Halo in his room for three or four hours a day, until the X-Box cartridge burned out. Now, he reads children’s books and usually watches Home Alone once or twice daily.

Still, Espy’s gotten his schoolwork covered. “[Freshman year] he’d tell people, ‘I took BC calculus in the 10th grade,’ and then kiss his bicep,” recalls current roommate Clinton L. Graham ’03. “That was his pick-up line.” Adds Daryk A. Pengelly ’03, another roommate, “It takes him longer to read a problem than it does to do the work. He doesn’t do his homework unless it’s due in 30 minutes.”

Espy’s wicked smaht. Last spring, he took six courses and managed five in most of the semesters before that. Upon graduating, he will receive two degrees: an A.B. in applied mathematics and a master’s degree in applied math and economics. He also tutors math at the Bureau of Study Counsel and has served as president of the Harvard Investors Club. “He turned it around,” says an anonymous fan. “He knows his shit.” Just last year, Espy campaigned for Undergraduate Council president, running entirely on a platform advocating cable TV and a student center. At the time, he declared that if elected, he would resign in protest.

Espy doesn’t see any of this as being particularly difficult, or even interesting. “I guess I just do things a little differently,” he says. He thinks a bit. “For example, I had the handicapped suite in Canaday B freshman year and I tried to rig the door by remote control.” Pause. “Also, last year I had a hat that they called the Grandma Hat. It had a big plastic flower on the front. They said it was strange, but what they missed was that it was a conversation piece.”

Espy’s sense of style is something of a punch line among those who know him. “He’ll wear $300 shoes and $2 sweatpants,” says Graham, laughing. Espy has ably justified his spending habits. “He borrows from Future Matt,” Pengelly says. “He spends the money he expects to make as his future self.” Espy also once climbed a mountain wearing a bathrobe—though that was only because he had no jacket.

Glen R. Curry

Glen Curry blushes as he recalls the notorious photo of him that ran on the cover of the Advocate’s Winter 2001 “Men Issue,” in which he posed shirtless on the beach looking slyly at the camera. This innocent moment—which looked like his three summers as a lifeguard at a country club—did not prepare him for the pictures in the middle of the magazine. Inside ran a series of nude photographs of another man, whose face was not pictured.

“I spent the whole semester trying to convince everyone the photos weren’t of me,” Curry says. His then-boyfriend had taken the photos, but Curry had not understood at the time how they would be used. As it turns out, the Men’s Issue is “not like Playboy. The person on the cover is not necessarily posing naked on the inside,” Curry explains.

In his clothed life, Curry is president of the 80-member Crimson Key Society and a psychology concentrator in Mather House. In a year that saw a major shakeup in the organization due to the Admissions Office’s decision to end the Key’s official role as campus tour guides, as president Curry was forced to redefine the Key’s mission and function. Curry says the organization has been strengthened through volunteering for a broader group of Harvard organizations. Because of Curry’s work, the Key will now play an integral role in Freshman and Junior Parents’ Weekends in addition to continuing running tours through the Information and Marshals’ Offices.

Curry also has made a mark on campus through his role as one of the few openly gay members of a Harvard final club. He joined the Fox Club his sophomore year and served as punchmaster last year.

Curry is as visual on campus as he is visible. He is most often heralded as a beacon of dressy-chic style. He devotes 20 hours a week to working at the Banana Republic on Newbury Street, a job that has ensured him an extensive wardrobe of chic business casual. He has worked in retail for the past five years, including stints at the Gap in Harvard Square. Yet his Mather dorm room has taken on a very un-Banana tone since he desperately sought to fill his empty common room in his first year. At a fabric store he found a giant leopard-print cloth that has graced the walls of his Harvard pads ever since. “It’s really not my style,” he insists, “but it has stayed with me.”

Yet despite the fact that he has never run Primal Scream and is “really freaked out about being naked,” Curry has had a surprising number of skin-baring moments. He recalls how, during his first year in Greenough, living on the ground floor, he emerged from the shower, dropped his towel to change, and looked out the three large windows facing Prescott Street to find a crowd of people waving at him. These are moments the modest Curry would prefer to forget. Fans of the Advocate Men’s Issue, however, may remember “his” naked body forever.

Shelby J. Braxton-Brooks

At the ripe age of five, Shelby J. Braxton-Brooks ’03 mounted a stage for one of her first performances. “I did this god-awful tap version of The Nutcracker,” she says without a hint of nostalgia. “The really little kids were cuter and they got to wear wings and halos, while we just got the ugly white leotards, white tights and black patent leather shoes.”

Tacky costumes and a passion for performance have remained a part of Braxton-Brooks’ life ever since. She attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a magnet high school for the performing arts in Washington, D.C. There, after her academic day ended, she regularly spent 10 hours a day rehearsing. Cramming for tests in the corner of dance studios during breaks had positive consequences. “I can study anywhere now,” she says.

And what does she study at Harvard? Performance, of course. Braxton-Brooks crafted her own special concentration, “Performance Studies,” during the spring of her sophomore year. “I had a strong interest in studying performance theory, aesthetics and practice,” she says. “There really isn’t a department that offers that here.”

Drawing on her coursework in literary theory, dance ethnography, music theory and folklore and mythology, Braxton-Brooks is putting the finishing touches on her performance thesis. “Basically it’s a show that unfolds on itself in a weave of dance, song and theater,” she says. “Everything is going to overlap and it’ll be hard to place it in a specific genre.” To assist with her project, Braxton-Brooks traveled to Brazil this past summer to study samba and capoeira—“a martial arts form that is disguised as dance,” she says.

While dance has been a central element of her performance life, Braxton-Brooks hasn’t limited herself to Harvard’s dance community, instead choosing to explore a wide range of activities. She also works part-time at the House of Blues, as an art gallery educator, has volunteered with Women and Youth Supporting Each Other, directed The Vagina Monologues, worked for Dorm Crew and starred as the lead—a “sinister kind of vamp”—in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Braxton-Brooks denies that any similarities exist between herself and said “vamp.”

Add singing with Kuumba to the list. “Singing is a new interest for me and I want to do it seriously and visibly,” she says. But it hasn’t been easy. When auditioning for the Sisters of Kuumba ensemble, Braxton-Brooks threw up and had a feeling that she was “being run over by a tractor-trailer.” Vomit and tractors aside, she’ll be singing a solo this year at Kuumba’s annual holiday concert.

Next year Brooks plans to pursue a performance career in New York City. She admits she is still sorting out the details. “In my mind I’m going to New York to have a wonderful and successful career,” she says. “According to my mom, I’m going to New York to wait tables.” Until then, she’ll keep playing off people’s misguided notion that Toni Braxton is a relative. “Unfortunately, there’s no relation,” she says. “Then maybe I’d know what I was going to do next year and she’d set me up with a backup deal.” She pauses. “Maybe I can claim I’m a distant relative.”

Lisa N. Guttentag

Good Day. That’s what Guttentag means in German and that’s what is embroidered in neat block letters on Lisa Guttentag’s blue L.L. Bean backpack. It’s unclear if it’s an affirmation or a command. But either way, Guttentag is having a good day and wants everyone else to have one, too. She’s not really supposed to be here right now. At least, on June 12, 2000, when her van was hit by a tractor trailer, no one thought she would be here now, busily concentrating in psychology, dancing with and coordinating children’s programming for the Indian dance troupe Ghungroo, walking, talking, or hastily scribbling notes in class. According to Guttentag, her score on the Glasgow Coma Scale when she first arrived at the hospital in her hometown of Greensboro, N.C. that day in June was four, on a scale of 3-15, where anything above eight carries a good chance of survival. She suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and was in a coma for 16 days and in the hospital for two months. She had to relearn how to walk and talk. “At first I wasn’t expected to survive. When I left the hospital I worked so hard to come to Harvard because I knew I would have wanted to come back,” she says, explaining that she also lost her emotions and had to figure out how to feel again.

“I at least have the opportunity [at Harvard] to play the same social role as I did and your social role is part of identity,” she says. Being at Harvard “was very important as far as no longer feeling like a brain-injured person.”

Guttentag returned to campus in the spring of her sophomore year, taking a reduced course load and using a laptop to take notes in class because writing by hand was still too difficult. In her first semester back, she was hesitant to tell people about the severity of her injury because, she says, “Having people think of me as a brain-injured person is always incurring a risk. There are some people here who are not as tolerant of imperfection.”

Susannah Graves ’03, Guttentag’s friend and first-year roommate, says that while Guttentag recognizes how much she’s changed—reinvented herself, even—there is much of the vintage do-anything first-year that remains. “Everyone changes in college,” Graves says. “It’s just that a big part of what changed her was the accident. She doesn’t take bullshit from anybody and she has always been like that.” Limitations, however, are something new. “When she was a freshman I don’t think there was anything that limited her except maybe her printer. She was always complaining about that,” Graves says.

In her first year Guttentag was active in the Harvard Ballet Company, performed in the freshman musical and tutored kids at a housing project and a middle school. Now, she’s more selective in how she spends her time, partly because she needs to be cautious. “I don’t have the best balance on my left side. I can’t control my right arm. It’s still difficult to speak,” she says. “I try not to put myself in situations where I’ll just fail people. It’s still hard to know what’s changing.” But she’s trying new things, thinking about pursuing a career working with brain-injured people and taking courses, like a seminar on identity, that pertain to her experience.

“I used to be the good Greensboro girl, a goody two-shoes,” she says. “Obviously, I stopped living the perfect life. Now I’m more willing to explore new possibilities rather than just doing what I’ve always done.”

Carl E. Morris

For Harvard seniors, recruiting usually involves briefcases, business suits and economics concentrators. But wide receiver Carl E. Morris of Dunster House totes an athletic bag and suits up in full uniform for his recruiting sessions, which include weekend workouts with his Atlanta-based trainer. Instead of the stresses of brain-teasing interviews, he faces a series of intense tryouts and interviews with interested corporations from February through the spring. While other seniors are hitting hot spring break spots, Morris plans to pour some blood, sweat and tears into workouts with NFL teams.

Morris didn’t play team football until his junior year in high school, but by the spring of his first year at Harvard, he began to think seriously about playing professionally. During his college career, his prowess on the field has mesmerized fans and he has been Ivy League MVP two years in a row. After his latest victory, Harvard football coach Tim Murphy said, “Obviously, I wasn’t surprised [by the selection]. There’s no question that he’s the Ivy League’s best player.” This fall saw Morris break a slew of Harvard records, many his own. He caught 90 passes for 1,288 yards—toppling last year’s school record-setting mark of 71 and 943. Morris also broke the school record for most catches in a game with 21 in the Crimson’s October win over Dartmouth.

Though his schedule is demanding, Morris made time during the hectic fall season to have a little fun. Laughing, he remembers this past Halloween, when he and his roommates hit a Halloween party on Tremont Street in SpongeBob SquarePants costumes.

“We didn’t win best costume, though,” he complains. “It was an outrage!”

It has become common to see autograph-hunters elbowing through crowds to get to Morris after Harvard games. He says he gets letters in the mail from kids, recalling one young girl who sent him a detailed questionnaire. “Stay in school,” he advised her.

For all his gridiron success, Morris is extremely down-to-earth. He is extremely close to his family, who attend every one of his games. An economics concentrator, Morris has held summer jobs in law, real estate and pharmaceuticals. Former girlfriend Melinda J. Jellin ’03 recalls scoping him out in Annenberg in their first year. “I remember saying, after Carl walked by, that he was the hottest guy, but he must be such a cocky jerk,” Jellin says. He proved her wrong, and they dated for two years. Still friends with Jellin today, Morris had to leave the FM interview to take her to The Nutcracker, a ballet few future NFL players are likely anxious to see.